When ‘We Jews’ Becomes Too Simple

When “We Jews” Becomes Too Simple

There is a sentence one hears more and more often: we Jews will manage. Let them talk. Let the world condemn. Let the newspapers write. Let the campuses scream. Let the diplomats perform their little ceremonies of concern. We Jews have survived worse.

At first, the sentence sounds strong. It has the tone of historical endurance. It carries something ancient in its posture: we have crossed deserts, ghettos, inquisitions, expulsions, pogroms, camps, borders, languages, and graves. We are still here. The world may speak; Jewish existence will continue.

There is truth in that. But there is also something in this sentence that should make a Jew rub his eyes in astonishment. Not because Jews should panic before every accusation. Not because every critic of Israel deserves respect. Many do not. Some critics of Israel are simply old antisemites with new vocabulary, wearing the recycled costume of universal justice. Others discovered Jewish suffering only after discovering that it could be used against Jews. The moral theater is not subtle. One does not need a doctorate in political theology to smell the incense.

Still, the problem remains. When someone says “we Jews will manage,” the question is not only whether Jews will manage. The sharper question is: which Jews are speaking through this “we”?

This question matters because the contemporary “we Jews” is not innocent. It often pretends to be older than it is. It speaks as though it carried the whole weight of Jewish history, yet it frequently gathers around figures, institutions, and political styles that many older Jewish worlds would have recognized as deeply dangerous: contempt for liberal restraint, contempt for institutional limits, contempt for the separation of powers, contempt for the fragile discipline of law, contempt for criticism, and contempt for internal distinction.

One begins to wonder: around what, exactly, has this “we” now assembled? Around Jewish learning? Sometimes. Around memory? Often, though memory is increasingly used as a shield rather than a measure. Around Israel? Certainly. Around Jewish survival? Yes, but survival has become a strange word. It no longer means only the continuation of Jewish life. It increasingly means loyalty to whatever claims to protect Jewish life, even when that protection begins to deform the very measure by which Jewish life once judged power.

The old Jewish seriousness was not simply a politics of survival. It was a discipline of distinction. It did not believe that force becomes pure because necessity invokes it. It did not assume that law is innocent because it wears the robe of order. It did not trust rulers because they spoke loudly about destiny, security, borders, enemies, or sacred inheritance. If anything, Jewish history should have trained Jews to be specialists in the suspicion of sacredized power.

Yet here we are. A part of the contemporary Jewish world now speaks as if the highest form of Jewish maturity were to stop being disturbed by the weakening of democracy, the humiliation of liberal norms, the attack on judicial independence, the erosion of the separation of powers, the cult of executive decision, and the transformation of politics into a permanent emergency.

One is expected to applaud hardness as seriousness. One is expected to confuse institutional destruction with courage. One is expected to treat contempt for restraint as proof of authenticity. One is expected to believe that because the world is often hypocritical toward Jews, Jews are therefore released from the burden of measuring what is done in their name.

This is a remarkable achievement. After centuries in which Jews were vulnerable to arbitrary power, some Jews now cheer when arbitrariness wears a friendly uniform. It is not exactly progress. It is more like a historical nervous breakdown with flags.

The irony is severe. Jews know better than most peoples what happens when law becomes an instrument of exclusion, when courts are weakened, when public language prepares figures of suspicion, when emergency becomes permanent, when the state begins to divide the world between those fully inside protection and those available to exceptional treatment.

Jews know what happens when a population is treated as a problem before any individual act has been judged. Jews know what happens when power says: trust us, the situation is exceptional.

And yet, in the name of Jewish security, some now gravitate toward precisely those political forms that Jewish memory should have made almost impossible to admire.

This does not mean that Israel should be weak. That accusation is lazy. A Jewish state has the right to defend Jewish life. It has the right to fight enemies, punish murderers, secure borders, rescue hostages, and refuse the obscene demand that Jews die politely so that others may feel morally elegant.

But defense is one thing. The worship of force is another. Security is one thing. The conversion of security into a theology of exemption is another. Israel is one thing. The reduction of Jewish history to the political psychology of a besieged state is another.

The danger begins when these distinctions collapse. At that point, “we Jews” no longer names a people formed by law, text, argument, memory, exile, return, fracture, prayer, irony, and judgment. It begins to name a compressed political reflex. It becomes a slogan of defensive fusion. It says: we do not need to listen, because we have suffered. We do not need to measure, because we are threatened. We do not need liberal restraint, because liberal restraint is what weak people invoke before stronger people decide.

That is not Jewish strength. It is the provincialization of Jewish history by fear.

And now the sentence “we Jews will manage” meets something harsher than rhetoric. It meets numbers.

