MORNING MUSINGS
No More Pleading for Permission: The New/Old Jewish Priority
Peter Himmelman
February 8, 2026

Last week at the 92nd Street Y, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens spoke about the state of world Jewry. What stayed with me was not a political argument but a change of direction. He suggested that Jews have spent too many years pleading for understanding and too few years investing in the only strategy that has ever preserved us: becoming more Jewish. Listening to him, I felt the relief of hearing aloud what I have been saying, often to deaf ears, for decades…For millennia, until today, Jews have used a word that has vexed the world. They have used it stubbornly, courageously, with great faith, and at times at great cost. The word is no. No to serving idols of any kind. No to tyrants. No to cheap strains of universalism. No to assimilation into other faiths and ideologies. And no to a world that bows to the latest ism. Most vexing of all has been Jewish success despite that refusal. The world has often demanded that we dissolve into its fashions, and time and again we have answered with a single inconvenient syllable. READ MORE