American Jewish parents are asking how to prepare their children for a world where antisemitism is once again visible.

The recent Democratic primary in New York’s 10th Congressional District offered two different political answers.

I think it exposed a much deeper parenting question.

Brad Lander and Dan Goldman, two Jewish, Zionist candidates, offered different answers to the question of how to keep Jews safe in a frightening time.

Lander and Goldman are serious men who genuinely care about Jewish safety. Both built explicit plans for confronting antisemitism into their campaigns for the second most Jewish congressional district in the country.

Lander won by nearly two to one.

I’ve read the analysis. I’ve read the headlines. What I haven’t read is anyone asking the question I can’t stop thinking about:

What are we teaching our children to carry inside themselves — and is what we’re giving them a foundation, or a wound?

Two strategies. One missing conversation.

The Forward’s Joel Swanson wrote perceptively that the Lander-Goldman race wasn’t really about Israel. It was a contest between two ancient strains of Jewish thought: the universalist strand that insists Jewish ethics point outward first, toward solidarity with all who suffer; and the particularist strand that insists loyalty to one’s own people is the structural precondition for Jewish survival.

Both readings are genuinely grounded in our tradition. Both have been tested by history. Neither one is wrong.

But both are arguments about which adults will protect Jewish children. Neither is an argument about what we are building inside those children before they are old enough to vote — or to face a slur in a school hallway, a hostile professor, a chanted crowd outside their campus Hillel.

The question I’m asking isn’t primarily political. It’s developmental. Before children become voters, advocates, or leaders, they become people. The emotional habits they acquire at home become part of the way they experience the world—including what it means to be Jewish. That’s where I find pioneering family therapist Virginia Satir’s work especially illuminating.

What we are actually transmitting

I’ve spent decades understanding how fear travels between generations. What I’ve learned—and what Satir spent her life documenting—is that children don’t primarily absorb our beliefs. They absorb our emotional posture toward the world.

When we talk to our children about antisemitism, most of us — with the best of intentions — transmit one of two things.

The first is fear organized as vigilance: They have always hated us. They always will. Be careful. Be aware. Be ready. This produces children who are alert, often informed, sometimes brave. It also, over time, produces children whose Jewish identity is structured around threat. They know what Jews are against. They are less sure what Jews are for.

The second is pride organized as grievance: No people has suffered as we have. No hatred is as old or as persistent as ours. Our pain is singular. This produces children with a........

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