Jewish lions must displace America’s Jewish sheep

The election of Zohran Mamdani — a proud antisemite and Israel-hater who actually condones worldwide violence against Jews with his defense of “Globalize the Intifada” — is an embarrassment, let alone a danger, like no other to American Jewry. New York City is not just the town that has more Jewish inhabitants than any other in world history. It is also the new Rome: Global financial capital, global diplomatic capital, global media capital, and second only to Paris or Rome as the world’s cultural capital. How in God’s name did the Jewish community lose New York to an inexperienced, fake-smiling fraud who says openly that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state?

Some will say that Mamdani’s win proves two things. First, that with about 40 percent of Jews actually voting for someone who hates their guts, Jews are not nearly as clever as they purport to be. And second, that Candace Owens (Klandace Ovens, as she’s known online, for where she wants the Jews to end up), Tucker Qatarlson (named for the country that he has never denied is allegedly bankrolling him), and Nick Fuentes, the knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal antisemite, can no longer claim that Jews control America if they can’t even control a city filled with Jewish billionaires and 2.5 million Jewish residents.

Both conclusions are wrong. Jews are not as stupid as they vote. Rather, they are self-hating, a topic we’ll address in a future column. And who can blame them? After 2000 years of hatred, one begins to internalize the hatred and despise oneself, which explains why so many Jews deny their heritage. And second, the three loathsome antisemites I list above are going to hate us regardless of whether we win elections, lose elections, or don’t vote at all. Carlson, Fuentes, and especially the thoroughly execrable Candace Owens want us dead, dead, dead.

Indeed, the Mamdani victory is a catastrophe for the Hebrew nation because it shows American Jews to be utterly powerless, disorganized, and weak. Last week was the 87th anniversary of Kristallnacht, and the one thing we learned from that horrible November pogrom is that your enemy strikes specifically amid the perception of weakness. After five full years of anti-Jewish laws in Nazi Germany, with the world turning a blind eye to the persecution of Jews and lodging no full-throated protests, the German Nazis struck and started the Holocaust.

Am I afraid for American Jewry? You’re damn right I am. Not that there will be a Holocaust in America or Europe. No. That would require a state sponsor of genocide, and even disgusting, Jew-hating governments like Norway, Ireland, and Britain are not there. Rather, I fear real pogroms against Jews. Manchester on Yom Kippur, where two Jews were stabbed to death, was a pogrom. Because it only takes one.

Obviously, Pittsburgh and the Tree of Life was a pogrom, as was the burning alive of an octogenarian Jewish woman in Boulder, Colorado, of all places. Seriously, in Colorado? The Rocky Mountain High? They’re burning Jews alive.

And I’m also scared of something almost as dangerous. The wholesale disappearance of visible Jewry and Judaism from American, European, and Australian cultural life. No visible yarmulkes. No Magen Davids. Synagogues as fortresses where cameras and security are visible everywhere but the actual name “Synagogue” has been removed.

It’s happening already. And unlike Israelis, who are lions confronting the possibility of an actual Holocaust that can be brought about in a nano-second by a single Iranian bomb, American Jews, by contrast, are sheep.

Yes, sheep. We’re cowards. We’re afraid. We’re in hiding. We’re in denial. And our children are growing up in terror and fear as Jewish day schools become army camps and synagogues fortresses.

There is one question — one terrifying, inescapable question — that now defines the Jewish future: Will we survive the next century? And if we do, how?

Most Jews instinctively answer, “Of course we’ll survive. Look what we’ve endured. And God promised He’d never abandon us.”

But tell that to the one-third of world Jewry wiped out just 80 years ago, murdered not in ancient times but in modern, supposedly enlightened Europe. Tell it to the millions of Jews disappearing today through assimilation. Tell it to the six million Jews in Israel who — God forbid — could be annihilated in minutes by a single Iranian nuclear device.

Faith cannot replace responsibility. Even the Torah rejects that fantasy. “And the Lord your God will bless you in everything you do.” Blessing requires action. It requires courage.

And so we arrive at the mother of all Jewish questions: If we are to live, especially in the Diaspora, how are we to survive?

My answer is stark: By becoming lions. The corollary is equally stark: By refusing to become sheep.

Let no one distort or diminish this point. Jewish history did not begin in ghettos or gas chambers. The image of the Jew as frail or submissive is an insult to the truth.

We began as lions.

When Moses defied the man-god Pharaoh and Joshua stormed the walls of Jericho, when King David forged a kingdom and the prophets thundered moral truth to power, the Jewish people were not cowering victims. We were a sovereign, warrior nation.

