Oct. 7 forever altered the global Jewish existence

For nearly a century, Jews in places like America, Canada, Great Britain and Australia took for granted their connection to and comfort within their homes and nations. Even if antisemitism still dwelt at the fringes of society, Jews in these places felt as though they had finally been woven into the very fabric of society and shared history.

There was comfort and confidence in being Jewish as well as a part of daily American, British, Canadian and Australian life. Finally, after wandering for thousands of years, we found homes and places where we could let our collective guard down.

It took a single day last year for that comfort and confidence to shatter. In the wake of Hamas’s gruesome attack in Israel, our homes, businesses and places of worship suddenly became targets of hateful acts, slurs, screams of “go home,” graffiti, assaults, gunshots and murder.

At no point since World War II have so many Jews in so many places across the world felt so insecure and untethered from the Western democracies in which they live. At no point in nearly a century have so many felt as though the citizenship and connection they had with their homes had suddenly and shockingly been ripped away. We have lost our basic sense of normalcy.

This latest watershed moment epitomized the existential threats facing the State of Israel. On Oct. 7, Hamas was responsible for the greatest number of deaths in a single day in the country’s history, leading to the most rapid, pervasive and tectonic transformation of global Jewish existence since the Holocaust. The Jewish sense of security, safety, acceptance and integration into our broader communities has been permanently altered across the world.

On this first anniversary of that dark day, it is incumbent upon us as Americans — as well as upon citizens of all democratic countries — to take stock of that transformation, to understand what it means to our greater society and to the future into which it is heading us.

This assessment cannot simply be limited to documenting the percentage increases in the number of antisemitic incidents or diagnosing the trends and types of threats now facing Jewish communities. It is imperative for us to recognize the truly global nature of the altered state of Jewish existence simply in a matter of one year.

Within one year, British Jews went from freely and safely using public transit in London to now taking separately designated buses as a way of keeping them safe.

Within one year, Jewish kindergartens in Perth, Australia, went from being openly integrated into their neighborhoods to now being protested by anti-Israel activists and needing 24-hour security protection.

Within one year, Jews in France went from having the choice of political parties across the spectrum to becoming politically homeless, as Marine Le Pen emboldened far-right nativist extremism, and far-left party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, accused of antisemitism multiple times, downplayed antisemitism in French society.

To be clear, many of the trends negatively impacting Jewish life did not begin with Oct. 7. The Anti-Defamation League has been documenting the normalization of anti-Jewish hate globally for the past decade.

I joined ADL as the senior vice president of international affairs in 2017. Even then, my number one task was to ring the alarm bells through data quantifying the year-over-year increase in antisemitism and highlighting incidents that impacted the lives of Jewish communities across the globe.

For the first five years of my tenure, I witnessed a consistent pattern of normalization of anti-Jewish hatred both in national and local settings impacting Jewish life in big and small ways. In Europe, we documented the “perfect storm” of the rise of far-right populist parties such as in Italy and Germany. In the United Kingdom, we watched far-left extremists such as Jeremy Corbyn hijack the Labour Party.

We witnessed the proliferation of radical Islam in both perpetrating acts of terror — such as the beheading of French teacher Samuel Paty in 2020 — and in daily life in Brussels, Paris, Madrid, and other cities where Jewish citizens have been harassed, accosted and even murdered.

In just one gruesome example in 2018, Yacine Mihoub murdered 85-year-old French Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll and set her apartment on fire. After convicting Mihoub in 2021, a French court associated the brutal attack with a “broader context of antisemitism.”

In the Middle East, as we witnessed the miraculous opening brought about by the Abraham Accords, we also documented the expansion of the Iranian regime’s fundamentalist Islamist ideology in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Gaza Strip and the West Bank, as well as European and Latin American cities.

As the top state sponsor of antisemitism, Holocaust denial and terrorism, the Iranian regime’s direct support of the Oct. 7 atrocities is what brought all that we had witnessed in the past decade to a devastating new climax.

What Oct. 7 and its aftermath demonstrated to Jews around the world is that the lessons of the Holocaust have not been taught or learned effectively enough to prevent the replay of those very horrors.

We learned that “Never Again” is not real. Nor can we trust the world when it proclaims those words. We learned that the semblance of safety and security can be completely destroyed within a year; that blacklists of Jewish authors, musicians and artists can sprout up again; that Jewish businesses can again be targeted, vandalized and destroyed; that Jewish schools and institutions must yet again rely on their own security to keep their children and community safe while Jewish university students fear walking across campus alone.

So, if Oct. 7 communicated to global Jewry that we cannot trust the commitment to Never Again, then it should also convey to all people of the world that our democracies are in danger. If our Jewish citizens are so fearful, so isolated and so unsafe, then our very democratic values and institutions are on the brink of shattering.

What 4,000 years of Jewish history have taught us is that if it starts with the Jews, it never ends with the Jews. And what we have witnessed across our cities is not a Jewish problem for Jews to solve.

It is an American, Canadian, French, British, Australian, Argentinian and South African problem. It is a problem of democracy, telling us that our society is headed in the wrong direction. And we need to find an offramp from this dreadful highway we’ve been down before.

Sharon Nazarian is the president of the Y&S Nazarian Family Foundation, with a regional office in Israel named the Ima Foundation and founder of the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. She previously served as the Anti-Defamation League’s senior vice president in international affairs.