In the federal FACE Act case born from the mob that blocked access in November 2024 to a synagogue in West Orange, N.J., the defendants are asking the courts to abandon the constitutional protections of religious freedom that make America great, while disregarding Jewish law, prayer and lived experience. One could hardly seek better proof that the defendants in this instance discarded both the law and America’s founding principles in their pursuit of antisemitic bigotry.

The legislation was initially designed to protect people entering abortion clinics from being harassed; eventually, it was expanded to apply to the entrances to houses of worship.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation New Jersey, American Muslims for Palestine New Jersey and numerous individual defendants all outrageously insist that the synagogue event they disrupted—one that memorialized a murdered Israeli rabbi and encouraged Jewish life in Israel—was not religious at all. They arrogate for themselves the right to decide what Judaism is, what Jews believe and which parts of Jewish life count as religious. That is not a legal defense, but an act of erasure, as antisemitic as it is unconstitutional.

The court filings could hardly make their intent and animus more blatant. One defendant asserts therein that encouraging Jews to live in the Holy Land “could not plausibly be interpreted” as a religious activity. Another compares such a real estate fair to “bingo night in a church basement.” A third faults the government for failing to prove, from Jewish law, that it’s a mitzvah (“commandment”) for Jews to live in the land of Israel, as if U.S. attorneys should be expected to research Jewish sources to establish basic Jewish tenets.

All of these attempt to force the courts into unconstitutional entanglement with religious doctrine, while denying and distorting obvious Jewish beliefs.

The First Amendment, to be certain, forbids the courts from wading into this argument; they cannot be called upon to determine what is or is not a Jewish religious activity. American courts cannot claim expertise in the Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel, the relevant mitzvot (“biblical commandments”) or how they apply today.

At the same time, the defendants’ attitude is so obviously at odds with Jewish belief and so dismissive of the Jewish experience as to prove antisemitic bias. The desire to live on holy ground is a theme that saturates Jewish prayer, holy texts and halachah (“Jewish law”). Antisemitism does not only target Jews as individuals, but Judaism as a religion, and the defense filings openly express that the defendants share this familiar and repugnant hostility.

To claim that a synagogue event about land in Israel is “not religious” requires, first of all, that one deny the mitzvah of yishuv ha’aretz, “settling the land,” affirmed by the Ramban and rooted in Torah. It demands nullification of the pleas for rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Holy Temple, restoration of the Davidic Kingdom and return of the Divine Presence that are at the core of every Jewish prayer service, every day of the year.

And, of course, it erases religious expression by Jews. Whether those making aliyah come from the United States, France, Ethiopia, Ukraine, Argentina or anywhere else, political Zionism is rarely even a secondary concern. The overwhelming majority move either to escape Jew-hatred or to fulfill numerous religious commandments, including living in the Land of Israel and participating in its rebuilding. Maimonides, Rav Ovadiah of Bartenura, Rav Yosef Karo, in addition to the hundreds of students of the Vilna Gaon and Ba’al Shem Tov who moved to the Land of Israel, all did so exclusively as an expression of their Jewish religious beliefs.

Most fundamentally, to insist that their motivations are “not religious” is to tell the Jews targeted at Congregation Ohr Torah that their own lives, fears, hopes, beliefs and commitments do not matter. That is not a defense. It is an expression of transparent—and transparently hateful—disregard for Jewish humanity.

The FACE Act protects all forms of religious exercise, not only ritual. Congress enacted it to protect houses of worship and religious communities from intimidation and obstruction. This protection is not limited to prayer services, but encompasses the full spectrum of religious life, including gatherings that express, celebrate or advance a community’s religious identity. A synagogue event discussing Jewish life in Israel is unquestionably part of that spectrum.

If a court accepted the defendants’ framing, that would set a chilling precedent. Jewish prayer would be protected, but attempts to realize the commitments expressed in those prayers would not. That would hamper Jewish religious liberty no less than attacks on circumcision or kosher meat. It would have the courts annul the parts of Judaism that anti‑Israel activists find inconvenient.

The defendants’ argument is unconstitutional because it asks the court to define Judaism, and antisemitic because it expressly denies both Judaism’s own self‑definition and the religious beliefs of the targeted Jews. In other words, the defendants want the courts to declare their activities not to be hateful or bigoted, precisely because they are.

This is dangerous not only for Jews who seek to fulfill mitzvot, but for all Americans who share the reverence of the country’s Founding Fathers for religious freedom and tolerance.

Consider that without those principles, Pilgrims in Massachusetts, Mennonites in Pennsylvania and Anglicans in Virginia could not have united to build the world’s dominant superpower. The defendants have thus proven both their guilt and their hostility towards Judaism, Jewish life and the values that make America great.

If you think about it, it is shocking that Korach joined forces with Datan and Aviram in his campaign to usurp leadership. Korach had a distinguished reputation, as Chazal (the Sages) explain, and he presented his case by way of (very flawed) doctrinal arguments, trying to persuade the masses that his theological position was correct. In stark contrast, Datan and Aviram had a very checkered and disreputable past of nasty confrontation and shameful instigation.

