Jews have often been concerned about what others think more than about what our traditions advise. There has always been a sense that they could fulfill the imaginary goal of the model citizen and be embraced, acknowledged, or at least tolerated. The preoccupation with being the good Jewish boy, conforming, pleasing, and trying to ingratiate oneself, has it not been disastrous and often deadly?
The greatest desecration is not that they slaughtered us.
It is that we have grown used to it.
There is a sick, self-destructive desire to be liked. This is not the approach of a clever and capable people who outperform, provide, and contribute. Resistance trumps resilience when security is undermined, when we and our families are threatened.
We have learned nothing from the Roman wars to the Inquisition, from the countless massacres of antiquity to the modern age, from the pogroms to the annihilation of European Jewry.
Again and again, history has revealed that when it comes to the Jews, humanity’s universalism is often exposed as a sham, and “world brotherhood" a tragic farce. European emancipation granted little dignity. The world will never respect the Jew until he strives for and attains the courage to accept and make purposeful his identity. Liberation will come when we, as Jews, cease waiting for others to confer dignity upon us and reclaim it for ourselves.
Currently, there is a Mayor Mamdani. Those paying attention can see his reckless course: encroaching upon the day-to-day safety of our houses of worship, normalizing incitement and hostile rhetoric, and extending handouts that deepen divisions within the Jewish community itself. Now he has been strengthened by the primary votes in New York.
A surprising number of Jews helped elevate Mandela, oblivious to the fact that, in the eyes of many revolutionaries, Zionist and Jew are interchangeable. They imagined they could sacrifice one part of themselves to purchase acceptance for the other, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Yet history has repeatedly shown that those who sell out their brothers eventually discover that the bill comes due for them as well. One cannot barter away Jewish solidarity and expect the storm to distinguish between the Jew and the Zionist. Those who believe they can purchase favor at the expense of their own people often learn too late that they themselves were included in the bargain.
So, whoever takes the bait should remember the next Yankel Rosenbaum is already being chosen by those who think they are merely playing politics. Every generation of Jews that believed history no longer applied to them eventually met history face to face.
Mamdani is not the issue; he is merely the face of a larger Islamist ambition to infiltrate the West. He is replaceable, and should he fall, another actor will come to the forefront to claim yet another Western city for a future caliphate.
The names change, the slogans change, the accents change, but the ambition remains the same: to capture the institutions of the West, weaken its civilizational confidence, and transform its great cities into something their founders would scarcely recognize.
As of now, it is Mamdani who seeks to remake New York into a Sadiq Khan-style London, today a city that Winston Churchill would scarcely recognize and that would send any red-blooded patriot into a frenzied call for the posthaste repatriation of Islamist migrants.
Jews in Golders Green increasingly speak of feeling trapped between rising Islamist hegemony and the collapse of the social order around them. Every day brings the EU Jew a new incident, not just in London, but in Paris, Antwerp, and elsewhere. Most fear for their future yet even selling their homes and leaving is not simple.
Property values, demographic change, and insecurity have left some feeling unable to pivot elsewhere without enormous loss. Today the battle is over New York. Yesterday it was London. Tomorrow it will be another city, another nation, or another people who convinced themselves that history could not happen to them. Illusion buys time. History collects the debt.
A Horse is a Horse
The first green light to the cattle cars is forgetting who you are. It begins by denying the cyclical nature of hatred and dismissing second-order effects. Rhetoric, alliances, and normalization quietly reshape society until demoralization is accepted. A horse remains a horse, and a Jew remains a Jew, regardless of his own assessments.
The Warsaw Ghetto
“We should have resisted at the beginning, when we still numbered half a million." - Dr. Schimkovitz
The Church’s exhortation that “Jesus saves" offered little salvation to the two thousand baptized Jews trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto, many of whom had fully embraced Christianity, attended Mass, prayed their novenas, lit candles, and called upon Mary as the Mother of God. Yet in the hour of catastrophe, baptismal certificates could not redeem them from the racial hatred consuming Europe.
Even priests of partial Jewish ancestry were cast into the abyss alongside the Jews, abandoned by institutions that preached universality yet too often failed to defend their own.
Many later lamented that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising did not begin when the walls first started closing, when more than half a million Jews stood poised to become fuel for the Nazi machinery of annihilation. The tragedy was that the opportunity for effective resistance diminishes with every concession to those who seek our destruction. By the time the revolt finally erupted, the children, the elderly, and the holy had already been taken. Those who remained were debilitated by hunger, and only about ten percent of the ghetto's original population was left.
