Yo Semites!

Yom Kippur 2026

Long before this current wave of antisemitism, the Jewish community has spent a lot of time fighting antisemitism.

We’ve created organizations devoted to it. We’ve held conferences about it. We’ve developed educational programs to teach about it. We’ve tracked incidents and confronted hate speech and lobbied governments and built relationships with other communities.

And all of that matters. We must and should fight antisemitism. We should call it out when we see it. We should educate people about it. We should protect our communities from it. And we should expect our non-Jewish friends and neighbors to stand beside us when it appears.

But in light of the antisemitism we have experienced these past few years, I find myself wondering whether there is another response that we don't talk about nearly enough.

Maybe one of the best responses to antisemitism is more Semitism. Which is to say, maybe we need to make more Semites.

Now, I realize that's a strange sentence. And technically, historically, linguistically, "Semite" isn't really the right word. But stay with me. Because when I say that we need to make more Semites, I mean two things.

First, us: Our children. Our grandchildren. Ourselves. We need Jews who know more about who they are. Jews who know our story. Jews who find meaning and joy in Jewish life. Jews whose Judaism consists of something more than knowing that there are people in the world who hate Jews.

But beyond that I mean the people around us, whether they are Jews and non-Jews: Our partners. Our friends. Our neighbors. Our co-workers. We need to make them Semites too! And by that I don’t mean converting them. I mean making them Semites by helping the people who we live with to understand what it is that we love: our tradition, our history, our people and our homeland.

● Because our primary responsibility as Jews cannot be fighting antisemitism.

● Our primary responsibility as Jews is living as Jews. And there is a difference.

That distinction feels particularly important right now because so much of this current wave of antisemitism is entangled with Israel.

So let me be very clear about something at the outset. Criticism of the State of Israel is not antisemitic. I criticize Israel. I have serious concerns about decisions Israel makes and policies Israel pursues. At this moment, my greatest concerns have to do with Israel's policies in the West Bank.

And…Israel is a country. It has a government. Governments make choices, and those choices deserve moral scrutiny. Israel should not be exempt from that scrutiny simply because it is the Jewish state.

But there is an enormous difference between criticizing what Israel does and denying the Jewish people the right to national self-determination. There is a difference between saying, "Israel is doing something terribly wrong," and saying, "Israel should not exist." And particularly when Jews alone are told that their national existence is illegitimate, we have crossed into something very different.

So before we go any further, I want to remind us why the existence of Israel matters so profoundly to the Jewish people.

Many people assume that Israel exists because of the Holocaust. And the Holocaust certainly made the need for a Jewish state undeniable, but the story begins much earlier.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, millions of Jews were trying to leave Eastern Europe. They were fleeing pogroms, discrimination, poverty and persecution.

But here's the part that surprised me when I first learned it - most of them weren't trying to go to Palestine. They were trying to come here. America was the dream. And then America began closing the door.

In the 1920s, immigration quotas sharply reduced the number of Jews who could enter. Other countries did much the same. And when Britain restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine during the 1930s, the Jewish people reached one of those terrible moments in our history when the places Jews desperately needed to flee to were no longer willing to receive them.

The doors were closing. After the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of survivors remained in displaced-person camps because they still had nowhere to go.

Think about that for a moment. The camps had been liberated. The war was over. The world knew what had happened. And still, many Jewish survivors had nowhere to go!

At almost the same time, another Jewish world was disappearing. Ancient Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa were emptied as hundreds of thousands of Jews fled or were forced to leave countries where their families had lived for centuries. Our own Nakba!

Again and again, Jews learned a painful lesson: No matter how welcome we might feel, ultimately somebody else controlled the door.

● Someone else could decide whether we could enter.

● Someone else could decide whether we could remain.

● Someone else could decide that there were simply too many Jews.

And that is part of why Israel matters.

Not because every Israeli government is right. Nor because every Israeli policy is beyond criticism. But because for the first time in nearly two thousand years, there was one place on earth where the Jewish people controlled the door. One place that could never decide: "No more Jews."

For many Jews, that is the answer to a question history asked us over and over again: If the world closes its doors, where do the Jews go? For most of Jewish history, there was no answer. Today there is. And thank God for that.

