A new Washington Post poll reports that fewer than one in five American Jews say they feel “very safe” in the United States. 42% say they avoid publicly wearing anything that might identify them as Jewish, a 16-point jump in just one year. On its face, this seems to tell a grim story about rising antisemitism in America. But there’s a deeper and more complicated truth hiding behind those numbers, one that says as much about our internal Jewish culture as it does about the external threats we face.
I’ve traveled with my family across two continents, raising six children who are proudly and visibly Jewish. When we were in London and Paris, my sons couldn’t wear their yarmulkes. It wasn’t safe. The threats there were too real, too close. European Jews have learned to hide. I understood that instinct, even if it broke my heart to give in to it.
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Once, here in America, I did the same. We were walking near George Washington University and passed a protest filled with demonstrators waving signs in “solidarity” with Hamas. The crowd was angry, radical, and unmistakably hostile to Jews. I told my boys to take off their kippahs. It was the first and only time I’ve ever done that on American soil. I felt something that day I had never felt here before: fear.
Even so, America has always been exceptional in Jewish history. This country is not perfect; we’ve had our share of dark chapters, from General Ulysses S. Grant’s 1862 order expelling Jews from his military district to the country clubs and quotas of the 20th century, but America has been, overwhelmingly, the safest, freest, most welcoming nation Jews have ever known. And unlike Europe, we have never had to rely on the government to “tolerate” us. We belong here, fully and proudly.
That’s why the panic reflected in polls like the Washington Post’s feels both understandable and, in some cases, misplaced. There is real antisemitism in America; much of it today comes from the radical Left, which cloaks old hatreds in the language of “liberation” and “justice.” But I suspect that many of the Jews telling pollsters they don’t feel safe are not people who have ever been visibly, observantly, or communally Jewish in the first place. Their fear is theoretical, not lived. They don’t wear yarmulkes. They don’t belong to synagogues. They don’t celebrate Shabbat. Their Jewish identity is something they pull out for holidays and hashtags.
And that detachment, ironically, makes all of us less safe. Because when Jews who have no meaningful attachment to Judaism speak for the community, especially in politics, they often side with those who seek to undermine Jewish safety, both in America and abroad.
Look no further than the recent Fox News poll of the New York City mayoral race, where 38% of Jewish respondents said they plan to vote for Zohran Mamdani, the socialist assemblyman who has openly supported Hamas-sympathizing protests and vilified Israel. That’s the same city where Jews have been physically assaulted for wearing yarmulkes, where synagogues are routinely vandalized, and where Jewish institutions must hire armed guards.
These are the voters who will make the most Jewish city in the world outside of Israel unsafe for Jews, and they’ll do so in the name of “justice.” It’s an almost biblical irony: The Jews most eager to prove their moral standing to the world are the ones empowering people who despise them. Their Judaism is a costume, a symbolic garment to be put on or taken off depending on what’s fashionable in their political circle.
Meanwhile, the Jews who actually live their faith, who attend synagogue, send their children to Jewish schools, and wear their identity openly, are the ones being told by those same secular Jews to keep quiet, to blend in, to “not make it worse.” They are the ones shouldering the physical risk of being Jewish in public while others wring their hands in theoretical fear from behind their anonymous screens.
But America, for all its flaws, is not Europe. We are not at the mercy of a hostile state or a centuries-old aristocracy. We have a president who has made the security of Jewish Americans a visible priority. Across federal, state, and local levels, law enforcement has treated antisemitic threats with unprecedented seriousness. Those are not small things. They are proof of American exceptionalism.
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So no, I don’t think the lesson of this moment is to hide our stars or remove our yarmulkes. Quite the opposite. The lesson is to wear them proudly, to raise children who know who they are and why it matters, and to reject the false sense of safety that comes from silence and conformity. Safety purchased at the price of identity isn’t safety at all. It’s surrender.
The pollsters can measure fear. What they can’t measure is pride. They can ask Jews if they feel safe; they can’t quantify how many of us feel grateful, defiant, and determined to live openly Jewish lives in the freest country the Jewish people have ever known. That is still the American story, and it’s worth fighting to keep it that way.
Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a homeschooling mother of six and a writer. She is the bestselling co-author of Stolen Youth.