Randy Settenbrino is a writer, artist, and public intellectual whose work bridges theology, philosophy, and psychology. He is a passionate advocate for Israel and Jewish-Christian solidarity, and the founder of the Historic Blue Moon Hotel-recognized by National Geographic as one of the 150 most unique projects in the Western Hemisphere. A father of IDF soldiers, Torah scholars, and holy daughters, his work is devoted to truth, faith, and cultural restoration.
Mine is a voice formed through lived experience, grounded in confrontation rather than speculation. My voice was removed from a panel meant to address that reality. I survived the SJP cancellation effort only to be removed by the ADL, which is supposed to defend Jews from experiences like mine, from another panel meant to discuss those realities. In that irony, I found myself in company with Kahane. No informants necessary.
The Historic Blue Moon Hotel after anti-Israel agitators marked the property during a coordinated harassment campaign. What institutions discussed in conference halls, some of us lived at our own front doors.
The Federation and the ADL continue to act in dissonance with reality. For decades, they mistook access, prestige, and political proximity for communal responsibility. They opposed Rabbi Meir Kahane while he confronted threats at personal peril and expense.
Meanwhile, highly paid Jewish institutional leadership presided over religious decline and treated growing dangers as public-relations problems, responding with passivity instead of resolve and force. They aligned themselves with ideology over covenant, politics over faith, and institutional acceptance over Jewish continuity.
Conferences are convened, panels assembled, statements issued. Yet when hostility arrives, the most visible and vulnerable Jews stand alone. The Jew in the arena, confronting threats, is opposed not only by adversaries, but by the institutions claiming to represent him. Organizations built on diplomacy and consensus are uncomfortable with messages rooted in Jewish pride, self-defense, and confrontation.
We have reached a point where consensus should demand change in our institutions, party affiliations, and in my opinion, willingness to engage in civil disobedience when necessary.
Yet stagnation remains, and voices disturbing institutional comfort are removed.
Elise Stefanik, a Christian Zionist and political figure I admire, was scheduled to speak at Temple Emanu-El. Her appearance was canceled, and whether from pressure, fear, or avoidance of controversy, the message was unmistakable.
Comfort, accommodation, and the need for approval eroded the confidence that once sustained Jewish identity.
Silencing voices or retreating when new strategies are required invites shame, emboldens predators, and alienates the next generation.
Compare that with seventy years under America’s most powerful Jewish institutions. With vast resources and influence, one might have expected a renaissance of Jewish identity.
Intermarriage soared. Jewish literacy collapsed. Entire generations grew distant from their identity. Some now support movements hostile to Israel.
Where oppression failed, institutional complacency succeeded.
For me, being the child of an inner-city mixed marriage left me far from the illusions of suburban Jews. My radar detected antisemitism crouching beneath the surface, whether through confidences or direct confrontation. Experience strips away illusion. I learned early that failure to push back becomes complicity and invites aggression.
My grandmother, Ida Turkenich Smiloff, was one of only two survivors of a pogrom. My grandfather, Abe Smiloff, came from the pogrom-ravaged town of Chern Jenya. Their world taught them what happens when hatred is normalized and Jews stand alone.
I knew my Jewish grandparents, pogrom refugees who escaped with little or nothing. There was distance between us. We lived in southeast Brooklyn, they in the western reaches of the borough. Not far, yet far enough. Life intervened, and we were seldom together. We sensed their character and goodness from a distance, more felt than lived. Born in the late 1800s under the Russian Empire, they carried the weight of a world where violence against Jews was normalized by populace and state.
That pattern has not disappeared. It has changed form.
Across the Atlantic, it is emerging again, and it does not bode well for North American Jewry.
The seeds of genocide are no longer sown by czars or Nazis alone, but by new forces that an institutional Judaism is unwilling to face with the strength of a threatened people.
When the ADL, the Federation, and elements of the Reform movement align with policies antithetical to Torah and Jewish continuity, it becomes a Purim spiel.
When Jewish law is bent to serve progressive goals, it becomes a Passover farce, with self-loathing Jews reciting from a Haggadah glorifying Egypt and condemning Israel.
Arthur Szyk’s depiction of the Wicked and Simple Sons from the Four Sons of the Haggadah.
The American Exodus began in the aspirations of the Ivy League halls, where we grew polished yet naked and bare. We ourselves became the Pharaoh who does not know Joseph and the four sons, fractured in spirit: one wise, one wicked, one simple, and one who no longer knows how to ask.
Who cultivated the wicked son, writhing in self-contempt and standing with our enemies?
Who raised the simpleton, emptied of spiritual literacy, no longer able to formulate a question?
Why be Jewish?
Where are we in America if we no longer know, or no longer care, why we are Jewish at all? What have we gained from our golden calf universities? Our degrees, positions, and status drift toward the abyss, not only because of hatred, but because we have become a people rich in knowledge yet impoverished in spirit, literate in the world and illiterate in our own inheritance, failing to pass on the spiritual gold our ancestors placed at our feet.
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge." - Hosea 4:6
Material success is exalted. Assimilation is mistaken for safety. Identity is cast aside, while those who endure do so only by standing unapologetic, unbowed, and proudly Jewish.
If 14 percent of young adults are anti-Zionist and another 18 percent remain undecided, even as we are under siege, we are not drifting, we are inviting catastrophe.
“I spoke to you persistently… but you did not listen." - Jeremiah 7:13
There are Jews within institutions, and Jews on the front lines.
You learn the difference when a yarmulke makes you a target, your business becomes a symbol, and threats arrive in the middle of the night.