But here is where I think we sometimes misunderstand the deeper lesson of that history. The lesson cannot simply be that when antisemitism becomes dangerous enough, Jews need someplace to run.

Israel gave the Jewish people something much more profound than refuge. It gave us agency. For two thousand years, so much of Jewish existence depended upon what somebody else decided about us.

● Will they let us live here?

● Will they let us work here?

● Will they let us worship here?

Israel changed the question.

And I think there is a lesson in that for those of us who live here as well. Because I worry that antisemitism can put us right back into that old posture.

Once again, we begin looking outward.

● Are we safe here?

● Do they like us?

● Do they understand us?

And suddenly, without realizing it, we have handed someone else control of the door again.

Only this time, it isn't the door to a country. It's the door to our own Jewish identity. And I don't want to give anyone else that power. Our primary task as Jews is not to fight antisemitism. Our primary task is to live as Jews.

Antisemitism is real. It is ancient. It adapts itself to every age, every ideology, every political movement. It deserves to be confronted wherever it appears. But we make a terrible mistake when we allow antisemitism to become the organizing principle of Jewish life.

Because antisemitism is not fundamentally a Jewish problem. Antisemitism is a societal illness. And the disease resides in the hater, not in the hated.

Too often we find ourselves trying to prove that we are good people. We answer accusations. We explain ourselves. We defend our history. We justify Israel's existence. We justify our own existence.

But the moment we accept that invitation, we have already lost. No people should have to prove that they deserve to exist. And our task cannot be to spend our lives trying to win the approval of those who have already decided to hate us.

Our task is something else. Our task is to become ever more deeply Jewish.

● To know our story.

● To teach our children.

● To celebrate our tradition.

Because our answer to hatred cannot be to become consumed by hatred. Our answer must be to become consumed by Jewish life.

And this, I think, is one of the great dangers of antisemitism that we don't talk about enough. The tragedy of antisemitism is not only that it seeks to harm Jews. It also tempts Jews to define themselves by their enemies.

But eventually we have to ask: How much of our Jewish identity are we willing to surrender to the people who hate us? Because if the primary reason our children know they are Jewish is that there are people who hate Jews, then antisemites have become their Jewish educators. And if the primary reason we care about Israel is because we feel compelled to defend it, then Israel has become something we defend rather than something we love. If the primary reason we gather as Jews is because we are frightened, then fear has become the glue holding the Jewish people together.

And that cannot be enough.

Surely Judaism has something more compelling to offer than that.

● We have Shabbat.

● We have Torah.

● We have a rich history of music and food, argument and learning.

● We have a tradition that insists that human beings are created in the image of God.

● We have a calendars to accompany us through time

● And we have rituals that guide us through life’s highs and lows.

● We have stories our ancestors told their children, who told them to their children, who somehow, improbably, told them all the way down to us.

That is what we have inherited. And, more importantly, that is what we can inherit.

On Yom Kippur we ask: Who have I been? Who am I? Who might I yet become?

And perhaps we need to ask that question not only as individuals, but as a Jewish people. What kind of Jews are we becoming?

The deepest response to antisemitism is not simply opposing those who hate Jews. It is raising Jews who know why being Jewish matters.

We do not answer hatred by making our enemies the center of our story. We answer hatred by making Judaism the center of our lives. Our enemies have written chapter after chapter trying to define the Jewish people. And generation after generation, we have answered them.

They tried to make us disappear and instead, we kept becoming Jews. And that, I believe, is still our answer. Even while we confront the antisemitism around us. But we will not make it the center of our Jewish lives. Antisemitism tells us to spend our lives thinking about people who hate Jews. Judaism asks us to spend our lives becoming Jews worthy of the name. Because the Jewish future will not be secured simply by producing fewer antisemites. It will be secured by producing more Jews.

● More knowledgeable, committed, joyful, compassionate Jews.

● More Jews who know what they belong to and why it matters.

Antisemitism is society's disease. We will demand that society confront it. But that is not our sacred task. Our sacred task is Jewish life and Jewish living. To learn, live, practice, love, and pass on.

Our job is to make Semites. So this year let’s both become and make some damn good ones. Amen.