This is a late edition, and I am sending it at the end of the weekend on purpose. Tomorrow night marks the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, when Nazi mobs smashed Jewish shop windows and burned synagogues across Germany and Austria.
On Sunday, the eve of that anniversary, a group called Philly Bike On Your Left staged a âBoycott Rideâ to six Jewish-owned restaurants around Rittenhouse Square, including three run by chef Michael Solomonov. Their flyer declared, âThese Zionist establishments must go.â One organizer explained that the group picked its targets for their closeness to the square, and every target on the list had a Jewish owner.
Philadelphia answered with its feet and its appetite. Hundreds of people turned out to eat at the six restaurants, and long lines stretched outside their doors while the riders circled the square. Governor Josh Shapiroâs office called the ride blatant antisemitism, and the people of Philadelphia answered it at the lunch counter.
Antizionism is the modern face of antisemitism, and every American who cares about children should learn to recognize it. It gives the oldest hatred in history a progressive vocabulary and aims it at the Jewish state and at the Jewish family that runs the deli down the street. The IHRA working definition of antisemitism names this pattern plainly.
Shelby Steele has spent decades naming a force most Americans feel and few can describe. He calls it white guilt, and he means a hunger for moral innocence. Real guilt ends when a person makes amends, but white guilt never ends, because the accused has nothing specific to repair. Schools, universities and corporations learned to buy their innocence by obeying whoever holds the accusation. The accuser gains power, and every institution that wants peace hands it over.
His son, my good friend Eli Steele, turned that argument into a new film, White Guilt, and I talked with Eli about it last month. Eli shows how the formula outgrew race. It only ever needed a new oppressed group and a new oppressor. After October 7, the formula found its newest oppressor in the Jew. The settler-colonial libel now locks every Jew inside that box for good, whatever he believes and whatever he does.
My own family left Odessa, where the Soviet state sorted its citizens into classes and blamed âclass enemiesâ for every failure. Under the same logic in Philadelphia, an Israeli-born chef who cooks hummus becomes a colonizer, and a woman who sells macaroni and cheese becomes a target. The riders needed no evidence against any of these owners. The accusation did it all.
In 1905, the Spanish-born Harvard philosopher George Santayana wrote in The Life of Reason that âthose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.â His warning carries more weight today, because technology now spreads terrible ideas faster than any earlier generation could imagine. The Philadelphia organizers posted their flyer on Instagram on October 31, and their campaign reached national headlines within days. Our children absorb these ideas on their phones and in their classrooms long before anyone teaches them the history that would let them question it.
Restore Childhood exists so that children, and everyone who cares about them, can read the present through the lens of history. That job grows harder as publishers quietly let the best childrenâs history books go out of print. Yama Barâs essay below does that work. She connects Sundayâs ride to the boycotts, signs and campus movements that prepared Germany for Kristallnacht. Targeting a business because of its ownerâs identity betrays everything America stands for, and we cannot restore that America until we understand what threatens it. Please read this essay and share it widely.
Yama Bar wrote the essay below. We publish it here as a guest post and subscribe to her excellent substack Behind the Narrative đŁ
When I got married, the man who was then my husband and I made a little agreement. We would each spend our last days of singlehood doing exactly what made us happiest. I chose a quiet, intimate evening with my closest friends, the kind of evening where conversations become confessions, where question games lead you into the deepest corners of one anotherâs souls, and where the wine, the cheese, and the laughter last until the first light of morning. He flew to Belgium with his best friend to spend a week touring breweries.
Why Belgium? Because his favorite beer, which over the years had become ours, was La Chouffe. Back when we were students at Ben-Gurion University, our little apartment in Beer Sheva was almost never quiet. Every evening, it seemed, someone would knock on the door, another friend would arrive, another bottle of Chouffe would be opened, and the night would stretch into something beautiful and unforgettable. We had Chouffe hats, a Chouffe song, special dishes we invented just to accompany the beer, and above all, we had friends. So many friends. So much laughter. So much love. We were young, poor, hopelessly idealistic, and happy in that innocent way you can only be before life teaches you how fragile happiness really is. At our wedding, we ordered barrel after barrel of La Chouffe, and on Purim we dressed up as the little gnomes from its label. It was more than a beer. It was a small, ridiculous, wonderful symbol of everything we had built together.
