Rebel Against Sycophancy

By Dr. Rachel Fish

Mar 13, 2026

In which Rachel Fish envisions a sovereign Jewish culture released from the habits of deference formed in exile, and calls for a posture of dignity befitting a people restored to history.

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Rachel Fish.

Rachel Fish is the co-founder of Boundless, a nonprofit think-action tank that partners with community leaders across North America to revitalize Israel education and to take collective action to combat Jew-hatred. She also serves as Special Advisor for the Brandeis University President’s Initiative on Antisemitism and as an associate research professor at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies.

In addition to her research and advisory work, Fish teaches Israeli history and society at The George Washington University, where she serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership in the Graduate School of Education and Human Development. Across her academic and public engagement, her work has focused on strengthening Jewish confidence, education, and civic responsibility in contemporary life.

We’re proud to share Rachel’s Prophecy with you - and hope you’ll share this with others to introduce them to her, too:

Rebel Against Sycophancy

By Rachel Fish

For a long time, I’ve argued that something fundamental is off in the way Jews in the United States understand themselves and their place in the country. What I see, again and again, is a deep desire to be accepted. Not respected on an equal footing — but rather, accepted, as in liked, allowed to stay in the room without making anyone uncomfortable. And that desire shapes so much more than people realize. It shapes how Jewish parents tell their kids to behave, how our institutions respond to pressure, and how Jewish leaders decide what risks they’re willing to take. It’s the reason people say “don’t rock the boat” instead of asking why the boat is taking on water.

That mindset didn’t come out of nowhere. Historically, the American Jewish experience really has been exceptional. America is built on a different idea than the places Jews lived previously. The country wasn’t formed around one ethnicity or one religion. It pushed against the concept of religious identity melded with political identity. It imagined a melting pot with a “high and impregnable wall” separating church from state as envisioned by Thomas Jefferson. And that created real opportunities for Jews that didn’t exist in Europe or the Muslim world. That exceptionalism opened doors. But it also encouraged Jews to organize mostly as a religious group, not as a people with a political identity. The ethno-national piece of Jewishness — the peoplehood piece — was pushed aside for decades.

Now we’re in a moment in which such avoidance is no longer possible. Jews are being pushed — sometimes gently, sometimes aggressively — to define who they are, while simultaneously being told what being a Jew should mean. They’re being told that if they stand out or speak up or insist on being part of a Jewish people, they’ll pay a price. Many of them don’t know what to do with that because they didn’t grow up learning the history they need in order to respond. They didn’t grow up being told that they were part of something larger than themselves. So when someone else defines them, they don’t necessarily have the grounding to challenge it.

I see this especially with students from middle school through higher education. They’re navigating environments where antizionism is normalized to the point that it has become antisemitism in most instances. They hear classic antisemitic tropes in hallways. They hear people make comments like, “Sniff, Sniff. Smells like a Jew has been here,” as a young person told me recently, and they think the safest response is to say nothing. They know that if they report such an incident it will most likely only lead to greater and more serious confrontation, and they are not prepared for that.

Jews are accused regularly of supporting a state that promotes genocide and ethnic cleansing, and as Jews they can’t imagine being responsible for these atrocities. And so they find themselves on the defense over perceived acts that are indefensible, and have no idea what to say or how to respond. They don’t trust the grownups to help. And in many cases, the grownups don’t. Institutions tell them to hide the fact that they are Jewish and sublimate this part of their identity, instead of addressing the root problem – the persistence of Jew-hatred. It’s astonishing, but that’s where we are.

Meanwhile, the political discourse in America — ranging from the hard Right to the hard Left — has created conditions where such ideas spread easily. On the Left, there’s a worldview that reduces everything to questions of race and power. On the Right, there are forms of ultra-nationalism that target anyone perceived as “other.” Jews end up caught between these two poles. The result is a society that claims to be pluralistic while normalizing big lies about one specific community. Jews once again are presented as all-powerful and sub-human simultaneously. When a society accepts big lies about the Jews, the fabric of that society frays. It always has.

All of that sits on top of something else: a romanticization of powerlessness that has taken hold among many American Jews. There’s a belief that being powerless makes you morally pure. Power, in this view, sullies you. Power forces you to make hard and sometimes unpopular decisions. Israel represents Jewish hard power — military power — something that doesn’t fit into the moral framework some American Jews want to inhabit.

