You know the moment I’m talking about.

Maybe it was in a meeting. Maybe it was in a hallway, or on a Zoom call, or over lunch. Maybe it came from a boss, a colleague, a client. Maybe it was phrased gently. Maybe it wasn’t phrased at all—just a look, a pause, a sudden awareness that the room had rearranged itself around you.

But at some point after October 7, someone at your job turned to you—the Jewish one—and expected you to say something. To explain. To account for. To condemn.

Not because you had done anything. Not because you had said anything. Because you were Jewish, and something had happened in a country six thousand miles away, and apparently that made it yours to answer for.

If you’re a Jewish professional in America, there is a very good chance you know exactly what that moment felt like. And there is an equally good chance you have never fully talked about it.

This year, the federal government put a dollar figure on what that question cost at one institution. Columbia University agreed to pay $21 million[1]—the largest EEOC settlement for antisemitism in the agency’s sixty-year history—to resolve claims that Jewish employees were subjected to a hostile work environment after October 7. The claims process is open now, with a deadline of June 2, 2026. That is one university. The same thing happened at thousands of workplaces across the country where no one filed a claim—because most people had no idea they could.

Sometimes it was explicit. So, what do you think about what’s happening over there? Said with a weight that made it clear this was not a casual question. Said in a way that no one was asking your non-Jewish colleagues. Said in a way that assumed your answer would reveal something essential about you—your values, your loyalties, whether you were one of the good ones.

Sometimes it was softer. A colleague forwarding you an article with no comment, just a thought you’d want to see this. A manager checking in with a tone that felt less like concern and more like surveillance. An invitation to sign a statement that somehow only landed in your inbox.

And sometimes it wasn’t a question at all. It was an absence—the meeting you were no longer included in, the project that quietly moved to someone else, the conversation that stopped when you walked into the room. No one asked you anything. They just decided they already knew the answer.

Here is the part that is hard to explain to people who did not experience it: the question itself was not always the worst part. The worst part was what happened inside you when you heard it.

There was the flash of recognition—the instant understanding that you had been reclassified. You were no longer just a colleague, just a professional, just a person in the room. You were a Jewish person in the room, and that distinction, which had never seemed to matter before, suddenly mattered very much.

There was the calculation. How do I answer this without making things worse? How do I say enough to satisfy them without becoming the office’s designated spokesperson for an entire people? How do I keep my head down and still keep my dignity?

And under all of it, there was something older. Something you might not have been able to name in the moment, but that you felt in your body—a weight, a dread, a sense that this had happened before. Not to you, specifically. But to you.

The Oldest Question in the World

The dual loyalty accusation is not new. It is one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in existence—so old that most people who deploy it have no idea they are reaching for something with a two-thousand-year pedigree.

Jews in medieval Europe were accused of secret allegiance to one another at the expense of the Christian kingdoms they lived in. In early twentieth-century America, the charge was loyalty to international communism—or to international capitalism, depending on who was doing the accusing. During the Dreyfus affair in France, an innocent Jewish army officer was convicted of treason, and an entire country tore itself apart over whether a Jew could ever truly be French.

The specific accusation changes. The structure never does. You are not really one of us. Your true loyalty lies elsewhere. You cannot be trusted.

That is what your colleague was asking you, even if they did not know it. When they turned to you—and only you—and waited for you to explain, to account for, to distance yourself from a country and a conflict you may have no personal connection to at all, they were asking the oldest question Jews have ever been asked: Whose side are you really on?

The Part No One Talks About

Here is what I hear from Jewish professionals more than almost anything else: they are not sure whether what happened to them was real.

They know how they felt. They know something shifted. But they doubt their own experience, because nothing about it was dramatic enough to point to. There was no slur. No HR complaint. No clear-cut villain. Just a question, or a silence, or a look—and a feeling they cannot shake that they are being seen differently now.

So they minimize it. They tell themselves they are being oversensitive. They tell themselves it was just an awkward moment, that their colleague meant well, that it is not worth making a thing of. They absorb it, quietly, the way Jews have been absorbing these moments for centuries.

I want to tell you something: it was real.

The question was not innocent, even if it was asked innocently. Being singled out because of your identity—being made to account for a conflict, a country, a government that is not yours simply because of your ethnicity—is not an awkward moment. It is discrimination. And the fact that it did not come with a slur does not make it less so.

For a lot of Jewish professionals, the question was not a one-time event. It was the beginning of something.

Some describe a slow change in their standing at work—not anything overt, just a subtle recalibration. They are no longer quite as included. Their opinions carry slightly less weight. Their name comes up less often for opportunities. Nothing they could prove in a meeting or point to in an email, but unmistakable to the person living it.

Others describe an internal shift. They started editing themselves. Removing the Star of David necklace before a client meeting. Not mentioning their synagogue, their Israel trip, their family’s history—not because anyone asked them to stop, but because the question had taught them that visibility had a cost.

And some describe something harder to articulate: a grief. The loss of the assumption—one they had carried their entire professional lives without even knowing it—that they were seen as individuals first and Jews second. October 7 did not just change the world. It changed how the world saw them.

Here is what I need every Jewish professional reading this to understand: what I just described—the question, the shift, the quiet exclusion—is not just a feeling. In the law, it has a name. It is called disparate treatment—being singled out, treated differently from similarly situated colleagues, because of who you are.

Whether what happened to you is actionable depends on the particular circumstances—including the state you live in, whether the treatment was severe or pervasive enough to alter your working conditions, and whether you suffered what the law calls an adverse employment action. That means something tangible: a termination, a demotion, a reassignment, or some other concrete change in the terms, conditions, or privileges of your employment. Not every bad moment qualifies. But far more qualifies than most people think—and the bar is not nearly as high as you have probably been telling yourself it is.

If you are not sure whether your experience crosses that line, that is exactly the kind of question a civil rights attorney can help you answer. You do not have to figure it out alone.

You Were Not Imagining It

If any of this sounds familiar, I want you to know three things.

First: you were not imagining it. The feeling in your gut—the one that told you something had changed, even if you could not prove it—was not paranoia. It was pattern recognition. Your body knew what your mind was still trying to explain away, because this is something Jewish people have experienced in various forms for a very long time.

Second: you are not alone. I hear these stories constantly—from lawyers, doctors, bankers, tech workers, academics, people in every industry and at every level. The specifics differ but the experience is remarkably consistent. It is happening to far more people than you think, and almost no one is talking about it publicly, because every person I speak to thinks they are the only one.

Third: you do not have to absorb it. You do not have to minimize it. You do not have to tell yourself it was not that bad, or that your colleague did not mean it, or that making an issue of it would be worse than letting it go. The law provides remedies for what happened to you. And there are organizations—including The Lawfare Project—that exist specifically to make sure Jewish people who experience discrimination do not have to navigate it alone.

The question your colleague asked you was not new. Jews have been asked some version of it for thousands of years. But the answer does not have to be the one our grandparents gave—silence, assimilation, absorbing it and moving on.

You can name it. You can refuse it. And for the first time in a very long time, you can do something about it.

[1] Press Release, US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “In Largest EEOC Public Settlement in Almost 20 Years, Columbia University Agrees to Pay $21 Million to Resolve EEOC Antisemitism Charges” (Feb. 13, 2025), https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/largest-eeoc-public-settlement-almost-20-years-columbia-university-agrees-pay-21-million. The claims process opened December 4, 2025. See Press Release, EEOC, “$21 Million Payout Process Begins in Columbia University Antisemitism Settlement with EEOC” (Dec. 4, 2025), https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/21-million-payout-process-begins-columbia-university-antisemitism-settlement-eeoc.

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