There is a reason a group like a new Jewish Defense League (JDL) can sound compelling right now. It has emerged in a moment when Jewish fear is not theoretical, when many Jews feel newly exposed in public, newly watched, newly measured, newly alone. Recent research found that over half of Jewish Americans reported experiencing some form of antisemitism in the past year, and nearly one in five reported assault, threats, or verbal harassment because they were Jewish. Separate reporting this week found that 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks globally in more than three decades.

So when a group like JDL 613 presents itself not only as a response to antisemitic violence, but as a brotherhood for Jewish men — a place where frightened, isolated, or angry men can find strength, purpose, belonging, and even an answer to loneliness or suicidal despair — that appeal should not be dismissed with a wave of the hand. It should be taken seriously precisely because the wounds it is trying to speak to are real, even if the vision of manhood and Jewish power it offers is deeply troubling.

That includes wounds many men barely know how to name. In the United States, men still die by suicide at dramatically higher rates than women, and federal health authorities continue to describe loneliness and social isolation as a major public-health danger. A movement that offers not only vigilance but brotherhood can therefore feel, to some Jewish men, less like extremism than like oxygen. And that is what makes this morally serious.

Because a group like this is never just offering safety. It is also offering a script for manhood. It is saying: the world is dangerous, softness is naïve, brotherhood is forged by enemies, and moral clarity comes through readiness for force. That is an old script. It is seductive because it turns fear into posture. It turns loneliness into tribe. It turns confusion into purpose. And it tells men, especially scared men, that the quickest path out of humiliation is hardness.

But Jewish history should make us suspicious of any brotherhood that requires dehumanization to feel whole. The old JDL was not simply “assertive.” It was tied to bombings, plots, and a theology of force that crossed into terror. The new iteration appears to draw from the same Kahanist inheritance, which is not a doctrine of Jewish dignity alone, but a doctrine that easily slides from defense into contempt, and from contempt into violence.

That matters because Judaism does not ask Jews to be passive. It is simply false to say our tradition teaches the Jewish equivalent of “turn the other cheek.” The Talmud preserves the principle that if someone comes to kill you, you rise to stop him first. And yet the same tradition also insists that strength is not the same thing as rage. Ben Zoma’s famous teaching in Pirkei Avot does not define the mighty man as the conqueror of enemies, but as the one who conquers his own impulse. Elsewhere, the Psalmist commands: seek peace and pursue it. That tension is not a flaw in Judaism. It is its genius.

Judaism permits self-defense. It does not sanctify domination. It allows force under necessity. It does not make force into identity. It knows that there are Amaleks in the world — those who prey on the weak, those who strike the stragglers, those who treat Jewish vulnerability as an opportunity. The command to remember Amalek is part of Jewish memory because forgetting predatory hatred is dangerous. But Amalek has always been one of the most morally volatile ideas in Jewish life, precisely because once it becomes a floating label for everyone we fear or hate, it stops being memory and becomes fantasy. Then a people commanded to remember evil becomes tempted to imitate it.

That is the everyday question for the Jewish man after October 7: What stance do I take in a world where antisemitic violence is real, where Jewish institutions need protection, where some of my fellow Jews are traumatized and angry, and where I still do not want violence to become the grammar of my soul?

The answer cannot be helplessness. It cannot be denial. It cannot be pretending that a mezuzah on the door or a kippah on the head carries no risk. It is reasonable for Jewish communities to invest in security, training, vigilance, and legal self-protection. It is reasonable for Jewish men to learn how to keep themselves and others safe. None of that contradicts Jewish ethics. But the answer also cannot be a masculinity built on menace.

A Jewish man does not become more faithful by becoming more enchanted with force. He does not become more whole by needing an enemy to feel alive. He does not heal loneliness by joining a circle that teaches him contempt is courage. Brotherhood that cannot cry, reflect, hesitate, or distinguish between defense and vengeance is not brotherhood. It is radicalization with a minyan-like aesthetic.

Perhaps the harder calling is this: to be visibly unbroken without becoming spiritually brutal. To be ready to defend without becoming eager to strike. To gather Jewish men not only around fear, but around friendship, grief, prayer, accountability, mental health, and honest speech. To build communities where a Jewish man can admit he is scared, lonely, furious, or unraveling without needing to cosplay as a warrior to remain respectable. That may be less thrilling than militant brotherhood. It is also much harder.

But it is closer to the best of Jewish tradition. The Jewish man in this moment should be neither a victim nor an avenger. He should be a guardian: alert, disciplined, grounded, capable of protection, reluctant about violence, and unwilling to let hatred tell him what kind of man he must become. That is not weakness. That is covenantal strength.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)