The Maccabees of 167 BCE — outnumbered and out-armed — defeated the mighty Seleucid empire. Antiochus IV commanded one of the greatest armies of the Hellenistic world, yet a small band of Jewish fighters drove them from Judea. That was not only divine providence; that was strategy, unity, and fearlessness.

In 66 CE, Judea rebelled against Rome — the most formidable empire ever known. The Jews resisted four Roman legions for years. Josephus records the shock of the Romans at Jewish resilience. Edward Gibbon, in the most celebrated work of history of all time, “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” notes that no nation other than the Jews rebelled so regularly and so stubbornly against the Romans like the Jews. No other province held out so long.

And in 132 CE, the Jews rose yet again under Bar Kochva. The emperor Hadrian, humiliated, recalled Julius Severus, his most brilliant general, from Britain to suppress us. Ancient Roman historians wrote that Rome had never faced a more determined foe. Nearly all Jews were slaughtered — but Rome paid dearly for every inch. And as Winston Churchill famously noted, as he attacked Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement and cowardice, “Nations who go down fighting rise again. But those who surrender tamely are finished.”

The Jewish story is not a tale of victims. It is a chronicle of defiance.

Even during our darkest centuries — slaughtered in the Crusades, burned by the Inquisition, butchered by Khmelnytsky’s Cossacks, gassed by the Nazis — we remained lions in the only way left to us: we refused to surrender our identity.

We did not convert en masse to survive. We clung to our rituals. We clung to our sacred texts. We clung to our covenant. The mother in the Lodz ghetto who starved herself to feed her child was not a sheep but a lion. The old man whispering Shema in Treblinka was a lion. The most disgusting slur against Jews ever uttered was that the six million went to the gas chambers like sheep to the slaughter. That’s crap, my brothers. That’s crap.

There is nothing bolder or more courageous than a mother, pointed to go left by Mengele at the train tracks at Birkenau, holding her baby in flea-infested rags, trying her best to warm the baby to life, and straining against every hardship to cling to her offspring, even as Zyklon-B gas, rather than hot shower water, fell down upon her and her infant as they were murdered together, inseparable, now and forever.

A lion does not always conquer. A lion refuses to bow.

But the Jewish story has changed. For 2000 years we were powerless and stateless. So the Jewish lion demonstrated his or her ferocity in their fearless willingness to be martyred for their faith. Today, our lionhood must be demonstrated differently. We must bury the courage to be martyrs in a sacred Jewish grave, forever, never forgetting the six million but never allowing it to happen ever again. We have a sovereign State of Israel — the miracle of Jewish rebirth — and the Israel Defense Forces, the most effective fighting force of its size in the history of the world.

We also enjoy full civil rights in Western democracies with courts, legislatures, and public platforms. We can fight and destroy our enemies in court, as I am being forced to do even now against the Fontainebleau Miami Beach, where I was publicly threatened with murder by radical Islamist Faiz Akbar, and against the Waterline Square complex in New York City, who are suing me for a tiny memorial I held for Shani Louk, the most famous victim of the October 7th massacre. I promise, God willing, to legally annihilate their revolting attempts to defend antisemitism, silence Jewish identity, and erase Jewish memory.

For centuries Jewish heroism was defined, against our will, as martyrdom. But martyrdom is not a Jewish ideal. It is a Jewish tragedy and now, and forever, it must be avoided at all costs.

Now that we have a state, an army, and national power, the era of noble powerlessness must be buried forever.

The goal of Jewish history can no longer be to die with dignity, but to live with strength.

Israel has embraced this pivot brilliantly. But many Jews in the Diaspora have not. While they are lions, we are sheep.

Here lies my deepest fear: just as the Jewish people finally have the freedom to fight back, many are becoming sheep again.

Fear is eroding our spine.

Across America — a land of unprecedented freedom — Jews conceal their identity as if it were prewar Berlin. Yarmulkes disappear in Times Square. Magen Davids vanish at Lakers games. Parents quietly instruct their children not to announce they’re heading to Hebrew school.

At Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, mobs chant “Globalize the Intifada” while even Jewish administrators cower. Jewish students file complaints, seek safety escorts, hide their symbols. What they rarely do is publicly demonstrate with peaceful ferocity and march.

Our enemies smell the fear.

