I

magine reaching the age of 75, and your life’s work still lies ahead of you. That’s the strange position that Israel’s forever leader now occupies as Iran’s proxies fall and the decades-long conflict comes to a crisis point.

Three years ago, during his brief sojourn in the opposition, Netanyahu published his autobiography, titled Bibi: My Story. What a tale it told: a gripping account of his high-achieving youth in Israel and America, service in the vaunted Sayeret Matkal unit, UN ambassadorship, 1996 election as the country’s youngest ever prime minister, 1999 downfall, triumphant 2009 return and 12 years at the helm until being toppled again in 2021.

The crisp prose conveys the governing philosophy, media savvy, and political wiles that have made Bibi one of the world’s leading statesmen. Over 650 pages, Netanyahu made a compelling case that his own visionary leadership was the crucial factor in the bid to leverage Israeli innovation and hard power to make peace with Arab states. He set out the central place that Iran occupies in his thinking, and recounted how he combined covert action against Tehran’s nuclear program with diplomatic moves to isolate the Iranian regime.

The last page contained a postscript noting that Bibi had won reelection. Rather like Marlboro Man riding off into the sunset, it seemed that the rest was a question of time. Under Mr. Security, Israel was set for prosperity and Middle East peace with the Saudi accession to the Abraham Accords.

Then came Simchas Torah 5784. The Hamas pogrom made two things clear: Israel was in the fight of its life against Iran, and Bibi’s legacy was in tatters.

Regardless of the fact that an entire generation of Israeli generals had failed, it was Bibi’s security concept that was proven illusory. Only by Divine grace did Israel escape a cataclysmic simultaneous invasion by Hamas and Hezbollah. “Mr. Security” — Netanyahu’s old campaign title — seemed a thing of the past.

From that point on, the multifront war that Bibi leads has doubled as a battle to restore his reputation. The bravery and self-sacrifice of Israel’s soldiers have been blessed with tremendous Heavenly assistance, with stunning results. Hamas is reduced to a guerilla force, Hezbollah’s leaders killed or maimed, Syria removed from Iran’s orbit, and Tehran itself stripped of its defenses.

It’s a mark of Israel’s restored deterrence that friend and foe have adopted a new tone lately. President Trump — no fan of a loser — has grown markedly warmer to Bibi and Israel in general as the IDF’s battlefield successes have mounted. Even the Al-Qaeda alums now at the controls in Damascus are making noises about peace amid a recognition that Israel has roared back.

But it’s delusional to think that the clock has been reset to October 6 for Israel, and Bibi personally. That’s because a twin dynamic is forcing a showdown: Netanyahu’s rehabilitation and legacy depend on defeating Iran, and Iran in turn feels cornered.

Grievously weakened, and shorn of its most powerful proxies, the Iranians are growing desperate. The ring of fire strategy to surround Israel with a forest of missiles has failed. Beirut lies in ruins while Tel Aviv stands. The billions invested over decades are gone, and when its last proxy — the Houthis — are defanged, Tehran will be faced by a choice: sue for peace, or try to guarantee the regime’s survival by reaching for the nuclear option.

The breakout time to a nuclear weapon is now measured in weeks and depends solely on Khamenei’s order. What stands in the Ayatollah’s way? The knowledge that a dash for the bomb would trigger an Israeli strike on the nuclear facilities — and possibly decapitation of the regime itself.

Yet despite that risk, with its regional defense shield now a smoking ruin, alongside its Russian-supplied antiaircraft systems, the Iranian leadership may feel that it’s time to cash in the ultimate insurance policy, in the form of a nuke.

Having based his entire career on denying Tehran that option, Bibi would have no choice but to act to prevent that happening. A record of economic prosperity and defeating Hezbollah and Hamas would count for naught if Iran became a nuclear power. The stain of October 7 would pale into insignificance compared to that catastrophic event.

Thus it’s decision time on both sides — the denouement of a decades-old face-off.

Does Israel have what it takes to knock out the nuclear program? Given the Israeli Air Force’s lack of heavy bombers and bunker-busting capacity, there have long been doubts about whether it could do the job.

It’s always possible that Israel has a plan to use brain, not brawn, when knocking out the Iranian nuclear program. For the effectiveness of intel-driven operations, think back to the Stuxnet computer virus of 2010 or the recent beeper operation that took out Hezbollah. Who knows? Centrifuges might mysteriously go berserk across Iran once again, or some bunkers might miraculously collapse.

Surely, though, Bibi and Ron Dermer will be putting the case to Donald Trump that with the hard work of degrading Iran’s defenses already done, the time is now right to unleash American air power to obliterate Iran’s sprawling nuclear industry.

Trump aims never to start a war, but he’d delight in finishing one — and he’s already demonstrated a willingness to deploy short, sharp jabs of maximum force in pursuit of a limited goal. What a deterrent signal it would send to Russia and China if Trump resumed office by deploying an aerial armada to remove the Iranian menace.

We’re not privy to the secrets of Divine Hashgachah, but the startling gains made by Israeli arms since the beginning of the war represent a turnaround from the hester panim evident on October 7. Will Tehran’s defeat be the next stage in the Heavenly show that has played out for 15 months?

With the Iranians weaker than ever, and his own legacy on the line, Bibi will remember what he said back in 2009 when a new nuclear development facility was revealed beneath a mountain in Qom, central Iran.

In a briefing to a group of senators, he quoted Hillel Hazaken: “If not now,” he told the influential politicians, “then when?”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1043)

The post If Not Now  first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Some journalism doesn’t age very well, one genre being fawning, tone-deaf puff pieces about the scions of Arab dictators that paint the vicious little princelings as enlightened reformers. With the flight of Bashar al-Assad from Damascus in the early hours of Sunday as jihadists destroyed his family’s murderous, half-century-old regime, there was a renewed “eesh” as memories of some old interviews resurfaced.

“Wildly democratic,” one ridiculously naive profile labeled the Western-dressed Assad family back in 2010. Among other claims, it laughably painted First Lady Asma al-Assad — a British-born former investment banker — as encouraging “active citizenship” from the rogue state’s populace. That characterization would have come as news to the many young people tortured by the regime in the Arab Spring a year later.

Over in Syria — where the reformer’s statues were being toppled, members of his family strung up on cranes, and crowds ransacked presidential palaces in the best Middle East tradition — there were more important things to think about than the blushes of Western newsrooms.

Bashar al-Assad’s sudden downfall took everyone — foreign intelligence agencies and average Syrians alike — by surprise. It threatens to shatter one of the Middle East’s central states and will remake the region. Israel has rushed to fortify its border with Syria. Tehran’s dreams of a Shiite crescent across the Middle East are over. Russia has likely lost its legacy base on the Mediterranean. Turkey — which backs the rebels who burst out of Syria’s north two weeks ago — is now ascendant.

The fall of the Assad regime is the last, drawn-out death rattle of the uprising that began in 2011. It also brings to a close the reign of a dynasty that has ruled Syria with an iron fist for six decades.

As Bashar al-Assad’s plane went dark as it left Syria early on Sunday morning, with his wife Asma and three children reportedly already in Russia, the fate of Syria’s ruling family shines a spotlight on Arab autocracies. Were Bashar al-Assad’s purported reforms ever serious? How did this son of a dictator lose his power base and end up fleeing into exile? And could rulers from Jordan to the Gulf — intermittent subjects of fawning media profiles themselves — meet their ends in the bloody vengeance of a revolt?

Assad or Burn

Bashar al-Assad is that age-old phenomenon: The weak son crushed under the burden of upholding his powerful father’s legacy. The story of Bashar’s rise and fall begins with his father, Hafez. Born in 1930, the elder Assad — Arabic for “lion” — was born into an Alawite family in French-Mandate Syria.

The Alawites — an offshoot of Shiite Islam — dominate the Syrian coastal region, but are a minority within the wider country, with traditionally tense relations with the Sunni majority. The elder Assad joined the Syrian Air Force, and then rose to power in a series of coups, beginning in 1963 with the Baathist coup.

A secular pan-Arab movement, the Baathists were officially in the business of exporting socialism. But when Hafez Assad shunted aside his coleader in 1970, emerging as Syria’s sole ruler, he ditched the state socialism and pan-Arab aspects of the regime to focus on Syrian nationalism.

That led to the rise of the Alawites as a dominant force in Syria. Once he’d jettisoned the Baathism of the original revolutionary regime, Assad turned to his own denomination as a bedrock of his regime’s support.

