We Jews Have the Honor of Being Hated
After Édouard Manet caused a firestorm in the late 1860s with his politically provocative paintings The Execution of Maximilian, he got a consoling note from his friend, the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire. “Monsieur,” Baudelaire wrote, “it seems you have the honor of inspiring hatred.”
And that, in a sentence, is also the state of world Jewry in 2026. The Jewish people—Israeli Jews and Diaspora Jews; observant Jews and secular ones; right-wing Jews and left; all of us together; all of us, ultimately, in the same boat, whether we like each other or not—have the honor of being hated.
We should take it as a compliment, just as Baudelaire intended it.
We have the honor of being hated by the people who say “Zio” when what they mean to say is “Jew.” We have the honor of being hated by the campus lemmings chanting anti-Semitic slogans whose meaning most of them aren’t bright enough to understand—though some of them understand it perfectly well. We have the honor of being hated by Ali Khamenei, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and other despots whose loathing of Jews is directly proportionate to their crimes against their own people. We have the honor of being hated by Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, Alice Walker, Roger Waters, Francesca Albanese, Tucker Carlson—the out-and-out Jew-haters and their sly enablers. We have the honor of being hated by those who think Jesus was a Palestinian. We have the honor of being hated by the so-called feminists who downplayed the rape of Israeli women on and after October 7, and by the so-called progressives who denied it. We have the honor of being hated by virtually every political movement, left or right, that also opposes the idea of personal merit as an organizing social principle. We have the honor of being hated by UN mandarins who would like you to know that the preponderance of human rights violations are committed by one small country: Israel. We have the honor of being hated by “Queers for Palestine,” who have neglected to notice what happens to queers in Palestine. We have the honor of being hated by the Hamas water carriers masquerading as reporters at the BBC and other media. We have the honor of being hated by all the Hollywood celebrities who see nothing amiss with demanding boycotts of Israeli artistic institutions but not of, say, Chinese ones. We have the honor of being hated by our charming new mayor, who thinks that he can endorse the erasure of one state and one state only, the Jewish state, and still acquit himself of the charge of anti-Semitism. We have the honor of being hated by people who parade their so-called Jewishness only when it serves as a tool to defame and endanger half the Jewish people—as if they’ll be spared the furies should, God forbid, Israel someday fall.
In short, we have the honor of being hated by an axis of the perfidious, the despotic, the hypocritical, the cynical, the deranged, and the incurably stupid. What shall we do with all this hatred—other than to take it as a badge of honor and turn it to our advantage?
I don’t want to sound flip about this or put on airs of false bravery. This is a scary time to be a Jew. The “honor of being hated” is also what led to the massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney, the “Jew hunt” in Amsterdam, the atrocities of October 7, the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh. It is why Israeli writers struggle to find publishers in the United States, and why so many Jewish undergrads and Jewish professors feel ostracized on college campuses.
It’s an honor we all yearn to do without. But we can’t. We can’t, because for as long as there have been Jews, there have been Jew-haters. And for as long as there willbe Jews there will be Jew-haters. What’s been going on for over 3,000 years is not about to end anytime soon. And with that in mind, I want to make four specific arguments about how to move forward with the knowledge we have gleaned.
The first point is that “the fight against anti-Semitism,” which consumes tens of millions of dollars every year in Jewish philanthropy and has become an organizing principle across Jewish organizations, is a well-meaning but mostly wasted effort. We should spend the money and focus our energy elsewhere. The same, I might add, goes for efforts to improve the quality of pro-Israel advocacy, or hasbara.
The second point is that while anti-Semitism may be history’s most demented hatred, it’s also the world’s most unwitting compliment. And here I am going to say something that may be misconstrued but needs to be said: The Jew-haters have a certain point, because Judaism and Jewish values and Jewish habits of mind are indeed subversive of many social orders.
The third point is that the proper defense against Jew-hatred is not to prove the haters wrong by outdoing ourselves in feats of altruism, benevolence, and achievement. It is to lean into our Jewishness as far as each of us can irrespective of what anyone else thinks of it. If the price of being our fullest selves as Jews is to be the perennially unpopular kids, it’s a price well worth paying.
Finally, the fourth point is that what Jews need now isn’t allyship or sympathy or a seat at the table of the world’s victimized groups. What we need is the wisdom of the composer Philip Glass: “If there’s no room at the table, build your own table.”
