When They Come for the Jews First

I’m not Jewish, but I Hear the Signal Beneath the Slogans

This is not an essay about Gaza.
It is about the soul.
About what happens when grief is asked to choose sides.
When the suffering of one people is used to silence the sorrow of another.
As if compassion were some meager ration, to be hoarded or withheld.
As if the heart could not hold more than one wound at a time.

It’s really about how easy it is to love someone when you are looking them in the eye, in an exchange of pure conscious energy, in all its beauty and pain.

A Tapestry of Carnage

Something old and cruel has slipped back into the room – uninvited, but unmistakably familiar.

Our hearts ache with sorrow for the Palestinian people – war is hell, and their suffering is real, vast, and deserving of compassion. The sickening flattening of Gaza is part of a tapestry of violence we’re all tangled in now, where grief begets grief and bodies are buried beneath the slogans.

Here is another thread in that same tapestry – this one woven here, in America. It does nothing to diminish the unbearable grief of a Palestinian father who held the bodies of his children after their home was reduced to rubble. Compassion is not a finite resource. We are capable of mourning more than one tragedy at a time. It is not an act of injustice to acknowledge that something happened, and to say it plainly:

It was broad daylight in Washington D.C when a man walked up with a gun and opened fire. Yaron dropped first. Sarah tried to crawl away, arms trembling, dragging her body toward some imagined safety just out of frame – and he shot her again while she crawled. Not because she posed a threat. Not because there was some tactical ambiguity. But because hatred, when given permission, always wants to be thorough. There was no riot, no great national reckoning, no candlelight vigil on the Capitol steps. Just blood cooling on American pavement while the country refreshed Instagram.

Something as fraught and agonizing as the current conflict in Gaza demands to be understood in its totality. To speak only of one side’s pain is to confuse empathy with erasure. The agony of Israeli families burying their dead, and the anguish of Palestinian parents sifting through rubble for their children’s remains, are not mutually exclusive truths. They are part of the same unbearable human ledger. If we are to move forward at all, we must be willing to name the grief on both sides, and to sit – uncomfortably – in its full weight.

October 7 Was the Match

Gaza did not spontaneously combust. It was kicked off – unambiguously, barbarically – when Hamas crossed a border and turned a music festival into a mass grave, when families were butchered in their beds before a single bomb fell on Gaza. It was not a metaphor. It was not a symbol. It was a real and terrible morning where Jews were hunted through their homes like animals, where children were burned alive in safe rooms, where women were raped beside the corpses of their friends and paraded like trophies.

A festival of annihilation, broadcast in real time. And somehow – grotesquely – it’s being reframed as resistance. On campus, antisemitism now wears the robes of virtue, wrapped in words like “decolonization,” where murder is theory and atrocity is metaphor. Online, it spreads through carousel posts in pastel fonts, as if genocide were a branding problem. And I find myself wondering how many of us will recognize this moment for what it is: not a spike, not a phase, but a signal. The sort of signal history always gives in advance, to those willing to feel it.

If we’re serious about justice, about understanding how we got here, then we have to think a bit deeper about history – about how old these patterns really are. Because antisemitism doesn’t just erupt. It evolves. It adapts. And one of the ways it has survived so long is by pretending to be something else. So let’s go back – before Gaza, before Israel – back to medieval Europe, where the same scapegoating impulse took a different shape.

From the Fields to the Ledger

It is one of history’s darker jokes that Jews are now condemned for excelling in the very professions they were once confined to by force. In medieval Europe, Jews were barred from owning land – the foundational asset of pre-modern wealth, power, and security. While Christian serfs toiled the soil, Jews were excluded from agriculture, forbidden the sword, and shut out of guilds. What remained was literacy – and the few professions that required it: finance, law, medicine. In short, they were left with the life of the mind and the ledger.

And so, through necessity rather than design, the Jew became a scribe, a lender, a lawyer. This was not because Jews had some ancestral affinity for compound interest, or because of a secret Talmudic cabal in Zurich. It was because, as always, they were told: you cannot go there – and so they went where they were allowed.