Despite casting socialist economic ideology aside, Assad’s pro-Russian orientation remained, as a way to extract Russian weapons and intelligence support for his battle against Israel. When Syria joined Egypt in invading Israel in the Yom Kippur War, it was with the latest model Soviet tanks and anti-armor weapons that Syrian forces flooded across the Golan Heights.

Hafez was to bequeath to his son that Russian alliance, as the post-Soviet Russian Federation retained naval and air bases in Syria. It was Russian air power that propped up Bashar al-Assad’s regime for the last decade after the rebellion began, and it was Russian naval forces’ abrupt departure last week that was a harbinger of the regime’s fall.

The Assad regime was essentially a mafia state, with the economy dominated by the Assads and a few related families. One aim of the regime was to keep the Alawite minority in power: Although a Sunni was allowed to be prime minister, the presidency, armed forces and key ministries were held by members of Assad’s tribe. To justify his repressive reign, Hafez made an implicit deal with both Syrians and foreign powers: Tolerate my rule, he said, or you’ll get something far worse.

During the Syrian civil war that raged from 2011, that power extortion was summarized in a graffiti that was sprayed by regime supporters: “Assad or we burn the country,” it read.

The alternative that Assad could point to was twofold. First were the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood who had conducted a series of attacks on regime officials, culminating in an assassination attempt on Hafez Assad himself. Assad survived, though he had to kick aside a live grenade to do so. His revenge led to a crackdown on Islamist rebels in Hama, a city in central Syria. In February 1982, Assad’s forces leveled two-thirds of the city, killing around 20,000 rebels in the process. The butchery gave the regime almost three decades of uncontested rule.

The Alawite leader could also point to Lebanon as a salutary lesson on the perils of chaos as the erstwhile “Switzerland of the East” descended into a bloodbath. In 1976 Assad intervened in his neighbor’s civil war to secure the interests of his Maronite Christian allies, and the Assads continued to exercise power in Lebanon until 2006.

An uncompromising enemy of Israel, Hafez al-Assad rejected the Egyptian and Jordanian peace treaties with Israel as treasonous to the Arab cause, and remained a staunch backer of the Palestinians until his death in 2000. Ever fearful of the next Israeli superspy in the mold of Eli Cohen, and anyway viciously anti-Semitic, the Assad regime cracked down on Syrian Jews, who lived in fear of a knock on the door from Assad’s secret police.

But despite his grim regime, Hafez al-Assad was able to eke out grudging legitimacy from Western powers as Syria’s leader. Only seven weeks before being forced from office in 1974 following the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon visited Syria. He posed for a smiling photo op with the whole Assad family — a show of friendship that went far beyond realpolitik.

Shy Dictator

The eight-year-old second son of Hafez Assad pictured in that shot might well have been named Bashful Bashar. He was never groomed for the top role in the police state — that spot was intended for his charismatic, dashing older brother, Bassel.

Unlike Bassel, who rapidly rose through the ranks of the military, Bashar was shy and introverted, uninterested in politics or the military. The son of a bloodstained dictator, Bashar was apparently squeamish, opting for a bloodless branch of medicine. Graduating as a doctor in Damascus, he then moved to London to study ophthalmology.

In a 2013 interview with Britain’s Daily Mail, Dr. Edmund Schulenburg, who trained Assad, remembered “Dr. Bashar” as a skilled surgeon, and in personal terms “sensitive, polite, and punctual” — not qualities often associated with a future warlord.

“When he left after two years,” said Dr. Schulenberg, “I remember thinking that he was really better suited to being an eye surgeon than a leading politician. I thought he was not strong enough.”

Assad’s 18 months living in London were a far cry from the normal lifestyle of the scions of Arab autocrats; there were no luxury houses and cars, carousing or parties. Instead, he lived alone in a low-key rented apartment, nursing interests in Western music, technology, and computers.

Bashar Assad only exchanged the operating theater for the dictator’s office because of his brother’s impetuousness. In 1994, firstborn Bassel Assad had a high-speed encounter with a Syrian bridge on his way to catch a plane to vacation in the Alps. He was killed instantly. Bassel’s death left a gaping hole in Hafez’s succession plans.

Bashar was told to pack up his scalpel and board a flight for Syria, where his belated and hasty tutelage for power began.

Court Intrigue

Within months of assuming power in June 2000, Bashar al-Assad made a series of alliances that would define his years in office. One was with Iran — soon to emerge as the major backer of his rule. Syria under Hafez had been the first Arab state to recognize the Iranian revolutionary regime, and despite the deep differences between the Islamic Republic and secular Syria, relations remained close.

That alliance deepened under Bashar, whose rule from the outset was far shakier than his father’s had been. From 2006, Syrian became a logistics hub for the Hezbollah buildup after the Second Lebanon War. Tehran began to manufacture weapons and conduct military research on Syrian soil, as well as providing intelligence and security service training which Assad employed to maintain his grip on power.

Assad’s second alliance was marriage, and his wife would prove to be at least his equal as a Syrian power player.

Asma al-Assad grew up far from the intrigue and power struggles of the Syrian president’s court. Her Syria-born father Fawaz was a cardiologist in a private London hospital, and the daughter was given an upwardly mobile British education. In her Church of England high school, she went by the name “Emma,” and despite her parentage, spoke no Arabic. In ’90s London, the finance sector was booming, and as bright university grad, that’s where she headed, joining JP Morgan.

Bashar and Asma were quickly hailed as a pro-Western, jet-set power couple. All too predictably, news coverage focused on their English, sartorial style and promises of reform. The same media outlets that swoon over photogenic, smooth-tongued Arab autocrats to this day fell for the sales patter.

The couple talked of wanting to bring democratic reforms to the repressive state. In 2005, the New York Times wondered whether they represented “the essence of secular Western-Arab fusion.”

Asma had grand ideas of transforming Syria’s dour Soviet-style cities into something more modern. She recruited leading Western designers to remodel central Damascus, with a cement factory slated to become a gallery, and a dirty river running through the city zoned as an urban park. With her background in finance, she took control of Bashar’s economic policy.

Mrs. Assad wanted to turn Syria into a regional version of Dubai, as a tax-free investment haven. With her experience in the world of the global elite, she was able to position herself as the friendly face of the regime, and the conduit for all Western development projects.

But the reality behind those glittering visions of modernity was ugly. In a fascinating 2021 article in the Economist, Nicolas Pelham says that those reformist wishes were frustrated because they hit the entrenched interests of no less than her own mother-in-law.

In the best traditions of court intrigue, Hafez al-Assad’s widow Anisa detested her new daughter-in-law. She had wanted Bashar to marry dynastically to strengthen the regime, and she made her antipathy clear.

The dowager Assad refused to surrender the First Lady title until her death in 2016, and stood in the way of her son’s economic reforms because they threatened the interests of her own family, the Makhloufs. Rami Makhlouf, her nephew, is worth $10 billion, a fortune made by controlling key parts of the Syrian economy.

In the battle for influence between the tycoon and his cousin, Bashar, the money man came off worse. He was imprisoned and his assets were nationalized, reportedly kept alive only because he still had the access codes to the foreign bank accounts.

Bashar found himself imprisoned in the web of entrenched interests that his father’s regime leaned on. “Hafez Assad was an octopus that controlled the tentacles,” Pelham says. “Bashar began as an octopus controlled by his tentacles.”

Glowing profiles brokered by Western PR firms aside, things were about to fall apart for the Assads. The “First Lady who thought social reform and tailoring would modernize a pariah state,” says Pelham would become “the Marie Antoinette of Damascus, shopping as her country burned.”

On the Brink

In February 2011, a 14-year-old boy graffitied “It’s your turn, doctor” on a school wall in Deraa, southwestern Syria, and triggered a 13-year-long civil war. The inscription clearly referred to Bashar al-Assad’s medical past, and held a prognosis for his shaky future. The graffiti was only off by 13 years; in retrospect, the clock began ticking for Assad from that moment.

Within months, Syria had turned into the battleground of foreign powers. Rebels were a mix of Sunni jihadists (including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the al-Qaeda affiliate that has taken the lead in this round of fighting), Kurds, former Syrian Army soldiers, and Western-supported forces. On the regime’s side were Iran, Hezbollah and Russia — the latter two providing Assad’s infantry and air power, respectively.

Iran’s interest in propping up the Assad regime was to create a Shiite land bridge from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, allowing Tehran to send weapons and fighters across the Middle East to menace Israel, its principal foe.

Russia’s motivation was to preserve Putin’s Great Power pretenses by competing with America for influence in the Middle East and by maintaining bases on the Mediterranean. Having been largely ejected from the Middle East after the United States emerged as the dominant regional power after the Yom Kippur War, Russia was able to contrast its commitment to its Syrian ally with the United States’ hesitancy.