As Rashi explains, based on midrashim, it was Datan and Aviram who were violently fighting with each other in Egypt when Moshe tried to stop them (Shemot [Exodus] 2:3); it was Datan and Aviram who badmouthed Moshe to Pharoah, thereby almost causing Moshe’s execution (ibid. 2:15); it was Datan and Aviram who violated the command not to leave over any manna until the next day (ibid. 16:19-20); and as Midrash Ha-Gadol (Bamidbar [Numbers]16:1) states, it was Datan and Aviram who complained at the shore of Yam Suf (the Sea of Reeds) about having left Egypt and who sought to return there (Shemot 14:11-12 – v. Rashi on v. 12).

Why in the world did Korach join forces with Datan and Aviram, whose very compromised past and quite negative reputation would surely not have served his professed ideological campaign well?

How could people who were known for their belligerent personalities and violations of Torah bring prestige to what Korach promoted as a grassroots religious drive founded on positive principles?

Why would Korach tarnish his movement by aligning with known troublemakers and negative forces?

The answer is that despite Korach presenting his agenda as an ideological crusade for the betterment of the masses, in truth it was a self-serving power grab motivated by jealousy and personal ambition; the ideology was a mere front and a ruse to draw pubic support for what was nothing more than an egocentric stunt. As such, Korach needed loud voices and strident personalities to amplify his message and force Moshe into a position of weakness and concession.

Datan and Aviram were the perfect characters for this. They were the ideal “hit men” and the best people to catalyze a mass movement against Moshe Rabbeinu, escalating matters to the point of surrender and collapse.

It is not surprising that throughout Jewish history, those who sought to challenge the Mesorah (Torah tradition) typically launched their campaigns by professing lofty ideologies that purported to enhance or ennoble Judaism, whereas the reality is that these deviant movements’ true aim to was to dilute and tear down Torah values and observance, usually with an underlying motivation of opportunism on the part of those involved.

By including Datan and Aviram in his uprising, Korach in effect exposed his campaign for what it really was – a self-serving power grab, in which Torah and Torah leadership were contested and defied by ostensibly lofty religious philosophies, all in a base effort by an illegitimate and greedy player to undermine the system and seize power.

May Hashem continue to illuminate our path, provide us with true Torah leaders, and enable us to realize when people are seeking to subvert Torah values while professing to enrich them.

By the time Tucker Carlson trashed the Book of Esther, describing the source of the Jewish festival of Purim, it was already Passover. But timing was the least of his errors, and since he took it upon himself to rewrite Scripture and misinform the masses, those who revere the Holy Bible must now take a stand for God and his Word.

Carlson told his listeners that the Book of Esther was “controversial,” that the Book describes: A Genocide of Persians. Oh yeah, 75,000 Persians… Not just people who committed crimes but people who were Persian, and that’s why they were killed.

I would suggest that such a grievous misreading requires not only a “low IQ,” as President Trump recently put it, but a mind burdened by hate. Call it “Jew Derangement Syndrome.” And far from being an affliction limited to Carlson and a few others, this particular mental illness afflicts the multitudes claiming Israel committed a “genocide” in Gaza, rather than Persia. And that is why it is so crucial that those who wish to learn from the Bible, rather than rewrite it to serve their own bigoted interests, emphatically correct the record.

The account in the Book of Esther is quite the opposite of Carlson’s. There was indeed a planned genocide, but of the Jews, architected by the evil Haman. When Queen Esther intervened, disclosing that she was a Jew herself, King Ahasuerus was bound by Persian law that his decrees not be rescinded. Instead he issued a second one, permitting the Jews to defend themselves.

The fighting that followed, per the Biblical text, was not an offensive campaign, but self-defense against a genocidal mob.

Perhaps Carlson’s greatest offense was to claim that the mob was targeted because they were Persian. “That’s why they were killed,” he said. Scripture could not be more clear; those killed were “of those who hated them,” says Esther 9:16. They came from all 127 nationalities of the empire; their unifying characteristic was murderous hatred for Jews.

The obvious motivation for this inversion, misportraying a genocidal band of antisemites as innocent victims of Jewish bigotry, is that Carlson shares their same hate. Allowing Jews to defend themselves is what he terms “genocide.” By telling a lie so obvious, Carlson exposed a broader pattern which is as evident regarding Israel the modern country as Israel the ancient people.

The side responding to violence is recast as the initiator, while the culpability and hateful motivations of those that launched the attack is ignored. Context is ignored, in favor of an immoral calculus in which the side with the lower casualty count is presumed to be the villain.

This is just as obvious in media reports relying upon the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry as it is in Carlson’s dystopian version of Esther. This type of inversion is found not only in the charge of genocide, but also in the details. For example, it is a criminal violation of the laws of warfare to store weapons in a school, or to use a hospital as a military base. Once this crime has been committed, the former school or hospital becomes a legitimate military target as a result. Yet Hamas knew that it could commit war crimes with impunity, because global media outlets would falsely report that Israel bombed a school or hospital, rather than the Hamas base that they had become.

To offer a specific illustration, when Israel bombed the Hamas Command and Control center located in the Nasser Hospital building in Khan Younis, outlets from the BBC to NPR to CNN reported the “outrage” that Israel bombed a “hospital” and “killed journalists, health workers and emergency response crews.” It failed to mention that the erstwhile hospital was a base for Hamas fighters that had been used to imprison hostages.

This sort of omission of relevant context happened far too often to be brushed away as an innocent error. In a just and decent world, CNN executives would have faced federal charges under the Antiterrorism Act for having provided material support to Hamas.