So he went to Belgium. For an entire week, he wandered among breweries tucked away in tiny villages, the kind of forgotten European places where tourists rarely venture, where the streets are narrow, the houses are centuries old, and life seems untouched by time. When he returned home, he told me something Iâll never forget. In some of those villages, people looked at him, recognized something in his face, and said a single word: Jid. Jew. Sometimes they spat. That was all. One word, one gesture, and centuries of hatred suddenly stood between a stranger and a young Israeli man who had traveled thousands of miles for nothing more sinister than his love of beer.
It was 2007. More than sixty years had passed since the Holocaust. Yet somewhere in a quiet Belgian village, that word had survived, waiting patiently on someoneâs tongue. I remember how deeply it hurt me, not simply because he was my fiancĂ©, but because he was a descendant of Holocaust survivors. His mother, born in Poland, was a woman I loved dearly. Over the years, she and I had spent countless hours talking about her familyâs history, her motherâs escape from Poland, and what it meant to watch the Nazis rise, to feel the world around you turn hostile, and to understand that the people who had once been your neighbors could suddenly look at you as something less than human.
Years passed. We had three beautiful children. We built a life, crossed an ocean, moved to the United States, and eventually, like so many people who once believed their love would last forever, we divorced. Life carried us in different directions, but I never forgot the Jid, and it seems he has. Every time I come to pick up my children, I feel that pain again, but a different kind. It is no longer the pain of knowing that somewhere in Europe, a stranger could look at a Jew and spit. It is the pain of watching a Jew forget what that spit meant.
A Progress Pride flag hangs in his house. He has remarried a Jewish woman from progressive Somerville, who embodies the tragic caricature of the privileged, spoiled, self-hating Jew, surrounded by people who speak endlessly about oppression yet seem incapable of recognizing the hatred that has followed their own people for centuries. They march proudly in No Kings protests, vote faithfully for the far progressive left, and call anyone who pushes back even slightlyâyes, you guessed itâa fascist.
What is more frightening? That in 2007, a stranger in a Belgian village still knew how to spit the word Jid at a Jew, or that in 2026, Jews who heard that word, Jews whose parents and grandparents survived far worse, refuse to see the signs and vote for, champion, and defend the very side that openly fuels Jew-hatred and calls to dismantle the one place on earth that still serves as a safe haven for Jews?
I donât know the answer. But Iâm telling you all this because of the pain I felt when I read that nearly 60 percent of Michiganâs Jewish early voters walked into the voting booth and handed a Senate seat to Abdul El-Sayed. This is a man who accuses Israel of genocide, who rallied with Hasan Piker, the streamer who once announced that America deserved 9/11, and who, after a terror attack on Temple Israel in their own backyard in West Bloomfield, offered the community the profound wisdom that âhurt people hurt people.â And how did they reward him for that fortune-cookie philosophy, delivered over the smoke of their own synagogue?
With their votes, naturally, because nothing says self-respect quite like promoting the man who explains your attacker to you. A year earlier, New York had already rehearsed the same play, when a third of the cityâs Jews helped crown Zohran Mamdani, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, as mayor of the largest Jewish city outside Israel. And all of them, every last one, comfort themselves with the same magic formula: Iâm Jewish, but Iâm not a Zionist. Anyone who still believes that distinction will save them is an idiot, and if you need proof, just ask Scott Wiener. He is Jewish, gay, as progressive as they come, a man who spent years fighting for trans rights and who even bowed to the pressure and declared that Israel is committing genocide. Did it help him?