According to data reported from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, 82,700 people left Israel in 2024, while only 23,800 returned. That was not a marginal tremor. It was a record departure figure, a sharp increase from the previous year, and part of a broader negative migration balance. The following year did not dissolve the problem. In 2025, Israeli media reported that 69,300 Israelis left the country, while only 19,000 returned.

These numbers are brutal because they do not shout. They simply stand there. They say that while some voices declare, “we Jews will manage,” tens of thousands are quietly answering by leaving.

This does not mean that those who leave are cowards. It does not mean that those who stay are fools. It means that the “we” has become materially fractured. It means that the confident public sentence no longer corresponds to the actual movement of bodies, families, careers, children, and futures.

And the fracture is not only numerical. Reports presented in the Knesset have warned of a serious emigration wave, not merely as a temporary inconvenience, but as a human-capital problem. A significant portion of those leaving are young adults, highly educated people, professionals, and people whose departure affects the future capacity of the country itself.

That is the point at which a slogan becomes obscene. Not morally obscene. Analytically obscene. Because the phrase “we Jews will manage” begins to sound less like courage and more like a refusal to read the room.

If young people, educated people, native-born Israelis, and recent immigrants are leaving in large numbers, then the question is not whether the world is unfair to Israel. The world often is unfair to Israel. The question is whether Israel is becoming less inhabitable for precisely those people whose lives would make the future more than a bunker with excellent technology.

A country can win arguments and lose its future. A state can defeat enemies and still become a place from which its own children quietly begin to calculate exit routes.

This is why emigration matters here. Not because every emigrant is a political verdict. People leave for many reasons: cost of living, family, work, fear, opportunity, exhaustion, disillusionment, or the ordinary restlessness of modern life. But when the numbers rise sharply, when departures exceed returns, when the young and educated are disproportionately present, one must stop using heroic grammar as insulation.

At that point, “we Jews will manage” becomes less a description than an incantation.

There is an old wisdom here, too severe to be used as decoration: collapse is often preceded not by visible weakness, but by a surplus of confidence. A people does not begin to fall only when enemies defeat it. It begins to fall when warning signs are treated as noise, when criticism is mistaken for treason, when departure is dismissed as softness, and when the public voice grows louder precisely because the ground beneath it has begun to move.

The Jewish world before the Holocaust was not one thing. It was not a single path waiting to culminate in the modern security state. It contained religious worlds, secular worlds, Bundist worlds, Zionist worlds, anti-Zionist worlds, Hebrew worlds, Yiddish worlds, Ladino worlds, Polish-Jewish worlds, German-Jewish worlds, Arab-Jewish worlds, worlds of law, theater, poverty, scholarship, commerce, irony, mysticism, revolution, assimilation, and refusal.

It was not harmonious. It was often bitterly divided. But it had density.

That density matters. The Holocaust destroyed much of it physically. The creation of Israel answered an immense historical need, but it did not restore the full spiritual, linguistic, and political plurality of Jewish life. Nor could it. No state can inherit an entire people without reducing it. No army can replace a destroyed civilization. No parliament can speak in the name of all the dead. No intelligence service can become the executor of Jewish metaphysics.

A state can protect life. It cannot exhaust Jewish meaning.

Here another historical clarification becomes necessary. It is often said now, as if the matter were timeless and simple, that Israel is the Jewish state. But this formula has not always carried the same weight, the same legal force, or the same political atmosphere. The Declaration of Independence spoke of the establishment of a Jewish state, but it also promised complete equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race, or sex. For decades, the phrase lived within an unresolved tension: Jewish national restoration, democratic citizenship, diaspora plurality, minority presence, and the absence of a complete written constitution.

What has changed is not merely vocabulary. What has changed is the hardening of the formula. “Jewish state” increasingly no longer means only the historical refuge and political center of the Jewish people. It begins to mean a constitutional identity filter, especially after the 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, which anchored national self-determination in Israel as unique to the Jewish people. Once that shift occurs, the danger is clear: the state no longer simply protects Jewish life. It begins to act as if it may define the legitimate form of Jewishness itself.

The problem is not that Israel is Jewish. The problem begins when the state’s Jewishness is treated as authorization to administer Jewishness itself.

This is why the sentence “we Jews will manage” becomes dangerous when it is used to silence the question of what kind of Jews are managing, by what means, around which institutions, under which forms of power, and at what cost to Jewish measure.

But another question must be asked even more directly. It is not rhetorical. It is not decorative. It is a question of jurisdiction.

Who has the right to exclude someone from Jewishness?

