Please, Just Leave Us Alone

A remarkably modest request

This week marks three years since October 7.

I have spent much of those three years writing about what followed: Israel, Gaza, antisemitism, terrorism, college campuses, politics, and the increasingly uncomfortable place of Jews in the world.

But on this anniversary, I find myself thinking about something simpler.

When I launched the Jew News Review, I never imagined that so much of my writing would revolve around antisemitism and anti-Zionism. I wanted to write about Jewish life, not Jewish hatred. About living Jews, not dead ones. About the richness of our tradition, not the persistence of our enemies. About Israel’s astonishing accomplishments in medicine, technology, agriculture, and culture, not another United Nations resolution or another campus protest or another synagogue attack. I wanted to tell stories that my children and grandchildren would someday enjoy reading, not stories they would feel obligated to understand.

Yet the events of the past few years have repeatedly pulled me back to the same subject. Not because it’s the story I most want to tell, but because antisemitism keeps insisting on writing about us. Underlying much of it is the persistent suggestion that somehow Jews could make it stop.

There are those who believe Jews would finally be left alone if only Israel behaved differently. If only it elected different governments. If only it responded differently to terrorism. If only it withdrew from more territory. If only there were no Jewish state at all.

Jewish history offers little reason to believe that.

Long before there was an occupation, there were pogroms. Long before there were settlements, there were expulsions, inquisitions, and mass murder. The explanations changed with the centuries. The obsession did not.

For two thousand years, Jews searched for a way to simply live ordinary lives. We assimilated and remained separate. We became deeply religious and proudly secular. We built businesses, universities, hospitals, orchestras, and communities. We tried becoming indispensable. We tried becoming invisible.

Nothing quite worked.

The Zionist dream was always modest. It wasn’t empire. It wasn’t conquest. It was normalcy. After centuries of depending on the goodwill of kings, popes, czars, and presidents, Jews wanted what every nation hopes for: one place where they could determine their own future, raise their children in safety, and speak their own language without wondering whether history was about to repeat itself.

Since its founding, Israel has repeatedly sought negotiated peace. Some efforts succeeded. Others ended in rejection, violence, or both. Yet the aspiration has remained remarkably consistent: to live ordinary lives in peace and security.

October 7 began with people doing the most ordinary things imaginable. Families were sleeping in their homes. Young people were dancing at a music festival. Parents were making breakfast. Grandparents were visiting grandchildren. It was a holiday weekend.

Then the extraordinary invaded the ordinary once again.

That may be what we sometimes miss when we talk about Israel only in the language of war and geopolitics. The overwhelming majority of Israelis don’t dream of endless war. They dream of the day they no longer have to think about it. They dream of raising children without air raid sirens, bomb shelters, or military call-ups defining the rhythm of everyday life.

We were reminded of that just last week, when more than 170 passengers boarded a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv expecting to do something utterly unremarkable: go home. Instead, they found themselves fighting for their lives after the co-pilot attacked the captain and tried to crash the plane. Passengers and crew subdued him, and the plane landed safely in Saudi Arabia. Afterward, one Israeli passenger was asked what he wanted.

His answer: “I just want to go home.”

Jewish communities across America now spend over a billion dollars every year protecting synagogues, schools, community centers, and summer camps. Money that could educate children, care for the elderly, support families in need, strengthen Jewish education, or enrich Jewish life is instead spent making sure Jewish children can safely walk through the front door of their schools.

Antisemitism doesn’t just threaten Jewish lives. It quietly reshapes Jewish expectations. It teaches us to accept precautions that no parent should have to accept, security measures that no school should require, and fears that no child should inherit. Over time, extraordinary things begin to feel ordinary.

That may be its quietest victory.

I don’t want my grandchildren to inherit that victory. I hope one day they will find it slightly unbelievable that Jewish schools once required armed security. I hope they will ask why we ever accepted that as normal.

And I hope I’ll be able to answer, “It isn’t anymore.”

The remarkable thing about Jewish history is not that we have been hated for so long. The remarkable thing is that hatred never became the center of our story.

Family did.

Learning did.

Shabbat did.

Children did.

Laughter did.

Hope did.

Living did.

Generation after generation, we kept building those things while others kept trying to tear them down.

That, in the end, is the Jewish story.

All we want is what every family wants: to raise our children, celebrate our holidays, worship freely, bury our dead with dignity, argue politics around the dinner table, laugh with our grandchildren, build a future instead of constantly re-litigating our past, and live in peace and security.

It is, in the end, a remarkably modest request. Yet after two thousand years, I confess my patience has begun to wear thin.

Please…just leave us alone.