Russian intervention was essentially green-lighted by Barack Obama’s infamous failure to enforce his own red lines over the regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria in 2012. That failure crumbled American deterrence across the board and likely led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 — a linkage that came full circle when Russia proved unable last week to come to Assad’s rescue due to its own involvement in the Ukraine war.

As Syria burned, Asma al-Assad fiddled — with her husband’s credit card, that is. Her reform projects up in smoke, she went on a spending spree, shelling out $250,000 on interior decorating. But after her mother-in-law’s death in 2016, she emerged as an undeniable power player in her own right. Her London English and elite status made her the main contact point for aid agencies. Through her Syria Trust the bulk of UN aid was soon funneled, turning the former outsider into a source of patronage. Her portrait began to appear alongside that of her husband in government offices, and there was talk of her own presidential ambitions.

Short-Sighted

Foreign military muscle stabilized Assad’s hold on power, and the ophthalmologist turned warlord shored up his own support base among the country’s Alawites and other minorities, using the time-honored Assad talking point about the language of power.

“There is no way to govern our society except with the shoe over people’s heads,” he said.

But it was all an illusion. Underneath the appearance of stability, the Assad regime had been hollowed out, and the regime itself was just a front for the Iranian, Hezbollah, and Russian forces propping it up. Underneath that façade, the two devils with which Bashar al-Assad had bargained were about to desert him as the heat was turned up.

That’s all in hindsight, though. Two weeks ago, experts assumed that the conflict had been perma-frozen. In reality, Turkey-backed rebels in the north had been preparing for an offensive for a year. That time period coincided with the growing weakness of the Assad regime, as its external props faltered.

Struggling to defeat Ukraine, Russia was unable to sustain its commitment to the Middle East. As Israel decimated Hezbollah and scythed Iran down to size, the Shiite axis splintered. When the Sunni rebels emerged out of the north, taking first Aleppo then moving down the M5 highway — the country’s north-south axis — the Syrian Army melted away and its allies stood by.

So, with barely a whimper, ended the six-decade rule of the self-styled family of lions, the Assads. To the disbelief of world leaders who’d assumed that the Cold War relic regime would survive indefinitely, the son of an air force general took the last plane out of Damascus and dropped off the radar.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1040)

The post Doctor Death first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

It’s so precise and metronomic, you have to wonder if the calls for aliyah are pre-programmed. Every time there’s a terror attack abroad, Israeli politicians respond with calls to depart given (mostly-European) country and come home. As news broke of the open season on Israelis/Jews in Amsterdam two weeks ago, it was former defense and foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s turn: “I call upon the Jews of Europe not to delay like they did before the Holocaust,” he posted. “Leave everything and immigrate to Israel.”

Lieberman has form on the subject — he issued the same call after the recent French elections — but it’s a well-worn road, dotted with similar statements by Netanyahu, Bennett, and others.

To be clear: No one is betting on a long-term European future for Jews. European politicians mouth platitudes like “Europe without Jews isn’t Europe,” but they won’t act on the number one threat — the rising thuggery of the pro-Hamas mob.

That said, any Israeli politician urging Jews overseas to come should be asked: “What are you doing to make that process easier?” Chazal say Eretz Yisrael is acquired with yissurim — but some of those difficulties are directly caused by the actions, or lack of them, of those selfsame politicians.

Among the biggest deterrents to moving to Israel is the extraordinary cost of living, especially that of housing. The math simply doesn’t make sense. The average house price in 2024 is 2.2 million shekels, or $606,000 — about $110,000 more expensive than in the US. Meanwhile, the average monthly salary — $3,200 — is 35 percent lower than the monthly pay in the US.

That figure alone explains the immense financial pressure that Israelis live with. Phrases like “finishing the month” are a commonplace of conversation in a way that they aren’t elsewhere.

Israel’s absurd house prices have to be seen to be believed. A while ago I was in Nof Hagalil. That’s the new name for Upper Nazareth, a Jewish town next door to its more well-known Arab neighbor, regular Nazareth. I found myself outside an apartment block so decrepit that I thought it had been emptied for demolition. I was wrong — the place was inhabited, and a three-room apartment cost some $200,000. In other words, even the back of beyond is unaffordable.

Everyone loves the picture of an incoming Nefesh B’Nefesh flight, but yeridah is its embarrassing cousin — the family member no one likes to talk about. The reality is that on every outbound plane there are Israelis who have no intention of coming back. Speak to the vast number of yordim who live in places like Miami or London, and there’s a common theme: financial pressure. “There’s simply no way that we could make it,” they’ll tell you.

That’s a tragedy, both for the country that experiences brain drain and for the Jewish people as a whole. Overseas, these yordim are prey for assimilation in far higher numbers than back home.

Speak to the politicians about this incredible burden, and they’ll point to Israel’s unusually high defense expenditures. Even prewar, the country spent 4.5 percent of GDP on the military — far higher than the US, which spends only three percent. In the middle of a major war, spending has obviously risen, and is set to cost each household a further $1,000 annually.

But that’s only a partial excuse: The cost of housing has risen remorselessly since the early 2000s, through war, peace, and Covid. It’s not as if house prices are subject to some mysterious, anti-gravity forces that governments are utterly incapable of contending with. It’s plain supply-and-demand.

Yet the last election that housing was on the ballot was in 2015, when Moshe Kahlon’s party stood on a cost-of-housing ticket. Since then, normal politics has been subsumed by Israel’s culture wars, turned into an insane Yes-Bibi-No-Bibi choice that’s about identity, not kitchen table issues.

Housing is obviously not the only reason that many don’t get on a flight to Israel; there are things that the Israeli government can’t be asked to deal with, such as the low communal priority for living in Eretz Yisrael in some quarters. Or the undeniable fact that parts of “chutz l’Aretz” (that amazingly capacious term for 99.99 percent of the planet) offer a higher standard of living than in Israel.

But there are many areas where the government — and only the government — can act effectively. Things such as the travesty that overseas qualifications aren’t recognized in Israel, forcing foreign-born teachers to be dishwashers, and dentists to jump through hoops in order to raise their first drill. Or when it comes to the housing problem, taking on the bureaucratic beasts that control the supply of land, cutting through environmental and planning red tape to dramatically expand the housing stock.

There’s no question that when there’s sufficient political will, governments can act decisively to address giant problems. Look no further than the MAGA movement. As I wrote in a post-election take, Donald Trump is a transformer. He came into office in 2016 promising to rewrite the rules of international trade, using tariffs as a blunt weapon. That created a tremendous backlash, but Trump reset the American consensus on free trade.

Likewise, he promised to slash illegal immigration. He failed to build his promised wall and make Mexico pay for it, but having created a political consensus is now poised to make good on his second mandate by a program of mass deportations.

In the Israeli context, a dose of that political determination would go a long way. The words of Maseches Avos connecting yegiyah and metziyah are as valid for daunting national projects as they are for any context: Where there’s a political will, there’s often a legislative way.

Why is this column appearing in the pages of Mishpacha? What good will it do if it’s read in Flatbush or the Five Towns? Because Israeli politicians of all types love a good photo op with the numerous delegations who come to Israel; they love being able to rub shoulders overseas with the reliably-supportive Orthodox community.

At those meetings, one item should come up as standard: aliyah. “What are you doing to ensure that our children and grandchildren — who come to study in Israel and who hope to stay — are able to buy a house?” those politicians should be asked. “What have you done since we last spoke so that my neighbor who made aliyah can practice his profession without mind-numbing bureaucracy?”

With anti-Semitism now a fact of Western life once again, no one needs an Israeli politician to lecture them to come home. It’s time for policy, not pontification. If what is required to make Israel affordable is a dose of slash-and-burn of the country’s unreformed housing and labor markets, so be it. There’s a MAGA playbook to Make Aliyah Great Again.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1037)

The post Make Aliyah Great Again first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photos: AP Images

As Democrats descend into infighting, will the party wake up to the fact that its leftward lurch is toxic? And can Republicans translate the second Trump victory into long-term power?

L

ike a combination of relay race and kindergarten circle time, the best way to picture the blame game underway in the Democratic Party is a loop. Kamala’s people blame Biden for arrogantly delaying his exit; Bidenworld is briefing against Obama for pushing the aging president out; and Obama insiders are heaping off-the-record scorn on Harris for the party’s humiliation.

