Never Again Is for Us

I am the grandson of Holocaust survivors, barely survivors, who walked out of the camps into a silence so total it could scarcely be understood. I have written elsewhere about what this meant for my own family.

I mention it only because it is the ground I stand on when I say what follows.

Three years ago today, on 7 October 2023, terrorists from Gaza murdered some 1,200 people in a single morning, the great majority of them Jews.

Infants and grandparents were killed in their homes, families were burned alive in their safe rooms, young people were hunted down at a music festival, and 251 people were dragged into Gaza as hostages.

It was the largest killing of Jews in one day since the Holocaust, and the killers, emboldened by a world that had nurtured their hatred and indulged them more than any genuinely oppressed people on earth, filmed their atrocities and bragged about them.

We had prayed and hoped that, with liberation and our sovereignty restored in a small part of our ancestral homeland in 1948, the words we had sung to our Father had finally come true, and that He had at last declared: “Too long have you dwelled in the valley of weeping.” We had felt our broken nation finally stumbling towards the dancing hills. Instead we found ourselves back in that valley.

We have buried too many brothers and sisters, every kind of Jew, and there is no end in sight. We are attacked relentlessly, and our finest sons and daughters, glorious soldiers barely out of school, stand in harm’s way to secure our future in the land we never stopped yearning for.

The heroism of these three years has been breathtaking. On the morning of the massacre, off-duty soldiers and ordinary residents ran towards the gunfire with whatever they had. Reservists left their families and livelihoods for months at a time and went back into the tunnels of death again and again.

Our nation showed once more that we are woven from God’s own fabric: the world-building kindness that characterises our people never stopped, in encouragement, in selflessness and in self-sacrifice at every level. And at the graveside we have watched parents bury their children and turn their grief into strength for the rest of us.

No nation could ask more of its people, and ours keeps giving more, and more meaningfully, than anyone could have imagined.

While we were still scrambling to regain our footing, the world did not simply turn away. It struck us in the heart again and again while we were down.

It sided with our enemies and gave them relentless support, while we received condemnation, insults and extortion. It tried to tie our hands behind our backs and accused us in advance of crimes we would never commit, even if we were alone in the world. Lies, libels and threats were aimed at every Jew around the globe in an attempt to break us, from a world united in its hatred of the people of God. Only the few righteous among the nations stood apart, and they will always be joined to us.

Many of us felt betrayed, but it was not betrayal. Betrayal requires a bond, and the world never cared about us. What it had after 1945 was a moral freeze: six million dead made open hatred of Jews unspeakable for two generations. The Holocaust did not cure antisemitism; it muzzled the debate, and in our brokenness we wished the muzzle into a change of heart. 7 October removed it. Before Israel had counted its dead, crowds were celebrating, even in Western cities. There has been no pause in Jew-hatred, not even for one day.

Then came an escalation my grandparents could not have imagined. For thousands of years we have been libelled. Pharaoh chose to forget Joseph, the Jew who built Egypt, and it has never mattered whether the Jew kept quietly to himself or contributed everything and stood beyond reproach; he is turned against all the same.

We were accused of disloyalty, of poisoning wells and of baking matzah with blood, and we are still accused of manipulation and control. In this war the libel has escalated to proportions never heard before: first disproportionate response, then starvation, then war crimes, and now the verdict.

We are a people convicted of genocide, a word coined to name what was done to us. They hunted for us in the furthest corners of Europe and the most isolated villages, because every single Jew had to be annihilated: women, children and the old, Jews whose families had turned their backs on Judaism generations earlier, and Jews who did not know they were Jewish until the moment they were taken. Now they say our people are doing the same.

It chills me to the bone that some of its most eager and effective carriers are Jews. In August 2025 the president of J Street, a lobby that calls itself pro-Israel, wrote that he had been persuaded international courts would one day find Israel in breach of the Genocide Convention. When the libel is heralded by those who play the Jew card, we are not only under attack. We are outflanked.

The zealotry of the fight against us tells us what is really being opposed. This is not a fight against the Jew, or even a fight against those who merely support Zionism. The world will tolerate a Jew of descent without covenant and a Zionism that begins in 1948 and can be argued away. What it cannot tolerate is a Jew who lives, or even struggles towards, a Judaism that says there is a God, that He gave us a way of life in the Torah and that He promised a land to us. This is a fight against the eternal Jew, and ultimately against our Father in Heaven; when they cannot reach Him, they try to hurt His children.

7 October must be the moment Never Again becomes ours, the moment we stop believing we can argue our way out of antisemitism. For eighty years we believed that if we showed the world everything, truth would compel compassion. We screened the 7 October footage for journalists and diplomats, and it changed almost nothing, because antisemitism is not a factual error but a posture. Pain does not create affinity; affinity must exist first.

Worse, we built our children’s identity on that trauma, and an identity built on trauma cannot transmit itself. A glacial torrent cannot ignite a flame, but a small spark can.

Judaism never commanded us to convince the nations. God commands us to remember, and that remembrance is inward. Never Again is for us. It will not be secured by the conscience of a world that has shown us its limits, but by Jews who know who they are and carry it in public without apology.

The one strategy we have never seriously tried is to show the world Judaism itself, in its beauty and its depth. It will not end antisemitism, but it will reach the many good people who would stand with us if they knew who we truly are.

It is a bitter thing that this calamity fell on Simchat Torah, the day we dance with the Torah in our arms. Perhaps that is also its message. Those who rejoice in Torah have danced through every catastrophe our enemies devised, and they outlived every one of them.

No matter what the world does or does not do, no matter how it tries to break us, we will dance again.

WE WILL DANCE FOREVER.