Jewish identity and anti-Jewism after October 7, 2023: World routines and ruptures

The aftermath of October 7 has profoundly reshaped Jewish identity and community practices, as well as how they are perceived by the rest of Western societies. In this article, demographer Sergio DellaPergola offers a general assessment of these changes from an Israeli perspective, highlighting what he believes are the major issues facing the future of the Jewish people.

 

 

The Jewish experience, in the long term, has featured stable and continuous trends and patterns, intersecting with sudden changes, ruptures, and dramas. These turning points sometimes redirected Jewish history to a non-sequential point between the before and the after of a given event. The perennial – and at times somewhat predictable – movement of Jewish history and society sometimes shifted toward new roadmaps and unexpected vistas.

Two such watersheds, just before the mid of the 20th century, were the Shoah and the independence of the State of Israel – following which, a dual course of Jewish existence consolidated. Today, Jews in Israel comprise the majority of the total citizens of a sovereign state. Across all other countries worldwide, many diverse Jewish minorities sometimes thrive, sometimes struggle. The United States of America is by far the largest, more dominant and complex among these minorities. 

Tonight, I will outline how the events of October 7, 2023 in Israel and its aftermaths may have affected the main course of perceptions and practices of Jewish identity and community, globally and locally, noting some similarities and differences, convergences and divergences. My assessment does not come out of a pre-established scenario, and rather tries to address a range of salient features, drawing some conclusions after, and not before observation of the empirical evidence. My only warning is that I mainly address Jews as real, flesh and blood people, and not only as an item of more broadly conceived social or literary theory – such as in the narrative of constructed identities.

1. What happened on October 7, 2023

On October 7, thousands of Hamas terrorists penetrated the southwest of Israel and massacred 1,195 people, of which 815 civilians and 380 military, and deported 251 civilians to Gaza. October 7 was a Sabbath, the day of the Jewish Holiday of Simchat Torah – the Happiness of Torah. This seemed to indicate a particularly cynical stint in Islamist terrorism. 

The massacre was followed by war in Gaza and Lebanon, the displacement of about 150,000 Israelis from their homes, and tough retaliation by the Israeli military. These events triggered a crisis of fear and disbelief among Israeli society, a similar shaking of identities among Jews worldwide, and a wide process of disenfranchising of the State of Israel among the world public opinion, which – rightly or wrongly – reverberated upon Jewish communities globally.

In large sections of society, in the world at large and in Western countries, legitimacy of the three fundamental ingredients of being a Jew today – equal dignity, autonomous memory, and political sovereignty – was again called into question.

October 7 marked another watershed in the chronology of the state of Israel, and in the one-hundred years old Arab-Jewish or Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It marked forever the history of the Jewish people and the mutual relationship among its components – fully involving the Jews in the US. It generated an unexpected turning point in discourse about Jews and their relations with non-Jewish society. It questioned with unprecedented sharpness the position of Israel in its regional and global context, as well as the standing of world Jewish communities globally. It proposed once more the questions: What does it mean to be an Israeli? What does it mean to be a Jew today? It extended to a Middle East congested by multiple crises. It also questioned the very essence of the Western civilization.

2. Immediate implications of October 7

The first and most immediate implication of October 7 was discovering the dramatic failure of Israel’s military and civilian intelligence services to predict and monitor events. The causes were arrogance, machismo, euphoria, superficiality. There were many clear, extremely precise, detailed, and disturbing indications of Hamas’ plans, coming not only from well-acquainted internal, but also from foreign sources. Some of this information had been collected and analyzed by highly capable female intelligence, border guard, and non-commissioned officers, tragically branded as “immature” or “hysterical” by their male superiors. But above all hovered the dominant and widely shared paradigm of the balance of power and deterrent between Israel and its enemies. 

Israel’s grand strategist for the past 16 years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had made the choice not to put at risk his negative approach to any form of Palestinian Authority sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza. Hence the better path seemed to keep some sort of accommodation with the worst enemy of the Palestinian Authority: Hamas. The central pillar of the so called konseptzia was that Hamas was deterred by Israel’s military power. Economic benefits, like these huge transfers of money from Qatar, and the employment of 20,000 commuters from Gaza in Israel, would preserve non-belligerence. All the rest stemmed from this clue, including lack of preparation of the military on October 7. Netanyahu is a man of charisma, and he can be a good analyst. In a speech at the Knesset, not long before October 7, he had described in detail and with great precision what might happen in case of a Hamas attack. He understood, made his choices, and instructed. His entourage and subordinates were evidently convinced, or at least subdued, by the Prime Minister strategic directives. He knew better than everyone else. 

