Gather Up Your Things And Get Thee Out

Photo Credit: Via Twitter

There is a growing feeling that the above-quoted final line from the song “When Messiah Comes” from Fiddler on the Roof may be about to come true. Increasingly, like the European Jews, we appear to have no long-term future in America, as evidenced by Islamofascist relative political newcomer Zohran Mamdani’s victory over former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary election for mayor of New York, the city with the most Jews outside Israel, which gives him the inside track on winning the general election. To add insult to injury, two of the most powerful Jewish politicians in New York State, Senator Charles Schumer and Representative Jerry Nadler, have endorsed Mamdani and say they look forward to working with him on antisemitism!

A few prescient observers predicted this trend years ago. On November 1, 2019, The Jewish Press published an article by Rabbi Chananya Weissman, “The Antisemitism Handbook for Diaspora Jews,” which identified a six-stage progression. (For the sake of brevity, I have omitted his tongue-in-cheek “appropriate [totally inadequate] responses.”) He laid out the six stages as follows:

Stage 1 Antisemitism:

• Dirty looks, insults, slurs, assorted other verbal abuse
• Spitting, throwing pennies, assorted other non-physical signs of contempt
• Accusing Israel of racism, war crimes, etc.

Stage 2 Antisemitism:

• Vandalism of Jewish homes, synagogues, and institutions
• Swastikas
• Desecration of cemeteries
• Jews being knocked down, harassed, lightly assaulted in the street

Stage 3 Antisemitism:

• Holocaust denial
• Holocaust celebration – “We will finish what Hitler started”
• Bias in the media
• Antisemitic cartoons
• Antisemitic statements from public officials
• Legal discrimination to keep Jews out (zoning laws, etc.)
• Attempts to ban shechita, circumcision, impose anti-Torah curriculum on yeshivas

Stage 4 Antisemitism:

• Attacks on synagogues and Jewish institutions
• Serious beatings
• Children being bullied in school, with no serious consequences
• Fear of being recognizably Jewish
• Occasional shootings and murders
• Expectations of attacks on Jewish holidays, fear of assembling

Stage 5 Antisemitism:

• Pogroms
• Legislation targeting the entire Jewish community
• Confiscation of Jewish property
• Show trials
• Mass incarcerations
• Destruction of synagogues and Jewish institutions

Stage 6 Antisemitism:

• Legislation stripping Jews of basic human rights
• Destruction of entire communities
• Mass murders and other atrocities

In the succeeding months, I engaged in email correspondence with Rabbi Weissman. My opinion was that we were at Stage 4, while his was that we were on the cusp of Stage 6. I now feel he was on the right track but premature. Moving up to more recent times, Touro Law School professor and widely published commentator Dr. Thane Rosenbaum began seriously beating the drums with the publication of his April 14, 2025 essay “Next Year In Jerusalem Has Arrived” in Jewish Journal. On June 26, Melanie Phillips wrote on JNS that Israel’s Diaspora Minister, Amitai Chikli, had said that British Jews are in such danger from the Labour Party’s dominant hard-Left and Islamist base that they need to make aliyah to Israel.

Here are a few representative samples of antisemitism in the West:

1) As Rabbi Pini Dunner reported on July 4 in his blog at the Algemeiner, a student at Nysmith School, a toney K-8 private school in Virginia, submitted a portrait of Adolf Hitler for a project on “strong historical leaders,” which the school proudly displayed, and when one Jewish student’s parents protested, the school told them she needed to “toughen up” and then expelled all three children from that family. This wasn’t something new. After October 7, the school’s headmaster raised a Palestinian flag in the gym and canceled a Holocaust education event because “it might inflame tensions.” Rabbi Dunner’s conclusion: Jews in America and the world need to wake up.

2) In Boulder, Colorado, 82-year-old Karen Diamond died of her injuries sustained in the June 2 firebombing attack against Jewish senior citizens rallying for the release of Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas.

3) At the Glastonbury music festival in the U.K., rapper Bob Vylan shouted into the microphone, “Death, death to the IDF!” and the crowd roared its approval. The BBC let the feed go out, whereupon it went viral on Instagram, TikTok, and X. The U.S. was shamed into canceling Vylan’s visa.

4) A study showed job applicants with Jewish-sounding, especially Israeli-sounding, names are less likely to get interviews than others, and Jewish authors are finding it increasingly difficult to get books accepted for publication.

5) A very long June 2 e-mail from BDS Monitor (Scholars for Peace in the Middle East) details scores of antisemitic actions in higher education, K-12 education, economics, arts, and culture.

6) Generally speaking, antisemitism in the medical profession is rising. Nurses in Australia were dismissed for expressing the desire to kill Jewish patients, in a now-famous video on social media.

In short, Jews are gradually being squeezed out of mainstream American life, just as we were in Nazi Germany.

Perhaps worst of all, on July 3, as I was writing this column, JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, who isn’t easily given to alarmism, had a discussion on video with Foundation for the Defense of Democracies senior analyst Ben Cohen centering on the peril to Jews posed by the credentialed elite’s mainstreaming and normalization of antisemitism, which has merged with the rougher antisemitism of the streets in the form of pro-Hamas mobs chanting “Globalize the intifada” (translation: kill the Jews). Cohen likens the transition to the effect of London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s antisemitic tirades leading to Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing takeover of the Labour Party.

