For months, people in the US have dressed the ‘globalize the intifada’ slogan up as activism, outrage, or edgy protest. On Thursday, in West Bloomfield, Michigan, this manifested in what Jews knew it would become all along: a threat.
Authorities said Temple Israel was hit in what appeared to be a vehicle-ramming and active-shooter attack. Children from the early childhood center were evacuated.
The suspect, meanwhile, was reported dead. As of the latest public reporting, no other injuries had been confirmed. Temple Israel says it serves about 12,000 members and is the largest Reform synagogue in the nation.
I was in this exact neighborhood a few weeks ago. I met federation leaders, rabbis, and people at the heart of the local Jewish community.
It is one of those places that still feels intimate even though its infrastructure is sizable. People know each other. Reform and Orthodox Jews work together. Israel matters there. Judaism matters there. And when something happens, people show up.
That is why this attack hits so hard. This was a communal home in one of the warmest, most connected Jewish areas in America.
The quiet warning
And there was something else I saw there too, something too many Jews in America now know by instinct. It is the quiet warning to conceal one’s Jewish identity. It is the notion of: ‘Be careful where you wear your kippah.’
When I mentioned going to a mall in one nearby area, someone immediately said, “I hope you didn’t wear it there.” Think about how obscene that is. A Jew in the United States in 2026 still has to think twice before walking around looking visibly Jewish. That should disgrace the country.
Yes, investigators still need to establish motive, and serious people should wait for the facts before making claims they cannot prove.
Still, the wider climate is already obvious. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents across the US in 2024, the highest number since it began tracking them, up 5% from 2023 and up 344% over five years.
In Michigan, the Justice Department’s 2023 hate-crime data counted 71 religion-bias incidents.
Federal authorities have also recently prosecuted violent antisemitic threats and a white supremacist conspiracy that included desecrating a Michigan synagogue with neo-Nazi symbols.
This did not begin on Thursday.
Eliminationist language treated as theater
In April 2024, at an al-Quds Day rally in Dearborn, some attendees chanted, “Death to America” and “death to Israel.” FOX 2 Detroit reported that speaker Tarek Bazzi called “death to Israel” “the most logical chant shouted in the world today.”
Local leaders, including Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud and Muslim officials, condemned the chants. Organizers later called them wrongful and a mistake.
Fine. That needed to be said. But what really matters is that those chants were uttered at all in the first place.
And this is where too many Americans lose their nerve.
They hear eliminationist language openly and treat it like theater. They hear people glorify “resistance” and pretend the meaning is vague. They spend more time explaining Jewish fear away than explaining why calls for Israel’s destruction, and rhetoric lifted straight from the Iranian revolutionary playbook, poison public life in America.
That failure is moral, civic, and political.
I am not saying every Arab-American or Muslim in metro Detroit shares these views. They do not. Many want safety, dignity, and peace for their families. Muslims and Arabs deserve that.
So do Jewish families. So do Jewish preschoolers. So do people praying in a synagogue without having to wonder whether the barriers outside are enough this time.
The wider problem is the tolerance for the ugliest voices, the reluctance to confront them clearly, and the instinct to change the subject the moment Jews point out what is happening to them.
This showed up again in Dearborn last year. FOX 2 Detroit reported that Hammoud told a Christian resident he was “not welcome” during a clash over signage honoring journalist Osama Siblani.
The ADL has documented Siblani’s past statements describing Hezbollah and Hamas as “freedom fighters” and expressing support for Hezbollah.
People are free to argue with the ADL. They are not free to act as though this record does not exist. A serious city does not flinch every time someone points to extremism in its midst.
At the same time, Dearborn’s Muslim community has also faced threats and ugly backlash. AP reported that the city increased police presence around places of worship after a Wall Street Journal opinion piece triggered Islamophobic and anti-Arab vitriol.
That matters too. It should have led to a basic principle everyone could agree on: communities that know what hate feels like should reject language that makes their Jewish neighbors feel hunted.
Yet America keeps getting this wrong. A synagogue attack does not begin when a vehicle slams into a building. It begins much earlier.
It begins when “death to Israel” becomes just another chant. It begins when Jews are told to hide the kippah, avoid certain neighborhoods, and keep their heads down while others openly fantasize about Jews’ disappearance.
Temple Israel was protected on Thursday by security, barriers, training, and a Jewish community that understood the danger before much of polite America was willing to say it out loud.
This is why the children got out. This is why it wasn't even worse. American Jews are now expected to build fortresses around preschools and pretend that it is normal.
It is disgraceful.
The intifada has been globalized. Jews in Michigan are just the most recent ones to pay the price. Who will be next?
America should stop acting confused about how one thing leads to the other.