Generations of accommodations have been made to avoid confronting the realities of antisemitism. Polite language. Careful euphemisms. Diplomatic silences. The persistent, civilized pretense that what is happening is not quite what it is — and that if we simply make enough room, adjust enough positions, offend enough fewer people, the hatred will eventually exhaust itself and go home.
It never does. It never has. And the accommodation itself is the proof.
I am 100% Ashkenazi. Every ancestor I have, from the beginning of recorded time, has been required to engage in the fight against antisemitism. This was not a choice. It was the condition of existence. The price of survival was vigilance, and the price of vigilance was the knowledge that surviving one onslaught only made us targets for the next. The hatred did not end. It rested. Then it returned, in a new form, wearing a new face, carrying a new ideology — but always with the same purpose. And in every generation, the world around us found a reason to accommodate it rather than confront it.
Consider what that means in historical context. Arabic civilization, as a dominant cultural force, is approximately 1,400 years old. Roman civilization dates back roughly 2,700 years. Greek civilization, 3,000 years. Chinese civilization, 3,500 to 4,000 years. Egyptian civilization, 5,000 years. By the Hebrew calendar — currently in year 5785, dating recorded time to 3761 BC — Jewish civilization is older than Greece, older than Rome, older than China, older than Islam. It predates or matches every great civilization on earth. And the accommodation of the hatred directed at it has lasted nearly as long as the civilization itself. Across approximately 200 generations — every single one of them — a member of my family was required to fight for the right to exist while the world searched for reasons to look the other way.
That is not rhetoric. That is mathematics.
Even the architects of the greatest organized terror in human history could not defeat us — though the world accommodated them long enough to murder six million of us before acting. Those who went to their deaths in Auschwitz and in the other camps — Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek — did not go in despair. Many went with faith. With the words of the Torah on their lips. With a belief that transcended the moment of their murder.
That belief was rooted in something that has no adequate translation in any other language. Judaism understands the human being as comprising two inseparable but distinct dimensions. The nefesh — the physical body, the vessel of flesh and bone that walks through the world and can be destroyed. And the neshamah — the soul, the divine breath that God blew directly into the first human being at the moment of creation, as it is written in Genesis: "And God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul."
The neshamah is not merely a concept. In Kabbalistic thought, the soul has five ascending levels — nefesh, the life-force animating the body; ruach, the emotional and spiritual self; neshamah, the seat of intellect and divine consciousness; chayah, the supra-rational self, the source of will and faith; and yechidah, the essence of the soul in absolute unity with God. The neshamah does not die when the body dies. It returns to its source — to the World of Souls — where it is held in judgment and in waiting. It waits for the Messianic Era — the Resurrection of the Dead — when neshamah and nefesh will be reunited in a transformed world, a world in which death itself is eradicated forever, and the physical will transcend the finitude and mortality that define it today.
This is what those in the camps believed. Not as metaphor. As truth.
I do not present this as the exclusive path to that truth. Christianity holds that the soul survives death, that resurrection is possible through the sacrifice and return of Christ, and that eternal life awaits the faithful in the presence of God. Islam teaches that the spirit returns to Allah at death, that the body rests in barzakh, an intermediate state, and that on the Day of Resurrection all souls will be reunited with their bodies for final accounting. Hinduism speaks of the eternal self cycling through death and rebirth until it achieves liberation and reunion with the infinite. Buddhism holds that consciousness continues beyond death, shaped by karma, moving toward liberation from suffering.
I respect them all. The specifics differ. The longing is the same: that what we are is not extinguished by what is done to our bodies. That there is something in us that cannot be murdered.
The men and women who died in those camps knew that. Their murderers did not understand it then. And the governments that accommodated those murderers — through appeasement, through silence, through the calculated decision that confrontation was too costly — did not understand it either.
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And yet — our very survival becomes the provocation for the next assault.
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This is the paradox that no accommodation has ever resolved. We endure. We rebuild. We contribute — to science, to medicine, to law, to technology, to the arts, to every civilization that has ever reluctantly granted us residence. And that contribution, in the eyes of those who hate us, is not evidence of resilience. It is evidence of conspiracy. It is proof of an unfair advantage. It is the source of a simmering, ancient resentment that asks, in every generation, the same ugly questions dressed in new clothes:
What makes you so special? Why are you so arrogant? Why do you deserve more than me?
This hatred continues because survival itself is perceived as provocation. Because every generation of Jewish achievement is read not as contribution but as accusation. Because those who cannot reconcile their own circumstances with the simple fact that we refused to disappear require an explanation — and the explanation they reach for is always the same one. Not our work. Not our faith. Not the discipline of a people who, stripped of land and temple and legal standing, poured everything into the one thing that could not be confiscated: the life of the mind.