Even more ominously, he expresses the fear that the 1960s shift of left-wing radicals from politics to violence will be repeated today in the form of domestic terrorism, as exemplified by the three incidents I wrote about in my previous column, “Rogue NGOs And Riots.” Tobin then noted the rise of antisemitism on the Right, as exemplified by Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who accuse Israel of dragging the U.S. into unnecessary wars, and Steve Bannon, who claims Israel is not an American ally and will soon be dumped. Any one of them could become the 21^st-century version of the 1930s antisemitic radio commentator Father Coughlin.

So where do we go from here? Don’t ask me. I have difficulty making decisions that affect my own life, let alone those of millions. I do believe, however, that I can identify four considerations for a solution:

1. We need a full-court press to prevent Mamdani from winning the New York mayoralty. His election would necessitate an exodus of Jews from New York approaching Biblical proportions. As I see it, the best way to accomplish this objective is to persuade Andrew Cuomo to leave the race – he’s had his chance – as well as Curtis Sliwa, whose repeated candidacy has become a joke like Harold Stassen’s, and the minor independents, and get all of them to rally around Mayor Adams, whom I believe has the best chance of winning. In particular, we need a massive Jewish turnout, including an explanation for younger, “progressive” Jews why voting for an Islamosocialist is suicidal.
2. We need one or more Jewish agencies to work with our rank and file to develop an “escape plan,” whether it be to Florida, to another “red” state, or to Israel, with a reasonable timeline. To borrow an old book title, we shouldn’t “rush to judgment.” Careful planning makes for an orderly retreat.
3. We need to work with Israel on finding a way to house displaced Jews in numbers approaching the exodus of Middle Eastern Jews at the time of Israel’s declaration of statehood. I find it disheartening to see the real estate ads on Jewish websites that almost exclusively address those fortunate enough to be able to afford to plunk down millions of shekels for a luxury apartment in Yerushalayim or its environs. Existing programs can likely handle the most desirable cases – lone soldiers, families with young children, and Torah scholars – as exemplified by personal stories appearing in The Jewish Press. What about the rest of us, those who need to work for a living, or retirees of modest means? Are we to be left behind like Dora Bloch in the rescue at Entebbe? Much is made of the IDF pledge to leave no one behind when it comes to advocating to release all the hostages even if it means caving to Hamas’ demands and allowing it to survive to massacre another day. Our civilians deserve no less consideration.
4. David Bernstein’s superb article in the July 2 Jewish Journal advises us that we need to stop emphasizing calling upon non-Jews to stand up against Jew-hatred (a typical contemporary grievance-driven ideology) but rather inspire them to restore traditional American civic values – “E pluribus unum (Out of many, one); equality of opportunity; the rule of law as a neutral framework for justice; freedom of thought and expression, even when ideas are unpopular; merit and personal responsibility; and an enduring commitment to civic tolerance.” It is these values that have allowed Jews to succeed in America and command widespread allegiance among the American people.

Conversely, in Bernstein’s words, “When the American value of ‘E pluribus unum’ gives way to tribalism, Jews become easy targets. When the rule of law is dismissed as systemic oppression, Jewish institutions lose their protections. When freedom of expression is sacrificed to ideological conformity, Jewish voices are silenced. When merit is reframed as privilege, Jewish achievement becomes suspect.”

Whatever we do, to quote Shakespeare, “If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly” (Macbeth, Act I, Scene 7). We have less than a year and a half to the midterm elections, when history suggests the Democrats will regain control of the House of Representatives; in fact, a recent Republican fundraising email expressed alarm that with their essentially unlimited multi-billion-dollar campaign funds, the D’s could win as many as 279 seats, close to a veto-proof majority.

Further, especially if the Senate flips, we can expect annual, if not more frequent, impeachments of President Trump, thus rendering him incapable of governing, and given the alternation of parties winning the Presidency since World War II, 2028 could find us without any friends in Washington, D.C. For that reason, I might add that Israel needs to make rapid advances in producing its own munitions in anticipation of a global cutoff. (And might it be possible to revive and modernize the Lavi fighter jet project that was canceled under pressure from the Reagan administration?) And we can also anticipate widescale rioting around the nation next year in response to the semiquincentennial (250^th anniversary) of the Declaration of Independence.

It is a remarkable coincidence that on the same day, July 3, that Messrs. Tobin and Cohen bemoaned the rising specter of antisemitism, a Siena College Research poll reported by the Algemeiner shows the surprising result that by a 57 percent to 42 percent margin, New York Jews approve of President Trump’s job performance and, even more stunning, 64 percent approve of his handling of the Israel-Iran conflict. Perhaps we’re finally catching on to who our real friends are. If we can translate the poll results into support for Mayor Adams and reach out to other working class and middle-class constituencies, we might be able to buy enough time to prepare for exodus in the second half of 2026.