3. Broader implications of October 7

When the whole world collapses with its illusions, a sense of emptiness takes over. But what were these main fallen certitudes?

The first great illusion concerned the history and meaning of Israel, as a Jewish state and as the core of global Jewish peoplehood. We had deluded ourselves that after more than 75 years of independence, Israel was now on the road to maturity and consolidated well-being, including the ability to self-criticism and the capacity to implement much needed reforms long postponed since the difficult beginnings of statehood. On the eve of October 7, the country was deeply divided following the legal-constitutional reforms introduced by the Netanyahu government. Hundreds of thousands manifested in the streets against the new authoritarian direction. This stimulated among the Arab leadership the wrong impression that such a divided Israel could easily be attacked and erased. Instead, on the crucial day of danger the positive response to the call to battle was overwhelming. Internal solidarity was instantly restored, regardless of previous disagreements, at least for a while. Israel’s extraordinary resilience, at a time of crisis was the first bit of light emerging from the initial chaos. A negative international migration balance of -18,000 actually appeared in 2024, largely reflecting departures in October 2023. Such a negative balance previously occurred only three times over 100 years, the last time in the 1980s, once in the 1950s, and once in the 1920s.  However, in such a traumatic context, this number can be considered rather moderate.

We had deluded ourselves that after more than 75 years of independence, Israel was now on the road to maturity and consolidated well-being, including the ability to self-criticism and the capacity to implement much needed reforms.

The second great illusion concerned the Jewish and Israeli presence, and its relations with the other peoples of the Middle East. A certain process of normalization, wavering but in progress, such as the Abraham agreements, had led us to believe that Israel would be accepted into the assembly of the peoples of the region. Instead, we discovered that the project of rejection and genocide was still very much alive and well, with the head of the snake clearly in Iran, its metastases in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and disturbing relations between vassalage and lordship with Russia and partly also with China and North Korea. The war in Gaza and Lebanon unveiled the bluff of Israeli military omnipotence, but also the commitment of the younger generation to their country. In spite of the horrors of October 7, and Israel’s unavoidable more than proportional reaction, the time for negotiation to try to reach the end of mutual destruction was not over. But the responsibility for the next stages – not an imaginary peace but at least a truce, or else a regional and then global catastrophe – largely moved to the shoulders of Western and Middle Eastern intermediaries. 

The third great illusion involved the intellectual and spiritual principles of the Western world. After and despite the Shoah, we had hoped that the West – which conceived and executed the Shoah – had repented; and that it had metabolized intolerance – if not repugnance – towards the occasional cause of the slogan: “Never again”. But “never again” was once again here with us. In large sections of society, in the world at large and in Western countries, legitimacy of the three fundamental ingredients of being a Jew today – equal dignity, autonomous memory, and political sovereignty – was again called into question. An ignorant, hostile, and arbitrary reading of the word Zionism was exploited to condemn the entire Jewish people for crimes never committed. 

4. Historiographic digressions

The catastrophe of October 7 was the worst occurrence to the Jewish people since the end of the Shoah. The question was raised by historians and others whether or not the term Shoah is usable in the context of October 7 and what followed in Israel and Gaza. The answer is not simple because evidently Shoah was a unique event historically, and hopefully will never be replicated. But I also believe that the problem should be examined not so much in terms of the specific features and events of that particular day – the greatest massacre of Jewish civilians since 1945. What instead should be developed is an analytic framework to help us judging whether certain particular events configure or not a given typology, in relation to two categories: intentionality and comprehensiveness. We search for rules which may help understanding what happened and what might conceivably happen again under certain circumstances. I suggest three elements for such a framework. 

1) The first necessary element is a certain broad theory outlining the wide scope of a program, reflecting a certain long-term vision of the world, very sharp as well as somewhat generic. Such basic program should include a strategic concept of an ideal world, as well as certain elements of what should not happen, and of what might happen if those unwanted things in fact do happen. In this respect we may compare the keynote speech of Adolf Hitler at the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, with the Hamas charter of 1988.