Who has the authority to decide that a Jew who refuses political simplification, who criticizes the state, who defends democracy, who distrusts sacredized force, or who remains attached to diasporic plurality has somehow become less Jewish, insufficiently Jewish, or useful to enemies?

This is not a minor dispute about tone. It is a struggle over the boundary of Jewish existence itself.

When loyalty to a state, a government, a military doctrine, or a security narrative becomes the practical test of Jewish belonging, Jewishness is no longer being defended. It is being administratively narrowed. The old plurality of Jewish life is replaced by a loyalty filter. The Jew is no longer measured by law, memory, learning, argument, prayer, inheritance, or ethical seriousness, but by the degree to which he or she consents to a political condensation of the Jewish “we.”

That is a dangerous transformation. For once political loyalty becomes the hidden criterion of Jewish admissibility, exclusion no longer needs to announce itself as exclusion. It can appear as concern, realism, communal discipline, wartime seriousness, or the familiar accusation of betrayal. The result is the same: certain Jews are tolerated as biological or genealogical Jews, but treated as defective participants in Jewish speech.

They remain Jews, but their Jewish voice is discounted. That is already a form of internal exile. It is a quieter form of excommunication, performed without theology and without courage.

It is not enough to survive as a people if the surviving form becomes spiritually narrower than what was destroyed.

This is difficult to say, but it must be said. There is a way of defending Israel that gradually makes Jewish life smaller. It flattens Jewish memory into state loyalty. It treats criticism as betrayal. It identifies Jewish seriousness with military hardness. It turns trauma into permanent pre-clearance. It makes democracy sound like a luxury, liberalism like weakness, the separation of powers like obstruction, and human dignity like a vocabulary smuggled in by enemies.

And then, after all that, it says: we Jews will manage.

But who are these Jews?

Are they the Jews of Warsaw, Vilna, Salonika, Baghdad, Fez, Berlin, Odessa, Cairo, Kraków, Aleppo, Łódź, Amsterdam, Bnei Brak, Tel Aviv, New York, Paris, London, Buenos Aires? Are they the Jews of text, law, dissent, theater, argument, prayer, refusal, commentary, and fracture? Or are they a new political condensation: Jews gathered around the state as the final administrator of meaning, Jews who increasingly treat survival as a license to stop distinguishing?

This is not a small difference. A Jew who defends Israel while preserving measure belongs to one tradition. A Jew who defends Israel by surrendering measure belongs to another. The first knows that Jewish survival must remain answerable to Jewish judgment. The second believes that Jewish suffering has already answered every future question in advance.

That second position is not strength. It is idolatry by historical injury. It takes catastrophe and turns it into a machine for producing innocence. It says: because we were betrayed, we may now refuse the burden of self-interrogation. Because the world is hypocritical, we may become simple. Because enemies exist, we may abandon the old Jewish suspicion of power.

But Jewish history does not authorize such simplicity. If anything, it forbids it.

The strange spectacle of our time is that some of the loudest defenders of Jewish destiny increasingly gather around political forms that weaken the very conditions under which Jewish judgment can remain alive: independent courts, institutional restraint, plural public speech, protection of minorities, limits on executive force, and the refusal to let the state become the final interpreter of truth.

They call this realism. But realism without measure is only fear that has learned administrative language.

They call this loyalty. But loyalty without judgment is only obedience with better music.

They call this strength. But strength that cannot bear distinction is already afraid of itself.

A people rarely loses measure because it admits fear. It loses measure when it mistakes its fear for historical wisdom and its confidence for proof of permanence.

The real question, then, is not whether Jews will manage. Jews have managed under worse conditions than most peoples can imagine. The question is whether Jews will manage as Jews, or only as a frightened political bloc speaking through the vocabulary of emergency.

Will Jewish survival remain attached to law, distinction, argument, and humility before a measure beyond state power? Or will survival be reduced to the capacity to endure condemnation while gradually becoming deaf to the forms of degradation taking place within?

This is where the easy sentence breaks.

“We Jews will manage” is not false. It is incomplete.

It becomes true only if Jews retain the right to ask what this “we” has become. It becomes true only if survival does not require the abandonment of democracy, liberal restraint, legal seriousness, institutional limits, and the hard discipline of self-accusation. It becomes true only if Israel is defended without being allowed to replace the whole Jewish inheritance. It becomes true only if the dead are not recruited as silent guarantors for whatever the living decide to call necessity.

A Jewish “we” that can survive only by disqualifying difficult Jews has already become too small for Jewish history.

The right to defend Israel does not include the right to shrink Jewishness until only obedience fits inside it.

A people may survive many enemies. It may survive exile. It may survive betrayal. It may survive war.

But it may not survive the moment when its own “we” becomes too simple.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig