The community must rediscover its strength as antisemitism that infected Democrats and campuses now consumes the conservative fringe too
January 2, 2026 12:24
America is a place and a people. America is an ideal and a dream. This was the year when the lines between the party of reality and the party of fantasy sharpened for all Americans. As usual, those lines cut across the lines of political allegiance. As usual, the Jews were in the thick of it.
In physical reality, Israel won its multi-front war against the Iranian-led alliance. In the compensatory dreamland of the digital world, the war against the Zionists goes on. Incitement and attacks against American Jews went through the roof after October 7. In 2025, they rose further.
The murder in May of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC by a gunman who shouted “Free Palestine” was the tip of an increasingly visible iceberg.
In June, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) claimed that 55 per cent of Jewish Americans reported “experiencing some form of antisemitism in the last year.” Nearly one in five (18 per cent) said they had been physically threatened or verbally harassed. A third (36 per cent) witnessed “actual or threatened antisemitic violence”.
One in five said that they had removed “distinctively Jewish” items since October 7. But 84 per cent of those affected by antisemitism said they were making “some positive change” because of it.
Jewish schools, shuls and community centres now have armed guards and concrete “diversity barriers”. But by March, nearly a third (31 per cent) said their engagement with Jewish life had deepened year-on-year – and that was after the 43 per cent increase in the year after October 7.
Jewish Federations call it “the Surge”. October 7 and the war against the Jews on America’s streets, campuses and social media have worked like spiritual and political Ozempic. It’s early days, but if the age of Jewish American safety and comfort is over, then so is the age of zombie liberalism and multicultural flab.
The ADL are among the slobs who are finally waking up to what is happening – and how the major Jewish organisations sleepwalked their people into a nightmare. In December, a dozen former ADL officials told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency how their worldview and communal strategy collapsed.
“We stood up for the LGBTQ community, for the African American community, for immigrants, and it was a real core part of our mission,” said Joe Berman, who had been one of the ADL’s top litigators. “We would often do it in coalition with other civil rights groups, and that’s all gone. That respect that we had is just completely gone.”
As my friend Seth Mandel, one of the heroes of the digital war for truth, wrote in Commentary, these officials “appear to be frozen in time on October 6, 2023”.
American Jewish leaders thought they could Tikkun Olam their way to a top spot in the priorities of the Democratic Party. The ADL in particular pushed talking points on partisan issues such as abortion, immigration and DEI. They pushed to impose a Palestinian state on Israel too, and called Donald Trump a white supremacist.
They pushed their own people into the firing line. They wasted time, money and credibility on backing activists who would, Mandel writes, “like to see us pushed into the sea”. We will be “forced to win this battle with a greatly reduced roster of allies”.
The good news is, the Jews who get it aren’t going to give up, and the non-Jews who get it are with us all the way.
Expect 2026 to be a year of strengthening alliances with old friends and building links with new friends. That will require a new set of Jewish institutions, and a new understanding of Jewish politics.
The old argument that Israel is a liberal democracy with Gay Pride marches and Holocaust survivors is losing its purchase. Not because it’s not true, but because it’s not smart.
The generation that remembers the Second World War and the Shoah is almost gone: Norman Podhoretz, one of its greatest writers, died in the last weeks of the year. Americans are tired of the world. As Trump’s tariffs show, Americans want a better deal from their friends.
In 2026, Israel’s supporters will need to argue the realist case. Israel is a hub of hi-tech and military ingenuity amid a region of amateur jihadists and tribal kleptocrats. Its strength is the cornerstone of America’s new Middle East. It has proved that it can fight its corner. It is America’s most reliable, competent and powerful ally – more than Britain.
***
The year began with the return to office of Donald Trump. In the future, historians will be baffled how, at a time when they faced a multifaceted and violent campaign to drive them from public life, only about 30 per cent of Jewish Americans voted for the candidate whose record included extending the Civil Rights Act to cover Jews and recognising Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights and in Jerusalem.
Instead of the most pro-Israel president in American history, American Jews voted 70-30 for Kamala Harris, who had defended the Biden administration’s slow-walking of arms to Israel as it fought for its survival and encouraged the Black Lives Matter movement, which was explicitly hostile to Jews.
For a clever people, we have a lot of fools. The good news? More and more Jewish Americans now understand that this is a luxury they can no longer afford.
If you want to know how things would now stand with President Harris in the White House, see what she said this year. She boasted that she was “the first” high-level official to “talk about the fact that people in Gaza were starving” – without mentioning that Hamas was controlling the flow of aid, and without querying the famine myth.