I quote from the former:^[1]

•  « If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! »

And the Hamas covenant proclaims the following:^[2]

• « (art. 22) They [the Jews] were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it. (art. 32) Their plan is embodied in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying. (art. 7) The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say: O Moslems, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.  »  

Two different literary styles, the same identical message.

2) The second element of the framework is a concrete executive program to implement the theoretical vision. It should include very detailed specifications on how to proceed regarding specific tactical targets to be attained and what strategic consequences the operation should determine. Here, we have the protocols of the January 20, 1942 Wannsee conference, with its meticulous enumeration of detailed goals and executive tasks, and its rigorous allocations of manpower and financial means. The detailed battle orders distributed two weeks before the Hamas invasion of October 7 provide a good match, as they do not extend only to the immediate border zone, but indicate precise paths to be followed to reach and destroy Tel Aviv and other important civilian centers, besides the main military facilities. 

3) The third element is the active involvement of willing participants who do not only execute orders received from above, but voluntarily and creatively add their own input to the plan and make it more efficient and fatal. In this respect, Hanna Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil passed away miserably with the recent release of the Eichmann tapes, recorded in Argentina in 1957. The tapes were known to exist but were accurately concealed for over 65 years, until they were found in a German archive. In the tapes, the voice of one of the main perpetrators unashamedly unveils the conscious ideological political intentionality and comprehensiveness of the project, and the pride of its authors. No more “anyone could do it, including yourself”. There are appalling similarities between the massacres of civilians perpetrated by the Germans and their collaborators during World War II, and the October 7 massacre – reported with jubilation by the authors in real time through video calls to their families. Without too much detail on the similarities, one notes the many acts of bestiality committed by the executioners with their own hands against civilians, including women, men, children, the elderly. One element, though, was added, and that is the sexual violence which was proudly reported on October 7, but was less typical of Nazi actions.

This easily upholds the attempted genocide crime – annihilating Israel and the Jews – on Hamas side, with the additional purpose to establish a visionary extensive Caliphate on the whole territory between the River and the Sea. Not unlike the visionary Third Reich over Europe in the 1930s. The bombing and demolition of the AMIA Jewish community building in Buenos Aires in July 1994, with Iranian backing, was part of such broader regional and global strategy. A strategy aimed at erasing Israel was actively promoted through Iran’s nuclear weapon program, the launching of hundreds of ballistic and guided missiles and drones, together with Hamas, the Hezbollah Islamic movement in Lebanon, and the Houthi insurrection in Yemen.

The Israeli military reaction was indisputably rude, but it did not intend to destroy the Palestinian people as such. It rather meant to put an end to the Hamas rule in Gaza.

As against this complex machine, it was alleged that Israel, too, committed genocide and crimes against humanity in the Gaza area. Figures were produced by Hamas on the several tens of thousands of victims among the Gaza civilian population. Higher numbers were postulated by some engaged analysts, even on the pages of learned journals, imagining the numbers of missing bodies still under the debris.^[3] These allegations deserve two answers. One is that the numbers provided by the Hamas Ministry of Health were evidently unilateral and uncontrolled. They do not withstand peer review of the real combination of civilian and fighting casualties as a share of the known Gaza population composition by age and sex. The data released by the Gaza authorities imply that nearly all of the victims were women and children, and there were no casualties among male fighters.^[4] The second limit of these data is that nobody controlled for multiple reporting of the same missing person by different relatives in a context of large extended families. In the professional literature this is known as multiplicity.

More importantly, what clearly lacked on the Israeli side were the two fundamentals of intentionality and comprehensiveness of a genocidal operation. The Israeli military reaction was indisputably rude, but it did not intend to destroy the Palestinian people as such. It rather meant to put an end to the Hamas rule in Gaza, while often warning the locals of incoming operations. Israeli action was cognate to the military answer by the Allied armies in Europe and Japan during World War II, which unquestionably hit large numbers of non-involved civilians and was obviously not proportional to the initial offense and damage caused by the Germans and by the Japanese. That was part of the tragic logic of war but not a genocide. Otherwise we would be compelled to admit that the West’s victory in World War II, too, was a genocide and crime against humanity. If so, the world’s democratic reconstruction, and the subsequent years of post-war freedom and prosperity all stand on immoral foundations.