The knives are out among Democrats — along with forks, spoons, and any other implement with which they can get at each other as the left melts down. Expect lots of performative outrage like Harvard’s tragicomic lecture cancellations for students left “feeling blue” by Trump’s victory. There will be many voices blaming the irreparable racism of more than that half the electorate. The machinery of the Democratic media-political industrial complex will gear up to “resist fascism” and manufacture a sense of perma-crisis in the Trump White House — a playbook that worked last time around.

But away from the tantrums, a serious debate is beginning to emerge to answer the question worth more than the billion dollars that donors poured into Kamala Harris’s campaign.

How, oh how — Democrats are asking — did a majority of voters reject the party of progress in favor of the dastardly Trump?

It’s the most important question that a defeated political party can ask itself — and also the question whose answer they are most likely to get wrong. Predictably, there are early signs that many are ignoring the clear wake-up call that Trump’s victory sends about what ordinary Americans want.

President Obama, for one, is intent on seeing the results purely as an aftershock of Covid, blaming “price hikes resulting from the pandemic,” “rapid change,” and “headwinds for democratic incumbents around the world,” in a post-election statement. In this analysis, there’s nary a word about the woke identity mania and anti-Israel demagoguery that have overwhelmed the party; no rebuke to the Democratic obsession with marginal cultural issues over improving the low wages and bleak outlook of many ordinary Americans.

One Democrat, though, has a theory about Harris’s trouncing that doesn’t involve whining. In his post-election diagnosis, Ruy Teixeira, a storied Democratic strategist, pointed the finger at the party’s leftward lurch.

“The Democratic Party may be the party of blue America, especially deep blue metro America, but its bid to be the party of the ordinary American, the common man and woman, is falling short,” he wrote. “There is a simple — and painful — reason for this. The Democrats really are no longer the party of the common man and woman. The priorities and values that dominate the party today are instead those of educated, liberal America.”

Given his role as longtime Democratic seer, Teixeira’s broadside will stoke an anguished debate inside the Democratic Party — one that the triumphant Republicans need to watch if they hope to turn Trump’s second victory into long-term power.

In that debate, a half-century-old political specter will be resurrected: that of George McGovern, whose 1972 loss has haunted the Democratic Party ever since. It will be fought over to explain whether the party can safely double down on the progressive present — as Obama implies — or needs to abandon wokery and course-correct for the center in order to recapture the White House in 2028.

History Lessons

G

eorge McGovern’s failed 1972 campaign — which foreshadowed today’s era of identity politics — is the ABC of Democratic Party history. The South Dakotan senator began his long-shot campaign with an insight: that there was a realignment underway in American politics. Southern states — hitherto Democratic strongholds — were turning red. To win, Democrats would need to assemble a new coalition. It would focus heavily on “identity” causes such as African-American, women’s rights, and liberals opposed to the Vietnam War. This would be combined with a populist economic message to target working-class whites.

McGovern’s coalition was like a mash-up of the modern Democratic and Trumpian Republican parties, marrying the identity politics of the former with the working-class populism of the latter.

The combination, said Josh Mound in a 2017 New Republic essay, was enough to unnerve Republican incumbent Richard Nixon, but in the end, McGovern’s campaign fell apart under the twin blows of its own ineptitude and attacks from moderate Democrats.

“Anti-McGovern Democrats staged an ‘Anybody but McGovern’ movement at the convention,” Mound wrote. “When that failed, some pledged that they would not campaign for him and might even support Nixon.”

The result was a wipeout for the ages. Richard Nixon trounced McGovern by 23 points in the popular vote, and the Democratic Party was changed forever. The lesson that Democrats drew from the debacle, says Mound, was “McGovernism” — a fear of all things left-wing. The party’s center of gravity lurched rightward as Democrats became more hawkish on defense and focused on the free market and not economic inequality. As late as 2012, when Obama ran for a second term with a hint of economic populism to contrast himself with Mitt Romney’s corporate image, McGovernism was invoked by Democrats fearful of deviating from the center.

That, the Democratic left has long contended, was the wrong lesson to draw. McGovern wasn’t wrong, they say — no Democrat could have won the 1972 election given Nixon’s popularity and the booming economy.

Nixon shifted to the left by instituting wage-price controls to clamp down on inflation and promised to cut taxes on the working class if reelected. Thus, the entire genesis of neoliberalism — the decades-long rightward tilt that was the reaction to McGovern’s faceplant — was misbegotten, critics say.

By way of evidence, they point to the other side of the aisle and the lesson of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. The Arizona-born senator and former Air Force general was in some ways a political twin of McGovern’s. Goldwater’s 1964 trouncing at the hands of Democrat Lyndon Johnson was by a similar astounding margin — 22 points. Like McGovern, he had run on his party’s flank trying to replace the moderate Republicanism of the day with something that we’d recognize as Reaganite conservatism.

Goldwater advocated hawkish confrontation with the Soviets, opposed the unions, was leery of the welfare state, and proposed tax cuts for the rich to boost the economy. His resounding defeat was the end of Barry Goldwater’s presidential aspirations, but his ideals found their way into the Oval Office within 15 years of his defeat. Unlike George McGovern, Barry Goldwater lost the battle of the ballot box, but went on to win the battle of ideas.

Revenge of the Left

B

ut did McGovern really fail? Like many a failed pioneer, George McGovern’s central premise may not have been wrong; he was simply a few decades ahead of his time.

In 2002, two political scientists, Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, wrote a book that made Democratic hearts thrill. The Emerging Democratic Majority contended that America’s shifting demographics were giving rise to a strong new Democratic voting base comprised of minorities, college-educated liberals, and working and single women. Teixeira and Judis called this new constellation “George McGovern’s Revenge” because it represented the triumph of McGovern’s vision.

That theory didn’t alter facts on the ground in the Bush years, but when Barack Obama swept into power in 2008, the Democratic majority had — it seemed — finally emerged. Obama’s victory was built on maximizing turnout among minorities, taking 79 percent of the non-white vote; making a breakthrough among white college-educated voters to carry this demographic by one percent; and stemming the party’s long-term deficit among white working-class voters.

Even after the bloodbath that was the 2010 midterms, when Democrats lost 63 seats in the House, Obama’s personal popularity and savvy campaigning delivered a second term. That was based on minorities growing by two percent as a share of the vote, Obama’s dominance of the professional and women’s vote — and crucially, a 23-point lead among young voters.

As Barack Obama gave his second inauguration address, it seemed that the American future would be Democratic blue, from sea to shining sea. Teixeira was able to write, with some justification “We are now ten years farther down this road and McGovern’s revenge only seems sweeter.”

And then it all fell apart.

Workers of the World

D

onald Trump’s 2016 victory was a profound shock to the system worldwide. From European chancelleries to NATO headquarters and Gulf palaces, leaders scrambled to fathom what madness had gripped the American electorate. Hillary Clinton had seemed a shoo-in against the “basket of deplorables” headed by Deplorable No. 1.

Trump’s victory, says Teixeira, was based on a profound Democratic misreading of Obama’s 2012 win. Excited by their coalition of minorities and progressives, Democrats had ignored the contribution that white working-class voters had made to Obama’s success. And so when Trump won the GOP nomination, Democrats were elated, believing the New York celebrity mogul to be unelectable given his anti-immigration stances. They sneered at his numerous vocal supporters as vulgar racists.

Reliant on misleading polls, Democrats missed the dramatic swing in the working-class vote. In 2016, Trump hiked the Republican lead among white working-class voters six points, to a yawning 31-point gap.

But their loss didn’t act to sober Democrats. Instead, they caught a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome — and entirely missed the lesson that his rise should have taught. In a recent essay, “Politics Without Winners,” Teixeira and political scientist Yuval Levin note that the left’s interpretation of Trump’s victory as being linked to a racist backlash against a black president had far-reaching implications for their overall worldview.

“It encouraged the Democratic Party’s burgeoning cultural left to build on that interpretation and link it to their radical critique of American society as struc­turally racist, hostile to all ‘marginalized’ commu­nities, and embedded within a rapacious capitalism that would destroy the planet.

“This view spread through sympathetic cultural milieus where it already had a considerable presence: universities, media, the arts, nonprofits, advo­cacy groups, foundations, and the Democratic Party’s infrastructure. In those spaces, progressivism became redefined to include that radical critique and the necessary link to all associated issues.”

Thus, the Democratic Party of the Trump-Biden era became associated with radical-left identity campaigns like Black Lives Matter, and the related calls to defund the police; wide open border policies that aided the entry of vast numbers of illegal immigrants; the eye-wateringly expensive Green New Deal; and a focus on radical gender policies.

