How October 7 changed what it means to be Jewish

The October 7 attacks fundamentally changed what it means to be Jewish, especially in the Diaspora. Antisemitism is mainstream again. Here is a personal reflection on how to fight back.

I rarely write personal reflections. Usually, I draw on my experience as a journalist, media strategist, and commentator to write polemics about media and politics, especially regarding Israel.

However, the High Holidays are nigh, and it is almost one year since Hamas’ October 7 attacks on Israel changed the world for Jews, so it seems appropriate to don both my professional and personal hats.

Jews are now living in a different world to the one in which I grew up. It is with immense sadness I note that we are back in a world more similar to the one into which my parents, both in their 80s, were born. It means the progress we thought we had made through several generations was illusory. We have regressed to history’s dismal mean.

Data shows that antisemitism had been on the rise for some time before the October 7 massacre, but it unleashed a tsunami of hatred. The scale of it has been transcendently shocking.

Even before Israel had counted its dead and accounted for its abducted, and before Israel had responded, mobs in cities as far apart as London, New York, Jakarta, Sydney, and Kuala Lumpur, were openly calling for genocide.

No longer limited to the fringes of the Far Right, Jew-hatred has become mainstream on much of the Left, including in the progressive circles with which many in the Diaspora have traditionally been a driving part.

Antisemitic views are now common in public discourse, universities, multilateral institutions, governments, political parties, non-governmental organizations, and the mainstream media.

My generation enjoyed what may have been the best years in Jews’ long history. Israel’s recreation gave Jews sovereignty for the first time in 2,000 years, allowing generations of Jews to grow up, not as outsiders, but as normal people in their homeland.

Flourishing Western democracies and a Christian re-evaluation of Christian-Jewish relations after the Holocaust allowed Diaspora Jews to have their rights protected amid a broad social consensus that antisemitism was something uniquely egregious.

The fall of the Soviet Union allowed Jews from that former empire to emigrate to Israel, or the West, to pursue opportunities of which they previously could only have dreamed.

I went to high school with many Jews who had come from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, as almost all of my friends were. My father once joked that we were the Tel Aviv Boys Club. Except for my school being half empty on Jewish holidays, this was unremarkable. We lived ordinary lives and gave it no thought.