Such lies have a real human cost: Hamas puts journalists, doctors, and children at risk knowing both that Israel will risk her own soldiers’ lives to take more efforts to avoid harming them than would any other military force, and that despite this, when civilians are inevitably harmed, Israel rather than Hamas will be blamed. Gazan children died in the conflict because Hamas knew it could rely upon CNN to cover for its crimes.

Antisemitism does not merely harm Jews.

The Book of Esther is deliberately structured to highlight the reversal of fortune—the oppressed rising up against their would‐be oppressors. But the story is also careful to preserve the moral logic of that reversal. The Jews defend themselves; they do not plunder, nor do they initiate violence. The text is a celebration of survival, not slaughter. And that is the account found in the most published Book on earth.

Esther, and Carlson’s distortion thereof, tells us how dangerous misinformation can be, especially when motivated by hate.

Newscasters can reverse victims and villains. Pundits can invert the moral order of a story. And podcasters can mislead us into condemning those who are simply fighting for their survival.

In an age saturated with data but starved for context, the ancient text offers both modern lessons, and an obligation to stand up in its defense.

A recent ConservativeHome article powerfully captured what many British Jews have been forced to confront: denial is no longer possible. The fear is real. The attacks are real. The evasions by some political figures are real.

Something has changed in Britain. Jewish schools, synagogues, shops and visibly Jewish neighbourhoods now live with a level of security concern that would once have seemed unthinkable. Parents worry about children walking through familiar streets. Jews who never previously felt self-conscious about being visibly Jewish now hesitate.

Britain has a serious antisemitism problem. That must be said plainly.

But after denial comes a second danger: panic. Serious problems require serious analysis. And here we must be careful.

The danger facing British Jews is not simply a story about Britain. Nor is it uniquely British. What we are seeing here is the British expression of a wider global phenomenon: the fusion of anti-Israel hatred, Islamist radicalism, far-left ideology and anti-Western resentment into a worldview in which Jews become the symbolic enemy.

This is visible not only in London and Manchester, but in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, New York, Sydney and on university campuses across the West. Wherever hostility to Israel becomes the language through which wider anger at the West is expressed, Jews are placed in the firing line.

That does not mean all Muslims are antisemites. It does mean we must be honest about ideological currents within Islamist politics and parts of Muslim communal activism which have turned hostility to Israel into hostility towards Jews. The slogan “globalise the intifada” was never a harmless chant. It meant what it said.

This is why the response cannot be sentimental. It is not enough for politicians to speak of “cohesion”, “dialogue” and “standing together”. Those words have their place, but they cannot substitute for policing, prosecutions, counter-extremism, school oversight, university discipline and political courage.

At the same time, Jewish leadership and Jewish commentary must avoid a different danger: despair masquerading as realism.

It is understandable that some Jews now ask whether they have a future in Britain. But it is not serious to speak as though British Jewish life is finished. Nor is it helpful, as some do in the wider communal conversation, to present aliyah simply as an escape route from danger. Israel is the eternal homeland of the Jewish people, but it is not a panic room. It is a country living with rockets, terror, war and daily security pressures of a kind British Jews have not experienced.

Jews who move to Israel do so for many reasons: faith, family, history, destiny, Zionism, belonging. Those are noble reasons. But to present aliyah merely as a move from danger to safety is confused. The Jewish people do not need illusions. We need clarity.

Britain remains a country with functioning institutions, courts, police, Parliament, allies and a deep reservoir of decency. Those institutions have often been too slow, too nervous and too evasive in confronting antisemitism. But they are not beyond reach. They can be pressed. They can be made to act.

British Jews are not helpless. We are not guests tolerated at the edge of national life. We are citizens, contributors, teachers, business owners, doctors, lawyers, soldiers, councillors, parliamentarians, neighbours and friends. We have every right to demand protection without apologising for our presence.

The proper response is therefore neither denial nor panic. It is clarity.

Name the threat. Confront Islamist antisemitism honestly. Challenge the far left’s obsession with Israel. Hold political parties accountable when they minimise or excuse Jew-hatred. Require universities to enforce their own rules. Insist that police treat intimidation as intimidation, not as colourful protest. And make clear that British Jews will not be frightened out of public life.

Jewish history has taught us never to be naïve. But it has also taught us not to collapse at the first sign of hostility. Jewish life in Britain was built by generations who endured hardship, exclusion and prejudice, yet still created schools, synagogues, charities, businesses and communities of extraordinary strength.

We honour them not by declaring the future over, but by defending it.

British Jews should not be told that their fear is merely a perception. It is not. But neither should they be encouraged to believe that despair is wisdom.

Panic is not policy. Fear is not analysis. And Britain’s Jews need more than lamentation. They need truth, courage, communal confidence and a state prepared to protect them.

Cover image: Canva Suite

For months, the debate over under-16 yeshiva provision has too often been framed as though there were only two possible positions. On one side: safeguarding, modernity, and public responsibility. On the other: secrecy, backwardness, and resistance. It is an easy frame, and for some, a convenient one. But it is also badly misleading.

The Bishop saw something more important. He understood that the argument was not really about whether children should be safe. On that, there should be no dispute. It was about whether the British state still has the cultural intelligence to recognise that not every serious institution is a school in the modern secular sense.

A yeshivah is not a failed school. It is a different kind of institution.

That distinction may sound narrow. It is not. It goes to the heart of a much larger question in British public life: whether the state can still make room for forms of life that it did not design, does not instinctively understand, and cannot easily fit into a single regulatory template.

