Why Do They Hate Us?
Originally published on Gimme Some Torah by Rabbi Eli Garfinkel on September 25, 2026.
The cover of Dara Horn’s latest book, the inspiration for my Yom Kippur Kol Nidre sermon
שֹׁפְטִ֣ים וְשֹֽׁטְרִ֗ים תִּֽתֶּן־לְךָ֙ בְּכׇל־שְׁעָרֶ֔יךָ אֲשֶׁ֨ר יְהֹוָ֧ה אֱלֹהֶ֛יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לְךָ֖ לִשְׁבָטֶ֑יךָ וְשָׁפְט֥וּ אֶת־הָעָ֖ם מִשְׁפַּט־צֶֽדֶק׃
You shall appoint magistrates and officials for your tribes, in all the settlements that the LORD your God is giving you, and they shall govern the people with due justice.
GST #1003
Note: This is the sermon I delivered on Yom Kippur night after Kol Nidre.
Shanah tovah and g’mar ḥatimah tovah. May we all be inscribed and sealed for a happy and healthy life. One night, a guy named Shmuel notices his friend Avrum underneath a streetlight, searching for something on the ground.
“Avrum,” he says, “What are you doing?”
“I’ve lost my keys. Please help me look for them.”
So the two of them look all over the area underneath the glow of the streetlight. After about ten minutes, Shmuel says, “Avrum, where were you when you realized that you didn’t have your keys?”
Shmuel points to a place about 500 yards away. “I was over there in that alley.”
Shmuel was dumbfounded. “So why are we wasting our time looking here!?”
Avrum looked over at his friend: “Because the light is better here!”
This joke is funny because Avrum is trying very hard to solve his problem, but he’s not doing anything that will actually lead to a solution.
We have a very serious antisemitism problem in America, and we’re trying very hard to fix it. Unfortunately, like Avrum in the joke, what we’re doing is not helping at all.
Our schools, from kindergarten through graduate programs, are simply overrun with anti-Jewish hatred. Here is a notable example from a lawsuit involving a high school in Berkeley, California.
A so-called art teacher displayed an image of a fist punching through a Star of David. The same teacher then promoted a walkout during which students chanted, “F*** the Jews.”
When a Jewish student in the class complained, the administration’s response was not to punish the teacher but rather to make the student spend the class time in the library. That is just one incident from a long and sad list, a list that describes the florid, putrid rot in American society.
What is happening here? Why can we put a flying robot on Mars but we can’t seem to stop antisemitism? Why do they hate us so much?
Celebrated and prolific author Dara Horn has just published a new book, “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living.” You may be familiar with her bestseller, “People Love Dead Jews.”
Dr. Horn’s latest book offers a cogent answer to that question: Why do they hate us? I thought I knew the answer to that question, but I didn’t. I learned a lot from this book, and much of what I’m going to say today is based on my interpretation of her writing.
When it comes to possible explanations of antisemitism, Dr. Horn identifies the usual suspects. The first is the scapegoat theory. The idea of the scapegoat comes from the Torah. In fact, the scapegoat played a crucial role in the ancient Yom Kippur ritual that we’ll read about in the Torah tomorrow morning.
You probably know the basics. There were two goats. One was sacrificed to God, while the other, the scapegoat, was loaded with all of the sins of the Jewish people and escorted into the wilderness, where it met its demise. To this day, the word scapegoat means to blame people for something they did not do.
The scapegoat theory of antisemitism says that the Jews are persecuted because we’re an easy, helpless target. So some think that if we can convince the world that we are not to blame for whatever the accusation is, then we will be found not guilty and antisemitism will disappear or at least go back underground.
The problem with the scapegoat solution is that it never works. The reason it never works is that it’s based on rational thought. Antisemitism is an irrational thought pattern. Jew-haters don’t use the cerebral cortex when thinking about us, they use the amygdala, the part of the brain we have in common with lizards and snakes.
