Old forms of assimilation did not threaten Jewish lives. Current anti-Zionism — ‘New Assimilation’ — does.
It is said that anti-Semitism is a mutating virus. The underlying dynamic is hatred of Jews, but it has taken many forms in Jewish history.
Assimilation — not what Gentiles do to Jews, but, largely, what Jews do to themselves — is also a mutating virus. It too has a long history, in many forms.
Assimilation stretches back to antiquity. The Maccabees fought not only their Syrian Greek oppressors but their Jewish brothers who aped the Greek culture of worship of the body. The most pronounced and sustained assimilation began with the Enlightenment when Jews, allured by the idea of political equality and the beauty of literature and philosophy, saw them and Judaism as mutually exclusive; or, worse, saw Judaism as antiquated, worthy of dismissal.
Thus began the unfolding of Jewish attempts to assimilate into the majority culture.
Most starkly, this was marked by conversion to Christianity, the “admission ticket” to European culture. Call this Assimilation Step One.
Assimilation Step Two was less radical, but not by much. It was a rejection of Jewish ritual to the extent that Sabbath services were switched from Saturday to Sunday, in clear aping of Christianity.
Assimilation Step Three was the rejection of Jewish ritual that demarcated Jew from Gentile. One may consult the Reform Judaism’s Pittsburgh Platform of 1885. However, even under this radical dilution of Jewish ritual, Jewish identity was retained.
Assimilation Step Four veered from Jewish identity — this, in three contexts: Soviet, European, Israeli:
• Under communist ideology, it was Jews themselves who fanatically stamped out all Jewish expression in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The utter ignorance of the most basic Jewish practices was on display as Jews were finally allowed to emigrate from the USSR, beginning in the 1970s.
• Under the allure of American and European culture, abetted with ebbs and flows of anti-Semitism, Jews assimilated by “melting away.”
• Ironically, assimilated teachers in Israel in recent years prevented secular students from trying on Jewish rituals, to such an extent that the Education Ministry had to issue a regulation that any student who wanted to lay tefilin could do so.
We reach the New Assimilation. It may look like the Pittsburgh Platform’s rejection of Jewish nationalism, but it is different, and it is worse.
The Pittsburgh Platform asserted that Jews are no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore do not expect a return to Palestine. This is a radical rewriting of Jewish history, theology and scripture. The Reform movement itself rejected it in 1937, under the influence of the fledgling Jewish community in Palestine.
The anti-Zionism of today — the latest iteration of assimilation — is worse than the anti-Zionism of the Pittsburgh Platform. The early anti-Zionism damaged the Jewish body politic spiritually but did not damage Jews physically. There was no immediate threat to Jewish life in the assertion of anti-Jewish nationalism in the Pittsburgh Platform.
Not so today. The New Assimilation puts the lives of eight million Jews in Israel in danger — and Jews around the world. Witness: Bondi Beach, Australia. Witness: Boulder’s Pearl St. Mall. Witness: the attacks in Michigan, Mississippi, et. al.
What, precisely, is the assimilationist element in the New Assimilation? At its root, assimilation is the prioritizing of non-Jewish values or practices or identity over Jewish ones. There is always the possibility of an affirmative integration of positive values or practices in the general culture that reflect or reinforce Jewish ones. But this is not the arc of the New Assimilation. Its assimilationist element is the absorption of strictly non-Jewish values and practices. The anti-Zionism of today’s New Assimilation says:
• It is OK to blame Israel for those who hate it.
• It is OK to say that Israel deserved the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7; or, that they didn’t happen.
• It is OK to deny the archaeological evidence of the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel ever since antiquity.
• It is OK to say that the creation of Israel was a “mistake”; to lay down a distinction between Arabs’ right to self-determination and Jews’ right to self-determination. Implied here is the destruction of Israel, to correct the “mistake.”
• It is OK to advocate a “one state” solution. Implied here, too, is the destruction of Israel as a predominantly Jewish state, whose rights extended to Arab, Druze, Circassian, Baha’i and Muslim minorities must supersede Jewish rights for a state of their own.
• It is OK to say that Jews had no right to emigrate from Europe to Palestine; that the freedom to emigrate does not include Jews.
• It is OK to advocate for an unrealistic right of return for Palestinians but not OK to advocate for an unrealistic right of return for Iraqi, Yemenite, Egyptian, Libyan and Syria Jews.
• It is OK to call Israel an imperialist invention, but not to say the same about Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia — it is OK to single out Israel, to articulate a double standard.
• It is OK to say that the Temple Mount was never the site of a Jewish Temple.
• It is OK to condemn political candidates for raising funds for their campaigns if the funders are pro-Israel, but not if the funders are anti-Israel.
• It is OK to condemn sexual violence against innocents, but not if the innocents are Israelis.
• It is OK to ignore the conditions under which Hamas forces Israel to defend itself — in homes, hospitals, mosques, tunnels and UN facilities — in order to manufacture the genocide charge.
• It is OK to excuse attacks on pro-Israel demonstrators as “resistance.”
Any of the above, if asserted by Jews, is classic assimilation: the absorption of values not rooted in Judaism, but aping an element of general culture; in this case, anti-Zionism in its current iteration.
© IJN 2026
