Gen-Zionists: Young Jews who Fight Back

Eylon Levy's Foreword to 'Young Zionist Voices' introduces the next generation of Jewish leaders

David H.—I’m delighted to share Eylon Levy’s foreword to the new book Young Zionist Voices, published last month by Wicked Son and Z3 Project. Since 10/7, Diaspora Jews have lived through a period of acute uncertainty, betrayal by allies, fear of antisemitism, and a tectonic rattling of their priorities and dreams. At the same time, however, a new generation of young Jewish leaders—activists, rabbis, professionals, and thinkers—has emerged. They’re energetic, proud, and committed to a vibrant Jewish future. Levy calls them “Gen-Zionists,” and the following essay captures the spirit of the moment.

Eylon Levy is a former Israeli government spokesman, who represented Israel on international television and radio at the start of the October 7 War. He now heads the Israeli Citizen Spokespersons’ Office and hosts the State of a Nation podcast and YouTube show. Eylon previously served as international media advisor to President Isaac Herzog, after a career as a television news anchor. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the University of Oxford and an M.Phil. in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, and he served in the IDF after making Aliyah from the United Kingdom. He is the translator of several influential works of Hebrew non-fiction, including Catch-67 by Micah Goodman and The War of Return by Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz. He lives in Tel Aviv.

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.

Introducing the ‘Gen-Zionists’: Foreword to ‘Young Zionist Voices’

A new book captures the rise of a generation of Jews who have chosen the path of pride.

Eylon Levy

On college campuses around the world, there is a new bully in the yard. The name-calling, threats, intimidation, and physical violence are not exactly new, but in the Campus Tentifada, the bullies have asserted their presence. Like antisemites throughout history, they are driven by a moral zeal, a conviction that excluding Jews is the noblest expression of virtue. From colleges to workplaces to city streets, the bullies feel they have the license to scare Jews, to shout them into submission. But there is one thing they did not take into account: You can pick on the Jews, but the Jews are no longer easy pickings.

The young writers, thinkers, and activists appearing in this collection are not simply Gen-Z. They are “Gen-Zionists”: a new generation of Jews who understand this historical moment. Gen-Zionists stand up to bullies. They refuse to be intimidated. They will not let anyone shame them for who they are. Around the world, young Jews are mobilizing to show antisemites that Jews fight back, Jews answer back, and Jews have each other’s backs.

On October 7, 2023, young Israelis awoke to rocket sirens and discovered, to their horror, that the adults were not in the room. Nobody was coming to save them. Those who had weapons grabbed them to defend their fellow citizens; others mobilized to distribute aid to displaced families, setting up whole civilian kitchens and volunteering drives. They took responsibility. They took action.

Gen-Zionist is a generation of heroes, some of whom made the ultimate sacrifice. Heroes like 22-year-old Aner Shapira: When Hamas death squads threw grenades into a shelter where he and others were hiding at the Nova festival, he chucked seven back out, until the eighth took his life. Heroines like 26-year-old Liron Barda, the bartender who refused to evacuate from the scene of the music festival so that she could treat the wounded—and was murdered. They have shown fortitude that should shame many of their Western peers.

That same spirit of self-reliance is also being seen in the Diaspora, where young Jews increasingly have come to understand that if they do not stand up for themselves, nobody will stand up for them. That if their cousins in Israel have lost friends who fell in battle, they can certainly risk losing friends by falling out over politics. That if their cousins in Israel can face down Hamas in Gaza, they can face down Hamas fangirls on campus. That this is their moment.

***

October 7 triggered three momentous shifts in the Jewish world, setting the stage for the immense challenges that Gen-Zionists must confront in the years to come.

The first was the surprise rediscovery of a sense of collective purpose in Israel, after the ugliest period of political division in the nation’s history. Suddenly, everyone realized that only one thing mattered: defending our homes and neighbors against a barbaric terrorist army. Nobody waited for orders. Everyone asked only what they could do to help. Israel witnessed a spontaneous civilian mobilization unlike anything the world had ever seen. A country that appeared to be tearing itself apart was suddenly unified as never before.

The second was the Great Diaspora Awakening, as Jews worldwide sprang into action to defend their Israeli brethren. They donated their jewelry, organized solidarity missions, volunteered, and sent planeloads full of gear for reservists. They opened their checkbooks, with the JFNA alone raising over $850 million for its Israel Emergency Fund. Rediscovering a sense of Jewish identity, they started wearing Magen Davids and plastering walls with hostage posters and anti-Hamas stickers. They also mobilized to push back against the pro-Hamas fever gripping their streets and elite institutions, determined to stare down a terrifying, self-righteous surge of antisemitism.

The third trend is still inchoate. It is the growing understanding that the fates of Israel and the Diaspora are inextricably intertwined. Neither can swim while the other sinks; neither can afford to ignore what is happening to the other. Diaspora Jews understand that if Israel is attacked, they too will not be allowed to live in peace. And Israelis understand that they cannot ignore the intellectual insanity unfolding across the “enlightened” world—and that the student radicals of today could be its allies’ leaders of tomorrow. The Diaspora needs a strong Israel, and Israel needs a strong Diaspora. Jews must therefore make the world safe for Israel so that Israel can make the world safe for the Jews.

