The Writing on the Wall:

What I Saw in 1984, What We’re Living in 2025

I left Columbia University in the summer of 1984 to move to Israel. After two years at Columbia dissecting my Jewish identity and Zionism, I concluded I couldn’t live comfortably as a Jew in America. Growing up as the only Jew in a small Pennsylvania town, I always felt the otherness of being Jewish. In New York, though, I met Jews who were confident, even complacent, in their American belonging. They were home.

As a left-wing Zionist activist, I felt alienated from both my Jewish peers, who couldn’t grasp my sense of otherness, and my liberal classmates, who couldn’t accept my Zionism. Even then, anti-Zionist rhetoric was in fashion; Noam Chomsky and Edward Said were campus icons.

The ideology that I adhered to was based on the classic Zionist belief that only in Israel, could Jews be truly at home, protected and confident. It followed from this that America, like Germany and Spain before it, would eventually turn on the Jews who felt so at home.

Before leaving for Israel, I wrote a short story for the Hamagshimim Journal, a literary journal of graduates of my youth movement, Young Judaea. In it, I imagined a dystopian future where a Jewish student, Judah, who succumbs to anti-Zionist sentiment after the election of an Arab-American president. Judah’s old camp counselor writes to him, “We need more crazy people like you to make Aliyah,” but ends up institutionalized for his ideals. Judah, instead, renounces Zionism before a major Jewish American gathering, proclaiming that it’s time to “move on from false ideologies.”

The message I was trying to articulate in my 21-year-old way was this: When anti-Zionism becomes politically acceptable, mainstream American Jews would not resist. They would rationalize. They would adapt. They would choose comfort and belonging over uncomfortable truth.

Forty‑one years later, the accommodation I imagined is no longer theoretical, and it is no longer confined to rhetoric.

Forty-one years later, Zohran Mamdani will assume office as mayor of New York City on January 1. One third of Jewish voters supported him—a politician who has called Israel an apartheid state, endorsed BDS, and refuses to recognize Israel as a homeland for Jews. In response to a violent demonstration outside a prominent New York synagogue, Mamdani publicly framed the promotion of aliyah as a violation of international law, effectively shifting moral scrutiny from the violence itself to Jewish self-determination, treating it as illegitimate.

That one-third of New York Jews voted for such positions would have been unthinkable in mainstream Jewish discourse just a generation ago.

What I misjudged in 1984 was that I thought it would take an anti-Zionist president to mainstream hostility to Israel. I didn’t anticipate that it would start with New York City, wrapped in the language of progressivism; that “social justice” would become the respectable veneer for ideas once considered beyond the pale.

But I was right about the reaction: faced with the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, many American Jews would not resist. They would accommodate, rationalize, and choose social acceptance.

This is not new in our history. Jews have even attempted reverse circumcision in Hellenistic and Roman times in attempts to fit in. Today, many young Jews are convinced that distancing themselves from Israel makes them morally brave.

Young Jews didn’t arrive here in a vacuum. They were educated in institutions that prioritized progressive universalism over Jewish particularity. They watched leaders accommodate anti-Zionism as it gained respectability. Many of the organizations my fictional Judah led in 1984 now see distancing from Israel as a higher Jewish value.

My polemic from 1984 has proven tragically prescient. I believed that Jewish comfort in the Diaspora was temporary, and it has proven true, though not through persecution, as many believed on October 8, but abandonment. Indeed October 7th should have been clarifying. The largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust; surging antisemitism on campuses and streets. And yet, an increasing number of Jews seemed more unsettled by Israel’s response than by the massacre itself, or even the justification of the Hamas onslaught.

But over the past year, consequences moved beyond rhetoric: from the murder of two Israeli Embassy staff members in Washington DC, to the attack on a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, to the Chanukkah massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney. These incidents were not isolated. They unfolded in a climate in which antisemitism is increasingly normalized, minimized, or endlessly explained away. When moral boundaries erode in language and discourse, they eventually erode in action. When calls to “globalize the intifada” are treated as principled protest rather than incitement, violence should not surprise us.

What was once merely uncomfortable has now become unsafe.

Mamdani’s victory is not an aberration. It’s a symptom of a deeper transformation in American Jewish identity. The question is not whether Mamdani will be good or bad for Jews, whether he’ll keep his promises to fight antisemitism while maintaining his criticism of Israel.

The deeper issue is what it means that a growing number of New York’s Jews voted for someone whose politics deny Israel’s legitimacy, and yet claim to be rooted in Jewish ethics.

I left America in 1984 not because I abandoned progressive values, but because I couldn’t sustain them honestly while watching the erosion of Jewish conviction. Only in Israel could I live those values fully: opposing government policy when needed, pushing for social justice, working for Bedouin inclusion, all while standing within the Zionist project rather than outside it in judgment. Here, Jewish normalcy doesn’t require apology.

That’s the cruel irony many American Jews miss: by making their progressivism contingent on distancing themselves from Israel, they’ve trapped themselves in the very accommodation my story warned against. They think they’re being brave by criticizing Israel from Brooklyn. They don’t realize they’re just being comfortable.

Forty-one years later, a new generation of American Jews is choosing American belonging over continuity. I fear however that this will not prevent America, like Germany and Spain before it, turning on the Jews who felt so secure. The harbingers are no longer theoretical or distant; they now unfold daily on American streets and campuses.

I hope I’m wrong. I fear I’m not. Watching from Israel with my children and grandson, I can’t shake the feeling that the writing has been on the wall all along.

We just weren’t willing to read it.