The world’s antisemites see one Jewish people. We need to as well.

Consider two scenes from Jewish life in 2026.

In Jerusalem, a young woman who immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union under the Law of Return — who served in the Israeli Defense Forces, paid her taxes, buried her grandfather in Israeli soil — is told by the state rabbinate that she cannot marry in the country she defended. Her Jewish ancestry passes through the wrong grandparent. By the rabbinate’s standards, enforced through the civil law of a Jewish state, she is not Jewish enough to be married as a Jew in the land of the Jewish people.

In a suburb of Chicago, a man in his fifties who grew up Jewish — who had a bar mitzvah, attended Jewish day school, feels his Jewish identity as one of the most significant facts of his life — has quietly stopped attending synagogue. Not because he stopped caring. Because the community he found organized itself primarily around questions he found dispiriting: who counts as a real Jew, which conversions are valid, which denominations deserve recognition. He came looking for meaning. He found a boundary dispute.

These two scenes are not unrelated. They are the same scene at different scales. And they are happening, in variations too numerous to count, across the entire Jewish world right now.

Here is what makes the internal fracturing of Judaism not merely sad but historically grotesque: antisemitism does not recognize any of our internal distinctions.

The Cossack forces that conducted the Chmielnicki Massacres in 1648 did not ask their victims whether they were halakhically observant. The Spanish Inquisition pursued conversos on the theory that Jewish identity was heritable in ways that baptism could not erase. The racial laws of the Third Reich defined Jewishness by grandparentage, making no distinction between the assimilated German Jew who had not set foot in a synagogue in decades and the most devout Hasid in Warsaw. To the perpetrators, the distinctions that consume our communal energy were irrelevant. They were all Jews. They were all targets.

This remains true today. Antisemitism is rising by every measured metric across the political left and the political right, in Europe, in the United States, across the world. Campus incidents, synagogue attacks, social media harassment, political violence — the targets are not sorted by denomination. The Haredi Jew walking to shul in Brooklyn and the secular Israeli studying at an American university and the Reform Jew attending High Holiday services in suburban Atlanta are, to the antisemite, indistinguishable. They are Jews. That is sufficient.

There is a bitter irony in this. The external world imposes on us a unity that we refuse to impose on ourselves. The antisemite sees one Jewish people. We see factions, denominations, movements, and streams, each questioning the authenticity of the others, each conducting legitimacy wars over who truly belongs. The hatred that has pursued us across centuries does not participate in these debates. It does not care which rabbi performed your conversion or whether your mother or your father was Jewish. It finds you anyway.

For much of Jewish history, this external identification — the imposition of a shared fate by shared persecution — has functioned as a powerful, if terrible, form of communal glue. When external threat becomes acute enough, the internal disputes recede. The wars of legitimacy are suspended when survival is genuinely at stake. Israel’s founding, the Six-Day War, moments of acute danger have reliably activated a solidarity across denominational lines that ordinary communal life fails to sustain. Shared threat concentrates what shared purpose has not managed to hold together.

But this........

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