Two years ago, on the joyous eve of Simchat Torah, the Hebrew calendar’s exuberant celebration marking the culmination of the annual Torah reading cycle, Hamas shattered the world for Jews everywhere. It was Oct. 7, 2023, a Saturday morning, when families in southern Israel should have been dancing with sacred scrolls under open skies and singing praises to the God who delivered His people from bondage. Instead, the air filled with the screams of the dying and the gunfire of terrorists who poured across the border like a plague from hell.

In a meticulously planned atrocity, the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust, Hamas terrorists and their allies slaughtered 1,200 souls and abducted 251 more into the bowels of Gaza. They rampaged through kibbutzim such as Be’eri and Kfar Aza, gunning down grandmothers in their kitchens, hunting festivalgoers at the Nova music site where 364 young lives were extinguished in a frenzy of hate, and dragging people into vans bound for tunnels of torment. The victims weren’t soldiers or settlers in disputed lands. They were Jews at prayer, at play, at peace — targeted for the singular sin of existing as Jews.

This wasn’t collateral damage from a military operation. It was a 21st-century pogrom, in which the attackers filmed their depravities and broadcast them as trophies. Hamas’s charter calls for the extermination of Jews — their actions that Sabbath morning made it manifest. And as the world watched in horror, or, in too many corners, in calculated silence, the aftershocks rippled across oceans, landing hardest on American shores.

For Jews here in America, the images weren’t abstract geopolitics. They were visceral nightmares, stirring the ghosts of ancestors who fled Cossack swords and Nazi gas chambers. “It could have been us,” became a whispered refrain in synagogues from New York to Los Angeles, a dread that clawed at our collective subconscious. Why? Because the Oct. 7 massacre wasn’t confined to Israel’s borders. It weaponized an ancient vulnerability, reminding every Jew that hatred doesn’t need provocation — it needs only prey.

Consider the math of fear. In the two years since, antisemitic incidents in the United States have exploded, shattering records and exposing the fragility of our assimilation. The Anti-Defamation League tallied over 10,000 attacks from Oct. 7, 2023, to Sept. 24, 2025 — a 200% surge from the prior year, with bomb threats against Jewish institutions tripling and assaults on individuals quadrupling. Synagogues vandalized with swastikas, Jewish students harassed on Ivy League campuses, kosher markets firebombed — these weren’t anomalies but a tidal wave, often cloaked in “anti-Zionist” rhetoric that served as modern cover for age-old Jew-hatred.

A 2024 American Jewish Committee survey found that 9 in 10 American Jews believe antisemitism had spiked since the attacks, with 7 in 10 feeling less secure in their own country. Campuses, once bastions of free thought, became battlegrounds: Over 3,000 antisemitic incidents were logged at anti-Israel rallies alone, where........

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