And also: the Israeli hostages were held in the Gaza underground in conditions comparable to a Nazi lager, in darkness, nearly without food and water, no health treatment or sanitary facilities, dramatic loss of weight, and the abject murder of several of them. During the same period, Israel continued to supply water, electric power, and for the most, free transit of humanitarian aid to the Gaza population. The Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails were kept under strict international standards and regulations, enjoyed rights of air and inside movement, health treatment (e.g. Sinwar’s cancer surgery), communication, and access to higher education. Juxtaposing these two situations outlines a dramatic gap of civilizations between the two parties of the conflict. Not all Gazans were responsible, but there was no Righteous of the Nations there. 

5. End of dignity

October 7 unveiled able manipulation of world public opinion by Hamas and its allies, and the failure of Israel to follow suit. However, certain features of public action and discourse manifestly indicated a pre-existing preferential orientation, which from latent became explicit. The positions taken by external observers and agents not directly involved in the October 7 events were quite revealing, in the US and other Western countries. Some took up the defense of Israel, but a much bigger side directly or indirectly supported Hamas from the beginning, and relatively few kept intermediate or neutral positions. Whether or not Hamas represents the whole Gaza population persisted as a most equivocal issue.

The truth is that today every honest person should document seriously, clearly explain one’s own positions, take a stand for one side or the other, and bravely bear the moral consequences of such choices. The different stances taken by large sectors of world public opinion, international, national and local politics, academia, research centers, the mass media, Churches, NGOs, and many ordinary people prompted us to create a sort of Gallery of Dignity. Here are some examples, in no particular order and in telegraphic style:

• In the first place, the International Red Cross never visited, not even once, the 251 Israeli deportees to Gaza. The first contact occurred only on the occasion of the restitution of some of the hostages through pompous ostentation by the criminal kidnappers. This was the paradigm of mandate betrayal and the end of dignity.
• The United Nations never passed a motion condemning the savage attack by Hamas on October 7, but voted for an immediate ceasefire (i.e. stopping Israel) with an automatic majority of 153 in favor, 10 against, 23 abstentions and 7 absent. The UN never gave such attention to the massacres perpetrated in any other regional conflict, namely the slaughtering in Syria of hundreds of thousands of Muslims by other Muslims. The UN General Assembly, the Security Council, the Human Rights Committee, or the sleepy UNIFIL troops in Lebanon, as well as the International Criminal Court in Hague, all demonstrated striking one-sidedness and double standards. The UNRWA, the UN agency for refugee relief and welfare, was repeatedly caught cheating and collaborating with the Hamas criminal endeavors, supplying shelter, stealing bodies, and holding hostages. These bodies lost moral authority, respect and credibility.
• Catholic Pope Francis, Jorge Bergoglio, expressed legitimate concern for the protection of human life, but never horror for the human carnage of October 7. He flaunted equi-proximity toward the families of the deportees to Gaza and the delegations from Gaza, giving same attention to victims and perpetrators. He hinted that Israel commits genocide, and was portrayed in adoration of a kid clothed in a red keffiyeh. Sequentially with his condemning of the Israelis for killing Palestinian children, this scene was tantamount to reaffirming the Jewish crime of deicide. Other prominent Cardinals revived an ancient misreading of the Law of Retaliation, restoring the old contrast of Jewish vengeance versus Christian love. Not a word was uttered about the persecution of Middle East Christian communities by Muslim fundamentalists. This regressive strategy caused the 1965 Nostra Aetate declaration to be practically deleted, and the ongoing Jewish-Catholic interreligious dialog to be brought back to square one.
• Academy, once a place for terse reflection and the enhancement of knowledge, sometimes emerged as a congenial gym for political activism, personal discrimination, boycott, and the reformulation of hatred. One of the most embarrassing moments was the hearings of the Presidents of major US universities affirming that gross disciplinary violations and elementary moral choices on campus “depend on the context”. Boycott, divestment and sanctions became tolerated modes of expression in a battle for academic hegemony – to the extreme of the denial of speech, or the imposition of speech by compulsory script. Analysts proclaimed that the war on terrorism reduced the counter-terrorist State to the role of terrorist, demonstrated complacency with unbridled terrorist violence, and ostentatiously celebrated crime. The confusion of knowledge with advocacy was a sure recipe to the downgrading of academic standards.
• Among the media, the New York Times, took one month to retract the fake news spread by Hamas about the alleged bombing and destruction by Israel of the Baptist hospital in Gaza, which instead was a missile launched by Islamic Jihad on the hospital parking lot, with the building staying intact. Unbalanced reporting mentioned Israel more than three times as often as Hamas on the negative side, while personal stories of Palestinian or Lebanese suffering appeared three times as often as Israeli losses.^[5] The BBC did not consider Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations and suffered a similar collapse of reporting accountability.
• Major NGOs failed to their mission. Amnesty International issued an explicitly racist statement against the very existence of Israel, falsely accusing it of apartheid, and staying all but silent on October 7. The main international women’s organizations failed to condemn the horrific acts of torture and sexual abuse against Israeli women, and belatedly released a watered-down document, which any other group of women would have dismissed.
• Crowds in the squares shouted “Palestine will be free from the River to the Sea” (i.e.: death to the Israelis), but also “Death to the Jews”, thus closing full circle the antisemitic roots of anti-Israelism.