In June, at San Franciscoâs Trans March, the very community he championed surrounded him, filmed him, and screamed that he didnât belong there, cursing his âIsraeli handlersâ until he had to flee the park for his own safety. Because it was never about Israel. It was always about the Jew.
When I heard about those 60 percent, all I could think about was my ex-husband standing in his house under his Progress Pride flag. Does he understand that without a Jewish state, his mother and her mother would have had nowhere to run? That the only thing standing between his family and the fate of the six million was a place on earth that would open its door to a Jew without demanding an apology first? And yet here he is, and here we are, cheering on the very progressives who want to cut ties with Israel and strip away its support until it can no longer defend itself, as if the door that once saved his family would stay open forever on its own. The Jews forgot. And in this article, Iâm going to remind them and show them signs from everyday life, our streets, schools, and screens, that prove we are living right now in exactly the same moment as Germany in the 1930s.
The Night of Broken Glass
Today, Sunday, November 8, the very day this article lands in your inbox, a coalition of activists in Philadelphia will climb onto their bicycles for what they call a âBoycott Rideâ through Rittenhouse Square, pedaling from one Jewish-owned restaurant to the next, six stops in all, a brief guided tour of who owns what. And what exactly do they want from these restaurants? A better menu? Lower prices? No. They want them gone. âThese Zionist establishments must go! Not in our city!â their flyers announce, while the organizers invite their followers to show these âZio business ownersâ that they see them âfor the disgusting humans they are.â
And who is behind this charming Sunday outing? A left-wing cycling club called Philly Bike On Your Left, a group of local writers who named themselves Philly Writers Against the War on Gaza, and Boycott CookNSolo, a campaign that exists for one purpose only: to harass a restaurant group run by the Israeli American chef Michael Solomonov. And what exactly is Solomonovâs crime? He was born in Israel, raised in Pittsburgh, and he cooks hummus in Philadelphia. What a war crime.
Now explain this to me: if their quarrel is really with the State of Israel, why ride past his falafel shop at all, when Israel has an embassy in Washington and a consulate in New York, each with an address, a flag, and diplomats inside? Because an embassy has guards, while a falafel shop has a Jew behind the counter. And if we look at the rest of their harassment list, we will find: Schlesingerâs, a Jewish deli co-owned by Allan Domb, who has no Israeli flags on his walls. Mac Mart, a macaroni-and-cheese kiosk owned by an American Jewish woman named Lieberman. Since when is mac and cheese a Zionist dish?
And how did the organizers choose their targets? One of them explained on Instagram that the Jewish-owned eateries were selected for their proximity to Rittenhouse Square. Not for their politics or ties to Israel, but because they are Jewish and close enough to reach by bike. And in case anyone missed the message, some of the promoters gave their outing a second name, âthe Great Ride of Return,â a wink to Hamasâs âGreat March of Returnâ on the Gaza border. Again. Not Israeli. Not Zionist. Jewish.
To everyone who voted this week for El-Sayed and for the red-green alliance that carried him, take a good look at Rittenhouse Square, because this is what you voted for. And if you think this mob will stop at Schlesingerâs door and never reach yours, or that your progressive credentials and your âAs a Jewâ posts will earn you an exemption, you are dreaming. They didnât check whether Mac Mart supports Netanyahu or whether it is Zionist; they only checked who owns it.
And itâs not the first Jew hunt, dear Jewish Michiganers. In Amsterdam, the city of Anne Frank, on the night of November 7, 2024, after a soccer match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv, gangs on scooters went hunting through the streets, organized in advance via Telegram groups that openly spoke of a âJew hunt,â as the cityâs own mayor admitted. Israeli fans were beaten, chased, and thrown into the freezing canals. One was filmed curled on the ground under a rain of kicks, screaming, âI am not Jewish! I am not Jewish!â as if denying who he was might buy him mercy.
Now look at the calendar. Of all the Sundays in the year, the Philadelphia riders chose the eve of the Kristallnacht anniversary, just as Amsterdamâs hunters struck two days before the anniversary. So letâs stop dancing around it and call it what it is: Kristallnacht.
