I have spent more hours than I can count inside Temple Israel. In seventh grade, there were hardly any weekends when I wasn’t there for a friend’s bar or bat mitzvah. My family usually attended a different synagogue, but Temple Israel—the nation’s largest Reform synagogue—was a community pillar so prominent as to be unavoidable. Even if you don’t prefer Shabbat services with female rabbis who strum guitar, you would inevitably end up there for some sort of concert, carnival, lecture, class, meeting, or even to vote (shout out Precinct 11!).
Yesterday, a heavily armed terrorist, Ayman Ghazaleh—a Lebanese immigrant from Dearborn Heights—drove an explosive-laden truck into the West Bloomfield synagogue’s preschool. Nearly 140 children and staff were inside. By some miracle, they are all alive. A security guard shot and killed Ghazaleh before he could carry out the mass murder he intended.
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Growing up in Metro Detroit, I understood early on that my community occupied a peculiar geography. West Bloomfield sits roughly 20 miles from “America’s jihad capital”—Dearborn.
Sometimes that distance felt much shorter. Whenever tensions flared in the Middle East, anti-Israel and America-hostile protesters would make the trip up Telegraph Road to demonstrate outside the Jewish Community Center, Jewish day schools, and synagogues throughout our suburb. It became a familiar ritual of intimidation, and the Jewish community’s response was just as familiar: we absorbed it, tried to ignore it, and moved on.
I once asked a teacher at my Jewish school why no Jewish groups ever organized counterdemonstrations outside a mosque or Muslim community center in Dearborn. The teacher looked offended by the question. Such a response, I was told, would be both absurd and dangerous. It was simply not something “we” would ever do. That asymmetry stuck with me for decades. It still irks me. Many of the more progressive Jews in my community—many of whom attended Temple Israel—were less bothered by it.
I vividly remember one summer Shabbat evening service held outdoors at Temple Israel. The rabbi was soon to lead a group of Detroit Jewish teens on a trip to Israel, mostly public school students with limited Jewish education or knowledge about the country and its conflicts with Arab neighbors. The rabbi promised the congregation that he planned to “teach these kids both sides of the story.”
The comment carried a note of pride that I did not share. Why, I wondered, was it the responsibility of Jewish community leaders to travel halfway across the world to explain the grievances of people who openly celebrate violence against Jews—especially to young Jews who had yet even to study their own history and tradition?
That instinct—to empathize endlessly with those who hate you—runs deep in parts of progressive American Jewry. It has been cultivated over decades, and it has made us less safe—a variation of the disease Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy.
The man who tried to murder scores of American children at Temple Israel was a Third World immigrant who became a citizen during the Obama administration. But he could just as easily have been radicalized here. After all, he lived in a community where, within days of October 7, 2023, thousands marched through the streets celebrating Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,200 innocent men, women, and children in Israel, including 46 Americans; where local imams called that day “one of the days of God” and a “miracle come true,” described the attackers as “honorable,” and urged congregants to pray for the annihilation of the Jewish state.
The hatred that brought Ghazaleh to Temple Israel’s parking lot has been incubated, preached, and normalized in Dearborn for years, in full view. And it has shown up in attempted acts of Islamic terror in Virginia, Texas, and New York, in just the last two weeks. That’s to say nothing of the numerous attacks on Jewish and American sites throughout Europe in recent days.
At a press conference yesterday afternoon at the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield—where I went to high school, had my bar mitzvah, and played mediocre basketball throughout my childhood—the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit said that today’s attack “will not change us.” With respect: it should. Three changes, in particular, are long overdue.
The first is armed self-defense. The security guard who killed Ghazaleh is the reason the 140 people inside Temple Israel are still alive. But hired security is expensive and not always present.
Jewish communities must normalize the lawful carrying of firearms by trained congregants, educators, and community members. The Second Amendment exists for moments like this, and the Jewish community’s cultural discomfort with it is a luxury we can no longer afford.
