Pro-Hamas activists gather in Washington Square Park for a rally following a protest march held in response to an NYPD sweep of an anti-Israel encampment at New York University in Manhattan, May 3, 2024. Photo: Matthew Rodier/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

The iconic Jewish sage Hillel is often quoted as teaching “If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?” This is the cornerstone of modern Jewish human rights philosophy.

For Jewish Americans, who have lived over the past half century in the protected bubble of American freedoms, the public repudiation of antisemitism, and US support for Israel, the focus and priority has often been on supporting others. Jews consistently have rejected a social philosophy of “for ourselves alone.”

Jews have been major supporters of the American civil rights, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and anti-poverty movements. Jewish organizations have been at the forefront of opposition to anti-Muslim and anti-Asian bias and discrimination. Jewish philanthropy has supported virtually every aspect of American life throughout the country. The vast majority of Jewish Americans have supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with a safe and secure Jewish state living side-by-side with a peaceful Palestinian state that has secure borders. (By the way, “Zionism” simply means support of the legitimacy of the Jewish State, which presumably everyone who seeks a two-state solution is willing to support and accept.)

Through their actions, Jews have become welcomed into American society to an extent otherwise unknown to them in modern world history. Whether it be in the arts, in medicine, in law, in politics, in business, in academia, in journalism, or elsewhere, Jews have achieved levels of acceptance and success that totally smashed the thick walls of embedded antisemitism.

Until now.

On October 7, Israel was viciously attacked and terrorized by Hamas. Since then, Israel has undergone missile attacks from Hezbollah in its northern border with Lebanon, forcing tens of thousands to leave their homes, and directly from Iran over its eastern border. Israel has faced attack from three of its four borders; the fourth border is with the Mediterranean Sea. Such is the definition of existential threat.

Israel is fighting enemies whose strategic goal is elimination of the Jewish state — period. For Hamas, this means ever-lasting terror regardless of the cost to the Palestinian population it purports to represent.

Hamas, Hezbollah, and, most importantly, Iran, do not seek a two-state solution to the Palestinian issue; they seek total elimination of the Jewish State no matter how many Palestinians die as a result. Their tactics are (i) to terrorize Israel through brutal murders, rapes, and missile bombings, (ii) to isolate Israel by using tactics that exacerbate the amount of civilian death and misery it can blame on Jews and the Jewish State, and (iii) to strangle Israel through world-wide economic and political attack and boycotting.

The response from much of the world, including the progressive wing of American politics, a wing largely led by Jews in the past, has been to support denunciation of Israel as a pariah state, and to utilize reckless language, bullying protest, and political power in a manner that has resulted in an unprecedented rise in antisemitism.

The de-Americanizing of Jews has been widespread, with the intent of nullifying the basic humanity of Jews. Cries that Jews should not be allowed to sing at world events, Jews are not welcome artistically unless they denounce Israel and Zionism, Jews are not welcome on college campuses unless they adopt the lie that Israel is committing genocide, Jews either are “pro-genocide or anti-genocide,” and Palestine should be free (meaning, according to Hamas, “Jew-free”) from the river to the sea, go without rigorous and effective denunciation.

Communities that have welcomed and benefited from Jewish support in the past, willingly chime in as the wave of anti-Jew rhetoric fills the increasingly polluted public airwaves of progressive speech and action.

It is in this context, that Hillel’s first teaching resounds with truth –“If I am not for me, who will be for me?”

Jewish Americans, despite their historic hope and preference to place their priorities elsewhere, now have been forced to prioritize their own safety and security.  Such is the shameful place we find ourselves.

“Never Again” has never felt so real.

Barry Fleishman is Chair of the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) National Commission’s Government Relations Committee.