History teaches the same bitter lesson again and again: wait-and-see is not a strategy, and divided Jews are vulnerable Jews.
America
In America, we still have numbers, and those numbers have power to push back against encroaching hatred, and at least signal that there will be consequences for incitement and for the lack of commitment by authorities and politicians to remain vigilant against antisemitism. A lack of response is the cause of antisemitism.
Jews have to get off the apathy. In a digital world, you are already on the list. So put some skin in the game. Without fear of reprisal, because whatever way haters can harm, they will, unless they can’t. Stopping them is up to us.
There is an ancient echo of this tragedy in the stories surrounding Muhammad’s campaigns against the Jewish tribes of Arabia. One tribe fell, and the others did not come. Then the second stood alone. Then the third.
Each believed catastrophe would stop with the other. Each met the same fate.
Too many examples exist to count the foolishness of believing that a gathering storm will pass over the one who crouches to conform to the winds of hate.
How We Got to This Point
Institutional Jewish leadership failed to resist the erosion of Judaic values, leaving many Jews with little worth defending and bringing us to this defining moment.
The ADL and Federation moved in lockstep with Democratic Party activism and candidates whom many viewed as dangerous for Israel and Jewish security in America. This allegiance has given us figures such as Obama and Mamdani.
In 1984, Jesse Jackson's “Hymietown" slur provoked outrage. Four decades later, “Zio" is the updated version. A radical mayor now governs the city Hymie built and wields Gaza as a moral bludgeon, turning every grievance into a masquerade of justice while emboldening antisemitic intimidation and humiliation. The epithet has changed, but the target remains the same. Hymie, Zionist, Jew, it is all one to those who hate us. The slur evolves, the animus endures, and the resulting contempt invites ever greater antisemitic violations.
Islamist supporters do not get to define who the good Jews are or what Zionism means. What they are right about is…. Zion is Jew and Jew is Zion they cannot be separated any more than the body from the soul.
Believing Jews and Christians share a divine attachment to Zion and to all that is holy. Zion is the seat of the Judeo-Christian vision of peace on earth. The letters of Zion grace tens of thousands of congregations, bearing witness to G-d's covenant and His commitment to mankind. For the Jew, Diaspora is the sickness and Zion the cure, the remedy that heals, invigorates, and makes Jewish existence whole once again.
Mamdani's election has sent shockwaves through self-respecting Jews and among those who escaped the USSR, China, Cuba, Venezuela, and other communist hells. Current coalitions of far-left radicals and Islamist sympathizers should profoundly alarm anyone who values liberty. The unholy Red-Green alliance is a chilling warning that our freedom is not guaranteed.
Islamist groomers and endless Palestinian Arab protests, amplified by Qatari megabucks, have already left London Bridge falling down. Is New York next? Inner-city unrest is increasingly cooked with a Red-Green recipe.
Mayors who indulge grievances through slyly worded propaganda and selective indignation help inflame passions, and civil unrest follows. Social order erodes when agitation is normalized, violence excused, and intimidation goes unanswered. Left unchecked, these ideologies will create disorder for all, but sooner or later they will arrive at every Jewish doorstep.
Without intervention, terrorist attacks will increase, neighborhoods will decay, our daughters will increasingly become targets, and Jewish communities will come under siege, as they already have in Britain. Civilization cannot survive without the cultural confidence and the will to defend itself. The enemy is at the gate, and therefore we must meet him at the gate.
Let there be civic resistance and public solidarity that shake the gates of every platform seeking to normalize communism, Islamist agendas, and the demonization of Israel. Let it be known that Jews are not a scattered collection of frightened individuals. We are a capable people with numbers too large to ignore, and we know the game of demoralization. Rush us and get tackled. Play us and get played.
Although I believe the antisemitism encroaching upon Diaspora Jews is metaphysical, sent from on high to unify us and move us toward the land of our forefathers, while we are here civil disobedience may be the means by which we make that transition from a position of strength.
Randy Yisroel 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. Founder of Ohr Chodosh L ‘Zion, a cultural and spiritual initiative dedicated to restoring Jewish identity, courage, and moral clarity through the fusion of art, history, and living faith. His newest release on Amazon Between the Altar and the Sanctuary: The Life, Faith, and Fire of Rabbi Meir Kahane