They accuse us of being lizard people even though they are the ones who are behaving more like reptiles than human beings. You can’t defeat irrationality with rational thought.
We could and have brought all kinds of evidence to show that we did not kill Jesus, that we did not poison the wells during the Black Death, that we didn’t run the transatlantic slave trade, that we neither desire world domination nor the extermination of the Palestinians. Our words are useless and our enemies will not listen to any of it. So it’s time to flush the scapegoat theory down the toilet.
The second usual suspect in explaining antisemitism is ignorance and a lack of education. The idea behind this answer is that if we could just give people the information they lack, they will realize the error of their ways and the hatred would stop.
Dr. Horn suggests that there are basically two ways of dispelling the ignorance. One is to focus on the Holocaust and our suffering, to shame people into looking at what the world has done and continues to do to us. This is the most popular strategy.
The other, less popular strategy is to focus on the great things that individual Jews have done, such as cure polio, win Nobel Prizes, etc.
Dr. Horn suggests that both of these educational strategies are very attractive and very wrong. They’re attractive because they’re so optimistic. Oh gee, if we would just teach enough people how much we have suffered at the hands of terrible, evil monsters, they would feel sorry for us and never participate in antisemitism. I could had a V8!
Alternatively, if we could just teach enough people that the internet does not get invented without Jews, that Jews have been at the forefront of virtually every field known to humanity, then people will think good thoughts about us and avoid anti-Jewish hatred.
And because educating the ignorant sounds so doable and cheerful, we throw hundreds of millions of dollars into the effort. Movies, television shows, school curricula, museums, lectures, the list of options goes on an on. We write checks to this non-profit and that non-profit and think that the education will eventually work.
Alas, there is simply no proof that any of this education does any good. Today, after all this Holocaust education, 11% of Generation Z blames the Shoah on the Jews themselves. In New York, which has had the most intense Holocaust education, that figure is 19%.
And trust me, nobody cares who invented what or who won what Nobel Prize. If anything, teaching about great individual Jewish achievements inspires envy, hatred, and conspiracy theories, not admiration.
The truth is that no amount of education will ever reduce antisemitism even one little bit. Ignorance is not the problem. In every generation, it is not the uneducated, simple people who pose the greatest threat to us. It’s the smarty-pants and the wanna-be smarty-pants who want to do us the most harm.
Remember, the leadership of the Nazi party was populated by professors, doctors, scientists, and even theologians. Likewise, the rageful hatred we have endured since October 7th, 2023 has emerged primarily from the universities and the arts community, not from normal, salt-of-the-earth kind of people.
A third usual suspect is the “We’re so different” explanation. We supposedly seem so strange to them that they fear us. So some say we should make people aware that we are just like them, that we should say, “Hey, we’re Jews, we’re just people with a different religion. You celebrate Christmas and we celebrate Hanukkah. It’s no big deal.”
The problem with the “We’re just like you” solution is that it’s a lie, a huge whopper. First of all, Jewish identity is only partially religious. A lot of Jews are totally secular. Most Jews get their Jewish identity not through Jewish law but through food, cultural traditions, family customs, Holocaust memory, and a love of Israel.
Secondly, as Dr. Horn argues, the notion that we’re just like everyone else is the polar opposite of Jewish history. We have spent the past 3,000 years telling and showing people that we are not just like everyone else.
After all, why would we want to be like everyone else? What’s so great about everyone else that we would want to be like them? Feh, I don’t want to be just like them.
Using any of these usual suspects to explain and combat antisemitism is like using an antibiotic to fight a virus. It might make you feel good that the doctor took you seriously and gave you a pill instead of just sending you to bed. But that pill will do nothing for you, and in the long run, it could even cause you harm.
So what is the answer? Dr. Horn’s basic idea is that antisemitism is not a problem to be solved but rather the natural consequence of being a Jew.
I’ll say that again because it’s the key. Antisemitism is not a problem to be solved but rather the natural consequence of being a Jew. This is who we are, and who we are makes powerful people very, very angry.