Some Jewish communal leaders are eager to get rid of the ‘Z’ word from public discussion, to distance themselves in the hope of avoiding the controversy an engagement with Zionist ideas may entail. Instead of dealing with moral complexity, they reject the whole conversation by assuming that if we could just avoid talking about Israel, or Zionism, or peoplehood, everything would be fine. What they fail to understand is that if Jews stand by while Israel and Israelis are described as evildoers, purveyors of genocide, a people focused narrowly only on their own interests, these same traits, by extension, reflect back towards them. The subsequent reaction by many of those same Jews is to further distance and even disavow themselves of the innate peoplehood connection, so core and foundational to Jewish identity.

The path that starts with avoidance threatens to nullify the essence of who we are.

If we want a healthier Jewish community than the one struggling to defend itself today, we have to wrestle with this tendency to avoid the challenges we face in defining our community and its relationship with the world. I believe we should start by eliminating the idea that there are “good Jews” and “bad Jews.” Right now, the “good Jew” is often described as someone who engages with the world only as an individual, who distances themself from Israel, and doesn’t bring peoplehood into the conversation. That’s the socially acceptable model — the Jew who won’t make anyone uncomfortable. And the “bad Jew” is the one who insists that Zionism is part of their identity, that the Jews are a people, that belonging to a political collective is legitimate, even essential.

This distinction between the “good” and “bad” Jew is destructive. It is irresponsible and it will tear the American Jewish community apart from within. A better future is one in which Jews do not have to feel that being morally acceptable means denying who they are.

A better future also requires acknowledging something that Jews from the Soviet Union and from Middle Eastern and North African countries understand instantly: Today, antizionism is antisemitism. It’s not theoretical. When people project old antisemitic tropes — Jews are too powerful, too greedy, too controlling — onto Israel, and then argue that Israel should not exist, they are simply shifting the target from Jews as individuals to Jews as a collective. When Jews say, “if we just don’t talk about Israel,” or “if we remove Zionism from the conversation,” we’ll be accepted — their thinking is not rooted in reality. It is an attempt to peel away a layer of identity. And once you do that, very little is left.

In an age in which so many other identity communities are fully embraced by the world at large and their complex histories alongside their communal narratives are elevated, why are Jews reluctant to demand the same? Have American Jews internalized the diaspora experience so deeply they can no longer recognize when they need to stand tall and assert who they are unequivocally? What are we so scared of? Losing our place in society? Are we worried that if we are not self-negating we will lose our place among other particular communities? We must stop contorting ourselves out of desperation to be liked.

A healthier future is one in which people understand that the strength of the Jewish political identity needn’t undermine American liberalism. In fact, a society that cannot tolerate one community having a distinct political identity will not remain liberal for long. If the promise of America is pluralism, scapegoating Jews or targeting the peoplehood dimension of Jewish identity undermines that promise. It threatens the idea of America itself.

A healthier future is one in which Jewish children know enough about themselves that when someone challenges them, they can respond confidently. They shouldn’t be thrust into environments that demand they explain who they are without possessing the tools to do so. They should understand the people they come from. They should understand the collective political identity they have inherited. They should understand why Zionism exists and why it matters — not because they may need to defend it all the time, but because they deserve to be grounded.They deserve to hear explicitly that it is a privilege and responsibility to be part of the Jewish People. When the Prophet Elisha offers advocacy on her behalf, the Shunammite woman responds “בְּת֥וֹךְ עַמִּ֖י אָנֹכִ֥י ישָֽׁבֶת” – “I live among my own people” or “I dwell in the midst of my own people” (II Kings 4:13). The profound sense of belonging possessed by the Shunammite woman is of the sort that we need to bestow to the next generation of Jews.

To move towards this future, we first and foremost need literate Jews. Twenty years ago, I sat in meetings where people argued that the Jewish community had enough money to make Jewish day school affordable for everyone. And then the idea just died. No priority. No urgency. If people don’t know who they are, they cannot stand up for themselves. Today, they are being asked to stand up for themselves constantly. So Jewish education has to be taken seriously. Not because it’s nice to have, but because it’s necessary. This requires philanthropists to take the long view and not get distracted by “shiny object” syndrome. We can no longer just bemoan the fact that our kids are Jewishly illiterate, we have to take responsibility and change the direction of the shifting sands.

Second, we need leadership that is willing to lead. Most Jewish leaders are not elected. They’re appointed. Many are too easily swayed by donors or by a fear of being disliked. They care too much about whether powerful people inside and outside the community approve of them. That makes them ineffective at moments when clarity is required. Communities need to challenge the assumption that whoever holds a position is automatically suited for it. If leaders are too weak to do what is needed, then we have to say so. Silence won’t fix this.

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