Illustrative: University of Wisconsin, Madison students on April 29, 2024. Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

After October 7, antisemitism was guaranteed to surge. History conditioned Jews for that much.

What was harder to absorb was watching Jewish voices join movements that could not clearly condemn the slaughter, rape, kidnapping, and massacre of Israeli civilians — movements that blurred or minimized what happened, or in some rare cases openly celebrated it.

This appeared across elite universities, media spaces, cultural institutions, and parts of organized Jewish communal life. It forced an uncomfortable question into public view: why do some Jews distance themselves from Jewish collective interests precisely when hostility toward Jews becomes most visible?

Before anything else, I want to say something plainly. Jews are not looking for conflict. They never were. In every country they settled, they built and contributed, often while facing restrictions that would have broken any other group. The hostility Jews face is not a response to Jewish aggression. It is ancient and historical.

When Jews are left alone, they thrive and so does the world around them. The problem has always been the periods when they are not. October 7 was one of those periods, and what followed in the public conversation made it worse.

The first mistake is treating all internal Jewish criticism as betrayal. Jewish civilization was built on argument. The Talmud is structured through disagreement. The Hebrew prophets criticized Jewish leaders relentlessly, often more harshly than Israel’s foreign enemies ever managed. Self-criticism is part of its intellectual core. The question is what kind of criticism emerges under collective pressure, and where it eventually aligns itself.

Part of what explains the fracture is basic human psychology. When external hostility rises, internal cohesion does not automatically follow. Some move closer to the group. Others move away from it, hoping distance will offer protection.

In certain academic, media, and activist environments, Israel is framed as uniquely deserving of condemnation, and Jews who depend on acceptance inside those circles face a real choice once Israel becomes the target of organized outrage.

This is the part that usually goes unsaid. In those spaces, publicly attacking Israel or condemning Jewish self-determination generates social approval, professional protection, and a particular kind of moral status. Expressing solidarity with Jewish suffering after October 7 — or raising facts about Palestinian society and violence that people want to ignore — often produced the opposite.

The distinction that matters most is between criticizing Israeli policy and joining movements that excuse violence against Jewish civilians or treat Jewish peoplehood itself as the problem. Criticism of Israeli military decisions, settlement policy, or political leadership is legitimate. None of that requires minimizing October 7 or blurring what Hamas actually did.

But some of the movements Jewish voices aligned with after October 7 went far beyond policy disagreement. They framed the massacre as legitimate resistance and treated Jewish existence in the region as the source of the conflict. The self-defense ethics that govern any honest confrontation apply here: what you participate in, and what you make possible for others, are not suspended because the cause sounds righteous.

What is difficult to account for is the speed of the collapse. The images from Kibbutz Be’eri were not ambiguous. The testimony from survivors did not require interpretation. And yet within days, some Jewish public voices redirected the conversation toward Israeli culpability with urgency entirely detached from the murdered and abducted. There is information in what a person instinctively moves to protect first when confronted with an atrocity.

Jewish survival has never required internal consensus. Jews have spent centuries arguing over religion, secularism, nationalism, and assimilation, and have remained a coherent people through all of it. The danger is the erosion of the floor beneath the argument, the shared baseline commitment to Jewish continuity that held across all that disagreement.

That floor is less stable than it has been, and the fracture is happening inside real institutions, real families, and real communities.

I train people to protect themselves and the people they love. One of the foundational lessons in that work is that threat recognition starts with seeing what is actually in front of you, without exaggeration and without denial. Jews do not need the world’s permission to exist or to defend themselves. What they need is clarity about who stands with them when it costs something to do so.

That clarity has to start inside the Jewish world itself, and the question it forces is a simple one: does internal disagreement stay inside a framework that still regards Jewish life as worth preserving, or does it drift into alignment with movements that have already decided the answer is no.

Tsahi Shemesh is an Israeli-American IDF veteran and the founder of Krav Maga Experts in NYC. A father and educator, he writes about Jewish identity, resilience, moral courage, and the ethics of strength in a time of rising antisemitism.