The real reason that antisemitism exists is because we Jews are the original anti-tyrants. Dr. Horn wrote, “This is the story of a tiny group of people whose groundbreaking ideas shaped world history. When the Jews said they do not bow to other gods, this also meant that they do not bow to tyrants. This was a radical idea in the ancient world. It is still radical now.”
Now that makes sense to me. That is why antisemitism existed and continues to exist. That’s why six million died in the Holocaust and that’s why Oct. 7th happened. We do not bow to tyrants. Certainly not to other gods, but also not to emperors, kings, popes, priests, emirs, sultans, and caliphs. And today, we do not bow to bots and algorithms, either.
We’ve been refusing to bow to the powers that be for thousands of years, and it is a sentiment that makes powerful people enraged. They think to themselves, “How dare these Jews with their strange, alien customs deny us our right to their obedience and destruction?”
Our insistence on not bowing to tyrants has cost us dearly. That is why there aren’t hundreds of millions or billions of Jews. As the Shulḥan Arukh recommends, I ask potential converts this question. “Today, you are a non-Jew. You have it easy and the world loves you. Why do you want to become a Jew and become the instant enemy of so many people?”
Strangely enough, nobody ever says, “You know what, Rabbi, you’re right. This isn’t for me.” The question doesn’t scare them because they know what the Jews gave the world. Our greatest gift to humanity is the concept of freedom itself.
Our story taught the human race that you don’t have to obey your ruler. Our saga told the world that you can tell any flesh and blood king or governor or president to gey kakken offen yam, you can tell your sovereign to go jump in a lake.
Our story also taught humanity that one ought to love life no matter what. Religions based on a love of life are good. Religions based on a love of death are dangerous.
I think Dara Horn is telling us that complaining about antisemitism is like complaining about night. We have night because our planet rotates on its axis, like all planets do. Therefore, we face the sun during the day and we face away from it at night.
Likewise, Jews experience antisemitism because that is what happens when a small group stands up for itself and refuses to prostrate itself before a ruling power. Sometimes, we face the light of God. Sometimes, we face the darkness of the human heart.
We have to stand up for ourselves. The antisemites are manipulating us with tired, worn-out, Soviet propaganda. Did you know that this whole “Antizionism is not antisemitism” nonsense was designed by the Kremlin in the 1960s and 1970s, like most of the Palestinian playbook? I learned that from Dr. Horn’s book.
Antisemites think they can fool us. They can’t. Antizionism is a form of anti-Jewish hatred. The words “Free Palestine” are a verbal swastika. We have to stop begging the nations of the world to love us.
The nations aren’t capable of loving us, and we don’t want their love in the first place. All we want is what we deserve, respect.
Notice that I say respect, not peace. Respect has to come before peace. Peace without respect is meaningless.
On this Yom Kippur, as on every Day of Atonement, we Jews have an individual responsibility to do teshuvah, to repent for the sins we have committed against God and our fellow human beings. But the Jewish people as a whole, Am Yisrael, only owes repentance to God, not to humanity.
To the contrary, humanity needs to apologize and repent for the way it has treated us. The human race needs to repent and apologize to us because the whole planet is teetering on the edge. If the world can fix its relationship with us, the Mashiach will come, either metaphorically or literally. Germany did teshuvah right, but Germany is just one country.
I wish that I could be like Jonah, whose story we’ll read tomorrow afternoon. Jonah went to the great city of Nineveh and shouted his demand that they repent, told them what would happen if they didn’t, and, lo and behold, they repented! Even their livestock wore sackcloth!
Obviously, I’m not Jonah. I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet. I know that we’ll get the world’s apology on the same day that I win both the PowerBall and MegaMillions. But even so, I offer this prayer:
O Holy One, teach the nations of the world to repent before You and Your people. Purify their hearts so that we can live in peace and security. Help us be a light unto the nations, and prevent the nations from extinguishing Your light. May this be Your will, Amen.
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