The issue arises in relation to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, and particularly the danger that under-16 yeshivot may be treated as though they are simply unregistered schools operating under cover of religion. But that description already assumes the point at issue. For many in the Charedi community, the yeshiva ketanah is not an attempt to evade schooling rules. It is a form of full-time religious formation rooted in a long and coherent tradition of Torah education.

That does not place it beyond scrutiny. No serious person should argue that any institution, religious or otherwise, is immune from safeguarding requirements. But neither should safeguarding become a slogan under which the state quietly abolishes difference.

This is where conservatives ought to be especially alert. We are meant to understand that society is made up not only of individuals and the state, but of families, communities, churches, synagogues, schools, clubs, traditions, and inherited forms of moral life. We are meant to know that these “little platoons” matter precisely because they are not interchangeable units in a national system.

Yet modern bureaucratic culture repeatedly falls into the same temptation: if something looks unfamiliar, regulate it until it resembles something familiar. If an institution does not fit the existing categories, force it into one of them. If it resists, treat that resistance as evidence of guilt.

That is not wisdom. It is administrative impatience.

In the case of yeshivot, the category mistake is especially serious. Britain has long allowed for educational pluralism. It has recognised that parents may raise and educate their children in different ways, within the law, and that not every legitimate path is identical to the standard state model. For decades, parts of the Torah world have operated within a broader understanding of elective home education and religious study, not in a legal vacuum but in a different educational tradition.

The real question, therefore, is not whether the state has an interest. Of course it does. The real question is whether that interest can be exercised with discrimination, restraint, and respect for a minority community’s deeply held way of life.

Can government protect children without insisting on cultural sameness? Can it enforce safeguarding without acting as though every thick, inherited religious culture is merely a problem waiting to be normalised?

Those questions are not only Jewish questions. They concern the shape of a free country.

A mature society does not respond to every unfamiliar institution with panic. It asks calmer questions. Are children safe? Is there neglect? Is there abuse? Are basic legal duties being met? If the answer to such questions is satisfactory, then the burden lies on the state to justify why further intrusion is necessary. And if the proposed intrusion effectively means forcing a religious institution to cease being itself, that should trouble anyone with a serious commitment to liberty.

This is why the Bishop of Manchester’s intervention was so striking. He did not approach the matter as an insider to the yeshiva world. He approached it as a public moral question. And in doing so he performed a service not only to one Jewish community, but to Britain’s wider constitutional culture.

He recognised that when the state loses the ability to distinguish between harm and difference, liberty is in danger. He recognised that a society confident in its own values should not need to flatten every minority institution into the same shape. And he recognised, too, that religious freedom in Britain is not secured merely by warm words about tolerance, but by the harder work of careful classification, proportionate law, and institutional humility.

Too much current discussion proceeds as though any educational model that departs from late-modern assumptions must be suspect. But conservatism, at its best, begins from a different instinct. It knows that human beings are formed in particular traditions. It knows that moral worlds are handed down, not invented afresh by each generation. And it knows that the state, though necessary and often beneficent, is a crude instrument when it tries to replace the organic work of family and faith.

None of this relieves religious communities of responsibility. They must be serious about child welfare, serious about engagement, and serious about explaining themselves to the wider public. But the wider public, and especially the state, has responsibilities too. One of them is not to confuse non-conformity with wrongdoing.

That is why this issue matters beyond the Charedi world. Today it may be a yeshivah. Tomorrow it may be another religious body, another minority institution, another community whose habits do not fit comfortably within official assumptions. Once the principle is established that legitimate difference is merely deviance awaiting correction, the space for freedom shrinks for everyone.

A confident Britain should be able to do better than that. It should be able to safeguard children while preserving liberty. It should be able to regulate carefully without erasing difference. And it should be able to admit that not every valuable institution is legible at first glance to Whitehall.

The Bishop of Manchester understood this. If ministers are wise, they will too.

Photo credit: Statue of Liberty by Firoz Ansari with CC BY-SA 4.0 license on Wikimedia Commons

The Jerusalem Post is right to say that Israel faces a real military strain. Reservists are exhausted, the war has dragged on, and the IDF’s manpower shortage cannot be brushed aside.

But that still does not settle the argument.

Too much of the current debate assumes that once the army has issued a warning and the court has ruled, all that remains is tougher enforcement. That is a mistake. The haredi (ultra-Orthodox) draft question is not only about numbers, legal authority, or equal burden-sharing. It is also about Torah, conscience, and the kind of Jewish state that Israel wants to be.

That is why this crisis cannot be solved by manpower logic alone.

An unequal burden and an unsustainable system

Yes, the public case is powerful: The burden is unequal, the old exemption model cannot continue indefinitely, and a nation at war cannot sustain such a gap in service. All true. Israel cannot ignore a question of this scale forever.

But urgency does not automatically justify crackdowns.

A harsher enforcement regime may produce some enlistment at the margins, but that does not make it wise. Coercion can create the appearance of success by forcing through a visible trickle, while discouraging a potentially larger number who might have entered voluntarily under more respectful and culturally serious conditions.

Once service is framed as capitulation rather than contribution, even those open to participation are pushed back into resistance. What is gained in immediate numbers may be lost in broader and more durable enlistment over time.

That is because for much of the haredi public, enforcement is not experienced as neutral state policy. Instead, it is experienced as an assault on a way of life, and once that is how it is felt, pressure does not simply produce compliance. It also fuels alienation, hardens resistance, and empowers the most uncompromising voices. If the goal is long-term national resilience, that is a very high price to pay.

