The weaponisation of our community’s safety

I have spent my career working at the intersection of my Jewish identity, building alliances and promoting solidarity, conflict resolution, and anti-hate initiatives. I have also led interfaith and civil rights coalitions, trained law enforcement on hate and bias, and helped communities navigate fear during moments of moral crisis.

The signs of danger rarely arrive all at once. They build slowly, almost imperceptibly, until suddenly the whole system catches flame.

This is one of those moments. This is a five-alarm fire for American Jews.

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The Jewish community has long centred the concept of communal security, but this moment marks its most significant distortion. Our institutions, once guardians of democratic and moral integrity, are drifting from the very foundations upon which Jewish life in America depends.

The Dangerous Drift in Our Search for Safety

“Safety” has become the most powerful and overused word in American public life. It’s invoked to justify censorship, police expansion, surveillance, war, and political silence. It’s used to shield ourselves from criticism, to rationalize cruelty, or to turn everything into a zero-sum contest of competing victims and narratives.

Antisemitism is surging from the centres of power, from the right, and equally from the left. Across the ideological spectrum, “Jewish safety” is being instrumentalised to advance agendas that threaten the democracy Jews have helped build and defend for over a century.

Too many of our leaders have responded with fear, aligning with forces on both the right and the left that offer a dangerous bargain: protection in exchange for loyalty.

It’s a quid pro quo that erodes the ground beneath us. And we keep mistaking erosion for stability. Fear has become political capital. It’s monetised, weaponised, and sold back to us in the form of influence, access, and false security. Within our community, this dynamic has hollowed out public discourse. Our institutions no longer lead with moral courage; they manage with anxiety. The rallying cry is no longer “Never again,” but “Not to us.”

Our moral horizon has narrowed to a single goal: self-preservation. Yet Jewish history shows that every time we trade principle for protection, we endanger both.

Political Polarisation

On the political right, “concern” for Jewish safety has become a convenient pretext to attack universities, silence dissent, and legitimise authoritarian controls.

Figures who once trafficked in antisemitic tropes now pose as protectors of Jews. They champion “law and order” while defending white nationalist movements. They demand crackdowns on campus speech not out of empathy for Jewish students, but because higher education itself, diverse and pluralistic, is their cultural enemy.

Jews are being used as a moral alibi for a campaign that undermines the very pluralism that made Jewish life possible in America. The right’s version of “safety” offers the illusion of strength, police on the corner, politicians on your side, the language of defence. However, it trades freedom for a false sense of security and moral agency for dependence on power.

At the same time, much of the progressive left has suffered a moral collapse of its own. In spaces that once championed human rights and solidarity, antisemitism has been laundered through the rhetoric of anti-Zionism.

Legitimate critique of Israeli policy has morphed into collective blame of Jews everywhere. The suffering of Israeli civilians is dismissed as deserved; Jewish grief is treated as suspect. “Zionist” has become a slur so elastic it can mean anything: a war criminal, a landlord, or simply a Jew unwilling to renounce connection to Israel.

This is scapegoating dressed in “intersectional” and “revolutionary” language. The left’s claim to moral superiority mirrors the same absolutism it claims to resist.

We must call out antisemitism on the left without letting fear drive us into the arms of those dismantling democracy on the right. Both paths are dead ends.

 Align with Power or Perish?

The Jewish community has spent decades teaching the world how hatred festers, gains legitimacy, and becomes institutionalised. Yet too many of us are now watching that process repeat, pretending this time is different. Within the community, criticism is increasingly viewed as a form of betrayal. Any challenge to political or institutional authority is met with hostility. But dissent is not betrayal; it’s the oxygen of Jewish moral life.

There is another danger we rarely acknowledge but must confront: the transformation of American law enforcement. Across the country, agencies like ICE and local police departments are being empowered in ways that erode accountability and blur the line between public safety and political loyalty.

In Nazi Germany, it wasn’t only the SS. It was the civilian police, ordinary officers, who became instruments of atrocity, not out of ideology but obedience. The system changed around them, and they adapted. That shift creeps in under the banner of “security.” When civil liberties erode and antisemitism becomes a political tool, Jews will never be immune. Today, it is immigrants. Tomorrow, it could be us.

Reclaiming a Moral Vision of Safety

We must reclaim a vision of communal safety that is not built on hunkering down behind fortresses, but on a covenant, a genuine shared vision that none of us is free or secure until all of us are protected in our democracy.

We cannot allow fear or comfort to excuse paralysis from our leaders. We cannot mistake proximity to power for protection. And we cannot keep chasing a false vision of safety while the moral ground beneath us burns.

Jewish trauma deserves compassion, not manipulation. When we turn fear into a political identity, we lose the moral clarity that once made Jewish ethics a beacon in dark times. Jewish safety has always depended on the health of the societies we live in. When democracy erodes, Jews fall. When the rule of law collapses, Jews are blamed.

The lesson of our history is not that we must build higher walls – it’s that we must build freer societies. We cannot rebuild Jewish safety by surrendering what once made it meaningful.

When freedom dies, Jews become a target. The lesson of our history is not that we must build higher walls (one would have hoped we had learned that from the atrocities of 7 October, despite the most sophisticated security walls ever built).

The lesson of Jewish millennia is that we must make societies freer to allow our people to thrive and flourish in safety, as we have managed to achieve for over two centuries in America. The leadership of our national community organisations should stand up and recognise that the erosion of civil rights as a core principle in our mainstream organisations is a detrimental step, ultimately making us less safe.

Let us meet the moment with pride, dignity, and self-respect for our American tradition and Jewish resilience.

Let us not succumb to pressures to bend, contort, and mould ourselves to serve other interests in hopes of protection.

Let’s seek to actively build our shared future here and now.

• Melanie Robbins is the deputy director at Realign for Palestine