These positive trends, however, are not self-sustaining. They will require strong young Zionist voices to nurture and amplify them.

In February 2024, I flew from Tel Aviv to Atlanta to attend Hillel International’s Israel Summit. Before my keynote speech, I spoke with the students to understand whether the situation on their campuses was really as bad as the reports I’d heard. “Who are your allies?” I asked them, and the reply was a room of blank stares. Allies? They felt abandoned, betrayed, and cast out.

They were facing classic schoolyard bully dynamics. The bullies were not the majority. But they were sufficiently numerous, loud, and violent to deter people from wanting to have anything to do with the kids who were getting picked on. Why put yourself on the bullies’ blacklist? Far better to keep your head down, or even to join them.

At the gala event, I ditched my trademark blue-and-white suit for a specially printed t-shirt emblazoned with a victory sign and the slogan: “GEN-ZIONIST.” The next day, I was mobbed as I handed out a thousand of the shirts, which many of the students then wore proudly as they checked in at Atlanta Airport. I soon started seeing pictures of Jewish students wearing them at campus counterprotests.

Gen-Zionist students are mobilizing to stand up to the bullies.

But they need support from the broader Jewish community. And they need leaders among them who will articulate their cause.

***

Exactly one month after October 7, David Hazony published an essay in Sapir Journal called “The War Against the Jews.” Both timely and timeless, Hazony’s cri-de-coeur will be remembered as one of the canonical texts of this turning point in Jewish history. In it, he makes the case that Hamas’s invasion was the opening shot of a global war against the Jewish people. Jews everywhere, he warns, must now see themselves in a state of war against the rising “antisemitic hordes” and must prepare for battle accordingly. The essays in this collection are an important answer to Hazony’s call.

“Stop acting like the benign ocean water that fuels the hurricane passing overhead,” Hazony writes. “Instead, be the hurricane.” Little could he have imagined that a song titled “Hurricane” would, months later, become one of the defining texts of this era, when Gen-Zionist heroine Eden Golan conquered Europe’s biggest stage despite the braying mobs determined to silence her.

The voices in this collection are the hurricane.

“Every day I’m losing my mind,” belted the 20-year-old singer at the Eurovision Song Contest in the notorious antisemitic stronghold of Malmö, Sweden, in May 2024. But the thirty-one young thinkers in this volume are putting their minds to work. And they are fortunate to do so under the editorial guidance of Hazony, who is a public intellectual in the finest sense: Through his leadership of the new Z3 Institute and his 2023 collection Jewish Priorities, he is working to resurrect the Jewish republic of letters for the so-called TikTok Generation.

The Gen-Zionists featured in this collection are thinking deeply about how to safeguard our eternal people in the latest stage of a forever war against them.

It bears repeating how strikingly countercultural this is. The majority of the contributors have gone through colleges that have brainwashed their peers with a simplistic, pseudo-intellectual view of the world that has left them receptive to daft, catchy slogans denying the validity of both the State of Israel and Jewish identity. These writers, however, have chosen to radically reevaluate the paradigms that have led us to this crisis.

They are not running headlong into battle. They realize that first, the Jewish people must perform some introspection, or what the Hebrew language so beautifully calls heshbon nefesh—an accounting of the soul. They understand that before we can strategize about solutions, we need to get our house in order and to offer a potent critique of the pre-October 7 era. Many of them feel, rightfully, that the Jewish establishment failed to evaluate the threat correctly. They have been let down, even betrayed, by the non-Zionist, anti-Zionist, or even only meekly-Zionist Jewish voices who thought they could achieve Jewish safety without fighting for the safety of the world’s greatest Jewish collective, the State of Israel.

In Young Zionist Voices, you will find Gen-Zionists discussing not only how to stand up to bullies, but how to prepare their generation to stand up to them. They think about how to focus inward, before outward. About nurturing solidarity across our global family, including through authentic shared experiences between Diaspora and Israeli Jews; about “leaning in” to a renewed Jewish identity, both nourished by ancient traditions and deliberately broadened; about embracing our difference, both Jewish difference versus the rest of the world and difference within our ranks; and about cultivating pride in Israel and strengthening the bond between Judaism and Zionism, instead of trying to draw increasingly painful artificial distinctions.

It is no exaggeration to say that many of the contributors to Young Zionist Voices will shape the future of the Jewish people in the twenty-first century, in Israel and around the world. Their challenge is monumental, and they face it, as contributor Avi Gamulka puts it, as “the first generation to experience the world as consistently getting worse.” Even before October 7, they were locked out of the housing ladder, their formative years had been upended by successive COVID lockdowns, mental health was in freefall, and global warming threatened to make the whole world inhospitable, if not uninhabitable.

But maybe, then, this is the reason that the Gen-Zionists are ready to inherit the mantle of Jewish leadership, or at least to demand an outsized voice at the table. They never had the luxury of thinking the world was going their way. Their generation has always known it would have to muster every fiber of creativity and entrepreneurship to reverse trends that the adults either denied, downplayed, or dismissed as inevitable. That primed them for this moment.

The Gen-Zionists have risen to the moment; the prospect of what they will yet achieve offers a powerful source of optimism, even inspiration, for the rest of us.