Jewish Americans and supporters of Israel gather at the National Mall in Washington, DC on Nov. 14, 2023 for the “March for Israel” rally. Photo: Dion J. Pierre/The Algemeiner

Let’s get the obligatory acknowledgment out of the way quickly, because it deserves exactly that much space: yes, antisemitism is rising, campuses have been ugly, many (if not most) politicians have been disgraceful, social media is a sewer, and October 7th broke something open in the American Jewish psyche that is still being processed. All of that is real.

All of that matters. Now let’s talk about what else is real, because the full story of the American Jewish community in 2026 is not a eulogy. It is something considerably more interesting than that.

What October 7, 2023 did — alongside everything devastating it did — was light a fire under a community that had, in some corners, confused comfort with safety and philanthropy with engagement. The Jews who had been writing checks from a distance started showing up in person. The parents who had never once considered attending a school board meeting showed up and kept showing up. The young professionals who had no particular Jewish organizational identity suddenly found one, fast, because the alternative was standing alone in a moment that demanded company. None of that made the front page. All of it matters more than what did.

Here is the thing about the American Jewish community the discourse consistently misses: we have always been at our most creative, most organized, and most formidable when our backs were against the wall. The institutions we now consider permanent and indispensable — the defense organizations, the cultural institutions, the advocacy infrastructure — none of them were built during quiet times. They were built by people who looked at the challenges of their moment and decided that what existed wasn’t sufficient and that waiting for permission was a luxury they couldn’t afford. That instinct is not gone. It is, right now, very much awake.

The most encouraging development in the American Jewish community isn’t happening at the institutional level. It’s happening underneath it. A generation of young Jewish leaders has emerged from the last two years with a clarity of identity and a willingness to assert it publicly that is genuinely new. These are not people who are going to sit quietly in the back of the room waiting to be called on. They are starting organizations, running for office, building media platforms, entering classrooms as teachers and leaving them as advocates, and asking with refreshing directness: what are we actually trying to accomplish here, and is what we’re doing working? That is a generational shift, and it is not small.

The relationship between American Jews and Israel has also changed in ways that will outlast this political moment. For decades, that relationship was often mediated by institutions — the mission trip, the annual gala, the check written to an organization that then decided how it was spent. Today it is personal. American Jews have Israeli friends they didn’t have before. They have volunteered, shipped supplies, sponsored displaced families, built business relationships, and developed human connections that no political headwind can easily sever. A relationship rooted in shared humanity is more durable than one rooted in shared politics, and that is the relationship that is quietly being built.

It is also worth saying plainly what the noise on social media works very hard to obscure: the overwhelming majority of Americans are not antisemites and are not hostile to Jewish life or to Israel’s right to exist. They are mostly uninformed, occasionally confused by a conflict that has been covered with staggering dishonesty by a media ecosystem with its own problems — but uninformed and hostile are not the same thing. Americans are persuadable. They always have been. That is the entire premise of the American experiment, and it happens to be a premise the Jewish community is extraordinarily well-equipped to work with, because we have been making arguments, teaching, and building relationships across differences for as long as we have existed.

The political moment for Jews and Israel in the United States is genuinely complicated, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Support for Israel has become more partisan than it has ever been, and that is a problem requiring a serious, long-term, cross-aisle strategy rather than a bumper sticker. But the American Jewish community has navigated complicated political terrain before, and the answer has never been to pick a team and hope the other team loses. The answer has been to build relationships everywhere, hold everyone accountable equally, and refuse to make permanent enemies out of potential allies.

That is still the answer. It just requires more courage to execute in a polarized environment than it did when the middle was wider.

The story of the American Jewish community in this moment is not a story of decline. It is a story of disruption — which is uncomfortable and clarifying in equal measure, and which has historically produced some of the most important chapters in Jewish life. The old assumptions are being stress-tested. Some of them won’t survive, and that is fine, because they weren’t serving us anyway. What will survive is what has always survived: the stubbornness, the creativity, the communal instinct, and the refusal to mistake a difficult chapter for the end of the book.

We have been here before. We know how this works. Watch what we build next.

Steven Rosenberg is the Principal of the Team GSD and the author of the book, Make Bold Things Happen: Inspirational Stories From Sports, Business And Life.