The main and meager consequence of this shameful carousel was that many Jews felt once again alone, abandoned and betrayed – sometimes by their own peers. In one synthetic caption, October 7 signified the return of Jews to powerlessness.

6. Antisemitism as ever, again

These fragments of evidence elicit a broader reflection on the status of antisemitism after October 7. By nearly unanimous judgment, an increase in Jewish perceptions of antisemitism was recorded all over the world, even in countries like the US where the phenomenon had been less acute. Over the last 15 years, the miserable syndrome appeared to be constantly and dangerously increasing, with large sections of the West sliding on a slippery slope of unknown depth.^[6] The Israeli retaliation in Gaza stimulated a massive process of disenfranchising of Israel, and by implication, of Jewish communities worldwide. But, appallingly, an increase in anti-Israeli attitudes was observed immediately after October 7, just following the massacre of Israelis, and before the Israeli military had intervened in Gaza.^[7] Certain hostile energies that seemed to have been weakened or even forgotten, reemerged with unexpected violence. These latent germs operated again throughout different channels against Jews and against the established web of relations between Jews and society. Many different narratives, perpetrators and tools were involved in this dissonant concert. 

One of the most frequent, if collateral, expressions of this otherness syndrome was accusing Jews that any critique raised against the state of Israel is taken as an antisemitic act. This implied Jewish intolerance of any critique, in turn implying the accusation of censorship and authoritarian control of discourse by Jews and their supporters. Here is where some of the fundamentals of antisemitism discourse should be clarified.

Antisemitism is an unfortunate word which should be avoided when one considers that the intention of its inventors was to offend the Jews.^[8] It was not conceived as a sort of neutral sociological term but as an active manifesto to fight the Jews, under the coverage of the euphemistic, non-existent term of Semitism. The whole concept should be reformulated substituting the old term with the better neologism of anti-Jewism. Not even anti-Judaism, because it is about the Jews. By contemporary standards of measurement and judgment the experience of anti-Jewism comprises three main outcomes. 

The first, most dramatic outcome, is physical violence and annihilation of the Jew, as has repeatedly happened in the past, most notably in the Shoah. While the quest for genocide seemed to have disappeared after World War II, the October 7 premises and context demonstrated that this was not the case. 

The second outcome is marginalization and exclusion of the Jew from civil, social, economic, cultural life. Such pattern, with a few exceptions, seemed to have been averted by legal provisions, at least in the countries where Jews mostly live. 

The third outcome is worsening the quality of life of the Jews, as individuals and communities, engendering fear, anxiety, frustration, and anger. This has been the experience of millions of Jews worldwide, and represents the most challenging and widespread common denominator of anti-Jewism after October 7.

One of the most frequent, if collateral, expressions of this otherness syndrome was accusing Jews that any critique raised against the state of Israel is taken as an antisemitic act.