And if you donât know what Kristallnacht is because your school was too busy teaching you about colonialism, it was the night of November 9, 1938, when Germany stopped pretending. Across the Reich, mobs went from Jewish shop to Jewish shop, smashing windows and looting everything inside. Synagogues went up in flames while firefighters stood by, making sure the fire didnât spread to the homes of their non-Jewish neighbors. By the time the glass had stopped falling, at least 91 Jews were dead, and 30,000 Jewish men were on their way to concentration camps, guilty of nothing but being Jewish. The Nazis called it the spontaneous anger of the people. Today they call it a bike ride for justice. The glass in Philadelphia hasnât broken yet. But does anyone still believe theyâre just stopping by for falafel?
So let me ask every Jew who walked into a voting booth this week and handed his ballot to the radical left and its jihadist friends: what exactly are you missing? Which part of a mob circling Jewish restaurants on the eve of Kristallnacht looks to you like social justice? The whole world loves to tell us we are the smartest people on earth, the people of Einstein and Freud, with more Nobel Prizes than anyone can count. Yet you canât recognize Kristallnacht when it rides right past your favorite falafel shop. Itâs the same old night all over again, the 2026 edition, only this time it comes with an athletic body, a pretty face, and a mob shouting Alhamdulillah.
The Sign in the Window
Long before the gas chambers, before the trains and the camps, there were the signs. They didnât come all at once. They crept onto the doors of cafĂ©s and restaurants, the windows of bakeries and butcher shops, and the gates of parks and swimming pools, until a Jew in Germany could no longer walk down his own street without being told, in neat black letters, that he was not wanted here.
Some establishments posted signs stating that Jews and dogs were not allowed, just to make sure the Jew understood exactly where he stood in the order of things. And it didnât stop at coffee and cake. As William Shirer documented in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, in many communities Jewish mothers could not buy milk for their young children, and pharmacies refused to sell medicine to Jews. Imagine standing at a pharmacy counter with a sick child at home, being turned away by the same pharmacist who had served you for years, and walking home with empty hands.
Now imagine something else. An Israeli family- a mother, a father, and two little girls- arrives at a small zoo. At the entrance, they are asked a simple question: Where are you from? They answer, and thatâs enough. Israelis are not allowed. Nobody asks what they think about the war, what party they vote for, or whether they marched in Tel Aviv against their own government. Then the zooâs manager storms out, screaming at them to get out right in front of the two little girls, headbutts the father, and throws a sign at the family as they flee. Then, just in case anyone missed the point, the zooâs own Instagram posts an Israeli flag crossed out with a âno entryâ symbol, right beside a shooting target.
Mako
Or imagine a Jewish woman in Barcelona, at a thermal spa, on what was supposed to be a relaxing day, until someone notices the small Star of David around her neck, calls her a Zionist, and pushes her out. Jews of Michigan, watch this video because these are not scenes from an old black-and-white newsreel. They are happening right now, as Europe and America slowly fill up with signs again: No Israelis. No Zionists. And, in some places, even a sign saying Jews are banned from here. So if this is not the Germany of the 1930s, tell me what it is.
The Campus Falls First
We like to imagine that Nazism was the work of angry, uneducated thugs in brown shirts, but the truth is far more uncomfortable. Some of its most ardent supporters sat in lecture halls. In the summer of 1931, a year and a half before Hitler came to power, the Nazi Student League had already taken over the national German student union. Young people, the bright, idealistic, educated hope of the nation, proved far more receptive to the movement than their parents ever were.
On May 10, 1933, it was students, not stormtroopers, who piled books onto bonfires in university towns across Germany, cheering as the flames devoured what they called âJewish intellectualism.â The universities fell first. The country simply followed.
