The Terrible Price

On Gaza, Antisemitism, and the Heartbreaking Burden of Being Jewish Today

Precious Child, by Sandu Liberman

I’ve struggled with how to write this post. How to be honest without being incendiary. How to speak from the ache in my heart without feeding the flames already consuming so much of the world. But I cannot remain silent.

What Israel is doing in Gaza—its war against Hamas—is both a military campaign and a moral crucible. It is a response to one of the most horrific acts of terror committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust: the massacre of Israeli civilians, the kidnapping of children, the desecration of bodies, and the brazen joy taken in doing so. These acts demanded a reckoning. They demanded that Israel defend its people with clarity and force.

But this war is not clean. No war is. Innocents are dying in Gaza. Families are displaced. Children are starving. The images are unbearable. And I do bear them. I read about hospitals without power, wards lit by cell phones and candles; schools turned into crowded shelters where bread is rationed and water tastes of rust; aid trucks stalled at checkpoints while mothers scan lists for missing names. Nights rattle with drones; mornings begin with dust in the lungs and the geometry of new ruins. I carry this with grief, with horror, with the heavy knowledge that peace will not rise from ash unless we plant something better in the soil than vengeance.

Still, I believe something irreversible has been set in motion.

This war—no matter how one views its tactics or its targets—has ripped the veil from a lie we were all taught to believe: that antisemitism was a relic of the past. That the world had learned. That Jews, especially in the West, had finally earned a safe place to call home, not just in Israel, but in America, in the so-called enlightened societies of the modern age.

But here we are.

Jewish students are harassed on college campuses for daring to express grief. Synagogues are vandalized. Small businesses boycotted. Friends go silent. Colleagues avoid eye contact. Suddenly, we are suspect again. Not because of anything we’ve done, but because of who we are. Because Israel—that small, embattled strip of land where Jewish history aches through every stone—is at war. And when Israel bleeds, the world sharpens its teeth not just at the State, but at the People.

This is the ancient logic of scapegoating. It is as old as Pharaoh. As vile as pogroms. And as predictable as fire follows kindling.

And yet there is a darker truth we must speak aloud:The Jews of today have become the sacrificial lamb on the altar of history.

We are paying the price in hate mail and slurs, in boycotts and broken friendships, in locked synagogues and armed guards. We are expected to walk silently, to nod in empathy when the world demands our condemnation, but remain mute when our own dead are forgotten. We are being offered up—not by our own hand, but by the tides of history—as the generation who must bear the fury, the confusion, the backlash, so that one day our children might live in an Israel that is not constantly at war for its very soul.

And isn’t that the ancient pattern? Abraham, Isaac, the scapegoat cast into the wilderness. Jewish bodies offered again and again to sanctify the future. The difference now is that we have a nation. A fragile one, yes—but one that fights back. One that says, “Never again.” One that risks international isolation to defend its right to exist, even as it struggles with its own conscience in the fog of war.

But make no mistake: today’s Jews are paying the price.Not just in Israel, but in Vienna, London, New York, and Los Angeles. In universities, in boardrooms, in everyday spaces where the word “Jew” has again become loaded, dangerous, whispered behind cupped hands or shouted through masked faces.

And yet I believe—I must believe—that this unbearable chapter will lead to a different future.

There will come a day when the fury dies down. When the ceasefire holds. When the dead are buried and remembered. And Israel—if it survives this trial—will be different.

Stronger. Maybe. Wiser. I hope. Safer. God willing.

And that safety—a true, enduring safety for the Jewish people—will have come at a staggering cost. Not just in lives lost in Gaza and Israel. But in the heartbreak echoing through Jewish homes across the diaspora. In the reawakening of a terror we thought we had outgrown. In the quiet realization that no matter how much we assimilate, contribute, and create, we are always one crisis away from being cast out again.

So yes, it is a terrible price.But it is not for nothing.

We are the generation standing between memory and survival. Between the ghosts of the past and the promise of a future Israel that does not just exist, but thrives. An Israel that no longer has to justify its right to be. An Israel that is not haunted by its own impermanence.

That is the prayer. That is the sacrifice.That is the inheritance.

And though it breaks my heart to see how high that price is, I still choose to believe in the future it might buy.

For our children.For their children.For peace.