Editor’s Notes: Future of Jewish Diaspora should follow spirit of ‘October 8 Jewry’
ZVIKA KLEIN
For world Jewry, October 7, 2023, was that violent intrusion. The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. What followed on October 8 was something nobody predicted: a mass awakening.
History doesn’t wait for an invitation. It storms in unannounced.
The data is incredible: 43% of American Jews increased their Jewish engagement in the immediate aftermath. Eighteen months later, after the news cycle moved on, after the social media storms quieted, 31% were still more engaged.
Nearly a third of American Jews fundamentally changed their relationship to their identity, and it stuck. This doesn’t happen. Communal energization fades. People return to their lives. Except this time they didn’t.
We are living through a once-in-a-generation rupture. The question is whether Jewish leadership has the imagination and guts to meet it.
The awakening nobody saw coming
October 7 revealed that the world we thought we lived in was a mirage.
Liberal Jews discovered that their progressive allies had no solidarity to offer when Jews were slaughtered. The movements they’d marched with, the causes they’d funded, and the friends they’d made. Worse: many celebrated it. Many justified it. Many immediately pivoted to blaming the victims.
The social psychologists have a term for this: “traumatic invalidation.” When your suffering gets denied. When the worst thing that’s happened to your people in 80 years is met with “yes, but” and “context” and “what about.”
It was enlightening.
Israeli-American actress Noa Tishby felt it viscerally: “The Jewish DNA has woken up.” Even she, a lifelong liberal Zionist, felt something primal shift: “Until October 7, I’ve always been a Zionist, but never militaristic. Until October 7.”
That “until” is doing a lot of work. It’s the sound of scales falling from eyes.
The data tells the story
Seventy-three percent of American Jews now say they want to learn more about Israel and Jewish history. Want to learn. Actively seeking it out.
Meanwhile, 40% of Jewish parents with kids in non-Jewish private schools are reconsidering their choices. Day school applications are up. Birthright saw applications for volunteer programs flood in. To work, to harvest crops for Israeli farmers whose workers were called up, to rebuild devastated communities. Seven thousand young Jews from 50 countries have already gone. Hundreds more apply every week.
North American aliyah jumped 12%. French aliyah doubled.
These represent significant tectonic shifts. And here’s the thing: this window won’t stay open forever. “The Surge continues,” one Jewish Federation report warned, “but is not going to last forever. If we are going to meet people’s needs, we must respond now.”
So. What’s the response?
Think bigger
For decades, Jewish institutional strategy has been incremental. A new program here, a modest initiative there, and a committee to study the declining engagement numbers.
That timidity ends now. It has to. This moment demands the kind of bold, generational thinking that built the infrastructure of Jewish life after the Holocaust, after 1948, after 1967.
Here’s what audacity looks like.
Deploy them for two years to cities where Jewish infrastructure is thin. Phoenix, Charlotte, Omaha. They teach Hebrew, history, texts to adults and kids, in living rooms and community centers. Cost: maybe $50 million a year. That’s a rounding error in Jewish philanthropic capacity. The return on investment? Immeasurable.
Netflix for Jewish Education. If people want to learn, make learning irresistible. Fund a streaming platform with world-class production values and compelling storytelling.
Ken Burns on Jewish history. A thriller-style documentary series on Mossad. An animated show teaching Hebrew to kids that’s actually good. Make it free or close to it. Pour $100 million into production. If you build it well, they will come.
Service Year as Jewish Rite of Passage. Birthright changed a generation by sending young Jews to Israel for ten days. The post-October 7 volunteer phenomenon proved something deeper. This generation wants to contribute.
Make service the defining experience of young Jewish adulthood. Real, meaningful, difficult work. Create structured tracks: agricultural work in Israeli border communities, teaching in struggling Diaspora Jewish schools, supporting immigrant absorption, campus advocacy training. Fund it properly. Triple Birthright’s volunteer budget to $75 million. Welcome any Jew between 18 and 30 who wants to spend weeks or months serving the Jewish people.
The Jews who come back from these experiences don’t drift away. They’ve invested sweat equity. They’ve felt what it means to be part of something larger than themselves. That bond doesn’t break.
Peoplehood Labs. Thousands of newly awakened Jews feel politically homeless. They’ve abandoned progressive spaces that abandoned them first. They don’t fit easily into traditional Jewish institutions either. They’re looking for something new.
So build it. Launch experimental community spaces in major cities. Think co-working spaces meets cultural centers. Beautiful design. Great coffee. No membership dues the first year. Offer serious Jewish learning, host Israeli artists and thinkers, and provide space for organizing. Make them places where the October 8th generation can build the Jewish future on their own terms.
The October 8th Innovation Fund. A $100 million venture fund for bold Jewish experiments. Back 100 ideas at $1 million each. Expect half to fail. Fund the other half to scale. This is how you get innovation: through creative destruction, through taking risks.
The Global Imperative
The post-October 7 era revealed something profound. Diaspora Jews and Israeli Jews need each other in ways we’d forgotten.
When young Americans landed in Israel to volunteer, Israelis wept. “We thought we were alone,” they said. When Diaspora Jews faced exploding antisemitism on campuses and city streets, Israel became family.
This bond needs architecture. Convene a Global Jewish Assembly. Make it flexible, urgent, driven by the October 8th generation. Make it a rapid-response network: when a synagogue in France needs emergency security, funds flow immediately. When Jewish students face expulsion for Zionism, legal teams deploy. When a community is under threat anywhere, Jews everywhere mobilize.
Create exchange programs for mid-career professionals: a Brazilian educator teaching in London, an American tech worker supporting Ethiopian immigrants in Israel, an Israeli trauma counselor working with French Jews facing harassment. Build the bonds that make “all Jews are responsible for one another” more than a slogan.
This era is about whether we have the courage to believe that this moment is what it feels like: a hinge point in Jewish history.
Tishby said the Jewish DNA woke up. She’s right. But DNA doesn’t determine destiny. Choices do.
We can watch this awakening slowly fade as memory dims and comfort returns. We can go back to incremental thinking and committee meetings. We can let the October 8th Jews drift back into disengagement because we had nothing worthy of their energy to offer.
Or we can meet this moment with the ambition it deserves.
Build institutions that reflect the vitality of the awakening. Fund programs at a scale that matches the hunger for meaning. Welcome home, the Jews who discovered they’ve been in exile from their own identity.
Ten years from now, we should look back and see twice as many kids in Jewish day schools. A generation of young leaders who found their purpose in service. Communities that are safe and proud. A global Jewish people that proved stronger than the forces that tried to break it.
This is our 1967. Our 1948.
What will we build?
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