Jews Are in a New Cycle but Already Repeating the Same Mistakes

This is a guest post from

Z.E. Silver

, and was first published on his brilliant Substack, GAM V'GAM

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Jews Are in a New Cycle but Already Repeating the Same Mistakes

Yesterday, Am Yisrael celebrated Simchat Torah, which is literally when we restart reading the Torah from Bereshit 1:1 and move through each parsha (“portion”) until we do it again next year. Every year we run through the same cycle—a concept Judaism is obsessed with. We never deviate which not only prevents charlatans from claiming divine authority that differs from the word of Hashem, but it also creates exponential power in our understanding of our tradition. Imagine if you read the Lord of the Rings trilogy or the Song of Ice and Fire series (if George R.R. Martin ever finishes) every single year for three thousand years. You would undoubtedly find meaning in specific sentences, phrases, and even individual words. There is power in the collective doing the same thing over and over. Unfortunately, Am Yisrael is also repeating the cycle that brought us to October 7th and its aftermath.

Photo by Shahar Dekel

The two-year mark, both in the Gregorian and Hebrew calendar, the war is officially over and every single live hostage has returned home. Sadly, Hamas continues to repeat its cycle of reneging on deals as it pretends to not know the location of the hostages who they brutally murdered. Am Yisrael stayed up to whatever hour required to see our brothers and sisters return home followed by social media posts, statements, videos, podcasts, and articles that filled the World Wide Web. In reality, the content you consumed permeated amongst the Jewish Wide Web and not much else. How many of your non-Jewish friends posted something about October 7th? How many could even recount what happened on that tragic day? With the world having moved on already, we find ourselves back in the same position we have found ourselves in for centuries, asking the same question at the end of every cycle:

How do we stop this from happening again?

Jews have experienced a personal and communal reckoning since that fateful day. New voices have emerged, legacy institutions have been criticized, and new movements have been established due to the dangerous cracks finally brought to light. With a foot in both worlds, I’m sad to say we’re repeating the same cycle. Jewish legacy institutions have been accused of throwing big galas and paying speakers exorbitant fees for canned interviews while creating a Jewish community “less Jewish,” antizionist, and unable to fight antisemitism. Ironically, many of our community’s new slate of “micro-celebrities” are simultaneously generating huge followings by criticizing these legacy institutions while happily feeding that same system as participants or even beneficiaries. If they’re not walking the red carpet at the latest gala they supposedly distaste, our new slate of internet warriors will pick up their phone and speak into the camera about how legacy institutions failed us, and then use that same phone to accept a call by a different legacy institution to accept a speaking fee—sometimes charging tens of thousands of dollars in fees, flights, and hotel rooms.

Hypocritical influencers are the least of our worries as they will undoubtedly fizzle out over time. Maybe not this year and maybe not next year, but the time will come (and sooner rather than later) that influencers who got their bag by shouting into their camera will lose their sizzle. Even though there will be plenty of content to be made when Zohran Mamdani eventually wins the mayoral election and the 2028 presidential primary begins, our current reality will eventually soften and people will eventually get bored. It’s how the world goes, and frankly, that’s how it should. We, as a community, cannot remain in this survival mode forever. At some point, we do have to move forward but we will be stuck with a post-October 7th attitude that is nothing more than a redux of the one that existed on October 6th.

If they aren’t reinforcing the wasteful self-congratulatory culture they claim to hate, our freshest voices are focused on creating new movements and organizations fueled by the same empty platitudes they are certain brought us to the present day. Many of these new sentiments and missions certainly represent a healthy and necessary change in attitude, but my issue is not with their beliefs—only their lack of self-awareness.

Influencers will spend a dozen hours on a flight to Israel multiple times a year posting pictures with captions about “decolonizing identity” and “reconnecting with the land” but won’t spent five minutes asking themselves how they plan on helping Jews from Detroit follow in their footsteps. The average Jew goes to Israel once or twice over the course of their entire life due to the practical limitations of time and money for a total of maybe 10-14 days. Have these influencers thought about how they’re going to “decolonize the identity” of an Ashkenazi Jew who’s born and raised in Houston, Texas? I’m sure they’ll try to convince us that by going on these all-expense paid trips where they make content, they will “inspire Am Yisrael to adopt their Judean identities.” They’re not lying to us. They’re just lying to themselves.

Jewish content creators in every medium have expressed the need for Jews to be “proud” and “strong” and be “joyful” but offer no definition of what any of that means or how any of those concepts manifest in a tangible way. I’ve seen countless videos and posts of creators standing in the middle of Times Square silently holding signs that tell me to be proudly Jewish, which generate an awful lot of clicks and accomplishes an awful lot of nothing. I’ve seen countless creators addressing antisemites in all sorts of ways. They dress up to trick their would be targets; they jump to the front of a campus protest; and they sit at a busy park with a sign asking people to debate them. While the last one perhaps offers a small amount of impact, the others accomplish nothing but the sweet catharsis of “owning” some punk Free Palestine protester. Is this what we think it means to be a strong Jew? To dunk on people we know aren’t going to change their minds just to feel better about ourselves? Have these new voices who have taken their shots at legacy institutions for failing to fight antisemitism in a tangible way thought about their own impact?

Of course not. They’re committing the same sin for which they cast the first stone—acting upon their own ego-based idea of what they believe to be effective rather than step back to be certain based on objective measurables. They know that yelling at a keffiyeh wearing, masked blue-haired girl on camera will give the rest of us the catharsis we’re all seeking, which will lead to more views, more followers, and more personal success. None of that helps the Jewish community in any way and I challenge anyone to use objective, measurable, and tangible data points to prove me wrong.

Even our most established voices who have had new epiphanies have yet to change themselves in any tangible way. Jewish elders with financial resources and large platforms like to talk a lot but haven’t changed their behavior that reflects the urgency they’ve conveyed. They’re terrified that young Jews aren’t connected to Israel, but haven’t donated more money to programs that gets kids to the Holy Land earlier in life, more frequently, and for more immersive experiences. They now believe Jewish day schools are the most important vehicle for making Jews more Jewish but haven’t gone west of Philadelphia (unless of course one of those legacy institutions happily paid for their airfare) to understand the practical limitations of such a concept. They’re fundamentally convinced the only way to fight antisemitism is with education and yet not a single new organization has been created to get pro-Jewish officials elected to school boards, city councils, and state legislatures despite that’s where curriculum is created. Our newest leaders with all the right answers seem to not see the irony in charging a legacy institution $25,000-$50,000 for an hour of their time and then wonder why that institution can’t send more kids to Israel.

We are now in our third cycle in this post-October 7th world. We have yet to heal completely, and I am personally aware of it more than most in America. Israelis still have a long journey ahead of them. Our battle to win back the hearts and minds of Americans will remind us of the peace we lost in the first place. It will take time to heal. Nonetheless, we must continue to move forward, but with a caveat. Moving forward means we cannot repeat the mistakes of the past. Moving forward means keeping our loudest voices accountable, and ourselves. Moving forward means we must challenge each other, and ourselves, to think more critically about the impact of our actions; for if we simply decide to rebuild our house the same way we built the last one, with nothing changed other than the aesthetics, it’ll undoubtedly crumble even faster the next time it cracks.