The fairness argument, too, is less simple than it sounds. Fairness does not always mean sameness. A country can ask all its citizens to shoulder responsibility without insisting that every contribution take the same form.

The haredi public must bear responsibility

The real question is not whether the haredi public should bear responsibility. It should. It is whether the state has the imagination to recognize responsibility in ways other than forced conformity.

For the haredi world, this is not merely about convenience or coalition politics. It is rooted in a conviction that Torah learning is itself part of what sustains Jewish national life, and that military service brings with it not only physical danger, but cultural and spiritual pressures they believe threaten the fabric of their community.

One may disagree with that view, but one cannot dismiss it and still expect a stable solution.

That is the blind spot in much of the mainstream discussion. It speaks urgently and understandably about physical survival, but it has far less patience for those speaking about spiritual survival. It assumes the only serious language is that of enlistment quotas, legal rulings, and enforcement tools. A Jewish state should know better.

Courts can strike down arrangements. Generals can warn of shortages. Politicians can pass laws. None of that, by itself, resolves the deeper conflict. A legal ruling may end an exemption regime, but it cannot create trust. A manpower report may expose a military shortfall, but it cannot define the place of Torah in the life of the state.

That is also why talk of draft dodgers may vent frustration, but it solves nothing. It entrenches resentment, deepens estrangement, and confirms the haredi fear that what is being demanded is not only shared sacrifice, but cultural surrender.

The government deserves criticism if it is merely drifting. A problem this serious cannot be managed forever through coalition maneuvering and delay. But seriousness does not mean defaulting to the bluntest instrument available. It means building credible frameworks that increase participation in national responsibility without treating Torah life as expendable.

Israel needs soldiers. But it also needs wisdom. The goal cannot be merely to squeeze out higher enlistment figures at any cost. The goal must be to strengthen national resilience without tearing open one of the country’s deepest internal fractures.

That is the challenge. And crackdowns alone will not meet it.

The writer is the chairman of the Coalition for Jewish Values of the United Kingdom and the International Liaison of Coalition for Jewish Values in the US. He also serves as the chairman of Eretz Hakodesh UK at the World Zionist Congress.

When Tucker Carlson described the Book of Esther as celebrating a “genocide of Persians,” he did the world a favor. Not because his perspective was correct or well-informed, but just the opposite. His obvious lie, so clearly detached from reality, unwittingly revealed the true nature of the more contemporary charges of genocide leveled at the same People of Israel.

The Book of Esther offers no possibility for error regarding who was responsible for the violence. It tells us that Haman convinced the Persian king, whose empire stretched to the very limits of the civilized world, to issue a decree seeking annihilation of the Jews. When Queen Esther intervened, disclosing that she was a Jew herself, the king was bound by Persian law that his decrees not be rescinded. Instead he issued a second one, permitting the Jews to defend themselves. The fighting that followed, per the Biblical text, was not an offensive campaign, but self-defense against a genocidal mob.

The text emphasizes this in the same verse that tells us that 75,000 were killed (Esther 9:16). It tells us that, contrary to Carlson’s delusional retelling, the dead were neither Persians nor members of any one nation or faith. Instead, the casualties are described as “from those who hated them.” Their one unifying characteristic was that they had come out to kill Jews.

Yet in Carlson’s twisted version, all of this context was erased. The initiating threat vanished. The murderous mob disappeared. All that remained was a single statistic reframed as evidence of Jewish aggression, self-defense recast as “genocide.” Carlson only found the Book of Esther “controversial” after he had deprived the sacred text of both meaning and value.

This was no innocent misreading of the Bible. On the contrary, it exposed a broader pattern which is as evident regarding Israel the modern country as Israel the ancient people. The side responding to violence is recast as the initiator, while the culpability of those that launched the attack is ignored. The mechanism is simple: remove chronology, agency, and intent. Reduce everything to a single, emotionally charged statistic, and then use that casualty figure to invert reality.

And that brings us to the recent conflict in Gaza.

Here, too, numbers were presented without the events that produced them. The initiating attack was omitted, along with the stated intent of the attacking party. The distinction between targeting civilians and combatants was blurred or erased. And what remained was a false narrative in which the party responding to violence was portrayed as the aggressor, while the party that initiated the violence was treated as a passive backdrop.

To be clear, the parallel is not between Esther and Gaza as historical events, but between the use of the same rhetorical mechanism to distort them. In both cases, context is erased in favor of an immoral calculus in which the side with the lower casualty count is presumed to be the villain. Numbers alone determine guilt, while history is deemed irrelevant.

Reality, of course, does not work that way, but all too many political and media figures routinely partner with Haman’s ideological descendants to demonize Jews.

It is a criminal violation of the laws of warfare to store weapons in a school, or to use a hospital as a military base. Moreover, once this crime has been committed, the former school or hospital becomes a legitimate military target as a result. Yet Hamas knew that it could commit such crimes with impunity, because global media outlets would falsely report that Israel bombed a school or hospital, rather than the Hamas base that they had become.

To take a specific example, when Israel bombed the Hamas Command and Control center located in the Nasser Hospital building in Khan Younis, CNN reported upon the “outrage” that Israel bombed a hospital and “killed journalists, health workers and emergency response crews.” It failed to mention that the erstwhile hospital was a base for Hamas fighters that had been used to imprison hostages.