In effect, Democrats had ceded the working-class-friendly plank of McGovern’s program to Donald Trump, and were left with only the identity politics.

Voters noticed, and they didn’t like it at all. They snatched control of the House from the Democrats in the 2022 midterms, pulling the lever for Republicans even as the GOP doubled down on the Trumpiest of Trumpian candidates.

Wake Up or Double Down?

W

ith Democrats in trouble in the late Biden era, Ruy Teixeira and John Judis set out to explain how the leftward march had imperiled the party. Published in 2023, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? argued that Democrats had shot themselves in both feet: by embracing identity politics and driving working-class voters into the arms of Donald Trump by continuing to support elite-friendly economic policies.

The cultural radicalism of what they call the Democrats’ “shadow party” — comprised of the activists, think tanks, founda­tions, publications, big donors, and presti­gious intellectuals that set the tone for the party — has endangered Democrats at all levels given how out-of-step the party is with mainstream American opinion.

“Democrats,” Teixeira and Judis write, “need to look in the mirror and examine the extent to which their own failures contributed to the rise of the most toxic tendencies on the right.”

Reflecting the deep historical roots of the current Democratic moment, the crux of that argument is what Joshua Mound would call classical McGovernism.  It’s a call to swing to the center, on issues that are repelling working class voters such as race, immigration, and climate policy.

The test will be in the days ahead: Whoever now helms the party, are Democrats chastened enough to listen to Ruy Teixeira, the man who predicted their rise, and then foretold their defeat? Will defeat act as a wakeup call for a party that has now turned its back on the bedrock of its support in blue-collar America?

Republicans need to watch carefully for the results of that internal battle, because their own new working-class coalition may be more fragile than they assume. If Democrats head to the center and Trump struggles to deliver for them, they could head back to the left — a home to a surprising number of working-class voters as recently as 2012.

About the fragility of supposed realignments, and the fickleness of working-class voters who’ve soured on the left and drifted right, ask Trump’s first-term counterpart Boris Johnson, whose massive gains among Britain’s working class crumbled as he failed to deliver.

Post-election, there are signs that the Democrats are chastened by defeat. Commentators recently rah-rah for Harris are now lasering in on the “identitarianism” (i.e., wokeness) of the party. The New York Times notes the difference between the social media reaction of 2016 and that of 2024. Eight years ago, “online platforms were awash in calls to protest the day after Donald J. Trump’s victory.” Now, it seems like “business as usual.”

But to judge by Joe Biden’s preelection dismissal of Trump’s supporters as “garbage,” the old “basket of deplorables” trope that paved the way for Donald Trump’s return is hardwired into the party’s thinking.

Lip-curling contempt for half of the electorate isn’t a great way to expand your voter base. It leaves open only one avenue for victory in 2028 for a party scarred by the memory of George McGovern: hoping that, long-term, voters find the MAGA movement as awful as Democrats preach that it is.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1036)

The post Trump Cards: Left Foot Forward    first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photos: Elchanan Kotler

When the news broke that a soldier named Yaakov Hillel had died in Lebanon over Succos, his illustrious name became the focus of the tragedy. But as his father Rabbi Chaim Hillel makes clear, Yaakov’s story was a universal one — of educational challenges overcome and of the power of parents to help their children find their own path in life

It’s morning on the first day of Succos.

The shul is packed, the bimah surrounded by mispallelim holding lulavim. Rabbi Chaim Hillel — a son of Rav Yaakov Hillel, the great mekubal and rosh yeshivah of Jerusalem’s Yeshivat Ahavat Shalom — feels his body trembling, his heart ready to burst, but no one notices. His neighbors and friends are all looking intently in their machzorim, crying out, “Hosha na, l’maancha Elokeinu, hosha na.”

He joins in, closing his eyes, tightening his grip on his arba minim, trying to shut out any other thoughts and shouting with all his might, “Hosha na, l’maancha Boreinu, hosha na.”

But his heart refuses to cooperate, drawing him back again and again to the devastating news he’d heard just the previous night. He’d finished the seudah, surrounded by his children and multiple guests, and had risen from the table to get a few hours’ rest.

And then, just as he was drifting to sleep, there was a knock, and he heard one of his children shout, “Abba, there are soldiers at the door.”

His heart dropped — a late-night visit from the army usually means only one thing.

He and his wife walked toward the door, knowing what awaited them, but still holding on to the faintest glimmer of hope.

But when the men sat down, that last spark went out, too. “We’re here to inform you….”

“Hosha na, l’maancha Goaleinu, hosha na.”

There would be no sleep in the Hillel home that night. The entire family gathered together, in silence. There was no one to whom they could direct any questions; maybe there weren’t any questions to ask. Every now and then someone would burst into tears, and the others would remind them that it’s a chag, and you’re not allowed to mourn.

And in the morning, the newly bereaved father went off to shul with his sons, wrapped in his tallis, as if nothing had happened. The world was carrying on, even as a storm raged in his own heart.

The post Last Prayer for My Son  first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Golf courses of the world, hold your horses. Granted four more years, Donald Trump won’t be retiring to the verdant links anytime soon. But as he takes his seat behind the Resolute desk again, it’s worth pondering how dramatically and fundamentally he reshaped America — a change that four years of a Biden term could not overcome.

T

his is not a mere thought exercise. It’s the key to understanding the current state of politics. Because Trump is that ultrarare thing: a US president who is truly era-defining, who shapes the times as much as he’s a victim of them. Such is the force field of his political presence that he exerts influence both in office and out.

For ten years, he’s been the fulcrum of US politics: the leader to whose tune all others have danced, the initiator to whom all others react. He’s reshaped what it means to be a Republican and driven Democrats to a decade-long tizzy, their every calculus reduced to how to dislodge the Donald.

Even when that era of total dominance ends, the 45th and 47th president will go down in history as Trump the Transformer — the man who single-handedly triggered realignments across politics, the economy and foreign policy.

MAGA Mania

Given their mutual loathing, Donald Trump and Barack Obama make an unlikely pair. But they belong together — two leaders who triggered a realignment in their own parties. Had it not been for Obama taking the Democrats sharply to the left, transforming them into a party far more concerned with identity politics than the fate of the white working class, it’s questionable whether Trumpism would have risen at all. The GOP would likely have continued to wallow in legacy-Reaganism, giving birth to movements like the budget-balancing Tea Party. But when Trump took his (much-mythologized) ride down the Trump Tower elevator, he triggered a political realignment of his own.

The Republicans went from being the party of big business to the party of the blue-collar. A New York Times/Siena College poll in October found that 64 percent of white voters without a college degree supported Donald Trump. In parallel, Democrats increasingly own the white college-educated vote, such that education is now the dominant fault line in American politics.

The inversion didn’t start with Trump. It’s tied to the steady rise in the political importance of the culture wars. But Trump identified the space to reinvent the Republicans, and closed the deal with signature ruthlessness.

Such is the scale of the metamorphosis that it’s impossible to imagine a figure like Mitt Romney — corporate, centrist, and old guard — heading the party in the foreseeable future, as he did back in 2012. Instead, it’ll be various shades of MAGA in the post-Trump world — the only question being whether it will be MAGA with the mania, or without.

Burying Reagan

On a related note, when was the last time you heard a major American politician evangelizing for a free trade agreement, or for slashing Social Security? These used to be Reaganite orthodoxy, but Donald Trump ground those policies into dust.

It’s a sign of the extent of this realignment that it’s hard to remember how appalled the establishment was when Trump first implemented his “America First” tariff regime on China. A decade on, those cries of outrage have become whimpers of protest, or choruses of approval. Democrats have no intention of rowing back on protectionism, and Republicans fall over each other in their trade-hawkery.

Instead, in an October interview with Bloomberg News, Trump spoke of massively ramping up the tariff regime, saying, “To me the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff.”

And while it’s true that Trump elicited nods of corporate approval for his first-term tax cuts, they weren’t matched by entitlement reform.

For 40 years, Ronald Reagan reigned supreme over the Republicans, but after a decade of Trump, it’s clear that free-trading, small government Gipperism is a thing of the past.

Foreign Policies

No lover of jargon, Donald Trump would likely find it bizarre to hear his name affixed to a pretentious term like “doctrine.” Despite that, a clear Trump Doctrine has emerged in foreign policy that has reset America’s foreign affairs playbook.

It’s disdainful of the postwar liberal world order; wary of foreign wars; and committed to unexpected aggression when acting to defend American interests.

