For more than seven years, I have spoken regularly with anti-Zionists, including Palestinians, mostly online. Throughout, I openly displayed my Jewishness and my commitment to Jewish cultural continuity. That experience has changed how I understand the current wave of antisemitism.

Not because I found no hostility. I often encountered hostility, especially when I did not condemn Israel in the frame some people were looking for. But I also found something many Jews are rarely taught to expect: spaces where Jewish peoplehood was not treated as something shameful, illegitimate, or automatically doomed to disappear.

That creates a strange opening. The coast is not simply clear. But there are harbors we have not learned to recognize.

My family is not Orthodox, but we observe much of kashrut and celebrate Shabbat and the major Jewish holidays. When I wrote about those practices, I received little pushback. When I wrote about parts of Jewish history or the Jewish textual tradition that did not map neatly onto modern Zionism, I often encountered curiosity.

Sometimes, Palestinians or their supporters wished me a happy Jewish holiday. It felt like more than politeness. At times, it felt as if they had been waiting for permission to acknowledge Jewish life without betraying their own commitments. There was a sadness in it too, as though the conflict had made even a simple holiday greeting emotionally difficult.

That is not the whole story. Some people did say hateful things about Israel, Zionists, or Jews. But the holiday greetings revealed something else. Many people I encountered were not asking me to erase my Jewishness. They were looking for a way to relate to it.

I did not only speak about my Jewishness as private heritage or family memory. I spoke about the vitality and compelling nature of Judaism as things I wanted to strengthen.

One could imagine my position being seen as politically threatening. In Israel-Palestine, demographics are rarely neutral. Yet when I displayed this unapologetic desire for Jewish life to thrive and grow, the expected wall of hostility in Palestinian and anti-Zionist spaces simply did not materialize.

Most people did not respond as though Jewish growth itself were the problem. Some even gave upvotes.

The whole experience made me think of the classic line from U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address. Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to........

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