This sort of omission of relevant context happened far too often to be brushed away as an innocent error. In a just and decent world, CNN executives would have faced federal charges under the Antiterrorism Act for having provided material support to Hamas.

Such lies have a real human cost: Hamas puts journalists, doctors, and children at risk knowing both that Israel will risk her own soldiers’ lives to take more efforts to avoid harming them than would any other military force, and that despite this, when civilians are inevitably harmed, Israel rather than Hamas will be blamed. Gazan children died in the conflict because Hamas knew it could rely upon CNN to cover for its crimes.

Antisemitism does not merely harm Jews.

The Book of Esther is deliberately structured to highlight the reversal of fortune-the oppressed rising up against their would‑be oppressors. But the story is also careful to preserve the moral logic of that reversal. The Jews defend themselves; they do not plunder, nor do they initiate violence. The text is a celebration of survival, not slaughter.

When Carlson stripped away that context, he was not offering a “new interpretation” but a grotesque distortion. He took a story of self‑defense and deliverance and turned it into a false tale of aggression.

The lesson of Esther, and Carlson’s distortion thereof, is not that numbers are irrelevant, but that numbers without context are dangerous. They can reverse victims and villains. They can invert the moral order of a story. And they can mislead us into condemning those who are simply fighting for their survival.

In an age saturated with data but starved for context, the ancient text offers practical lessons as applicable today as at any time in the past.

Image Credit: Book of Esther by Anita Gould with CC BY-NC 2.0 license on Flickr

A rabbi recently shared a story from a flight home from Israel.

While preparing for a Torah class he was scheduled to give upon returning to the United States, he realized he didn’t have access to the material he needed. Through a series of last-minute efforts, someone tried to send him an electronic recording, but the plane was already preparing for takeoff. Nearby, a secular Israeli was working on his laptop.

Overhearing the situation, he offered his help. The rabbi thanked him and said, “You’re doing a mitzvah.” There was only one problem: the Wi-Fi was about to be shut off and there was no clear way forward.

In the weeks after Oct. 7, columnist Bret Stephens coined the phrase “the October 8th Jew,” someone who, in his words, “woke up trying to remember who he or she truly is.” It is a powerful idea.

But it also raises a deeper question: What does it mean to remember who we are?

For many, that remembering has taken shape through small, tangible acts. A young man in Israel went to get a tattoo but asked that it not be placed on the arm where he has now decided to wrap tefillin. A teenager in the United States began wearing a Star of David necklace for the first time, and she refuses to take it off, even when traveling.

Across the world, people who had long felt distant from their Jewish heritage are lighting Shabbat candles, attending a class, learning a few words of Hebrew, or simply choosing to identify more openly and proudly as Jews.

These are not stories of perfection. They are stories of movement.

In fact, a national study found that more than four in 10 American Jews became more engaged in Jewish life after Oct. 7, reflected in increased synagogue attendance and a surge in participation in Jewish campus organizations. While some of that initial surge has stabilized, something real and lasting remains.

But statistics, as important as they are, cannot capture the depth of what is happening. This Jewish awakening is not just about engagement. It is about memory.

The October 8th Jew is not a new Jew, but a revealed one.

Something long quiet, sometimes dormant, perhaps buried beneath layers of routine or distance, has begun to surface. Not all at once, not completely, but undeniably.

And that is what makes this moment so important, because while antisemitism can wake us up, it cannot keep us Jewish. Fear can ignite identity, but it cannot sustain it. That work belongs to us.

For decades, many Jews experienced their identity as optional, something cultural, symbolic or situational, something that could be set aside or revisited when convenient. Oct. 7 dispelled that illusion and reminded many that being Jewish is not something the world allows us to forget.

And in response, many chose not just to react, but to reconnect, not out of pressure, but out of recognition. Not because they had all the answers, but because something within them had begun to ask long-dormant questions.

So what does it mean to become an October 8th Jew?

For many, it has begun with something small, not with a dramatic change: wearing something that expresses your Jewish identity, showing up for our community, learning one idea, doing one mitzvah, taking one step toward a connection that already exists. Not everything at once, but something.

As the plane prepared for departure, the man turned to the rabbi and said he would purchase Wi-Fi so the file could be downloaded. The rabbi offered to pay, but he refused.

“No,” he said. “You told me it’s a mitzvah. I want the merit.”

He downloaded the file and handed it over. Later, after they landed, he approached again, this time with tears in his eyes, and asked, “Could you give a blessing for my wife and family? I’m so grateful I was able to do that mitzvah.”

He didn’t change everything that day, but something in him changed, and that is what it means to become an October 8th Jew.

Not to arrive all at once, but to begin; not to become someone new, but to remember who we are and to reveal what has always been there.

Cover Image: Pro-Israeli rally in Los Angeles taken by Israeli-American Council, accesed via Wikimedia Commons with CC BY-SA 2.0 deed

As both President of Princeton University and the immediate past Chair of the Association of American Universities Board of Directors, Chris Eisgruber has a powerful voice in the academic world. And at least thus far, Princeton has been only a minor target of government investigations of antisemitism.

This has positioned Eisgruber to lead the pushback from university administrators and faculty against demands from the Trump Administration and Congress that they do more to combat Jew-hatred if they wish further federal funding. And he is guiding America’s most elite educational institutions along a predictable path to failure.

Princeton historically prided itself on excellence, and shaped my understanding of political movements, public policy, and technology in ways that influence my work every day.

