Rachel Gorsky Bombach, chief policy officer at Democratic Majority for Israel, writes in the group’s Substack about her experience working in the intelligence community in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and what it tells her about today’s political moment. “The more I reflect on my career over nearly three decades, the more convinced I am that the central lesson of the post-9/11 era was that free societies cannot afford to ignore the ideologies that reject freedom itself. If ideas help create terrorists, then defeating terrorism requires more than military force. … The names of our adversaries will change, the technologies they use will evolve, and the battlefields will move. But free societies will always face movements that reject pluralism, glorify violence, and exploit our uncertainty about our own values. Defeating them requires more than military power. It requires moral confidence, intellectual clarity, and a willingness to defend liberal democracy without apology.”

Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, makes his “case for optimism” ahead of Rosh Hashanah in Jerusalem News Syndicate. “[T]he opportunities that lie ahead give us reasons to be optimistic: Saudi Arabia addressing concerning themes in school curricula to help lower the levels of hate globally; Colombia’s new leadership calling out the antisemitism of its predecessors to stand with its Jewish community; Argentina turning the page 32 years after the deadliest antisemitic attack in the Jewish Diaspora since the Holocaust to become the first Latin American country to assume the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) presidency; and the Dominican Republic endorsing the IHRA working definition of antisemitism to ensure public authorities have the tools they need to identify and counter this hatred wherever it appears.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Barton Swaim reflects on the tendency for anti-American activists to blame Israel as a stand-in for their antipathy of the United States: “In the years after 9/11, blaming America for the activities of Islamic terrorists became a mania among left-tilting scribblers the world over. When they couldn’t reasonably attach culpability to America — because the attack happened in France or Spain, which consistently oppose U.S. interventions — the enlightened blamed America’s stand-in, Israel. Somehow the jihadists always lacked agency. A corollary belief, equally resistant to evidence, holds that violent criminals commit their offenses because some societal inequity drove them to it.”

Shalom Hartman Institute President Yehuda Kurtzer writes on his Substack about the need for Jewish leaders to set clear red lines for politicians who want to win their support: “When voters fail to use their leverage, they relinquish power to those who have not earned it, they forfeit the responsibilities of the citizen who is meant to be sovereign, and they allow politicians to be static when they should always be bendable. This exercise of power is best expressed through transparency… I see many Jews doing the opposite, searching for signs of what is in a politician’s heart, parsing their rhetoric, standing on the side to wait which way the wind is blowing, and lamenting their chosen condition of ultimately having to choose between imperfect choices.”