The week after October 7, I flew to New York on a pre-planned speaking tour across North America. Initially, the trip was intended to support my second book, Reclaiming our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride, which came out last year and is a deep dive into internalized anti-Jewishness, (an issue which has become more prescient than I could have imagined when writing it). However, after October 7, the focus of the tour shifted toward Zionism and Jewish pride more generally.
During the week leading up to my departure, the idea of my tour was unexpectedly riddled with apprehension. Like other Jews, my heart was shattered as the news dripped out of the South as the world learned the horror inflicted on us by Hamas. The idea of traveling across a continent during a time of raw grief while striving to be educational, inspiring, and empowering rattled my nerves.
During the tour, I spoke to communities in Manhattan, Staten Island, Tucson, Phoenix, Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. And thank God I did. Despite my worry that the emotion of the past few weeks would get the better of me, I was the one who walked away inspired and empowered.
I have written a great deal about the American Jewish experience. I have commented on the fact that it was never an “Eden,” as historian Jonathan D. Sarna once claimed.
Nor was pride a universal phenomenon when Howard Sachar wrote, “It’s true, there’s been an erosion around the edges of Jewish life... but that’s a cheap price to pay for the freedom we have enjoyed in this country.” I have exhorted American Jews to wake up to the specificity of their experience and the rising dangers of Jew-hate.
Jews are embracing their identity-- this time it's different
But the vast majority of Jews that I met across the US and Canada were very awake to their reality. And very proud to be Jewish.
To be sure, American Jews have indeed always had pride in their Jewishness. The establishments they built are testament to that. But they were also coerced by the wider world to adopt identities and roles within societies that ultimately insulted and humiliated our great civilization. But the Jews of Fall 2023 were ready to throw off the shackles of humiliation and reclaim their Jewish identities like never before.
As an aside, although I had returned home to London before the march on Washington, 290,000 Jews traveled from all over the country to proudly proclaim their Jewishness and their Zionism. It was a site to behold.
The Jews that I met on my tour were grappling with the same devastation and horror that I had experienced in London. But their passion to fight back with pride spurred me on. I met Jews no longer willing to diminish their Jewishness in order to be accepted. They were no longer going to accept scraps. They refused to accept their identities as Jews being defined by a non-Jewish world. And they were ready to defend Israel with all they had.
Fuhrer, this recommitment to Israel was not just expressed through the extraordinary money that was raised in North America. No, it was a demonstration of their deep commitment to the land of Israel itself. Working on a new book about Jewish indigeneity, this came up in many of the talks I gave over the course of the month. As I spoke about the Jews as an indigenous people, I saw Jews all over rooms across North America nodding emphatically.
This was a major difference I saw between this tour and my previous ones. While always thirsty for knowledge and education, the hearts of my audiences were wide open. I didn’t have to convince anyone.
Simultaneously, they had undergone a kind of metamorphosis with regards to their Jewish identities. Although inspired by the abject horror of October 7, they began to understand Jewish specificity. In other words, that we are unique people. And each of us has a responsibility to honor and protect that.
The pride I felt in halls across North America inspired me. It gave me the strength to keep going, when I sometimes felt so tired I could have wept. I was spurred on by the immense pride and love emanating from these Jewish communities towards Israel, and indeed, the global Jewish family.
It always strikes me as profound in traveling across a continent and meeting so many people, how much we all have in common – because we are Jews. We know that a small, radical group of Jews rejects Israel, but they are still a minority, by far. The vast majority of American Jews are proud of their Jewishness and they love Israel, like the rest of the diaspora.
This tour was hard. It was probably the most challenging visit I have ever undertaken. But alongside the exhaustion, I also felt invigoration. I felt that the work in building a Jewish pride movement is making a difference – that, despite the horror of the last two months, we are a strong, proud people willing and able to defend ourselves and to ensure, as our ancestors did, the survival of the Jewish people. And that, to quote our esteemed Editor-in-chief and my personal friend, Avi Mayer, is “why we will win.”
The writer is the founder of the modern Jewish Pride movement, an educator, and the author of Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People. His new book, Reclaiming Our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride, is now available.