But to really understand the substantive matter of Jewish malaise, it is necessary to expound the essential minimum request by the Jews of today. Here we seem to have a colossal real or fabricated misunderstanding by many – Jews and non-Jews alike. The necessary starting point is the postulate that the victims, not the perpetrators, are the only ones who can determine the presence and nature of offence. In-depth research demonstrates that contemporary Jews, the victims in this case, feel under attack if three fundamental demands – demonstrably intertwined – are not met. 

• The first demand, for the Jew as an individual, is civil, social, cultural, political equality, respect, access, opportunity, inclusion – like every other citizen. 
• The second demand, for the Jew as a designated victim of persecution, concerns the right to preserve and transmit one’s own authentic memory of the Shoah, without confusion with the memories of other human tragedies. These must be respected but cannot be subsumed the ones with the others. 
• The third demand, for the Jew as member of a national collective, concerns the faculty to exert political sovereignty, therefore the legitimacy of having one’s own state – Israel, keeping the right to live there or not. Which obviously does not mean that one cannot criticize the government of Israel, or that doing so is antisemitic.

Antisemitism, or anti-Jewism, is the denial of one or more of these three basic and non-negotiable rights. Above all, judgment of whether or not these demands were accomplished competes to the offended side, and not to the perpetrators’ side. Antisemitism can and must be defined from below, not from above.

Jews are very sensitive to their history and their destiny, even if they can sometimes appear overly susceptible to memories of the past. Keeping alive the memory of the past is one dominant trait of contemporary Jewish identity – in empirical observation, one of the most powerful and diffused imperatives. Memory is also one of the traits most contested and considered annoying by critics of Jews. Memory articulates as an uninterrupted series of events, and is constantly enriched by new elements relevant to the collective and to individual members. Memory grows constantly, but also inevitably with the passing of time it is thinned out of certain details, and therefore it is distilled and updated. 

Jews not only remember in their own way the events that concern them personally, but also often transmit to others and in particular to their descendants the cognitive, experiential and affective perceptions linked to a particular episode. These transmission waves operate not only personally but also collectively, conveying similar stimuli from others. A crucial characteristic of accumulated memory is a sort of conditioned reflex that binds together events of apparently different nature, but evidently perceived as inextricably related. Touching upon any of the elements provokes a reaction on the other – perhaps Pavlovian, yet very real. This may be hard to understand by the outsider, but it should be explained and metabolized. The assertion “I am not antisemite, I am only anti-Zionist or anti-Israeli” is empirically untenable.

7. Jewish identity after October 7

These various threads deeply influenced the internal perspective of Jewish identity.^[9] The question is how did October 7 affect the dynamics of beliefs, behaviors and interactions within the Jewish collective. At the core of the question: Did October 7 change, strengthen, or weaken Jewish peoplehood? This requires a quick review of the three interrelated domains of Jewish contents-identity-identification: 

• What do Jews think Judaism is? i.e. what is the basic definition and meaning of the lemma as perceived by members of the collective?
• Why are Jews attached to Judaism? i.e. what is the leading motivation and the universe of contents imagined or manifested throughout the collective?
• How do Jews express their identification with Judaism? i.e. what are the ideational and behavioral models preferred in personal life, and the relational networks chosen by individuals for self-representation facing others within and outside the collective?
• A fourth domain of interest reflects the perennial question: Who is a Jew? i.e. how do we define the boundaries of the collective?

Jews are very sensitive to their history and their destiny, even if they can sometimes appear overly susceptible to memories of the past. Keeping alive the memory of the past is one dominant trait of contemporary Jewish identity.

In the competition between Judaism as religion, culture, ancestry or other primary definitions of belonging, recent comparative research demonstrates the consistent prevalence of culture and ancestry – regardless of place. Religion is the more original and binding mode of belonging, but everywhere – in the US, in Israel, in other countries – it regularly falls behind the preferences expressed for other modes. The question arises, of course, whether under significant stress people become more religious or less religious. Experiences from past turning points in Jewish history do not provide a firm answer: it can go either way. The current state of affairs can be described as a perennial struggle between a dominant atmosphere of secularization, producing less religion, and the effects of the more intensive demography of the more religious, producing more. Patterns of de-secularization have been visible in the recent Jewish experience for several years preceding October 7, probably representing among other needs the frustration of many Jews facing the perceived hostility of surrounding societies.

