Last Tuesday night, the author and podcaster Dan Senor told an enthusiastic crowd at New York’s 92nd Street Y that despite a rising tide of antisemitism and a backlash against Israel’s war in Gaza that has left Jews feeling isolated and vulnerable, the Jewish community had within its power to “create nothing short of a Jewish renaissance.”

If philanthropists and communities double down on supporting Jewish day schools, summer camps, adult Jewish education and gap years in Israel, “I’m optimistic about the Jewish future in the Diaspora, not because the challenges aren’t real they are, but because we really do have the tools to rebuild American Jewish life,” said Senor, delivering 92NY’s annual “The State of World Jewry” speech.

One week earlier, The New Republic published a long article by the journalist and academic Eric Alterman, titled “The Coming Jewish Civil War Over Donald Trump.” It too surveyed the state of world Jewry, but with a markedly different analysis. Alterman sees a Jewish community divided between an influential, politically conservative minority that unconditionally defends Israel and a majority that votes Democratic and prioritizes defending democracy in both Israel and the United States. On the extremes, meanwhile, is a far right that promotes Israel’s annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, and a far left that is non- or anti-Zionist.

For Alterman, the Jewish challenge won’t be resolved by funding Jewish identity programs but confronting, as one liberal Jewish leader tells him, “who gets to define what it means to be Jewish in the U.S.” Does being Jewish mean supporting a hard-right Israeli government and an illiberal Trump administration because it has vowed to fight antisemitism? Or does it mean, as Alterman writes, defending “educational and democratic institutions that have allowed [Jews] to become the safest, most secure, and most economically successful Jewish population to exist anywhere, anytime, ever”?

With the war in Gaza still raging, after 19 months that altered Jewish self-perceptions and perhaps their status in the United States, the two observers laid out visions of the present and future that are both diametrically opposed and in some ways complementary.

Senor, the co-author of the influential book “Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle” and host of the pro-Israel “Call Me Back” podcast,” focused on the resilience of Israel and the rise of antisemitism in the United States. He acknowledged Israel’s “internal fractures,” but also said it has........

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