This is why I find Eisgruber’s monotonous drumbeat of cries for “academic freedom” so disappointing.

Academic freedom is valuable when it enables pursuit of truth, not as cover for bigotry. The ability to spout hate does not obligate the American taxpayer to support it. Stripped of high-sounding verbiage, Eisgruber is advocating for the “right” of antisemites to inculcate hatred in America’s future leaders, free from the pesky burdens of America’s civil rights laws.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits an institution receiving federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

The Trump Administration clarified that Jews do not lose this protection for also sharing religious practices. A university that supports denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, characterizing Zionism as a racist endeavor, or otherwise judging Israel by arbitrary standards applied nowhere else, is rightly ineligible for government funding.

It is that simple.

History provides a sobering precedent.

Germany stood at the pinnacle of academia for nearly two centuries. But then, even before but especially after the First World War, ancient and pernicious hatred rebranded itself as a meritorious academic discipline: “Anti-Semitism.” This gave Hitler’s genocidal evil an intellectual veneer; half of the architects of his Final Solution held doctorates from Germany’s, and the world’s, finest schools.

When the Nazis purged Jews from government positions and universities in 1933, they cast prejudice as beneficial, calling their edict the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.”

The truth was precisely the opposite: the brain drain of scholars like Albert Einstein, Max Born, and Lise Meitner permanently ended Germany’s status as the global leader in scientific research. German universities ruined their own reputation by prioritizing bigotry over scholarship.

The parallel is obvious.

Today America’s elite universities demand “academic freedom” to teach “Anti-Zionism” instead. And the brain drain is already happening, on Eisgruber’s watch and under his nose.

When Princeton joins other leading schools putting antisemitic mythology on the curriculum, giving tenure to hateful professors, and supporting student organizations that back Hamas terrorism against Jews, Jewish students rightly choose to go elsewhere.

American academia suffers the consequences.

Today we are seeing hesitation in the face of harassment, equivocation where there should be enforcement. Formerly elite universities, in and beyond the Ivy League, now substitute antisemitic indoctrination for anthropology, archaeology, history, religion, sociology, and a host of other academic disciplines.

To claim that this comports with the reputed priorities of the Ivy League is laughable.

If academic freedom means tolerance for anti-Jewish discrimination, its schools will follow Germany’s in reputation and authority. Yet learned professors obfuscate, blaming government control rather than hatred for Germany’s lost academic prowess.

They have it backwards.

The Nazis put university-grown hatred into practice; President Trump and Congress are fighting to save American academia from that same bigotry. Their demands are as simple as they are morally proper: enforce Title VI. Protect Jewish students as they would any other group. Draw the line between free expression and harassment. And ensure compliance with the law that is a core prerequisite of federal funding.

As an alumnus, I am not condemning the university, but “speaking up,” in the words of its recent campaign, for what it is supposed to represent. The Ivy League should be leading the way in upholding civil rights, rather than fighting against what is both necessary and right.

Princeton University Graduate College by Zeete, via Wikimedia Commons with CC BY-SA 4.0

As government sought to fit Britain’s yeshivot into a regulatory framework designed for schools, an unexpected defender emerged in the House of Lords: the Bishop of Manchester, who understood that a yeshivah is not a failed school, but a different moral and educational world.

At nearly ten o’clock on a winter evening in the House of Lords, one of the clearest public defences of Britain’s yeshivot came not from a rabbi, a Jewish communal spokesman, or a campaigner, but from the Bishop of Manchester.

He rose to warn that a proposed legal definition of “full-time education” risked misclassifying institutions devoted solely to religious instruction. In the midst of a debate clouded by bureaucracy, suspicion, and the habits of the modern regulatory state, he grasped something simple but profound: a yeshiva is not merely a school with too little secular study. It is a different kind of institution altogether.

That mattered.

For much of the past year, parts of Britain’s Charedi community had pursued the issue of under-16 yeshiva education in a highly visible and often troubled way, with protests outside Parliament reflecting a deep sense that there was no meaningful route through to government. The argument had become stuck in a weary cycle of accusation and mistrust. On one side stood policymakers, officials, and campaigners convinced they were confronting educational neglect. On the other stood religious communities convinced that the state neither understood them nor particularly wished to.

The shift began when the issue was reframed not merely as an educational or regulatory dispute, but as a question of religious liberty. It began to be raised in Parliament through the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Freedom of Religion or Belief under the Coalition for Jewish Values banner, before the Bishop of Manchester later took it up in the House of Lords. That helped move the issue out of a narrow bureaucratic frame and into a broader constitutional and moral one.

Then, unexpectedly, the Bishop of Manchester altered the atmosphere.

This was not entirely accidental. Bishop David Walker’s residence lies close to Bury New Road, the main corridor running through the heart of Manchester’s Orthodox Jewish areas, and the Greater Manchester Faith and Community Leaders Forum meets regularly at his home, bringing together senior representatives of the region’s religious communities. He was therefore not approaching the issue as a distant observer, still less as an ideological partisan. He knew enough of the community, and enough of religious life more broadly, to recognise that the state was in danger of making a category mistake.

That distinction is the heart of the matter. A yeshiva in the British Charedi world is not, in the ordinary sense, a school. It was never established as a school, does not present itself as a school, and should not be regulated as though it were simply an unconventional version of the mainstream educational system. It exists to provide intensive Torah learning within a wider communal and familial framework in which parents retain primary responsibility for their children’s broader education.