In the last generation of social studies globally, the main factor of attachment to Judaism consistently was found to be memory of the Shoah and the struggle against antisemitism. An immediately lower level of involvement comprised a sense of belonging with Jewish peoplehood and the family, and emotional attachment to Israel. Jewish culture, charity, and religious beliefs and practices commanded lower involvement frequencies. An important clue in this respect has become the variable role played by Israel in the consolidation of world Jewish identity and population. That is: Israel today constitutes not only a concrete part of the total human collective, but also a symbolic point of reference regardless of place.

A crucial question, then, becomes whether or not there is one central domain of consensus between the different and sometimes conflicting options for Jewish identification – a sort of axis around which the whole wheel turns. Analysis of the perception universe of Jews in Israel and in the vast majority of communities throughout the world, shows that the extant polarization between the more religious and the secular sectors of Jewish society allows for a common ground in a certain sense of shared transnational solidarity. A manifest growth in the central relevance of Israel and Jewish peoplehood emerged in recent studies of European Jews, probably as a response to perceptions of increasing hostility in the surrounding societies. Quite amazingly, however, this central domain of consensus could not be detected empirically in studies of Jews in the US. While the intensity of Jewish sentiment in the US is not inferior in comparison to other places, this shared perception of central accommodation did not show up. One possible explanation would be a stronger Americanization of Jewish identity vis-à-vis the parallel nationalization of Jewish identities elsewhere.

To some extent this was compensated by the growing relative share of the Orthodox and Haredi expressions of Jewish religiosity among the younger age groups. Thus, a partial commonality of perceptions may emerge among younger Jews in different countries – as against growing distancing between other sections of the same younger cohorts. At the end of the road, moments of great stress may affect the willingness of people to remain Jewish or to sever their links from the collective. 

In the last generation of social studies globally, the main factor of attachment to Judaism consistently was found to be memory of the Shoah and the struggle against antisemitism.

Who, then is, but more significantly will continue to be a Jew? The question can be adjudicated following several classification criteria, from the inside or from the outside. With all due consideration for normative definitions, the only possible way in empirical research is to deal with it operationally. Based on the declarations by the people directly affected, the trend seems to be expansion of the small inner Jewish core, shrinking of the intermediate circles of belonging, expansion of the more distant, disenchanted and uninterested periphery, and growth of the highly engaged but strongly hostile critics. These trends are very resilient, but October 7, and its excruciating quest for explanations and meaning, hold the potentiality to reverse them.   

8. Some tentative conclusions and prospects

Concluding, I will mention five critical issues for further debate.

1) The first concerns the role of the Jewish investigator and the Jewish research subject matter. Professional and disciplinary impartiality, which already was under growing stress before October 7, became ever more difficult or even untreatable in the aftermath. Besides one’s own legitimate narrative choices, external pressures – framed by political and academic threads and threats – generated new self-defense and/or advocacy mechanisms among investigators. Investigators increasingly felt the need to position themselves taking certain distances, affirming certain truths, or subscribing to certain manifestos. When dealing with positions taken by others, in relation to Israel and the Jews – whether supporting or dissenting – to preserve distance in the future could require a dose of heroism. 

2) The second issue concerns the attempt to impose a new post-Jewish colonization. The void created by the momentary collapse of the Israeli state, facing the concerted attack of multiple actors all inspired by fundamentalist Islamic doctrines, was promptly filled by anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish toxics. The strict, inextricable connection that exists between anti-Zionism and antisemitism brought about waves of protest and hostility against local Jewish communities nearly everywhere. In the US, the strict policy collaboration between the US and Israel was nearly jeopardized by tactical concerns in the course of the 2024 Presidential primaries and elections, namely attention to large Arab constituencies. After October 7, some politicians squarely reintroduced into public discourse an element of denial of the right of the Jews to have their own sovereign state. In academia a tendency emerged to discuss antisemitism and Jewish identity issues above the heads of Jews, disconnected from the existential reality of the concerned persons. The pretension to reshape again the Jew as an agent necessarily subordinated to other more powerful actors amounted to no less than an act of post-Jewish colonization. Against such a quest for hegemony, lots of Jewish dialectics, rhetoric, but above all academic and political skill need to be found to recover positions that prevailed before October 7.

