To remember October 7 should mean mourning every life taken and recommitting ourselves to a world in which such horrors are not repeated. It should deepen our opposition to antisemitism without requiring us to ignore Islamophobia or anti-Palestinian racism. It should move us toward a future in which Israelis and Palestinians alike have safety, dignity, freedom, and the ability to determine their own futures.

It is possible, and necessary, to hold both truths at once:

Some of Epstein’s network included prominent Jews and Jewish institutions that courted money even after his conviction. That is real, and it demands communal self-examination in the Jewish world.

The vast majority of the world's wealthiest and most influential people are not Jewish. Antisemitic conspiracy theories that weaponize that reality to frame collective blame to Jews and Israel are also real, and they are a threat to Jews and a distraction from actual accountability. 

Power does not begin at the scale of a private island. 

Safety only comes through solidarity. Safety only comes through solidarity. And solidarity is not symbolic. It requires understanding how our struggles are bound together. Antisemitism and anti-Judaism do not exist in isolation.

Together, we will meet hatred with courage, clarity, and collective power.

What pressures—social, institutional, political—have allowed Jewish institutions to pivot so dramatically from empathy to exclusion, from universality to exception? And what does that shift reveal about the uses and misuses of Holocaust education today?