Exhibit A when it comes to the world order is Trump’s aggressive skepticism of NATO, in which context he’s said that Russia could do whatever it wants to a NATO country that doesn’t pay its dues. That belligerence has done what no amount of Euro-Atlanticism could ever achieve: finally convince European leaders to stop mooching off America and start pulling their own weight in the alliance, with some such as Poland massively rearming.

While the Democrats under Obama spoke of a pivot to China, it was the Biden administration that put that into practice with an ambitious Pacific military alliance, called AUKUS. That’s likely because Trump had succeeded in reorienting American foreign policy toward China in the interim.

Trump’s neo-isolationism led him to sign the agreement with the Taliban that ended the Afghanistan War. The Biden administration infamously botched the withdrawal, leading to fall-of-Saigon images of American retreat, but Biden essentially followed Trump’s lead.

Trumpian skepticism about the Ukraine war has influenced large parts of the Republican Party, leading to Congress balking at stumping up the cash for the fight. Officially, Democrats remain committed to the war, but they have basically prevented Zelensky’s forces from winning — a reticence based on reading the post-Iraq War room that Trump has built.

But Trump is no peacenik. The brand of norm-busting that led him to ingratiate himself with North Korea’s Kim also led him to move the US embassy to Jerusalem and kill Iranian Revolutionary Guards leader Qassem Soleimani.

Will these policies outlast him? As is clear from the Biden administration, which effectively implemented many tenets of Trumpism, they already have. Across the board, Trump has acted to galvanize longstanding processes, and seed new ones.

So as Donald Trump postpones his retirement to the Turnberry, he’s already a Hall of Famer — if not in golf, then as a transformative president.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1035)

The post Trump the Transformer first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Project Coordinator: Gedalia Guttentag

After one of the most volatile election campaigns in political history, it’s zero hour: the epic clash between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

What haven’t we seen in this race? One candidate seemingly back from the political dead after losing four years ago, having faced multiple indictments and assassination attempts. Another whose campaign gave up the ghost on the debate stage, to be superseded by a third who had 100 days to convince skeptical voters that she was both the continuity and the change candidate.

For many Jewish voters, this is no ordinary election, but a post-October 7 referendum. After a year of disquieting anti-Semitism on campus and on the margins of politics, some see this race as pivotal in determining the course of American support for Israel, and the battle against Jew-hatred domestically.

Yet despite the upheaval, the dynamics of the race have remained surprisingly stable throughout. With two unpopular candidates, it comes down to a neck-and-neck battle in the swing states. Who will come out ahead in the race, and which party will hold Congress next week? Is this election indeed a pivotal moment for Israel and the fight against rising anti-Semitism?

For last-gasp prognostications and bold predictions, we turn to the all-star panelists of Mishpacha’s Fourcast politics podcast.

Our panelists:

BINYAMIN ROSE

is former news editor and current editor at large for Mishpacha, and a popular commentator on US and Israeli political affairs.

MAURY LITWACK

is the founder and CEO of the Teach Coalition, one of the nation’s largest faith-based lobbying organizations in education funding advocacy, and writes Halls of Power, a semi-monthly column in these pages.

STU LOESER

is a Democratic communications strategist who has worked on three presidential campaigns as well as congressional and gubernatorial campaigns. His media strategy firm helps companies in crisis.

ELI STEINBERG

lives in New Jersey with his wife and children. They are not responsible for his opinions, which have been published broadly across Jewish and general media.

Guest panelist

SETH MANDEL

is the senior editor of Commentary magazine.

1

Nate Silver calls the popular vote a “beauty contest”; it’s irrelevant, because what happens in the swing states decides who wins. Based on what we’re seeing now in Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, where polls show Trump either ahead or within striking distance of Harris, give us your tally for the swing states.

Binyamin Rose

My instincts tell me since Harris never padded her early lead, that’s a sign she peaked too early and has faded. Trump should win at least five of the seven swing states above, including Pennsylvania and Michigan, where voters trust him more to tackle the economy and immigration. Not sure yet about Wisconsin and Nevada. A new Marquette poll is due out this Wednesday. Marquette had Harris in the lead all along, so if the new poll shows Trump ahead, it will confirm his momentum.

Seth Mandel

I don’t have any special insight into the swing states beyond the polling, so I tend to look at what the campaigns seem to think about their own positions there. I’m seeing more nerves from the Harris campaign toward North Carolina than I expected, and more confidence from Trump in Pennsylvania, so it’s possible they both know something we don’t.

But I have also said all along that I think the Harris campaign has a poor ability to assess battleground states and tends to catastrophize. For example, the numbers have always shown that the Arab-American vote in Michigan isn’t going to cost her the state. Yet the campaign clearly believes otherwise. That could be because the Harris campaign sees Trump momentum there and in North Carolina and in Pennsylvania — or it could be because they’re nervous, and that’s all.

Maury Litwack

Nevada and North Carolina don’t belong with these other swing states. In the last two presidential elections, Nevada went blue and North Carolina went red. I predict they follow that trend. Now let’s get to the fun:

Michigan — Harris. This is the first presidential election in which Michigan has early voting, and this gives the edge to the Democrats.

Arizona — Trump. I’ve discussed this before in my column. There is an immigration ballot initiative that gives Republicans the edge.

Wisconsin — Harris. I think the Democratic Party has grown its ground game in the last four years and they can eke this out.

Georgia — Trump. The margin was a tiny 11,000 in 2020, and I think the GOP has improved its turnout and early voting to swing this state back to their column.

Pennsylvania — Trump. If Fetterman is nervous, the Democrats should be too. He believes Trump has intense support in this pivotal swing state, and that’s enough to put this in the GOP column.

I think it won’t be close in Michigan, Wisconsin, or Georgia, but it will be close in Arizona and razor-thin in Pennsylvania.

Stu Loeser

Actually, there are almost no polls in these states that have one candidate up over the margin of error. Every real poll — ones using actual contacts with voters and basing educated predictions on that — caution that they could be off by two, three, or even five points in either direction. So the new large, credible, cautious Quinnipiac poll that shows Harris up by four points in Michigan could actually mean that she’s up by only one point there — and a real lead of one point isn’t much of a real lead.

Every one of these states is actually tied. That might seem shocking in Arizona, but the Democrat running for Senate there is leading by several points even outside the worst-case margin of error. When Trump won in 2016, Democrats in the US Senate races in tight states were all in free-fall. This year, none of them are. That doesn’t automatically mean Harris is going to win Arizona, where the Republican Senate candidate has huge weaknesses (and some strengths). But either candidate could win these states.

Eli Steinberg

I think you have to consider the following. Polls in the past have undersampled the Trump vote, and we really have not heard of any substantive adjustments to their methodology to try to capture it now. So while they have made changes, there is no real way to know how those are playing out until we get actual results.

At the same time, we are seeing clear movement to the Republican ticket over the last weeks, up and down the ballot, as voters who did not want Trump are “coming home” in all these states. So in light of that clear movement we see across the board, it is more likely for Trump to sweep all these states than anything else.

The post Epic Clash     first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

PHOTO: MOSHE SHAI/FLASH90

IN an age when the average phone packs more sensors than a Cold War satellite, no device yet exists to track spiritual level. More’s the pity, because if a belief-o-meter came as standard, Jewish cell phones would be vibrating like lulavim.

The October 8 Jew — a term coined by the New York Times’ Bret Stephens — is utterly unlike his October 6 counterpart. As a nation, we’re traumatized, isolated, and far more somber than before. And after a year of reporting and talking to Jews across the spectrum, it’s my strong belief that the average October 8 Jew is now more interested in his faith than at any time in recent memory.

At risk of blowing my own shofar, that’s the conclusion of my road journey through the Gaza border kibbutzim printed (at doorstopper length) in this issue. It’s obvious in a hundred separate cries of liberal Jewish pain published this year, particularly Franklin Foer’s disturbing Atlantic essay, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending.”

That belief was reinforced once again for me over Rosh Hashanah, which I spent in Tel Aviv. One conversation with a young man who has recently started to observe Shabbos sticks in my mind. Brought up in a secular home in England, he’s made large strides over the past year — a change that he attributes to the war.

“It definitely made me question my Jewish identity,” he said. “You’ll get canceled if you say this, but the war has had an effect on a lot of people’s Judaism.” Go and talk to Jews anywhere and you’ll hear the same.

It’s not surprising that the deluge of hate and anti-Semitism has done more to move the needle on Jewish identity than millions in kiruv funding. The Gemara (Megillah 14) says that Achashverosh’s removal of his signet ring to empower Haman did more for Am Yisrael’s spirituality than all the prophets who had warned them to change their ways.

When the pressure ramps up, we get the message.