No. The explanation they reach for is malice. Manipulation. A hidden hand pulling the strings of a world that should, by their logic, belong to them.
It is an old lie. It has survived every refutation because it does not require evidence. It requires only envy, and envy is inexhaustible. And it has survived, above all, because too many people in too many generations chose to accommodate it rather than name it.
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The war with Iran brought this into the sharpest focus of my lifetime.
We watched precision bombing and drone warfare executed with technological coordination that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. We watched the largest coordinated burst of misinformation in human history — not improvised, but architected — perpetrated simultaneously across the worlds of radical Islam, Russia, China, and their aligned actors. And we watched, again, the familiar chorus of accommodation. The calls for restraint directed exclusively at the side that was attacked. The moral equivalence applied to the aggressor and the defender. The diplomatic hedging, the institutional hand-wringing, the carefully worded statements from people and organizations who could not bring themselves to say plainly what was happening and who was responsible.
That is cowardice. It has always been cowardice. It wears the costume of nuance but it is, at its core, the same accommodation that allowed the trains to run to Auschwitz while the world debated the appropriate diplomatic response.
I will say something here that costs me to say, because I do not say it as an endorsement and I do not say it without reservations that are real and significant. I do not admire Donald Trump. I did not vote for him. I find much of what he represents antithetical to the values I hold. And yet — the conditions that now exist for ending state-sponsored Islamic terrorism, for dismantling the ideological and financial infrastructure that has funded the hatred and the killing, have never been better in my lifetime. Not because of the elegance of the strategy. Not because of the character of the man. But because, for whatever combination of reasons, the accommodation stopped. The line was drawn. The response was not calibrated to avoid offense. It was calibrated to produce a result.
History will render its verdict. I render mine here, provisionally and without comfort: sometimes the world changes not because the right person does the right thing for the right reason, but because someone, for whatever reason, stops accommodating.
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I have broken a long family silence to write this. My parents were born in 1911, children of refugees who carried the weight of that silence across an ocean and passed it intact to the next generation. The silence was not cowardice. It was strategy — the strategy of people who understood, from bone-deep experience, that visibility invites targeting. You survive by not being seen.
I have chosen a different strategy. At 83, having completed 22 marathons and crossed the channels of Catalina and Molokai alone, having built companies, raised a family, and watched a great-granddaughter enter a world I am no longer certain is safe enough to receive her — I have chosen engagement over silence. My guiding philosophy is simple:
Don't lament. Engage.
That philosophy brought me to a speech by Geert Wilders in January, hosted by Stand With Us, where a man who has lived under around-the-clock protection for over two decades described, with surgical and unflinching clarity, a civilizational threat that much of the Western world continues to accommodate. Days earlier, my daughter had been near Bondi Beach on December 14th. Days later, my great-granddaughter was born. The convergence was not lost on me.
I drove home that evening with one question: What can I do to prevent the loss of lives?
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We will never eradicate those whose ideology has consumed their humanity, nor those who feel so powerless that violence becomes the only language available to them. That is the honest truth, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you another accommodation.
But we can build systems that identify them before they act. That monitor radicalization in real time. That give communities — Jewish and Non-Jewish communities, schools, houses of worship, public institutions — the warning they need to survive the ones we cannot stop. Not perfectly. Not always in time. But better — immeasurably better — than anything that has existed before in the entire history of this hatred.
For the past two years, I have been building exactly that. Hallucinations.cloud queries eight leading AI models simultaneously, surfaces contradictions and manipulations in real time, and provides the analytical infrastructure that individuals, families, communities, and governments need to identify threats before they become tragedies. H-Enterprise provides institutional content safety at scale. Circle5 protects families. Route5 functions as a community perimeter system — a Waze for the institutions most vulnerable to the violence that accommodation enables.
It is not a theory. It is deployed. It is operational. And it exists at the precise intersection of the two great threats of this moment: the weaponization of AI, and the resurgence of organized, ideologically-motivated violence against Jewish communities and the open societies that still, imperfectly, protect them.
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The accommodations have had their run.
The question is not whether antisemitism is real. It has always been real. The question is whether we have, finally, the tools and the will to meet it at the level of sophistication it now deploys against us.
I believe we do. I believe this is the moment. And I believe — as a great-grandfather, as a builder, as a Jewish person who has chosen engagement over silence, who has watched 200 generations of his family fight this same fight and refuses to hand it unresolved to the two hundred and first — that the obligation to act has never been clearer.
My great-granddaughter was born into a world that is not yet safe enough to receive her.
I intend to change that.
Don't lament. Engage.