The second is investment. American Jewish philanthropy has poured staggering sums into Holocaust museums and Holocaust education. But building massive monuments to our own victimhood won’t protect us from Islamist terrorists. Ditto $15 million Super Bowl ads portraying Jews as helpless victims in need of rescue, or emoji-centric social media campaigns meant to foster moral sensitivity rather than deterrence.
Ruth Wisse, the Harvard literature professor and one of the sharpest minds in Jewish intellectual life, has for years argued that the Jewish fixation on victimhood has failed on its own terms. Anti-Semitism has spread in tandem with the proliferation of Holocaust curricula, and educating people about hate does not reliably reduce it.
Better to focus on hardened facilities and trained security personnel. Just as important is investing in well-funded day schools, summer camps, and gap-year programs in Israel—most of which remain wildly expensive for Jewish parents considering them for their kids—that inspire civic confidence and strengthen Jewish continuity and identity.
The third change involves political realignment. American Jews have spent decades voting irrationally and reflexively for politicians who treat their safety as an afterthought, while vilifying candidates who have made border security, counter-jihadist vigilance, and law enforcement their priorities.
Dearborn residents don’t lie awake at night fearing what someone from West Bloomfield might do to them or their children. The same cannot be said in reverse. A community that lives in fear must stop voting for and donating to political leaders who refuse to name the source of that fear.
You can be Reform. You can be a Democrat. You can post your black square on Instagram. You can even be a #FreePalestine Jew. All of these persuasions attend Temple Israel. Ayman Ghazaleh did not take any of that into account when he chose which synagogue preschool to bomb.
Consider what this new posture would look like in practice. In November 2023, mere weeks after the October 7 massacre, the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit chartered three planes to carry 900 community members to the March for Israel in Washington, D.C. When those planes landed at Dulles International Airport, the buses the federation had contracted failed to appear. In an act the federation itself called “deliberate and malicious,” drivers staged a sickout upon learning they were transporting Jews to a rally for the Jewish state.
What happened next? No lawsuit filing was reported. No bus company was named and held publicly accountable. The story faded—the way these stories always fade in the milquetoast institutional Jewish world, absorbed into the endless ledger of offenses quietly forgiven or forgotten. Anti-Semitism will not dissipate if it is not made costly.
In the Jewish journal Sapir, Jordan Hirsch recently argued that American Jewry needs a new model of institutional self-reliance—a shift away from the shtadlanut (Yiddish for “intercession”) tradition of dependence on establishment goodwill, and toward structures of genuine communal power. The age of the prestigious NGO issuing press releases and expecting the world to feel shame is over. The institutions that will protect Jewish life in the coming generation are the ones built on security, autonomy, and political seriousness.
AIPAC, the advocacy group dedicated to strengthening U.S.–Israel relations, grasped this reality after its defeat in the Obama-era Iran deal fight. It refocused on hard-edged political combat, pouring resources into primary elections and building durable legislative power. It has since made mistakes and earned enemies, but overall it has grown more effective as a result. The broader architecture of American Jewish communal life needs to learn the same lesson.
In yesterday’s other Islamist terrorist attack east of the Mississippi, Jews can find some inspiration for the new posture they ought to adopt. When a gunman with Islamic State ties opened fire on campus, several ROTC students charged the attacker and killed him with their bare hands. As one X user put it: “Spiritually Israeli.”
What happened at Temple Israel was truly a miracle. The security guard’s shot was true; the bomb did not detonate; 140 people lived. Whether you attribute that to training, luck, or providence, the obligation it creates is the same: we must not waste it.
American Jewry now has a choice. It can respond the way it always has—with grief, statements, Holocaust museum donations, and the reflexive search for dialogue and understanding of “both sides.” Or it can take a lesson from the only sovereign Jewish society that has learned, through painful experience, how survival works. Israel follows a simple rule: when your neighbors begin ratcheting up threats to destroy you, take them seriously—and respond in ways that ensure they fear you more than you fear them.
American Jews would be wise to absorb this lesson. The proper response to yesterday’s miracle is not another symposium on tolerance. It is a community that is harder to intimidate, harder to ignore at the ballot box, and harder for its enemies to kill.
Photo by Emily Elconin/Getty Images