The ideal scenario would expectedly be a new surge of Jewish-Israeli solidarity, but the opposite option of disenchantment and further distancing would not be surprising.

3) The third issue concerns the Israel and diaspora existential intersections. October 7 in a sense pushed Jewish history two generations back, by destroying the myth of Israel invincibility – and also, for that matter, military competence. On October 7, we rediscovered that the existence of the State of Israel had absolutely not solved the Jewish survival existential problem. The profound crisis generated in Israeli society, in turn, deeply impinged upon Israel’s image, still powerfully touching emotional chords among US and other Jews – in spite of the already noted decline of interest. The ideal scenario would expectedly be a new surge of Jewish-Israeli solidarity, but the opposite option of disenchantment and further distancing would not be surprising. One sensitive indicator was that while thousands of Jewish volunteers poured to Israel on the occasion of its previous wars, in 1948, 1967, and 1973, virtually none was seen in 2023 – when Israel’s existential danger was in no way lesser. There were plenty of declarations and marches of support for Israel, also by good Christians, but a feeling of fear and even anguish was hovering above all. Ghosts from past history re-emerged, overcoming the sense of self-reassurance that the Jewish state was supposed to project upon world Jewry. 

4) The fourth issue concerns the Jewish People and its governance. Facing the immense trouble of the October 7 collapse and its aftermath, the whole system of world Jewish governance revealed its limits and basic non-functionality. Discussion of the performance of Israel’s government was out of the scope here. What rather attracts attention is the evanescence of several of the major international agencies that were supposed to represent Jewish interests globally. October 7 exposed in particular the non-existence of a pan-Jewish world – and especially Israel-US bilateral – mechanism of alert, discussion, analysis and decision-making, within the recognized limits of division of labor between what is a sovereign state, and what is not. This was especially problematic in view of the extraordinary intertwined triangle of military and political dependence of Israel on the US; of the often-mentioned relevance of Israel in the consolidation of US Jews’ personal and community identities; and of the still not negligible interest of US politicians in the local Jewish vote. The cognitive, existential and affective dialectic relation with the Jewish Diaspora requires radical restructuring, with the creation of a real discussion board of joint problems and interests, which is lacking today.

The Israel-World Jewry dual relationship needs to be restarted. Jews in the world, wherever they are, cannot stand aside, or else they may desist from being inside.

5) The fifth and last issue concerns the very future of the Jews. October 7 offers a term of reference for a critical discussion about the future of the Jews. The picture in Israel, in the US and worldwide, is more complex and precarious than one would prefer it to be. The Jewish world rests on very solid ground in terms of its values, convictions, and accomplishments. Israel’s extraordinary resilience was demonstrated by the stern standing of the families of those abducted to Gaza, and the solidarity expressed by most of the nation. Yet, some of the self-reliance is now vanished – not about the righteousness of the road but about its feasibility. Israel emerged from October 7 as something that needs to be conceptually, politically, operationally restarted from scratch – Israel 2.0. For many years to come, Israel will have to devote a large part of its mental and material resources to be less Athens and more Sparta. Israel’s young people are bound to be mobilized for the coming generations to the categorical imperative of defending their country. Civil society will have to stay alert to strengthen democracy and avoid dangerous political turns in reactionary and messianic directions that are always lurking. A profound change of political and military leadership will be needed. The predicament of sectorial cleavages vs. unity and coherence must be solved by a unifying and not divisive leadership.

The Israel-World Jewry dual relationship, too, needs to be restarted, and with it many of the existing interpretations and scenarios. Jews in the world, wherever they are, cannot stand aside, or else they may desist from being inside. Omnivorous new research projects must be promoted for those who are interested both to understand, and to act in educated ways. It is time to end self-laudatory attitudes, lachrymose self-commiseration, and delirious visions. Less punditry and more modesty may help to construct a better Jewish future, or at least to avoid more catastrophes – whether through enhanced unity, or through growing separation.

We can trust Jews will continue to pursue their utopias, facing the challenges of defending their own inalienable rights, being steadily attentive to the rights of others, keeping to the moral values of Jewish heritage, and defending Israel democracy.

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Sergio DellaPergola. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

 

This article has been adjusted from The Gale Family Foundation Lecture at the University of Texas, Austin, March 6, 2025.