So, to my first point: Does anyone think the fight against anti-Semitism is working?
I know we all wish it could work. I know we’d like to think that if only we ensured that Holocaust education was part of every public school curriculum; or universalized the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism; or persuaded universities to stop inviting Israel-hating speakers; or got the news media to deliver fairer coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; or alighted on history’s most brilliant PR strategy for Israel; or switched prime ministers to nearly anyone other than Bibi—that if we did all this and more, we could turn the tide that’s been running so heavily against us in recent years. I also know that, now and then, we do achieve some victories, particularly when it comes to getting university administrators to crack down on the most overt expressions of anti-Semitic speech.
But here’s what I also know: that Tucker Carlson’s popularity and influence as a podcaster have only soared as his bigotry has become more blatant. That journalistic disgraces such as the fake report about the 500 dead Palestinians at the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza did nothing to prevent subsequent fake or grossly sensationalized reporting about the war that perpetuated anti-Semitic stereotypes. That the governor of Pennsylvania was asked if he’d ever been a “double agent” for Israel while he was being vetted for his party’s vice-presidential nomination. That the vice president of the United States dismissed the idea that anti-Semitism was widespread and rising and instead pointed the finger at “people”—by which, of course, he meant Jews— “who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel.” That, in New York State, with its abundance of Jewish cultural institutions open to the public, 1 in 5 Millennials and Gen-Zs believe the Jews caused the Holocaust.
All this is happening at a moment when the Jewish community has never been more alarmed, more engaged, more resourced, more eager, more courageous, and more willing to “do something.” So what is it that those of us who are in this fight against anti-Semitism are missing?
The mistake we make is this: We think that anti-Semitism stems, fundamentally, from missing or inaccurate information. We think that if people only had greater knowledge of the history of Jewish persecution, a fuller grasp of the real facts of the Israeli–Arab conflict, a finer understanding of all the ways anti-Semitism manifests itself, a deeper appreciation of the Jewish contribution to America’s success and to human flourishing, that the hatred of us might dissipate or never start in the first place.
But that thesis is wrong. Jew-hatred is not the result of a defect in education: From Martin Luther to T.S. Eliot to Sally Rooney, the world has never suffered a shortage of educated anti-Semites. Jew-hatred is the product of a psychological reflex—and that kind of reflex can never be educated out of existence even if, for a time, it may be sublimated into quiescence. Anti-Semitism, in other words, isn’t just a prejudice or a belief. It’s a neurosis.
This brings me to the second point we must examine, not least because so many of the usual answers are so superficial: What is it about Jews that has, over the centuries, aroused so much venom and violence?
Are Jews hated because of Israel’s alleged misdeeds? That’s a common view these days, but it fails to explain the thousands of years of anti-Semitism that preceded the creation of Israel, or account for why hatred of Israel mimics classic anti-Semitic tropes of insatiable Jewish bloodlust and secret manipulation of global affairs.
Are Jews hated because we represent the eternal “other”? This, too, is often said, and of course there’s some truth to it. But there are many “others” in every human society, yet none that are so persistently subjected to such lurid conspiracy theories, such murderous designs, such blatant double standards: Why has nobody written the book called “The Protocols of the Elders of the Amish” or “The International Quaker”?
Are Jews hated because we refused to accept Christ as Messiah or Mohammed as Prophet? Yes, sort of—but again, how do we account for the centuries of Jew-hatred before the births of Christ or Muhammad, or for the persecution of Jews whose families converted to Christianity?
All these explanations fail for the same reason that our attempts to educate people out of their anti-Semitism fail: They do not account for the psychological basis of anti-Semitism. That basis has a name: resentment, marinated in the emotion of envy.
Resentment of what, exactly? Of just this: The Jewish people are a countercultural nation. To make matters worse, our countercultural convictions have helped us flourish nearly everywhere we have put down roots.
What are some of those convictions? We believe there is one God—not many, not none—and therefore a common moral universe with a common moral code that applies to all people, everywhere. We believe that human beings are made in the image of God, and therefore that human life is inherently precious, and that the lowest among us is equal in basic dignity to the highest. We believe in freedom and the quest for freedom, and therefore we pose a fundamental challenge to every tyrant who would deny that freedom. We believe that the Messiah has notcome, and therefore we are not beguiled by any self-declared redeemer. We believe in the word and in the text, and therefore in literacy as a foundation for faith, not a threat to it. We believe that questions are of equal if not greater importance than answers, and therefore that curiosity, second-guessing, and the quest for knowledge are social goods. We believe in “argument for the sake of heaven,” and therefore in disagreement that isn’t impudence and heterodoxy that isn’t heresy.
