Alissa Bernstein: Young Jews Are Finally Learning to Fight Back

From 'Young Zionist Voices': How 10/7 Ripped the Mask Off Jewish Security

David H.—Delighted to share this essay by Alissa Bernstein from Young Zionist Voices. After graduating college, Alissa threw herself into Jewish communal work, and discovered just how different her generation was from those that came before. In the wake of 10/7, she writes, “young Jews are waking up to the fact that simply being Jewish isn’t enough to safeguard our people.”

Global Digital Launch Event: On Tuesday, January 28, Alissa will be joining me, along with other Young Zionist Voices contributors Shabbos Kestenbaum, Adela Cojab, Shanie Reichman, and Oz Bin Nun, as well as Z3 Project director Rabbi Amitai Fraiman for a moving online conversation about 10/7 and the Jewish future. Click here for info and to sign up!

Alissa Bernstein is the Assistant Director of American Jewish Committee (AJC) Los Angeles, where she manages the region’s political outreach, legislative advocacy, and interfaith and intergroup coalition building. Originally from Palo Alto, California, she graduated cum laude from Occidental College with a degree in Psychology and Spanish, where she spent her time advocating for Jewish issues and creating educational opportunities with the administration about campus antisemitism.

The following is an exclusive reprint from the anthology Young Zionist Voices: A New Generation Speaks Out, edited by David Hazony. Copyright © 2024 Wicked Son. Reprinted with permission.

Young Jews Are Finally Learning to Fight Back

The myth of Jewish security has been shattered—and young Jews are meeting the moment.

Alissa Bernstein

Faced with an acutely stressful situation, we have three choices: fight, flee, or freeze. Since I was a young girl, I never really understood fleeing or freezing up. Maybe there’s a neural connection that never quite developed, making me prefer head-on confrontation. Whatever the reason, I’ve always been a fighter.

It took me many years to discover that many people are not. When called to action, many freeze, conditioned to remain quiet to avoid retribution. This is particularly true for minorities who have been told both to put their heads down and to blend in if they wish to achieve success.

The Jewish community has been a prime example. After the Holocaust, standing out was not an option for most Jews, who came to the United States from countries that sought to exterminate or to ethnically cleanse them. Being loud in the face of antisemitism meant putting oneself at risk.

It has been eighty years since the worst atrocity the Jewish people has ever faced, yet so many in our community have continued to freeze up in the face of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate. This is particularly true of the younger generation—my peers, who have been uncomfortable speaking out or identifying as Zionists in public.

I often wondered why. Perhaps we were grasping for some kind of self-preservation tactic, albeit temporary and, in my opinion, largely ineffective. Although the Jewish community has historically been at the forefront of societal change, particularly in the United States, in recent decades we have foregone advocating for ourselves for the sake of advocating for others, many of whom have little to no interest in doing the same for us. We have adopted ideologies that put us directly in harm’s way for the sake of keeping our friends. We have often done this at our own expense, shaking off a public Jewish or Zionist identity to appease others.

I think this has been, in part, a result of a false sense of security. Many young Jews didn’t recognize the real threats facing our community and Israel, not having lived during a time when they were threatened. We believed that through the success of the Zionist movement and our cultural assimilation in the decades following the Holocaust, we—and Israel—were untouchable. Thus, we helped create communities defined by ideology, and we ended up ostracizing ourselves from the very communities we had built.

Now we find ourselves caught in a maze.

Here’s the thing. This false sense of security is just a symptom of a much deeper problem the Jewish community has faced for decades, and which has inspired conversation across denominations, practices, and cultural backgrounds. FBI statistics, after all, show that Jews have not been secure, as antisemitic hate crimes have tripled in the last three decades.

So where did Jews get the idea that they were so secure? The answer may have to do with their efforts to distance themselves from their cultural, religious, and traditional identity. This distancing may even have taken place because, in part, the Jews are known to be a historically targeted people. With each step away from their traditions, Jews believed they were becoming more secure, even when evidence suggested the opposite.

***

The United States population has become less religious in recent decades as a whole, and Jews are no exception. In the last decade alone—according to a 2020 Pew Research Study—Jewish denominational identity has moved towards larger participation in the Reform movement, and away from the once-dominant Conservative movement. The same study shows that American Jews are less likely to attend religious services than other faith groups in the United States. In fact, almost a third of American Jews don’t identify with religion at all.

Nor is the distancing expressed only in terms of religion. Only about a third of Jewish families send their children to Jewish summer camps, and the less religiously committed Jewish families are in this country, the less likely they are to send their kids to a Jewish school. As a community, we are distancing ourselves from the ancient sources of our unity and identity.

I was raised in a Conservative, Zionist, Jewish household that kept kosher, celebrated Shabbat every week, sent me to Sunday school and Jewish summer camp, and encouraged involvement in Jewish youth programs. Throughout the most formative years of my life, my strongest social networks were in Jewish spaces. Being raised in a home where Jewish history, culture, and tradition were celebrated, and having friends who had similar upbringings, cultivated a strong sense of Jewish and Zionist identity and a connection to the broader community. My upbringing is what made me an advocate; I understand that to love something is to fight for its strength and protection.

