David J. Butler
I thought it would be a good idea to wait until after the beginning of the new year to write about 2025. Not because the calendar demanded it, but because distance does.
Perspective requires a little time to settle — and a willingness to admit that many of the year-end summaries we just read were, at best, incomplete and, at worst, comforting evasions.
The truth is that 2025 was not a year we simply “got through.” It tested whether we actually understand the moment we are living in — or whether we are still relying on institutional reflexes built for a safer, simpler era that no longer exists.
For the Jewish community, 2025 was not defined by a single catastrophe or a single triumph. It was defined by an accumulation: of fear and fatigue, of courage and strain, of missed opportunities, and of moral choices that felt incremental at the time but will echo long after the headlines fade.
Let’s start with what deserves to be acknowledged. Jewish communities organized. Security was strengthened. Federations raised extraordinary sums. Advocacy groups documented antisemitism with precision bordering on forensic obsession. Synagogues, schools and community centers stayed open when retreat would have been easier, quieter and safer. In that sense, 2025 proved something essential: Institutional Jewish life did not collapse under pressure.
But survival is not the same as success.
Too often, our response to rising antisemitism defaulted to a posture of siege — necessary, understandable and ultimately insufficient. We protected buildings but struggled to protect meaning. We counted incidents but rarely confronted the harder question of why antisemitism now feels ambient rather than episodic, seeping into culture, politics, campuses and even polite conversation without triggering the moral outrage it once did.
We became very good at sounding alarms. We were far less effective at changing the conditions that make alarms necessary.
One of 2025’s most unsettling lessons was not how many people hate Jews. History has prepared us for that. What is more disturbing is how many were comfortable standing aside. The Jewish community long believed — sometimes rightly — that alliances, coalitions and shared democratic values would offer insulation in moments of stress. Last year exposed how fragile that assumption can be.
When antisemitism appeared wrapped in the language of “justice,” “resistance” or “context,” too many institutions hesitated. When Jewish concerns complicated fashionable narratives, support became conditional. When Jews were told, implicitly or explicitly, that safety required silence or ideological conformity, many recognized the message instantly — because history has trained us to.
This was not betrayal in a dramatic sense. It was something colder and more corrosive: selective empathy.
And we failed, at times, to call that out clearly enough—out of fear of alienating partners, losing donors or being labeled “difficult.” In doing so, we accepted a dangerous premise: that Jewish security is negotiable if the politics are inconvenient.
That same unease — about speaking plainly, about risking fracture, about choosing clarity over comfort — came to a head most painfully around Israel. No honest review of 2025 can avoid it. Not because Israel dominated Jewish life, but because it exposed and intensified every unresolved tension we were already carrying.
The war’s aftermath exposed how ill-prepared many Jewish institutions were to hold complexity without collapsing into slogans. Some spaces demanded loyalty without dissent.
Others demanded dissent as the price of belonging. Too few modeled what mature communal discourse actually looks like: moral seriousness without performative outrage, empathy without erasure, solidarity without unanimity.
We learned, painfully, that many Jews — especially younger ones — do not experience Israel primarily as ideology or inheritance, but as unresolved tension. And instead of meeting that tension with education, patience and trust, we too often met it with panic, suspicion or coercion.
That is not sustainable.
In many respects, 2025 took innocence we didn’t realize we still had. It took the comfort of believing that antisemitism announces itself clearly, that danger wears uniforms, that allies are permanent and that history moves in a straight, upward line.
It also took time — time spent reacting instead of imagining, time consumed by crisis management rather than future-building, time that could have been used to ask harder questions about Jewish purpose in a world that no longer grants us the benefit of moral clarity.
And yet, this is not a story of despair.
We gained clarity about who shows up and who does not. We saw new leaders emerge who do not confuse volume with courage or outrage with principle. We witnessed a generation of Jews refusing to outsource their identity to institutions unwilling to meet them honestly. We were reminded that Jewish continuity is not guaranteed by endowments, press releases or security budgets — but by meaning, relationships and moral credibility.
And we gained something harder to quantify but impossible to ignore: resolve. Not bravado. Not denial. Resolve.
If 2025 was the year of exposure, 2026 promises to be the year of consequence.
Antisemitism will not recede on its own. Political polarization will intensify. Israel will remain a moral and strategic fault line. And Jewish institutions that rely on pre–Oct. 7 assumptions will continue to lose relevance — not because Jews are disengaging, but because they are demanding more honesty, more courage and more depth.
The challenge ahead is not unity at all costs. It is coherence. Not louder advocacy, but better arguments. Not broader coalitions, but braver ones.
We do not need to be less Jewish to survive this moment. We need to be more intentional about what Jewishness demands of us — ethically, communally and publicly.
2025 asked whether we could endure. 2026 will ask whether we can lead. That is a harder question. And finally, it is the right one.
David J. Butler is an attorney. He is president of Dvash Consulting, LLC and a member of the ownership group of Mid-Atlantic Media, which owns and publishes Washington Jewish Week.