Now, walk onto an elite American campus today. When Harvard finally investigated what was happening to its Jewish students, its own task force found that they had become outcasts, hiding their identities just to get through the semester. One Israeli student told the committee that he hadnât done anything pro-Israel; he had simply existed. Simply existed. Isnât that exactly how it always begins, when a Jewâs crime is no longer what he does but what he is? And the students are only the vanguard of a much larger generation. In the months after October 7, while the bodies were still being identified, a Harvard-Harris poll found that 60 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 believed the massacre could be justified by Palestinian grievances, and two-thirds of them agreed that Jews as a class are oppressors.
Not Israelis. Jews. Michigan, are you listening? In 1933, the students burned the books. In 2026, they donât need matches; they have TikTok and hatred. Who exactly do you think will be running America in twenty years?
And it is only getting worse. While Jews in Michigan and liberals across the country keep marching into the voting booth for the progressive left, indoctrination is starting younger and younger. This fall, the New Jersey branch of CAIR handed parents and teachers a back-to-school guide linked to a 9/11 curriculum for elementary, middle, and high school students. The curriculum blamed the attacks on Americaâs support for Israel, never once called the hijackers terrorists, and recommended Osama bin Ladenâs âLetter to Americaâ as reading for teenagers. CAIR had already shared these materials with more than 55 public schools before it got caught and quietly deleted the link.
Meanwhile, the Young Democratic Socialists of America, the youth wing of the movement that AOC and Mamdani champion, is recruiting in New Yorkâs high schools, grooming teenagers to become foot soldiers in their revolution and teaching them to hate the country that gave their families everything. Critical race theory finishes the job, teaching children to despise the white body and worship the oppressed, to see every white classmate as a perpetrator and every story of America as a crime.
So explain it to me: why would you want your children educated this way? Because I hear the stories every day about sons and daughters who fell into this world and simply decided to cut off their own families. You are not just voting for a candidate. You are voting to hand your children over to the people who will teach them to hate you.
From Words to Murder
Every generation of Jews hears the same reassurance: itâs just words, itâs just a boycott, itâs just a protest. Calm down. But history teaches something the reassurers never want to hear: hatred turns into violence not when the street changes, but when the leadership does.
In 1933, the boycott of Jewish businesses was announced as âorderlyâ and non-violent, yet it led to beatings and even murders, while the police intervened only rarely. Why? Because ordinary Germans looked up and saw that the men in power hated the Jews, too. Once hatred gets a seal of approval from the top, the man in the street no longer needs permission. Words never stay words. They are the rehearsal, and the leaders hand out the script.
Letâs start with New York. Zohran Mamdani swears his quarrel is with Israel, not with the Jews. But New York now has the largest Muslim population of any city in America, and they can smell taqiyya, the deception, from a mile away. He says he is only against Israel, yet he picks anti-Semites to serve the city. The mob hears the message behind it and knows exactly what to do with it; every choice is permission. In his very first month in office, antisemitic hate crimes in New York jumped by 182 percent. Not attacks on Israeli Zionists, or whatever lies he is feeding the useful idiots who understand nothing about Islam or history. Attacks on Jews. A rabbi beaten outside his synagogue. Jews attacked on the subway. Jewish children in Brooklyn who walked out to their school buses this week and found them covered in swastikas and âFree Palestine,â side by side.
So explain it to me, Jews of Michigan. You watched all of this unfold in New York. Then you walked into the voting booth and helped send the first Muslim senator in American history to Washington, a man who celebrated his victory by declaring that American money should not fund âapartheid, or genocide,â which, translated into plain English, means not the Iron Dome, not Israelâs safety, not the only Jewish state on Earth. And now his party controls the Senate. Do you understand what you just did? What exactly did you think would happen next?
Gad Saad calls this suicidal empathy. With all due respect, he is being too kind. Empathy means you feel for someone. This is not empathy. This is willful blindness, the kind that once led Jews in Germany to believe the hatred was meant for someone else, right up until the day it knocked on their own door.