The irony, of course, is that having been pushed into roles deemed marginal or even sinful – usury was verboten to Christians – Jews were later castigated for occupying them. “Why do they control the banks?” is less a question than a confession: We told them to.

That Jews became prominent in finance and law is not evidence of conspiracy, but of resilience. They mastered the tools of survival in a society that left them with only tools, and no home to use them in. That they now excel in these fields is not a sign of undue power. It is a long echo of exclusion – transmuted, as it so often is in Jewish history, into competence. And competence, when displayed by those we once imagined beneath us, has always been a source of resentment.

The Mirror and the Math

But antisemitism is not some medieval glitch; it predates the Middle Ages by centuries. What has made the Jew so enduringly hated is not his heresy, nor his homeland, nor even his wealth – which, contrary to popular belief, tends to come with roughly the same tax burden and mortgage anxiety as everyone else’s. It is his moral imagination. By the time of the Roman Empire – think first century BCE – Jews were already being resented for their refusal to bow before local gods, for their strange insistence on ethical monotheism, for taking the Sabbath off when everyone else was busy worshiping power. The Jew did not introduce monotheism as a fun theological upgrade – now with fewer gods! – but as a deeply inconvenient ethical proposition: that human life is accountable. That history has direction. That there is a God, and that this God – brace yourself – cares what you do.

This was not a comforting idea. It didn’t flatter emperors or soothe tyrants. It did not offer transcendence through chanting or conquest. It offered something far more intrusive: moral scrutiny. The kind of metaphysical eye contact that makes even good people start nervously rechecking their receipts. To introduce a God who judges is to introduce a mirror, and the Jew, for millennia, has borne the burden of being the one holding it up.

You would think, in a cultural moment obsessed with injustice, that this would be a point of solidarity. But in the new orthodoxy – where oppression can be calculated like a calorie count, and moral status is doled out according to melanin and ancestral victimhood – the Jew has become suspect. Not for doing wrong, but for refusing to fit neatly into the spreadsheet. He is now cast as “white adjacent,” or worse, as “oppressor-coded,” despite being a people that has been evicted, exiled, ghettoized, and genocided with alarming historical regularity.

And so the oldest resentments are reborn in PowerPoint fonts and TikTok cadence. The very people who first taught the world to name evil are now being accused of embodying it. The Jew, once a stateless wanderer clinging to ethical law like a raft, is now recast as a sort of moral hall monitor – irritating, uninvited, and ruining the vibes.

But the tragedy is not that he’s mistaken for powerful. It’s that he’s punished for carrying the same message he always has: that actions have consequences, that cruelty is not a construct, and that truth – however inconvenient – is not whatever helps your side win. The ones who held up the world’s first moral yardstick are once again being struck with it. Not because they abandoned it. But because they never put it down.

The First Omen

If you want to understand where a society is heading, watch how it treats its Jews. Again and again, antisemitism has not been the end of a descent – it has been the beginning.

In medieval England, the expulsion of Jews in 1290 came with the rise of absolutist monarchy and the silencing of dissent. In Spain, the Inquisition began not with heretics, but with Jews forced to convert – soon followed by centuries of religious terror and imperial decline. In Germany, Jews were stripped of rights and humanity long before the war machine turned outward. In Stalinist Russia, Jews were purged as “cosmopolitans” just before the terror widened to devour artists, writers, and scientists. Even in the Roman Empire, antisemitism foretold the persecution of Christians and the broader collapse into autocracy.

History does not whisper. It tolls. And always the bell is the same.

The tyrant does not begin with the prison or the scaffold. He begins with the Jew. Not because the Jew is the greatest threat, but because he is the oldest warning. The canary in the pit. The ember that will not go out. The one who says: There is a law above your law. And it will judge you.

And so he must be silenced.

It begins in pamphlets and whispers. It moves through the gates of the university, down into the alleys of politics, and out across the square. Soon the world tilts. And when it does, the Jew is the first to fall.

But never the last.

The regimes that come for the Jew do not stop there. They cannot. For the thing they hate is not the man, but the mirror. The conscience. The idea that power is not its own permission.

You want to know where the world is going, look where the hatred is gathering. If it gathers at the door of the synagogue, you already know the rest.

The end is written in the beginning.