To Understand the Jews, Walk in Our Footsteps — Not Just Past Our Gathered Shoes

A Jew as a poisonous mushroom

PRAGUE — I stood today before gravestones so old their Hebrew letters are more memory than inscription. Some lie buried so deep that only the tips protrude from the earth. The stones lean and crack, yet they refuse to fall. They whisper of children once born here, of melodies once sung at dusk, of study halls lit long into the night. What remains of Prague’s once-thriving Jewish quarter is now a museum path and a lingering echo.

This city once nurtured towering Jewish thinkers like Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel — known as the Maharal — a spiritual leader in the 16th century who didn’t seek to influence royal courts, but instead sought to nourish the Jewish soul through moral teaching, Torah study, and communal strength. Before him, in medieval Córdoba, lived Maimonides — a revered Jewish philosopher, legal scholar, and physician — who spent his life healing bodies and fortifying a people living under precarious protection. These men, and the countless rabbis, scholars, merchants, artisans, and poets who followed, did not seek to control the world around them. They simply wanted enough space to live openly as Jews: to pray, to teach, to build families, and to pass down their way of life without fear.

You can still follow their footsteps — east and west — through Kraków’s Kazimierz district, Berlin’s Jewish quarter, the alleyways of Vilnius, the marketplaces of Aleppo, Baghdad, and beyond. Across continents, the pattern is heartbreakingly consistent: Jewish communities flourished when tolerated, endured when marginalized, and vanished when persecuted. Again and again, Jews were welcomed, blamed, expelled, or killed. And each time, we started over — carrying with us the memories of what was lost. And always, wherever we were, we prayed toward Zion — the ancient name for Jerusalem — our spiritual and ancestral home.

This is why one historical fact is vital, especially for those unfamiliar with the deeper Jewish story: Jews have always lived in the land of Israel and throughout the broader Levant, which includes today’s Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and parts of surrounding Arab nations. Jewish life in Hebron, Tiberias, Safed, Jerusalem, and even Gaza dates back thousands of years. Long before the founding of modern Israel, long before British colonial rule or the rise of Palestinian national identity, there were Jewish homes, synagogues, cemeteries, and families rooted in this land. Zionism — the modern movement to establish a Jewish homeland — was not a colonial imposition. It was the return of an indigenous people to the place they never fully left.

So when Jews are judged today by headlines alone — for political activism, for defending Israel, for speaking out loudly — understand that you are seeing only the surface. You are entering a long and painful story at its final chapter, and mistaking the survivor for the villain. Visiting Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, is powerful — but it is not enough. To truly understand the Jewish story, you must walk the streets where Jews once lived, not just where they died.

Visit the synagogues of Europe that now serve as museums. Walk through old schools in Yemen, once filled with Jewish children, now empty. See the remnants of Jewish homes in Poland, in Syria, in Greece. Then continue — to Terezín, to Auschwitz, to Babi Yar — to the places where Jewish civilization was not merely pushed aside, but systematically erased.

This long history of expulsion, exclusion, and extermination helps explain something that often puzzles outsiders: why so many Jews, particularly in the 20th century, gravitated toward liberal, humanitarian, and progressive causes. We believed that by championing the rights of others — civil liberties, social justice, freedom of religion — we could help create a world where Jews, too, would be protected. That idealism, born from suffering, built bridges and alliances. But in recent years, many of those same spaces now see Jews not as partners, but as obstacles. The goodwill we gave is often met with suspicion. And the ancient antisemitic myths — about Jewish power, manipulation, and dual loyalty — have returned, now disguised as political critique.

And so, once again, we find ourselves misunderstood. Some paint Jews as all-powerful; others cast us as colonizers. But we see ourselves differently: as a people who have spent centuries rebuilding from catastrophe. We know how fast the ground can shift. We know how quickly a once vibrant synagogue becomes a museum. How swiftly a neighbor becomes a captor. How easily an entire community can become ash.

This is why Israel matters so deeply. It is not about supremacy or conquest. It is about survival. It is the one place in the world where Jews do not have to ask permission to live, to defend themselves, or to define their own future.

To those public voices with immense platforms — Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and others — who frame Jewish advocacy as dangerous or manipulative: I urge you not to draw conclusions from a soundbite or believe visiting Israel makes you an expert. Don’t mistake a photo-op at a Holocaust museum for full understanding. Go instead to the places where Jewish life once flourished. Walk through Kraków, Thessaloniki, Sana’a. Look up and see the faded Hebrew above doorways. Step through rusted cemetery gates no one has entered in decades. Speak to the last remaining Jews in cities where millions once lived. Ask what happened — and why it keeps happening. Only thepn, maybe, you will understand why Jews still raise their voices. Why we cannot afford to be silent. Why the need to defend ourselves is not an ideology — it is a necessity.

(courtesy)

Empathy cannot be formed from opinion alone. It requires history. And our history lives not just in books, but in dust — the dust of vanished neighborhoods, extinguished families, desecrated synagogues, and stone paths leading back to Jerusalem. Walk those roads — not just past the gathered shoes in memorials — and you may come to understand who we truly are: hopeful, wounded, resilient, and, by the grace of G-d and the stubbornness of memory, still here.