This is no coincidence, and it is not mere rhetoric. It is the same chain we saw in Germany: the leader legitimizes, the activist incites, and the man in the street finishes the job. They donât wear brown shirts this time. They wear keffiyehs, carry âprogressiveâ slogans, and call themselves the resistance. But call them what they are: the new Nazis.
The Last Door
Look at the map. In Canada, the prime minister has admitted that his country failed its Jews. One in four Canadian Jews considered leaving, and Jewish organizations are now running exploratory trips to Panama and Oklahoma for families who no longer feel safe at home. In Britain, six in ten Jews have considered leaving, and the prime minister, standing in Downing Street after yet another stabbing, admitted that Jews are afraid to show who they are and afraid to go to synagogue: âNobody should live like that in Britain, but Jews do.â In France, more than 4,000 Jews have already moved to Israel since the start of this year, eleven every day.
These countries are about ten years ahead of America, and they all took the same path to get there: they opened their borders without asking who was coming, handed power to the progressive left and its Islamist partners, and woke up one morning to find their Jews were no longer safe.
So tell me, dear Jews of New York and Michigan, you who voted for El-Sayed and Mamdani and cheer for AOC: where exactly are your brothers and sisters supposed to go? Canada is no longer safe for them. Britain is no longer safe for them. France is emptying out. And now you are doing everything you can to make America unsafe too, because we have all seen what is happening in New York. And as if that werenât enough, you are sending to Washington the very politicians who believe Israel should not exist, who want to cut off its weapons and aid, and who want to shut the last door that still stands open. In the months after October 7, more than half of young Americans ages 18 to 24 said they believed Israel should be ended and handed over to Hamas. So where do you want them to run? Where do you want us to run?
I want to say something to every Jew in New York and in Michigan, and to every Jew who votes for the left: this is on you. I am not even angry at the Nazis and the Islamists. They belong to the underworld of hatred, the Sitra Achra, the Other Side. They are like the serpent: this is their nature, their Sanskar, to hate, devour, and kill. They still crawl in the lowest realm of existence, and hatred is their whole reason for being. But you? Every Jew who is murdered, every Jew who hides, every Jew who takes off his kippah or tucks his Star of David under his shirt, every mother like me whose childrenâs schools find fresh swastikas scrawled on the bathroom walls every single week, whose daughter is elected president of her high school and is immediately told, well, of course, thatâs what Jews do, they take over, and every mother who writes to me with a broken heart because her child has cut off all contact after a school taught that child to hate herself and the white, colonialist tyrants who raised her, this is f***ing on you.
I am furious, and I am grieving. I am watching Europe and America, the civilization that gave the world freedom, reason and the dignity of the individual, turn its Jews and its Christians into the easiest targets on the street. But more than anything, I am angry at those who keep voting for the people making it happen, and at the suicidal empathy that dresses up blindness as virtue and calls it compassion.
Please, share this article. Send it to the friend who still thinks itâs âjust politics,â to the cousin who voted for El-Sayed, to the neighbor who believes this will never reach his door. If it opens the eyes of even one person, it was worth every word.
I left this piece free for everyone to read, because it matters too much to sit behind a paywall. But I canât keep doing this without you. If you want to help this voice reach further, become a paid subscriber, pick up a copy of The Enemy Within, or make a one-time contribution here. Every reader who stands with me makes a difference.
Thank you for reading. This community matters, more than ever, to a world that has forgotten how to see.
Much love,
Yama Bar





Can't say that I've delved much into Jewish history, though I've run across tales of the Babylonian captivity, circa 600 BCE:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_captivity
But it's always been something of a puzzle to me how the Jews have "gotten it in the neck" throughout much of European history in the intervening 2600 years -- one pogrom and genocide after another. Some reasons there, methinks, that gives weight to the argument that the World more or less owes the Jews a homeland of their own:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Expulsion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain
I am so, so sad that SO MANY cannot see and are participating in repeating history. I am old and will probably be gone; but my children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren...I just keep talking with them, praying with them, and beseeching them to not let hatred win đđđ