Over the past two years, the same request has reached my Jerusalem Post inbox too often to call it a coincidence. Take my name off it.
A contributor asks us to pull an op-ed he was once proud to sign. An academic who gave us a thoughtful interview asks that her name come out of it, or that the quote belongs to no one. A professional who lent us one sentence months ago writes back, apologetic and tense, asking whether that sentence can vanish from the Internet. The article can stay, they tell us, just remove me from it.
None of them are renouncing anything. They are not writing to say they were wrong about Israel, or that they have stopped being Jews. They are writing to say that being publicly attached to a Jewish or Israeli cause has become too expensive: at work, in the group chat, at the wedding of a friend whose other friends have opinions.
The easy word for this is cowardice, and the easy word is wrong. The legal scholar Kenji Yoshino has a better one. He calls it covering: not denying who you are, but turning the volume down so the world lets you pass.
The writer who asks for anonymity has not abandoned the Jewish people. He is covering, trying to stay employable and safe in a world that has quietly decided his affiliation is a liability.
Fear does not erase attachment
This is not a column about disappointment, because fear does not erase attachment. Research in Britain after the October 7 massacre found Jews feeling far less safe and, at the same time, more bound to Israel and to one another. Both rose together. The people asking us to delete their names often feel their Jewishness more fiercely than they have in years. They are not less attached. They are more exposed.
So, let me say where the failure lies, because it is not theirs. It is ours. We have built a Jewish world organized around threat. We track antisemitism, we issue statements, we pay for guards at the synagogue door, and all of it is necessary.
But a people that knows itself only as a target will not hold its children. If the whole visible content of being Jewish is hostage posters and the daily arithmetic of who is safe to talk to, no one should be surprised when a young person decides the inheritance costs more than it is worth.
That is why I am writing this on the eve of Shavuot, the festival of Matan Torah, the giving of the Torah at Sinai. It is the one date on our calendar that is not about surviving an enemy. The story has no villain, only a people standing at a mountain, choosing to receive something worth carrying. Sinai is the opposite of erasure. It is a covenant entered in public, on purpose, by name.
We need two things and keep paying for one: an emergency response to antisemitism, and a Jewish life far larger than antisemitism. The first is a five-alarm fire. The second runs on fumes, and a generation is being raised inside that gap.
Many young Jews missed the encounters that grounded the rest of us. COVID shut the borders, then war kept them shut. Birthright trips were cut short and evacuated. The March of the Living could not bring its usual numbers to Auschwitz and then to Jerusalem. For many of them, Judaism has only ever shown up as breaking news.
We cannot let October 7 become the whole of what Judaism means, the way the Holocaust once threatened to. Trauma can wake an identity. It cannot sustain one. The harder work is to turn rupture into something that generates: study, argument, song, and a joy a 19-year-old would choose on its own terms.
Judaism as portrayed in US sitcoms
YOU CAN watch that shift, against all odds, in the two American sitcoms that taught a generation what a Jew was supposed to look like.
For nine seasons, Seinfeld was the great document of Jewish detachment, a show about nothing, where Jewishness was a rhythm, and a neighborhood, and never a commitment. Its sharpest religious joke is a dentist who converts to Judaism mostly for permission to tell Jewish jokes, with Jerry protesting that this offends him as a comedian, not as a Jew. Heritage as material.
Friends did the suburban version, with Ross dressing up as the Holiday Armadillo to sneak Hanukkah past a son who only wants Santa, until Chandler shows up as Santa anyway, and the armadillo gets elbowed aside. The lesson under the gentle joke is that the tradition cannot stand on its own and must apologize for taking up space.
Here is the contrast. The real Jerry Seinfeld was never the assimilated man his show implied. He worked on a kibbutz at 16 and has said he loved Israel ever since. The detachment was the act. After October 7 he dropped it, visiting Kibbutz Be’eri and the hostage families in Tel Aviv, telling Bari Weiss it was the most powerful experience of his life and unable to finish the sentence.
When students walked out of his Duke commencement waving Palestinian flags, he did not apologize. The man who made Jewish detachment funny decided, in public and at a cost, that he was done being detached.
So, let me rewrite both shows for 2026, when the joke is no longer how to fit in but the absurdity of being asked to disappear.
Seinfeld first. George needs his name scrubbed off a letter he once signed for a Jewish community center, because the firm interviewing him runs background checks.
GEORGE: It’s gotta be gone, Jerry. All of it. Like I was never there.
JERRY: You supported a community center. With a pool.
GEORGE: I was a different man. A man with a guest pass.
JERRY: So, you want to do the right thing, you just don’t want it coming up in conversation.
GEORGE: The right thing, off the record. The hero, in witness protection.
JERRY: You spent your whole life being nothing, George. You finally stand for something, and you want it deleted.
GEORGE: It’s not deleting. It’s curating.
JERRY: Mine’s staying up.
GEORGE: Well, you’re an idiot.
Friends features Shavuot dinner
Now Friends. The gang is at Monica’s for a Shavuot dinner she has been planning for a week. Ross is trying to explain the holiday. Nobody is helping.
ROSS: So, tonight is the anniversary of the day we received the Torah at Mount Sinai.
JOEY: Is that the one with the boat?
ROSS: That’s Noah.
JOEY: The sandals guy.
ROSS: That’s also not a holiday, Joey.
CHANDLER: Could this dinner BE any more educational?
MONICA: The custom is to stay up the entire night studying. All night.
CHANDLER: Oh good, an all-nighter with no exam and no payoff. So, my 20s.
ROSS (getting heated): It’s not nothing! For thousands of years our people stood up and said yes to this, in public, knowing it would cost them, and now everyone I know just wants their name quietly taken off the list.
(Silence)
PHOEBE: That’s actually beautiful, Ross.
ROSS: Thank you.
PHOEBE: My grandmother also faked her identity. But that was for the witness protection program.
JOEY: Wait, so do we eat, or do we just feel things?
MONICA: It’s cheesecake, Joey.
JOEY (standing): I’m in.
No armadillo. Nobody dresses up as anything to make it easier to swallow. They just stay at the table.
To the people who write asking us to take their names down: I understand the fear, and I will not call it irrational, because it is not. But a name is not only a risk. It is a vote. Every byline that stays is a refusal to accept that we are welcome here only as long as we cannot be seen.
The Jews at Sinai said Na’aseh venishma, We will do and we will hear, agreeing to the terms before they knew the cost. They signed first. They were not anonymous.
This Shavuot, we could do worse than to stand where they stood.