For many years I felt out of place among some of my Jewish peers—particularly those with whom I attended secular public school, who had vastly different Jewish upbringings than my own. Later, I noticed that Jewish friends from college who did not have a similar upbringing lacked a strong sense of Jewish identity, both as individuals and as part of a broader community. Many of them like to say they are “Jew-ish,” like they are talking about the color of their hair—something they were born with but which could be easily changed. Often they are disconnected from, or adversarial towards, Israel and Zionism, and seem to have no interest in being advocates for either our community or our homeland.

In place of tradition and observance, which are incredibly important markers of our ethnic and historical background, many Jews see Judaism as simply a “culture.” We have moved from Tanakh, Talmud, and Mishnah to tzimmes, whitefish, and matzoh. Adopting the notion that we are simply a “culture” not only prevents us from understanding who we are in all of our beautiful diversity and depth, it also makes us less capable of educating others. As a result, we allow non-Jews to decide for themselves who they think we are—with the inevitable scapegoating that results. I believe we have come to an era of reckoning that is forcing us to accept that our generations of assimilation have done far more harm than good.

When I was ten, a classmate told me that he wanted to finish what Hitler started and to kill the rest of the Jews. I lived in a town with a strong Jewish community; to be Jewish was an immense source of joy and power. It came as a shock to learn that some people thought that being Jewish is bad—that the world should be rid of us.

***

When I started college, it didn’t take long to discover how lackluster the campus Jewish community’s relationship with Israel was. With close to one hundred active student clubs, two were Jewish, and one of them explicitly anti-Israel. That group dominated the campus discussion of Israel and had a knack for drowning out Zionist voices—so much so that when a group of Jewish students was publicly lambasted by the student body for speaking up against a terror attack in Israel, the administration demanded they apologize for their statement. Several of them were harassed and intimidated at events on campus for weeks to come.

Reeling from the antisemitism I watched spreading across my campus, I met with a coalition of concerned Zionist Jewish students who felt as enraged as I did. Yet, none of them felt these incidents warranted action.

I knew that if I wanted anything to change, I would have to do something. After graduating, I sprang headfirst into a career focused specifically on Jewish and Israel advocacy through the American Jewish Committee (AJC). According to the AJC’s State of Antisemitism in America 2023 Report—which assesses and compares the Jewish and general population perceptions of, and experiences with, antisemitism in the United States—no fewer than 94 percent of American Jews feel antisemitism is a problem in the U.S. today. Since the Hamas attacks on October 7, 77 percent of American Jews feel less safe in the United States.

My peers have begun to understand the growing threat against our community, and many seem to have disabused themselves of the notion that we are in any way protected from antisemitism in contemporary society.

In the months since October 7, the Jewish community has been a punching bag for global rage against Israel—because, and only because, the Jewish state is defending itself. Many young Jews seem to be waking up to this fact; I see more Jewish pride, Jewish joy, and resilience than I could have ever expected. I see my peers demanding justice. Finally, I see the global Jewish community aflame with determination. Finally, my community is realizing that neither fleeing nor freezing will stop evildoers from attempting to destroy us.

So why, all of a sudden, is such a large part of the Jewish community so activated, determined, and resolute? What was it about the Hamas attack that triggered our fight response?

***

The myth of Jewish security has been shattered. Many young American Jews are witnessing a war which poses an existential threat to their homeland for the first time in their lives. On October 7, they watched as Hamas, an Iranian proxy, launched missile attacks in Israel’s South, and brutally murdered and raped more than a thousand Jews. They watched as hundreds of civilians from Israel, America, Thailand, and many other countries were stolen away and taken hostage underground.

For the first time, young American Jews understand the threat that antisemitism poses not just to Israel, but to Jews around the world. For the first time, they are experiencing real, direct, and dangerous Jew-hatred. They see it in their social media feeds, on their campuses, in the media, and in their places of work. They finally understand that no matter how much they try to distance themselves from their Jewish or Zionist identities, our adversaries will threaten us all the same.

Today they realize that to be a Jew and a Zionist requires action. Many of the same people I knew to be quietly Jewish and Zionist before October 7 are now proudly wearing a yellow ribbon to raise awareness of the hostages, or a Star of David to feel more connected to their identity. Many of them are now educating their peers about the ongoing war. Many are also attending synagogue regularly, keeping Shabbat in a way that feels authentic to them, and seeking Jewish community wherever they can find it.

Since October 7, many young Jews have begun to identify with, and to feel a deepened connection to, their homeland. They understand that “Zionist” is not a dirty word, as we’d been taught by many of our non-Jewish peers. They understand that to be a Zionist is to fight hate actively, to stand up for our community, to educate our non-Jewish friends, and to shake off those who oppose our very identities.

Young Jews are waking up to the fact that simply being Jewish isn’t enough to safeguard our people. If we want to see the Jewish people thrive, and if we want to protect and maintain the Jewish homeland whose neighbors want it gone, we must practice Judaism and Zionism actively. We must find ways to feel connected to our historical, traditional, religious, and spiritual roots, so that we feel capable of empowering and strengthening our community for generations to come.

I am proud to watch my peers understand that to be a Zionist is to be a fighter for the Jewish people, a unifier, and an advocate. To be a Zionist is to stand up in the face of hate, to tell our adversaries that we will not cower, to show the world that we will not be destroyed. To be a Zionist is to tell the world that we always have been, and always will be: Am Yisrael, the people of Israel.