All of which means that we stand at a unique, generational moment of openness. In the post-October 7 world, the old frameworks through which a majority of Jews made sense of the world are crumbling. What use is progressivism, when leading progressives are among the worst anti-Semites? Whence Holocaust Judaism, when bigots deny the latest slaughter of the Jews? Is Israel really the ultimate solution to all Jewish problems when it couldn’t prevent a medieval pogrom?

Jews everywhere yearn for comfort, for inspiration, for connection — and they’re open at some level to the emunah which is the only source that can provide it.

That openness has one practical application that should be inscribed in Kiddush Levanah letters across our communal agenda: K-I-R-U-V.

In recent years, there’s been sporadic talk of the end of an era for the outreach movement. With the legendary early pioneers no longer with us, some sensed that the movement’s best days were behind it.

Whatever the truth of that debate, that all belongs to the past. Because in this new era, we should be doubling down on kiruv. Aish, Ohr Somayach, Chabad, Olami, NCSY, plus a host of local initiatives on and off campus — they’re all doing amazing work, but we need more.

We need far more young couples dedicating time to the front lines of the Jewish People, and far more of us inviting a coworker or nonreligious acquaintance over for a Shabbos meal. “Kiruv” sounds like a daunting endeavor, because people still think it’s about philosophical odysseys. It’s a cliché by this point, but it bears repeating anyway: Your Shabbos table will change people far more profoundly than your shiur.

We need large-scale investment in the Israelis who now live in massive numbers across America, Europe, and beyond. They represent a tragedy of assimilation that is mostly preventable through day school attendance, yet the issue is largely a blind spot on the kiruv agenda.

At one stop on my kibbutz odyssey, I came across a sad example of the naivete that leads large numbers of Israelis down the road to assimilation. I met traditional parents who’d sent their traumatized 15-year-old — along with four other Israeli teens, from 12 to 16 years old — to a soccer academy in Pennsylvania.

“They all take out their pocket Tanach when the mandatory Christian Bible lessons start,” the mother proudly said.

“And what happens when your son meets a nice non-Jewish girl?” I asked.

“He has such strong values from home,” she responded, with total sincerity.

The solution to that case, and many others like it, lies in the implementation of our core values as a community. How many times have we said, sung — and meant — the words of “Acheinu”? We know and believe that Jews everywhere are our brothers and sisters. We know they’re in pain, because they’re broadcasting it everywhere. And we know they’re now more open to a conversation about what it means to be Jewish than for many years past.

In the spirit of retrospection, allow me to finish with a quote from something that I wrote toward the beginning of the war about the transformation of Jewish identity.

“It’s been decades since the Jewish body politic has done anything to give meaning to the term ‘Klal Yisrael.’ In what substantive way are we really a klal?”

“When two million religious Jews celebrate the Daf Yomi mega-siyum every seven years, secular Jews are simply oblivious. When they in turn celebrate a Jewish Hollywood actor or Olympian, the reverse is true. So when do we all collectively feel or experience the same thing at the same time?

“That was all pre-October 7. Ask any Jew anywhere how he is, and there will be a hint of reserve.

“Given the situation, okay,” will be the answer — a hesitation that only Jews will truly understand.

“For the first time in many decades, there is now one Jewish world, a certain minimal sense of Jewish consciousness.”

Even a year into the war, with the euphoric unity a thing of the past, this holds true. There’s a new sense of Jewish consciousness. It’s a fragile thing, and it doesn’t mean that people are going to flood into outreach seminars and become frum overnight, but it’s real.

So as we mark the tragedy of last Simchas Torah, there’s one forward-looking response that can turn sadness into hope, and the darkness of the past into a brighter Jewish future.

It’s time for a new age of kiruv.

 (Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1033)

The post A Time for Kiruv first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photos: Aviad Partush, Yitzchak Yirmiyahu, AP Images

A year after the day of infamy that capped months of zero-sum struggle over Israel’s soul, a road trip through the devastated kibbutzim of the Gaza border reveals that there’s a unique, epochal moment for a fresh start — a new dialogue about faith and fate, what it means to be an Israeli and a Jew.

T

he hum of drones and drumbeat of gunfire is the only music you’ll hear around the Gaza border nowadays — but dissonance there’s aplenty. A year after the attack that shook the world, jarring discordance is everywhere. It’s in the sounds of birds twittering over depopulated kibbutzim. It’s in the verdant foliage next to the blackened homes. It’s there in the tractor tilling the rich soil where the killers sowed death.

If there’s anywhere in the Gaza borderlands that dissonance reigns, though, it’s on Route 232, along which lie the graveyards that are Kibbutz Be’eri and Re’im. Ignore for a minute the hostage release placards that grow thickly by the wayside, and the road could be any main artery in rural Israel — complete with too few lanes and farm vehicles manned by Thai workers. But drive along the highway, and it’s all too easy to imagine the terrorists who spilled exultantly onto this axis that parallels the Gaza border.

That dissonance hits me one morning at the beginning of Elul, driving along the 232 on a mission to answer a question that has burned inside me since the Hamas attacks a year ago.

My copilot on this quest is Rabbi Shlomo Raanan, founder of the Ayelet Hashachar outreach organization and the man whose pioneering work building shuls in the kibbutzim across the country has made him familiar with nearly all the communities that dot the region. Over 25 years of painstaking effort to bring Jewish life to the many left-wing communities on the country’s borders, he’s developed a rare perspective on the hard, secular core of Israeli society.

In the apocalyptic aftermath of Simchas Torah, while secular soldiers donned tzitzis, hilltop youth hugged Tel Aviv techies, and chareidim fed the IDF massing on the Gaza border, anything seemed possible. So a few weeks after October 7, I picked up the phone to Rabbi Raanan with a question. “Are we on the cusp of a great change in Israeli society, a historic convergence of left and right, secular and religious, a new dawn for Jewish identity — possibly even a revivalist wave of teshuvah?”

His answer was prescient, recognizing the scale of what had happened, but cautioning against reading anything into the atmosphere of unity. “We’ve just undergone an earthquake,” he replied, “and it’s too early to see where the pieces will settle.”

Over the course of the ensuing year, Rabbi Raanan and I maintained an intermittent discussion — part hashkafah, part realism, part hope — about what was unfolding. It was a year in which the fleeting unity gave way once more to the old left-right and secular-religious rancor, where the fate of the hostages became politicized, and where chareidim once more became the lepers of Israeli society. By the year’s end, the impression from the media is that the seismic shocks of October 7 have left nothing but the same zero-sum struggle over Israel’s soul. But is that true?

Almost a year on, we’re heading to October 7’s Ground Zero to understand not only what went on that day, but to answer the same question that we’ve wrestled with for the past 12 months. Over the course of 12 stops and 20 hours of interviews, we talk with people from the left and the right, with foresters and politicians, farmers and engineers, people lining up for pizza, and others talking in their workshops late at night. To each and every one we ask the same identical question — one whose answer will mark the Jewish future.

“Did Israel’s day of infamy really change nothing at all?”

Amid the devastated kibbutzim, in conversation with the residents trickling back after a year’s exile, we hear strange stories of deliverance that some acknowledge as miracles and others insist on calling blind chance. We meet some people clinging to old stereotypes, and others whose deeply held beliefs have been shaken to the core. Alongside those firmly in denial, we find many people prepared to think afresh about Jewish identity.

Down by Route 232, under the sunshine interrupted by palls of smoke and velvety skies lit by occasional flashes, post-October 7 Israel comes into focus.

Step away from the headlines that proclaim that nothing has changed; talk to the people and it’s clear that change is indeed afoot.

1: Kibbutz Zikim — Over the Beach

“This tiny shul saved us ”

The young socialist pioneers who founded Kibbutz Zikim south of Ashkelon in 1949 obviously had an eye for prime real estate. It’s an idyll. Azure waves and sandy beaches within hailing distance of the kibbutz houses — here at least, Karl Marx’s Workers Paradise lived up to its name.

Until last Simchas Torah, that is. On that fateful morning, Israel’s southernmost beach became the scene of a full-blown invasion. Security camera footage shows motorized dinghies speeding across the horizon, from Gaza to Israel. They’re packed with heavily armed Hamas frogmen, who’d trained for years for just this mission: to assault over the beach, destroy the army base adjacent, and then invade the kibbutz just a few hundred meters inland.

Israeli gunboats engage some of the force, firing at the dinghies and circling around individual frogmen in the water, as sailors lob grenades and fire heavy machine guns. But some of the terrorists — known in Arabic as “Nukhba,” or “elite” — evade the navy and make it ashore. They massacre 19 people camped out overnight on the beach, and then make their way to the army base.

