Solidarity Sunday and the Test of Moral Memory

Solidarity Sunday was not created as a symbolic gesture. It emerged as a response to something far more unsettling: the realization that moral clarity, once assumed,  o can no longer be guaranteed.

After October 7, many Jews believed—reasonably—that the scale and nature of the violence would produce a moment of recognition. That the following day would bring understanding. That history, finally confronted with itself, would speak plainly. Instead, something else happened. Within days, Jewish students were being shouted down on the campuses of America’s  elite universities, excluded from public spaces, and treated not as victims of terror but as embodiments of a grievance narrative they did not author.

This reversal is not merely political. It is civilizational.

Solidarity Sunday exists because the expectation that “everyone knows this is wrong” proved false.

Antisemitism Is Not a Crisis. It Is a Constant.

What makes antisemitism uniquely resilient is not only its longevity, but its ability to present itself as reasoned, enlightened, even virtuous. Each generation inherits the comforting belief that this time is different—that hatred now wears better clothes, speaks the language of justice, and therefore cannot possibly be the same old thing. History counters with a darker narrative. Antisemitism does not announce itself as bigotry; it arrives as explanation. It persuades ordinary people that their silence is thoughtful, their distance is balanced, and their reluctance to speak is evidence of sophistication rather than fear.

One of the enduring errors of modern discourse is the belief that antisemitism appears only in moments of extremity. In truth, it is one of history’s most stable and consistent ideas—remarkably adaptive, endlessly repackaged, and always justified as something other than hatred.

It has worn many disguises: religious accusation, racial theory, economic resentment, revolutionary ideology, anti-imperialism, and now, increasingly, moral activism untethered from historical knowledge.

What changes is not the animus, but the vocabulary.

When Jews are blamed collectively for the actions of a state, when their grief is treated as suspect, when violence against them is contextualized while violence by others is individualized, we are not witnessing a new phenomenon. We are witnessing an old one finding contemporary permission.

The Category Error That Enables Silence

A central confusion has allowed this moment to metastasize: the insistence on reframing antisemitism as a geopolitical debate.

This is not a conflict between sympathy for Palestinians and concern for Jews. It is not an argument about borders, governments, or military strategy. Those are legitimate discussions, but they are not the issue at hand.

The issue is far more basic.

When Jewish people—wherever they live—are harassed, threatened, or told to justify their existence, the question is no longer political. It is ethical.

And ethics, by definition, demand response.

The Quiet Question No One Escapes

History is not moved primarily by crowds, but by thresholds. Moments shift when enough individuals decide that private discomfort is preferable to public cowardice. The tragedy is not that hatred exists—that is a constant—but that opposition so often arrives late, once the social cost has been paid by others. Solidarity, offered early, is preventative. Offered late, it becomes commemorative. The difference between the two is measured in damage already done.

History does not ask most people to be heroic. It asks something far more uncomfortable: to be authentic, to be true to themselves and to the humanity in others.

Are you willing to say that this is wrong?

Are you willing to say it out loud?

Are you willing to say it when it costs you social ease?

You may have Jewish friends. Jewish colleagues. Jewish neighbors. You may share meals, holidays, and memories. But morality  means nothing if it wilts  under pressure.

Silence does not preserve neutrality. It confers permission.

Solidarity Is Not Agreement. It Is Recognition.

Solidarity Sunday does not require ideological uniformity. It does not demand allegiance to a party, a nation, or a theology. It asks for something more elemental: the recognition that a people with a long, well-documented history of persecution should not have to explain—yet again—why hatred against them is unacceptable.

It is a refusal to participate in historical amnesia.

It is a refusal to pretend this is normal.

It is a refusal to outsource moral judgment to the loudest crowd.

The Only Serious Question Left

Every generation inherits a test it did not choose. This generation is learning, in real time, that moral language is fragile—and that courage is rarer than outrage.

The question is not whether antisemitism exists. History has answered that in centuries of venom and vitriol in the name of Christian faith, in the edicts of kings and prices, and in numberlous pogroms.

The question is whether people will stop tolerating the intolerable, whether university administrators will find the moral courage to call out the only form of hate speech tolerated by the academy, whether the media will call out the unholy alliance of radical Islam and Marxism.

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Recognition, once clear, leaves no such thing as honorable silence.