I am Israeli. I live in the United States. And recently, I traveled to Australia to stand with a Jewish community reeling from terror.
These are not three separate identities. They are expressions of one people, living in different places, carrying different vulnerabilities, and facing a shared moral challenge. The past two years, from the shock of October 7 to the sands of Bondi Beach, have made that reality impossible to ignore.
October 7 shattered many illusions. In Israel, it exposed the unbearable cost of failure and the fragility of security. The fear Israelis live with is real and existential: rockets, terror, irreplaceable loss.
But there is something that October 7 did not shake. Israelis, for all their fear, are not afraid to be Jewish. Jewishness is not something one negotiates or hides: It is the public language of life.
That distinction matters.
Fear of being visibly Jewish in the Diaspora
In the Diaspora, a different kind of fear has been quietly taking hold. Not fear of being targeted as citizens of a state under attack, but fear of visibility itself. Fear of gathering. Fear of celebration. Fear of what it now means to be publicly Jewish.
Shortly after the Bondi Beach attack, before I knew I would board a plane to Sydney, I was speaking with a close friend from Israel. She is thoughtful and deeply informed. I spoke about the terror of Jews being attacked at a Hanukkah celebration, about the fear of simply showing up as Jews in public. She admitted she had not fully considered it. She understood, but could not fully relate – not out of indifference, but because that fear does not translate easily into an Israeli context.
In Israel, you worry about safety. You do not worry whether lighting candles, wearing a kippah, or standing in a Jewish crowd is itself an act of defiance.
That gap in understanding is what propelled me to Australia. Being Israeli, born and raised, now living in the United States, and then traveling to Sydney in the wake of the Bondi attack made something unmistakably clear: Jewish fear today is not uniform, but it is connected. And so is Jewish responsibility.
Australia has long held a particular place in the Jewish imagination. It is no wonder so many Israelis travel there post-army service. Distant. Stable. Removed from the fault lines of Jewish history. A place where the promise of safety through geography seemed plausible. That illusion collapsed in an instant. Standing at Bondi Beach, in the brightness of summer, where terror struck a space meant for joy, I felt a deep and unsettling familiarity.
The setting was new; the story was not.
What shook the community was not only the violence itself, but the recognition that antisemitism, when left unchallenged, does not remain abstract. Unchecked rhetoric creates space for escalation. Silence by leaders allows hatred to move from words to bloodshed. Inaction becomes complacency.
This came into sharp focus during a conversation with a taxi driver in Sydney who told me he was half Jewish. After I shared that we had come to be with a grieving community, he pivoted quickly to Israel, raising allegations of genocide. He did not say the attack was justified, but the implication was familiar: Jewish blood explained through Jewish action.
I reminded him that this logic did not begin in Gaza or in 1967. Jews were massacred in Hebron in 1929 without having a state, without an army, without power. The details change, but the mechanism does not. When Jews are murdered for being Jews, turning immediately to Israel is not analysis: It is evasion. Being half Jewish does not make one immune to that history: It heightens the responsibility to confront it.
YET THIS moment does not call for panic or retreat. Jewish history has always been shaped by intergenerational trauma – but it has been sustained just as powerfully by intergenerational hope. Those two inheritances travel together, across borders and across time.
I saw that hope most clearly not in speeches, but in presence. In Sydney shiva mourning homes and hospital rooms, when words failed, being there mattered more than anything that could be said. At public gatherings, fear and resolve stood side by side. These moments did not explain the tragedy. No one could. But they created the conditions for resilience.
Peoplehood is not an abstraction: It is a practice. It is expressed through responsibility and the willingness to show up for one another, especially when it is uncomfortable or costly. It means recognizing that an attack on Jews in Sydney is not an Australian Jewish problem, just as antisemitism on American campuses is not an American Jewish problem – and terror in Israel is not Israel’s alone.
We are one people living in many places, facing variations of the same ancient hatred. The expressions differ. The accents differ. The risks differ. But the connective tissue remains.
For centuries, the forces arrayed against us have tried and failed repeatedly. Their failure, however, is not automatic. It depends on whether we allow fear to narrow us or responsibility to expand us.
Despite the understandable desire to return to normal, nothing is back to normal: Not in Israel. Not in the United States. Not in Australia. The task before us is not to flatten these differences or deny them, but to hold them together within a shared sense of peoplehood.
If the past two years have taught us anything, it is that Jewish fate cannot be siloed by geography. What happens in one corner of the Jewish world reverberates across all of it. Our response must do the same.
Jewish history has never been easy – but it has always been shared. And that shared responsibility, carried across generations and continents, remains our greatest strength.