Above all, we believe in the word “no.” No to sun gods and graven images and child sacrifice. No to Pharaoh and Caesar, the Inquisition and the Reformation, the Czar and the Commissar. No to emancipation from our peoplehood by the French Revolution or to the erasure of our faith by the Russian Revolution or to the destruction of our statehood through the siren song of bi-nationalism. No to the dethronement of God by reason, or of moral judgment by moral relativism. No to the seductive offer of eternal salvation at the cost of our covenant with God.
I don’t mean to suggest by any of this that Jews are incapable of making our peace with our political and cultural surroundings. Obviously we can, we have, and we do. But our yesses to our surroundings have always been predicated on our noes, and what we affirm also requires that we maintain the courage to reject. It is this courage that is the central source of our inner strength as people and our endurance as a people. We must never let go of it.
But “no” is also an infuriating word, however gently and quietly it may be uttered. And that makes it a dangerous word. Ask anyone who has been turned down by a college, an employer, a love interest: The normal reaction to rejection is rage. That rage only grows when it is suffused by the sense that, as with Cain in Genesis, one’s offering was not good enough; that it was rejected from a place of judgment and therefore a position of superiority. That is a basis for toxic rage. Conversely, the reason “people love dead Jews,” to borrow Dara Horn’s memorable phrase, is that it replaces that gnawing sense of inferiority with the pleasure of feeling pity.
It should go without saying that there is nothing Jews can do to cure the Jew-haters of their hate—they can hire their own psychiatrists. And there is nothing that we should want to do, either. Which brings me to my third point: If it’s impossible to cure an anti-Semite, it’s almost impossible to cure Jews of the delusion that we can.
You’re familiar with the sound of this delusion—you’ve probably heard it from your uncle. It goes something like this: “Don’t they notice the names on the hospital wings and the new campus centers? Aren’t they impressed by all the Jewish Nobelists in medicine and physics and chemistry? What about the fact that Israel is the only real democracy in the Middle East, the only place you’d want to be if you’re gay, the only place where brains are more valuable than oil? And wasn’t it a Jewish doctor who cured polio?”
All true, of course, and it’s a wonderful thing that there are so many creative Jewish minds and generous Jewish donors. It’s wonderful, too, that Israel remains a beacon of democratic courage and social creativity in the face of its adversaries. But this earns us no favors with the haters. They do not hate us because of our faults and failures; they hate us because of our virtues and successes. The more virtuous or successful we are, the more we’ll be hated by those whose animating emotions are resentment and envy.
And yet, as a Jewish community, we rarely seem to draw the obvious conclusion: Constantly seeking to prove ourselves worthy in order to win the world’s love is a fool’s errand. In the 1990s, Israel repeatedly took “risks for peace” for the sake of trying to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It culminated in the second intifada and the rise of the BDS movement. There isn’t a social justice movement in America in which Jews haven’t played a founding or leading role. Yet virtually every one of those movements is shot through with anti-Semitism.
This always seems to come as a shock to us, perhaps never more so than after October 7, when we witnessed just how little compassion there was for Jewish anguish, most of all from the very people to whom we have given so much. We need to stop being surprised. We need to stop being wounded. We need to stop being aggrieved and indignant.
I’d go further: We need to take this as an opportunity to stop caring. The goal of Jewish life is not to ingratiate ourselves with others so that they might dislike us somewhat less or love us somewhat more. The goal of Jewish life is Jewish thriving. And by “Jewish thriving,” I don’t mean thriving Jews, individually speaking. I mean a community in which Jewish learning, Jewish culture, Jewish ritual, Jewish concerns, Jewish aspiration, and Jewish identification are central to every member’s sense of him or herself.
How we choose to invest in our Jewishness—whether more religiously or more culturally or more politically or whatever—is up to each of us to decide. But the main point is this: Jewish thriving happens not when there are a lot of rich and successful and well-integrated Jews doing well and feeling safe in their host societies. Jewish thriving happens when being Jewish is not merely an incident of ancestry but rather the centering fact of life, the source from which we derive meaning and purpose, our spiritual compass and moral anchor and emotional safe harbor.
