A 1930s reminder: Ze’ev Jabotinsky was right
One of my earliest memories is standing in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem at age 11, hearing how European Jews once believed that catastrophe could never touch them. They were successful, cultured, integrated — convinced that prosperity was protection.
For me, the grandson of Holocaust survivors who lost more than 70 family members, that lesson was never theoretical.
I grew up in a home shaped by my mother, Penina Waga, born in a Polish Displaced Persons camp before immigrating to Israel, who taught not only what the Nazis did, but what Jews did and did not do in response.
Now, as an Israeli-American, a refugee from New York, I watch the city from afar and see a frightened, rudderless Jewish community.
Since the COVID pandemic, many Jews in New York Jews have fled to other states — namely, Florida — or to the suburbs seeking safety. But history whispers: In the 1930s, Berlin and Warsaw were also thriving Jewish centers. Prosperity is not protection.
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Meanwhile, the political trajectory of the American Jewish community is deeply troubling. More than 33% of New York’s Jewish voters supported Mamdani. A growing portion of American Jews now hold views about Israel not just disconnected from Israeli reality but openly hostile to it.
Elliot Cosgrove, spiritual leader of the Park Avenue Synagogue embodies this trend. [While in a widely-viewed sermon in October, he spoke as a Zionist and urgently warned against the election of anti-Zionist Zorhan Mamdani, earlier] public statements put him at odds with a majority of Israelis.
At an event in his Conservative synagogue in 2017, he gave a platform to his daughter’s claim that because Palestinians don’t vote in Israeli elections, Israel was an apartheid state. That falsehood itself was heightened by his choice to repeat it uncritically.
Still, the American Zionist Movement invited Cosgrove to headline its Biennial National Assembly on Dec. 8. There, explaining Mamdani’s success among Jewish voters, he argued that for “a liberal Zionist disillusioned by the Israeli government, Mamdani’s anti-Zionism is a difference of degree, not of kind.” His asked: “What are we going to do about it?”
Cosgrove insisted that “by making unconditional support for the Israeli government a litmus test for Jewish identity, we ourselves have inflicted harm on the Jewish future.”
And he blamed Israeli policy for Diaspora alienation: “The unresolved status of the Palestinians … forms a wedge issue between an increasingly liberal-leaning American Jewry and an increasingly right-leaning Israeli Jewry.”
That the American “Zionist” movement provides a platform for this is disgraceful.
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But the most glaring omission at the conference was that no one spoke about aliyah. Not one “Zionist” leader invoked the core Zionist response to Jewish vulnerability.
In similarly perilous times, Jabotinsky told the Hatzach Conference in Warsaw on June 13, 1936, that Jewish survival in Europe was slipping away. He was mocked for insisting on “Evacuation” — mass aliyah — as the only realistic solution.
His warning now echoes with terrifying clarity: “We must save the millions — many millions. I don’t know if the question concerns absorption of one-third of the Jewish race, to half of the Jewish race, or one-quarter of the Jewish race. This I do not know. But, it’s a question of millions.”
And he delivered the starkest truth of all: “If you won’t eliminate the Diaspora, the Diaspora will eliminate you.”
These were prophetic warnings from a man who saw the storm before anyone else.
Yet now, in 2025, at a conference called “Zionism: Many Visions, One Dream,” Jabotinsky’s foundational idea of aliyah was conspicuously absent. Worse, the American Zionist Movement banned Betar, Jabotinsky’s own movement, until Israeli Zionist courts reversed it. And the Anti-Defamation League labeled Betar, the 100-year-old Zionist movement, along with slain conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, a hate group.
As they silence Jabotinsky, American Jewish leaders in an increasingly unsafe New York lecture Israelis about democracy, identity and morality. Over-represented Park Avenue liberals claim authority over a reality they do not live. They lament that Israel does not resemble American progressive ideology, even as their own communities dissolve through assimilation, intermarriage and ideological confusion.
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It was Betar — Jabotinsky’s movement — that insisted on Jewish dignity, self-defense and national pride when others hesitated. That message resonates today.
Jabotinsky taught that Jewish survival depends on clarity, courage and refusing to apologize for existing. His words remain piercing:
“Our habit of constantly and zealously answering to any rabble has already done us a lot of harm. … We do not have to apologize for anything. … We are what we are, we are good for ourselves, we will not change, nor do we want to.”
And again:
“The bitter root of our shame and our suffering is that we do not give our own people the full love of a patriot. … It would be better if we did not love our people at all … than that we should love it halfway which means to despise it.”
Count me among those who believe the Zionism of 2025 means making aliyah, not lecturing Israel from a dangerous Western city or from a woke, self-congratulatory “Zionist” conference.
Ronn Torossian, an Israeli-American entrepreneur, is vice chairman of Betar Worldwide.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
