Every year, the ADL publishes a report documenting the rise of antisemitism in America. Every year, the numbers are worse than the year before. Every year, the report is followed by a press release, a new content moderation agreement with Meta, a call for stronger hate crime legislation, and wealthy Jews writing enormous checks to fund it all.
Antisemitic incidents in 2025 broke all previous annual records — for the fifth year in a row. An organization that spent over a century positioning itself as the Jewish community’s shield against Jew-hatred has watched antisemitism surge to historic levels on its watch, and its answer is another report, another pressure campaign, as if the problem of Jewish hatred in America will be solved by adjusting an algorithm.
It’s time to ask a different question entirely. Not “how do we fight antisemitism,” but rather “why is this happening to us, and what are we missing?”
The Haggadah that we read each year on Passover has a curious obsession. It insists, repeatedly and almost nervously, on a single point: God redeemed Israel from Egypt not through an angel, not through a seraph (a heavenly fire-being), not through any messenger. God Himself came down and struck Egypt. The Haggadah cites the verse:
Why does the Haggadah labor this point four times in a row?
The Sages teach that four out of five Israelites never left Egypt. They derive this from a single word:
The word “armed,” chamushim, can also mean “one-fifth,” and from this they concluded that only one in five Israelites walked out of Egypt alive.
What happened to all these people?
They didn’t flee to Pharaoh’s side or fight against Moses — they simply couldn’t bring themselves to leave. They were absorbed into Egyptian society beyond recovery, and lost to Jewish history.
These were not people living in a remote province who had missed the news. They were there for all of it: the Nile turning to blood, the frogs, the hail, the locusts, the firstborn dying in a single night. They witnessed the most sustained display of divine power in human history, up close, over many months.
And they still did not see God’s hand.
Why not? Rabbi Yehuda Leon Ashkenazi explains that these Israelites had a perfectly good explanation for everything they witnessed. Moses was a charismatic leader who organized a successful revolt. Natural disasters weakened the Egyptian empire. Political conditions shifted in Israel’s favor. And here is the thing — they weren’t wrong. Every one of those explanations was factually accurate. Moses was a remarkable leader. Egypt was weakened by disaster. The problem wasn’t that they were lying to themselves. The problem was that they never asked who was behind it.
They weren’t stupid — they were trained, by generations of exile, to read history through the categories of politics and human agency. The idea that God Himself was acting, that the plagues were a divine message addressed specifically to them, was simply not a category their minds could process.
And so they stayed in Egypt. Their blindness cost them everything — they and their descendants were erased from the story of God’s chosen people, written out of the covenant they could not bring themselves to see.
Now consider a man named Jethro, the priest of Midian. He was not in Egypt at the time of the plagues. He witnessed nothing — not the Nile turning to blood, not the darkness, not the death of the firstborn. He heard about the Exodus the way rumors travel across the ancient world: fragments of news, passed from traveler to traveler, arriving weeks later and far away.
And yet his response was immediate:
Think about what that means. Jethro was a pagan priest — a man whose entire life was built around other gods. He had no prior commitment to the God of Israel, no reason to read the Exodus as a divine message, no stake in the conclusion he reached. He simply heard what happened, asked himself who was behind it, and the answer was obvious to him.
The four out of five Jews who stayed in Egypt had every advantage Jethro lacked. They were there. They saw it with their own eyes. They lived through every plague. And that is precisely what made it harder for them to see clearly. They were living through it day by day, plague by plague — always focused on what was directly in front of them, always responding to the latest development, never stepping back far enough to see the whole picture. Jethro heard the Exodus as a complete story, with a beginning and an end, and what he saw clearly was that no human explanation could account for all of it.
Rabbi Ashkenazi found this deeply troubling. “Terrible, momentous things occur in our history, and the reaction of the Jews is very strange — it is incomprehensible.” The nations surrounding Israel heard about the Exodus and feared the God of Israel. Jethro understood the significance of what happened and abandoned his idols. “Only the Jews themselves harbor doubt.”
This is the central spiritual failure of American Jewish life today.
When Tucker Carlson slanders American Jews as disloyal, the ADL counts the incident and publishes another report. When campus mobs blockade Jewish students, Jewish organizations file Title VI complaints and demand university presidents testify before Congress. Antisemitism is a practical problem, and practical problems have practical solutions — better laws, more advocacy, stronger content moderation. Nobody stops to ask whether something else entirely is going on.
God acts in history — not as a vague background force, but directly. He uses nations and enemies to send messages to His people. Rabbi Yaakov Moshe Charlop, writing in Jerusalem in the early twentieth century, explains that antisemitism is not random hatred. It is what happens when Jews forget who they are. “When the Jewish people forget their own holiness and greatness… that is when antisemites come and attack them, striking and trampling them with arrogance.”
God’s challenge to American Jews today is simple, but one most people do not want to hear. “Who are you? Are you a Jew, or are you an American who happens to be Jewish?” For decades, American Jews could sidestep this question. They could be both American and Jewish; they didn’t have to choose. But the surging antisemitism sweeping America today, the constant accusation of dual loyalty, is God making the question unavoidable.
This is not easy. The Israelites in Egypt were not fools, and neither are American Jews today. When you are living through something — when the hostility is coming from your campus, your workplace, your Twitter feed, your congressional district — it is very difficult to step back and see the whole picture, to stop and ask the larger question.
But that is exactly what the Haggadah is warning us about. The four out of five did not stay in Egypt because they were weak or wicked. They stayed because they were too close to see clearly. American Jews today are in the same position — living through something momentous, responding to each piece of it, and at risk of missing what it all means.
Legislation and advocacy have their place. But when that is the only response — when Jews never stop to ask why this is happening, and who is truly behind it — they will never hear the question that actually matters.
In my new book, Countdown: American Jews and God’s Plan for Redemption, I argue that the crisis facing American Jews today is not primarily a political crisis. It is a divine summons. The antisemitism, the identity confusion, the intermarriage, the estrangement from Israel, the Tucker Carlsons and campus mobs — all of it is God refusing to let His people forget who they are. Responding to this with legislation and algorithm audits is the precise mistake four out of five Jews made in Egypt. They had an explanation for everything. They understood nothing.
The ADL is tracking incidents. The Federations are lobbying. Congressional hearings are being convened. None of it addresses the question that actually matters: Who did this? And what is He trying to say?
May American Jews, in this moment of crisis, have the wisdom to hear what God is saying to them — before it is too late.