By this measure, what Franklin Foer called the “Golden Age of American Jews” was fading long before October 7. It has been fading for decades, starting when American Jews began to treat their Jewishness as the most disposable part of their identity. It was fading when bar and bat mitzvahs became the last Jewish ritual many American Jews observed in their life. It was fading when intermarriage rates crept above 50 percent. It was fading as a growing percentage of American Jews started to feel more embarrassment than pride in Israel.
Now, however, we have an opportunity to reverse that trajectory. And, paradoxically, this opportunity has been handed to us by our awareness of our vulnerability, our unpopularity, our being hated. I’m the person who coined the term “October 8th Jews” in a New York Timescolumn. Yet, in hindsight, I got the definition only half right. I said at the time that the October 8th Jew was the Jew who “woke up to discover who our friends are not.” What I should have said was that the October 8th Jew was the one who “woke up trying to remember who he truly is.”
And this brings me, finally, to my fourth point: Building our own table.
There are three great stories in the history of American Jewry. The name for the first story is called “Arriving”: the story of the first generation who came off the boats and lived in the tenements and never forgot the old country. This is what Irving Howe called “The World of Our Fathers.”
The second story is what Norman Podhoretz called “Making It”—the story of American-born Jews who went through schools like Stuyvesant and City College and went into professions like medicine and law; and of their children, who went through Dalton and Yale and became investment bankers and tech entrepreneurs.
Then there’s the third story. It’s called “Departing.” Some of those departures have been to Israel: They include people like Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg-Polin of Chicago, parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin; or Jim and Myrna Bennett of San Francisco, parents of Naftali Bennett. But there are also internal departures: of Jews who, at some point in their careers, were told they weren’t allowed to sit at the cool kids’ table and so went off and sat at their own—ultimately creating investment banking, Hollywood, private equity, most of today’s biggest law firms, not to mention Bloomberg and Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts and 1,000 other iconic American brands.
Those individual departures can serve as a model for what the Jewish community, as a whole, must do to achieve the kind of Jewish thriving I spoke of earlier. The infrastructure is already mostly there; the scale isn’t. We have superb day schools. But we need many more of them—at Catholic-school tuition rates—to give every Jewish family in America a chance to give their children an excellent education rooted in Jewish values. We have extraordinary Jewish philanthropies. But they need to become the primary locus of Jewish giving, not the relative afterthought they are to too many major Jewish philanthropists. We have Jewish priorities, but not a coherent funding mechanism: Perhaps, as Jordan Hirsch suggested recently in Sapir, we need the private equivalent of a Jewish Sovereign Wealth Fund. We have a Jewish media that, to be honest, is something of a mixed bag but could, with investment and vision, be put on a path to becoming the most desirable employment destination for the best writers and reporters and editors in America. We have an emerging rabbinate that, frankly, runs the risk of being captured by ideological forces that do not represent the Jewish community—we need to dedicate a great deal of effort to ensuring that more liberal Jewish congregations don’t suffer the same fate as the collapsing Presbyterian Church (USA). We have millions of engaged Jewish readers who are currently being disserved by a publishing industry in which “Zionism” has become a dirty word; let’s rescue publishing, too.
In short, we have a lot; we need a lot more. We need it because we are not going back to the America we knew as Jews 50 or 40 or even 10 years ago. We need it because we know what has happened to Jewish communities throughout history, from Cordoba to Cologne to Cairo, that lost their instinct for danger and failed to notice that their zenith was just a step away from their precipice. We need it because too many of our children are walking away from, even turning against, their own Jewish inheritance. We need it because “Departing” is only a synonym for a new beginning, and Jewish vitality has, for millennia, been renewed and strengthened by that cycle of departure and beginning.
And we need it because America needs it—because America needs us. America needs us as its witty gadfly and loyal critic and skeptical moral conscience; as the keeper of its tolerant and pluralistic flame; as its no-sayer in moments of overweening certitude and its yes-sayer in moments of crushing self-doubt. America needs us because the hope of the New Jerusalem that our founders sought to create in Plymouth in 1620 and Philadelphia in 1776 and the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 could never come to pass if it were built on anything but the memory and inspiration of that other Jerusalem, the one that was—and is—ours.
All this was understood once and will be understood again. Until then, we will endure the honor of being hated, as we continue to work toward a thriving Jewish future.
Photo: Getty Images
This article is adapted from the author’s “State of World Jewry Address,” delivered on February 1, 2026, at the 92nd Street Y.