In Europe, the situation is worse. Jews in Paris, Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Vienna — sometimes even IDF veterans visiting on vacation — hide their kipot, Hebrew, and Israeli accents. These are warriors, yet they fear wearing Jewish symbols.

I witnessed this in Times Square. You can’t make this up. Three IDF soldiers who had just fought Hamas in Gaza recognized me and asked for a selfie. But first, they spoke to me in broken English and told me they are from Belarus.

What the hell, I asked them? Well, they said, all their friends in Israel told them never to speak Hebrew in public as American cities have become cesspits of Jewish hatred.

“You fought Hamas terrorists in Gaza. You fought Hezbollah murderers in Lebanon.” I said. “And you’re afraid of Times Square?” They shrugged.

That shrug is the metaphor for world Jewry today.

American campuses have tens of thousands of Jewish students. Harvard: 5,000. NYU: 6,000. Berkeley: 3,000. Penn: 4,000. Columbia: thousands more. And yet we lost these campuses to radicalized students, hate-filled professors, and jihadi propaganda.

Why?

Because our enemies act like lions — and we act like frightened sheep.

It happened because Jews did not mobilize. Because Jews did not roar.

No minority survives by hiding. Minorities survive by asserting.

The Black community would never allow a known racist to become mayor. They protest, march, and mobilize. They exert power. We Jews aren’t fond of Black Lives Matter because of its false equation of racism in America to intersectionality and the false comparison of dark-skinned Palestinians being oppressed by white Jews in Israel. My father, of blessed memory, was from Iran and his skin was as dark as any Arab. The majority of Israelis are Sephardic from Arab lands and are the same. The last thing they are is white. And besides, Arabs have even more rights than Jews in Israel, in that, crucially, they are not drafted to the army as Jews are, to fight and die. Okay, BLM is wrong here. But BLM is certainly right about the need to march, demonstrate, and holler “Black Power.” God how I wish we had a “Jewish Power” movement to stop us from becoming a scared flock of sheep.

Where is our Jewish protest culture?

Where is our Jewish assertiveness?

Where is our Jewish roar?

In New York alone, there are 2.5 million Jews. When I regularly organize massive pro-Israel rallies in Times Square (I’m wondering if Mamdani, as mayor, will block us), we are thrilled to  get some 5,000 participants. But that’s a postage stamp compared to the numbers our enemies muster.

It is the same in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston. Silence. Retreat. Fear. And Miami — my hometown — where Jews boast that antisemitism hasn’t arrived, the video of radical Islamist Faiz Akbar threatening to murder me in the Fontainebleau lobby, and the hotel then suing me to bankrupt me into silence, should end that delusion. Miami is not immune. Nowhere is.

Today, Jewish survival requires victory on two fronts: The physical battlefield — against Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran. The information battlefield — online, in media, in universities, in culture.

Israel wins on the battlefield. Diaspora Jews, tragically, are losing the information war.

Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and especially Qatar understand modern warfare: they spread lies at the speed of light, demonize Jews, glorify terrorism, and manipulate social media with ruthless efficiency. And too often, Jewish organizations respond with timid press releases.

The same spirit that conquered Jerusalem in 1967 must now conquer global media.

If you lose the narrative, you lose the future.

So what does “Jewish lionhood” mean in the 21st century? It does not mean violence. Lions rarely kill unnecessarily. But lions never behave like prey.

It means refusing to hide your Jewishness.

Wearing your Magen David proudly.

Standing up unapologetically for Israel.

Fighting lies in media and online.

Marching, organizing, mobilizing — peacefully, but ferociously.

Rejecting silence, shame, and retreat.

It means acting like the people who gave the world morality, monotheism, justice, and the dream of human dignity.

We are not guests in history. We are co-authors of civilization. And co-authors do not hide their names.

So, will the Jews survive the next century? Yes — but only if we choose to be lions once more.

If we choose courage over fear.

If we choose activism over apathy.

If we stop hiding and start asserting.

If we confront our enemies instead of flattering them.

If we fight antisemitism in the streets, the courts, the legislatures, and most importantly, online.

If we reclaim the Jewish pride that built the Temple, fought Rome, defied the Crusaders, rebuilt our homeland, and defeated invaders again and again.

Sheep do not survive history. Lions do. It is time to stop whispering, stop trembling, stop apologizing — and start roaring. The Jewish people have changed the world before, We can do it again.

But only if we remember who we are.

We are the Lions of Judah. And it is time to roar.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach of Englewood is the author of 36 books, including “The Israel Warrior.” Follow him on Instagram and X @RabbiShmuley.