In October, Harris told MSNBC that Israel had killed so many children and innocent civilians in Gaza that it was time to “step back and be honest” about the allegation of “genocide”. Another lie. By December, even Hamas’s health ministry had admitted that adult men of military age comprised somewhere between 52 per cent and 75 per cent of the deaths in the Gaza war.
The Biden administration had forced Israel to fight a slow and limited war. Biden and his carers cut off some arms supplies, threatened consequences if Israel crushed Hamas in Gaza, and let two-faced Qatar set the pace of hostage negotiations.
The second Trump administration changed all this within days of taking office. It opened the arms spigot to Israel, ran diplomatic cover, allowed Israel to win the war in Gaza and – crucially – worked closely with Israel to strike the head of the snake.
Israel’s successful Gaza campaign and Donald Trump’s levelling of Iran’s nuclear programme with American air power created the opening for the exit from the Gaza war in October. The terms bind all of America’s regional clients into a new, American-led order in the heart of the global energy market.
What happened next was astonishing. In November 2024, Trump had given the Republicans the trifecta (the House, the Senate and the White House), as well as the popular vote. The Iran strike and the Gaza deal restored America as the arbiter of western Asia and the energy business. But in November 2025, the party fell into civil war.
A minority of pols, think-tankers and pundits – some isolationist, some pro-Iran and pro-Qatar, some just plain anti-Jewish – launched the opening round of the struggle for the post-Trump Republican Party and the 2028 nomination.
This loud but small faction attacked Israel’s role in American foreign policy as a way of displacing Jews from American life, and attacked individual American Jews, especially conservatives and Republicans, as a way of splitting the America-Israel alliance.
Their leaders were Tucker Carlson who, after being fired from Fox News in 2023, had reinvented himself as a “just asking questions” podcaster in his Maine woodshed; and Nicholas Fuentes, a grubby racist whose digital stand-up routines had attracted an audience of resentful white youths who called themselves Groypers.
Carlson, Fuentes and their hangers-on were backed by a surge of online racism. In December, the Network Contagion Institute reported that the engagement numbers were confected by foreign bots. Much of the genuine audience was also foreign, in the kind of countries where morbid Jew-hatred never went away.
Still, it was real enough to blow up the biggest think-tank in DC, the Heritage Foundation, as its trustees resigned over its continued support for Carlson. And because he is tight with Vice President JD Vance, it may yet blow up Vance too.
Trump dismissed Carlson as “kooky”. But Vance stuck with Carlson and told Republicans to stop the “infighting”. A lot of Americans think that fighting racists is a good thing. A lot also think that open borders, imperial wars and decadent liberalism have driven the country to the lip of chaos and bankruptcy – and that liberal Jewish organisations and media voices backed that march of folly.
In 2026, we shall see how this shakes out. I believe that Americans are on the whole good people who like Jews and hate the enemies of America. Meanwhile, Jewish Americans face a wave of pitchfork paranoia and thuggery reminiscent of the Middle Ages, had America been around then.
***
America is undergoing a wave of domestic terrorism. Some of it is the fallout from the Great Awokening, as leftist groups spiral over the edge from performative alienation to genuine terrorism. Some of it is from the Islamists who used the Great Awokening to advance their idea of identity politics.
On the first night of Chanukah, gunmen shot up a house in Los Angeles while shouting “Free Palestine”.
On the second night, two men attacked Orthodox Jews on a subway train while bystanders did nothing.
At dusk before the third night, an Orthodox man was stabbed in the street in Brooklyn.
New York City police reported a surge in anti-Jewish attacks after the Bondi Beach massacre. It’s called “network contagion”. No one has any idea how to stop it, apart from massive censorship. That is a bad idea, and impossible in the land blessed with the First Amendment.
In 2025, America continued to undergo a wave of speech liberalisation after the ideological favouritism and digital censorship of the Obama and Biden years. The blessing and the curse after Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, is that Jewish Americans have a chance to make their realist case. But the racists and fantasists have the numbers, while X profits from their anti-American lies and incitement.
We also have Bari Weiss. And Bari now has an eight-man security detail that costs $10,000 a day, and travels in a military-style convoy of SUVs. Why? Because she defends the Jews. Her takeover of CBS News shows that the revival of the centre ground is beginning, and that pro-Israel Jews can make it happen.
It will get worse for American Jews before it gets better. But I believe, as Americans of all stripes believe, that it will get better. Americans are stronger than they realise. The American system is more adaptive than we think. Jewish Americans are stronger and more adaptive than they knew. The diaspora’s biggest and richest community is only now starting to flex its financial, political and spiritual muscles. In 2026, we will start to see the results.
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