What Do We Teach Our Children Two Years After October 7
October 7 was an ending and a new beginning. A day when barbarism broke through the walls of modernity and forced Jews everywhere to confront the fragility of our safety and the fragility of the world’s conscience. The atrocities were broadcast in real time and the moral inversions that followed came just as fast.
Two years later, Israel is now accused of the very crimes committed against it. Jewish students are still menaced on campuses. Synagogues are still vandalized. Online mobs howl for our destruction. And yes, Jews are being murdered for the very crime of being Jewish.
One question towers above the others: what do we teach our Jewish children now?
What do we tell a generation coming of age in a time of moral contradiction, when Jewish suffering is met with indifference and Jewish survival is treated as a provocation?
The answer begins with clarity about who we are, where hatred comes from, and what endurance truly means.
Antisemitism is Not Confined to the Left or Right
Our children must understand a truth too many adults are still unwilling to face: antisemitism arises not just from one camp but rather adapts, mutates and changes costume with every generation.
Today we are seeing antisemitism from both the right and the left. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens repackage old conspiracies about global Jewish control. On the left, Mehdi Hasan and Zohran Mamdani rebrand antisemitism as social justice. Marjorie Taylor Greene peddles fantasies of cabals, while Hasan Piker argues we need to rid the world of all Zionists. One side embraces the swastika, the other keffiyehs. To weigh which is worse is to miss the point. It is like comparing arsenic to cyanide: both are lethal, both aimed at Jews.
Our children must be taught that no party has a monopoly on antisemitism. They must be able to recognize hatred in whatever ideological language it speaks.
The World Still Loves Dead Jews
Dara Horn’s haunting 2021 title still rings true: People Love Dead Jews. Unfortunately, the world mourns us only when we are dead but condemns us when we fight to live.
We saw it in the murders of Jewish staffers in Washington, D.C., peaceful rally goers for the hostages in Boulder, Colorado, and in worshippers in synagogue on Yom Kippur in Manchester, England. It played out in the attempted assassination of Jewish Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. These were not isolated acts of violence. The world’s sympathy for dead Jews was loud. But what is always louder? The discomfort with living ones fighting for their survival.
The response to that deafening noise cannot be retreat or shame. The answer must be pride. Pride in our stubborn refusal to vanish. Pride in being the people who, even after pogroms and gas chambers and massacres, still build schools, hospitals, art, and life all over again. Pride in existing loudly in a world that keeps trying to write our eulogy.
Jewish Education Is Existential
If October 7 taught us anything, it is that Jewish ignorance is dangerous. The survival of the Jewish people has never been secured by wealth or influence, but by knowledge, the kind that binds identity to purpose.
It is not enough for our children to be academically gifted. If they do not know who they are, how will they know what they are defending when it is attacked? The data is striking. Jewish day school graduates are more than twice as likely to marry Jewish, three times as likely to lead Jewish institutions, and far more likely to identify with Israel and the Jewish people. Jewish summer camp, Hillel, and Birthright alumni are more likely to engage in Jewish communal life and to stand as advocates in moments of crisis. These are not coincidences but the natural results of a Jewish education.
Theodor Herzl wrote that the Jewish state was not a matter of charity but of survival. The same is true of Jewish education in any form. It should not be a luxury. It is the spine of endurance. We owe our children the intellectual scaffolding to argue and the emotional depth to endure.
The Folly of Celebrity Oracles
We must also teach our children discernment. In an age where fame masquerades as wisdom, celebrity has become the most corrosive form of moral confusion. Pop stars, models, and actors opine on “genocide” as if they were foreign policy experts. From Billie Eilish to the Hadid sisters, even Jewish entertainers like Hannah Einbinder and Jonathan Glazer have turned the Jewish state’s survival into their own spectacle of moral superiority.
Our children must be able to distinguish influence from insight. The loudest voices are often the least informed. Let’s raise a generation immune to celebrity moral posturing.
Social Media: The Battlefield We Cannot Win
For two years, Jewish institutions have poured millions into social media campaigns to counter lies and hate. Yet the hatred spreads faster than we can contain it. Much of this is not organic. It is amplified by foreign actors like Iran, Russia, and China eager to weaponize the world’s oldest hatred online. But the mob hardly needs encouragement.
But we cannot out-hate our enemies, and we cannot out-shout them, especially online. Israel built an Iron Dome to shield its citizens from the rockets that would not stop coming. We must somehow build a digital Iron Dome, and shield our Jewish children from the cyber vitriol that will continue to be launched at them.
The Endurance of the Hostage Families
We also teach our children through example. Few examples speak more powerfully than the hostage families. For two years, over one million minutes, they have lived with the unimaginable: loved ones stolen, their fates uncertain. Yet these families have not yielded to despair. They protest, they testify, they march, and they force the world to remember their loved ones still held hostage in Gaza.
Even Rachel Goldberg Polin and Jon Polin, after the murder of their son Hersh, did not retreat into private mourning. They continue to carry his story outward, demanding that their grief sharpen the world’s moral focus. Our children must develop that fortitude and persistence. They must recognize that at the core of Jewish identity is being responsible for one another. Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. The hostage families have turned this commandment into a living truth: no Jew is forgotten, not after one week, not after one month, not after two years.
The “October 8 Jew” Endures
In the early days after October 7, many wondered whether the “October 8 Jew” phenomenon, suddenly vocal and unapologetically proud Jews, was a passing phase. But two years later, we see the opposite. Synagogues are fuller. Jewish day schools have seen their numbers rise. Jewish parents are forming affiliate groups at their schools. Our children are inheriting a community that has been awakened. What began as fear has become a renaissance of identity we must maintain. We must keep lighting Shabbat candles, keep wearing Magen Davids openly, learning Hebrew and visiting Israel. These are not small gestures but affirmations of Jewishness for our children in the face of those who wish us erased.
Jewish Peoplehood Emerges
There is also a quiet but undeniable renewal of Jewish peoplehood. Across continents, Jews are rediscovering what it means to belong to one another. From Tel Aviv to Toronto, Los Angeles to London, the divisions between Israeli and diaspora Jews have begun to dissolve. Even the names of our future children will tell this story as babies in New York, London, and Melbourne are being named Hersh, Eden, and Carmel, among others, in memory of the hostages taken and murdered. Out of tragedy has come a recognition that our fates are bound together. This is what we must teach our children: that they are part of an unbroken people, a chain linked by history and responsibility, by courage and care.
Finally, what remains is the most important lesson to teach of all: Jews endure because we are stubbornly alive, tethered to one another and bound to our generational story. We have never mistaken the hatred of others for the sum of our worth. If October 7 split the Jewish world open, we must teach our children to write the next chapter of Jewish history as the proud Jews we will raise them to become.