That’s where the struggle for Kibbutz Zikim begins. From their homes a few hundred meters away, the kibbutznikim see everything. Nine terrorists get to the kibbutz fence, where four are killed by the defense squad, and five flee.

Beyond those bare statistics lies a story of survival — and as some locals see it, a miracle connected to a shul.

Yaacov Ohayon, a stocky man in his 50s, is a former policeman, current lawyer, and resident of Zikim’s “extension” — a modern area of spacious villas that lies between the original austere kibbutz and the sea.

A member of the kibbutz’s local defense squad, he was woken by the sirens and the volleys of missiles screaming overhead, and scrambled on his weapons and rushed to join the defense team.

A few minutes later, they were alerted that a Hamas force was at the kibbutz perimeter, directly behind Yaacov’s house. “We took positions behind these concrete blocks and saw a pickup truck full of Hamas fighters on the patrol road on the other side of the perimeter fence,” he recalls. “We opened fire straight away, emptying clip after clip.”

The terrorists came heavily armed; equipped with machine guns, rocket propelled grenades and even drones. It was clear, at least in retrospect, that they knew their way around the place. “Just two weeks before the attack, I saw one of the Arabs who was employed in construction here photographing my house with his phone. I thought he was taking a selfie, but now I know — it was all part of a mapping operation.”

It’s something that you hear everywhere in the region; residents remembering their own examples of the widespread intelligence gathering that was clearly part of Hamas’s master plan.

In one of the million acts of Providence that were everywhere on that grim day, Zikim’s local defense squad received unexpected backup in the shape of a squad of IDF Maglan special forces troops. Why were they there? A local resident who’s an officer in Maglan had punished five of his subordinates for driving in an army jeep without seat belts. Their punishment: detention on the adjacent army base for the Simchas Torah weekend.

Bolstered by the extra firepower, the defenders of Zikim managed to drive off the attackers who retreated to the nearby road commanding the approach to the army base. The terrorists were taking up positions when the Maglan squad infiltrated behind some sand dunes and killed them.

Best Defense

That storyline was widely reported in the media as the Battle for Zikim. But standing on the patrol road between his house and where the Hamas killers tried to enter, Yaacov Ohayon points out something that others have missed.

“The Nukhbas were outside the fence for a few minutes before we arrived,” he says. “It would have taken just a pair of wire cutters or a small explosive device like they used everywhere else to break in here, and then the results would have been the dreadful slaughter that we saw elsewhere. What were they waiting for — why didn’t they enter?”

For answer, Yaacov shows us to the parking space in front of his house, a few meters away from the spot where the terrorists tried to enter. Parked there is a little caravan containing what has to be one of the world’s smallest shuls.

It’s Yaacov’s pride and joy. As well as serving on the defense squad, he’s the gabbai of this midget shul. “Look inside here,” the gabbai says, turning on the air-conditioning. “We have everything here — an Aron Hakodesh, bimah, seats, siddurim.” It’s indeed a miniature wonder: five dinky mahogany pews with upholstered seats, a little wall-mounted Aron Hakodesh, and a movable amud.

The story of this place is the tale of the baby steps that some in the region are taking towards Jewish observance. With a Sephardic background, Yaacov is one of a cohort of more tradition-minded people who’ve moved to the old secular kibbutzim of the region.

Yaacov connected with Rabbi Raanan a number of years ago, when the latter held a hachnassas sefer Torah in a neighboring kibbutz. That meeting led the shul builder to set the ball rolling on a shul in Zikim.

When Ohayon applied to the kibbutz leadership for a permit, they refused. That wasn’t, perhaps, surprising: like many kibbutzim in the area, Zikim was founded after the War of Independence drew Israel’s then-Gaza border with Egypt. Of the various sub-ideologies encompassed by the kibbutz movement, the Hashomer Hatzair (“Young Guard”) movement that founded Zikim was the furthest left, a byword for secularism.

The no from the kibbutz leadership led Rabbi Raanan and Yaacov to pursue an unusual option: a shul small enough to fit into a parking space that would require no permit whatsoever.

Parked in front of Yaacov’s villa on the very edge of the kibbutz, it acts as the first beachhead of Torah life in this very secular place. Last Simchas Torah morning, it played a part in a very different type of beachhead, when Hamas attacked.

That’s why Yaacov Ohayon points Heavenward as he speaks about the rescue of Kibbutz Zikim. “I only have one explanation. Look where this happened: next to the shul. We were saved because of this shul.”

The post Borderline Change first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photos: Eli Greengart, AP images, Yeshiva University, and Mishpacha archives

In the moral morass of post-October 7 politics, as American lawmakers were silenced by the mob baying for Israel’s blood, one politician stood tall. At 6’8”, John Fetterman, the once progressive junior senator from Pennsylvania, has emerged as a man of steely conviction in a party whose left flank has moved to embrace the Hamas narrative, a surprising yet steadfast defender of the Jewish state in its darkest hour

IF Senator John Fetterman had a dollar for every time he’s been asked the question since October 7, he’d collect multiples of the $150 annual salary he once drew as mayor.

Pennsylvania’s junior senator was towering over the aisles of a Pittsburgh store a few weeks ago when a man came over to introduce himself.

“Hi, I’m Jewish, and I want to thank you for standing with Israel through all of this,” he said. “What I don’t understand is why you do it — do you have some kind of Jewish roots?”

From the moment he stood draped in an Israeli flag at the rally for Israel in Washington, D.C., last November, fathoming Fetterman has practically become a Jewish parlor game. Is Fetterman a Jewish name? Can Jews even grow to six feet, eight inches? How did a one-time progressive become such a fierce advocate for Israel?

If the question betrays the widespread post-October 7 sense of Jewish isolation, Fetterman’s lack of comprehension when asked about his Israel support says a lot about the man himself.

“A different kind of Democrat,” read the blurb on John Fetterman’s now-defunct 2022 campaign website. “John doesn’t look like a typical politician, and more importantly, he doesn’t act like one.”

Rarely in the long, mendacious annals of political PR has a truer statement been made. Fetterman is not just “not your average politician.” He seems utterly allergic to politics as usual.

Dispense with the externals — the shaven head, hulking height, and uniform of hoodie and cargo shorts — that make him stand out in the august upper chamber. Those are just the inevitable clichés that dot Fetterman-land.

It’s what John Fetterman has done since being elected as the Commonwealth’s junior senator in 2023 that has confounded the entire political spectrum. The man assumed by both left and right to be a card-carrying progressive has emerged as a force of nature in his moral convictions. The crucible for that transformation, at least in public terms, has been the Gaza war.

“I forcefully condemn these cowardly, horrifying, unprovoked attacks on Israel by Hamas,” he tweeted on October 7 — and ever since, he’s stood rock-like by Israel’s side. Even as many of his colleagues were silenced by the mob baying for Israel’s blood, he refused to abandon an American ally facing an existential threat.

He’s turned out to demonstrate with the Pittsburgh Jewish community, trolled progressives by waving an Israel flag from the roof of his home, turned his Senate office into a shrine to the hostages held by Hamas, and given no quarter to the leader of his own party for delaying arms shipments to Israel.

In turn, he’s been vilified by progressives furious at his betrayal, and left so isolated in his own party that he didn’t even attend last month’s Democratic National Convention.

Along with much of a press corps intrigued by Fetterman’s emergence as a fearless ally of Israel, I chased the senator for an interview for the best part of a year. A proposed sit-down interview didn’t pan out in DC or in Israel, but eventually took place remotely. The senator sat in his industrial-style home opposite the steel plant that anchors Braddock, a Pittsburgh borough. I sat in Kibbutz Ein Gedi, trying to understand a man whose choice to support Israel — a place he first visited three months ago — has puzzled many.

An hour’s conversation showed that Fetterman is an enigma only insofar as to what triggered his journey. Was it something that he somehow absorbed from home? Was it a reaction to the near-fatal stroke that he underwent when running for Senate, that somehow freed him to speak his mind?

Whatever the cause, the end result is unmistakable: John Fetterman is a liberal mugged by the vicious reality of his party’s activist left. He’s emerged as a convert to old-fashioned Democratic centrism, inviting comparisons to such Senate legends as Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Hawaii’s Daniel Inouye — Cold Warriors and Democrats who fiercely defended Israel. In a sign of Fetterman’s signature independence, his evolution comes just when that orientation was falling out of favor — and just when Israel needed it most.

The post Pittsburgh Steel: Senator John Fetterman Stands Tall as Israel’s Ironclad Defender first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.