“The Jews are witnesses to God.” — Blaise Pascal

Here’s a staggering idea. At least it is to me.

The existence of the Jewish people may be among the strangest phenomena in human history.

One of my great fascinations has long been the movement of the Jewish people through time, their resilience, their strengths, their remarkable gifts, and the overwhelming challenges they have faced. My wife once joked that I’m the Jewish Spike Lee—his passion being the story of Black America, mine the story of the Jews.

October 7, 2023 amplified many things. Something profound happened that day, certainly for those directly touched by the horrors, for the Israelis who lost friends, relatives, and neighbors. But also, I think, for Jews everywhere and anyone still capable of recognizing what it means when such brutality erupts into the world.

A fissure opened. A wound in history that never quite heals began to bleed once more, as it seems to do every seventy or hundred years. History has a way of bringing us again and again to the same moral reckonings.

As for that tragic day, I am often asked, sometimes with what seems like genuine curiosity, whether I am dwelling on something that has already been spoken about ad nauseam. Or worse, whether my unflagging attention to the October 7 pogrom is merely an excuse used to condone genocide. This is not the place to rebut those accusations..

But the questions they raise lead me back to something that has long fascinated me.

How does one explain the Jewish story, the ancient one and the modern one?

Just under a century ago, six million Jews were murdered—six million minds, six million lives filled with love, creativity, faith, and strength extinguished. Entire branches of a civilization were cut off at the root. And with them disappeared the generations that would have followed.

Yet within less than eighty years, the remnants of that same shattered people built a tiny nation that is now arguably one of........

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