The first thing to recognise is that the Charedi world is not educationally monolithic. There are, broadly speaking, two pathways. One is a Torah im derech eretz model, in which boys receive a fuller general education alongside serious limudei kodesh. The other is the yeshiva ketanah model, in which the teenage years are given over primarily or exclusively to intensive Torah learning. Public debate too often flattens these distinctions. Yet the present controversy is bound up especially with the second path, because it does not see itself as a variant of the mainstream school model at all, but as a different form of formation.

That legal and cultural context is crucial. British law has long recognised parental responsibility in education and has long allowed considerable flexibility in how that responsibility is discharged. Home education is lawful. The law has never required that every legitimate form of education replicate the assumptions, curriculum, or institutional model of the state school. The present controversy arose in large measure because some in government seemed tempted to collapse those distinctions and force a form of Torah education into a framework designed for something else.

To many outside the Torah world, the issue may appear baffling. Why should a religious community resist being drawn into a more regulated educational structure? Why not simply accept the language of “schools,” submit to the relevant oversight, and move on?

But that question itself reveals the problem. It assumes that the school is the natural and universal template for all serious forms of learning. It is easy to frame the matter as though the only alternatives were neglect on the one hand or full assimilation into the mainstream regulatory model on the other. But that is a false choice. A free society ought to be capable of insisting on child safety while still making room for forms of religious formation that do not fit the assumptions of the secular state.

Too much commentary on this issue also assumes something else: that a child is only being properly educated if he is being formed above all for eventual independence from his inherited community, measured against the norms and expectations of the wider secular culture. But that is not a neutral standard. It encodes a substantive moral judgment about what education is for. Torah communities, by contrast, understand education not primarily as preparation for exit, but as initiation into a covenantal life of obligation, learning, family, and belonging. That does not remove the state’s duty to protect children from harm. But it does mean that the state should hesitate before treating continuity itself as evidence of coercion or educational failure.

A yeshiva begins somewhere else.

Its purpose is not merely to convey information but to shape a human being through disciplined immersion in Torah, sacred texts, obligation, reverence, and a way of life. Its task is not simply academic formation but covenantal formation. It transmits not only knowledge, but belonging; not only literacy, but identity; not only skills, but the habits of mind and soul required for a life under Torah.

That is why the attempt to treat it as a species of school is not a neutral act of administrative tidying-up. It misunderstands the institution at its core.

Of course, none of this means that the state has no legitimate interest in child welfare. Safeguarding is real. Safety matters. Abuse must never be hidden behind the language of religious autonomy. Every serious religious community has an obligation to protect children, and Jewish communities should say so clearly and without hesitation.

But safeguarding is not the same as standardisation. Child protection is not identical with the imposition of one cultural and educational model on every community. A government serious about both safety and liberty should be able to distinguish between protecting children and flattening difference.

Nor is it obvious that “success” in education can be defined only by the extent to which a child is prepared to leave behind the world that formed him. A liberal society may reasonably wish to ensure that no child is trapped in abuse, ignorance, or neglect. It is a far more radical claim, however, to say that the state must require every community to educate as though departure were the norm and inherited belonging a problem to be overcome. That is not merely safeguarding. It is the imposition of a moral anthropology.

What made the bishop’s intervention so important was that he saw this larger picture. He recognised that the issue was not whether Torah communities should be above the law, but whether the law itself was being framed with sufficient intelligence to recognise the realities before it.

As Rabbi Rashi Simon later remarked to me, the Bishop’s intervention recalled an earlier moment in European history — the moment, more than five hundred years ago, when Johannes Reuchlin defended the Jews’ right to preserve and study the Talmud. At a time when others demanded confiscation and burning, Reuchlin argued that these works represented a profound intellectual and religious tradition deserving respect rather than suppression. The circumstances are, of course, very different. But the underlying principle is recognisable: a society confident in its own traditions need not fear the learning of others.

That, in its quieter way, is part of what made the Bishop of Manchester’s intervention so striking. He saw that to misclassify a yeshiva is not merely to inconvenience a religious minority. It is to reveal a broader incapacity within the modern state: the inability to recognise forms of life that do not fit its preferred categories.

And that should concern more than Jews.

A liberal democracy cannot measure its commitment to religious liberty merely by whether it allows houses of worship to remain open. The real test comes when religious communities seek not only to pray differently, but to educate differently, order family life differently, and pass on a thick moral and spiritual inheritance that does not align neatly with prevailing assumptions. If the state can tolerate religion only when it is thin, private, and culturally compliant, then what it is tolerating is not really religion in any historic sense at all.

In that respect, the yeshiva debate reaches far beyond one community and one clause in one bill. It touches the future of religious freedom in the West.

The challenge in Britain now is to move beyond confrontation into something better: serious, legally literate, morally intelligent engagement in which government comes to understand what a yeshiva is, and Torah communities articulate clearly both their commitments and their responsibilities.

The Bishop of Manchester did not solve the problem. But he did something rare and important. He recognised that a yeshiva is not a failed school. It is a different moral and educational world.

And in a Britain often unsure whether serious religious difference is a problem to be managed or a good to be preserved, that recognition may prove more important than it first appeared.

Cover image: limud in the yeshiva or elhanan tiberya by מנחם מנחמי, accessed via Wikimedia Commons with CC BY 2.5 deed