The Future of the Jewish American Story Is Still Being Written©
Rosh Hashanah Day One
September 12, 2026 - 1st of Tishrei 5787
Rabbi David Baum - Congregation Shaarei Kodesh
When I say the word "graffiti," what comes to mind? Vandalism, maybe. Something illegal. Something you scrub off a wall. Not something you would go out of your way to see.
This summer, our congregation traveled to Israel together. We walked through three thousand years of history: Masada, the Kotel, ancient Jerusalem, Caesarea, and more. But on our last day in Tel Aviv, our guide took us somewhere I didn't expect: a graffiti tour.
In Tel Aviv, graffiti isn't vandalism. It's more like a public diary of artists responding, in real time, to what the country is living through.
As we drove through the streets, I saw something enormous on the side of a building: Superman. I thought to myself:
Why would Superman, an iconic American symbol, be painted on a huge wall in Tel Aviv?
Graffiti doesn't come with a written explanation, so before I tell you the story, I want you to try yourselves.
Turn to the person next to you, a chevrutah, and interpret the graffiti of Superman from two perspectives:
What is the message for Israeli Jews who were in shock and fighting immediately after 10/7?
What is the message for Jewish-Americans living in this country in 2026?
During our graffiti tour of Tel Aviv, our tour guide told the story of this huge graffiti Superman:
Below Superman, you may have noticed the words, “Don’t panic—the IDF will protect you.” Two street artists from Ashkelon, Roman and Andrei, created the graffiti, which compares the army’s strength to Superman. It was created two weeks after Roman’s house in Ashkelon was hit by shrapnel in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas onslaught.
The Superman is how Israeli Jews, most of whom serve in the IDF, felt before October 7. Yes, they were always in danger, but the idea that the whole country could fall was unimaginable. The days of the 1973 war were well over, but that feeling, that it could have all ended, came back with a roar. An exhausted Superman represents how all Israelis felt during those dark days. Where was the IDF, the backbone of the country, to protect them?
I told the graffiti artist that this picture is also for Jewish-Americans — because, after all, we, Jewish Americans, created Superman. He had no idea. Maybe you didn't either.
This summer, we celebrated the 250th anniversary of American independence, and it gives us a chance to revisit the Jewish story of independence in this land. The story I want to begin with is the very Jewish story of Superman, who stood for truth, justice, and the American way.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the children of Jewish immigrants fleeing the pogroms, created Superman in 1932 in Cleveland when they were both in high school. Their parents changed their last names from Segalovich and Shusterowitch.
The story of Superman is the quintessential story of the Jewish-American experience in the early to mid 1900s: an alien refugee from a foreign land and culture comes to Earth, or in this case, America, for refuge, and to build a new life and new identity. We stood for truth, justice, and the American way. We also kept our Jewish identities, but mostly just to ourselves.
Yehudah Leib Gordon, the founder of the Russian Jewish Enlightenment movement in the 1800’s, who wanted Russian Jews to enter non-Jewish society, wrote, “Be a Jew in the home, and a man in the street.”
What he meant was, when you’re out in the street in non-Jewish society, try to blend in, but at home, keep our traditions. In Superman’s case, his costume wasn’t the red cape and blue spandex; rather, it was the business suit and the glasses he wore as his alter ego, Clark Kent. It makes me wonder: did Superman have tzitzit hidden under his suit in the early comics?
This was the Jewish-American story. We had a dual identity, wanting to keep both, which we could in the land of freedom, America.
But that story is being threatened today.
I learned this firsthand from our children.
This summer, while at Camp Ramah, I taught Judaics to every age group, from entering 3rd graders to entering 11th graders. In our get-to-know-you sessions, I asked each group the same questions: What do you love about being Jewish? And what do you hate about being Jewish?
The love part was diverse: Shabbat, community, Jewish food, Havdallah, camp of course, and more. The answer for what they hated from every age group was the same: anti-semitism and hatred.
I heard stories that gave me the chills. One girl, a twelve-year-old, said she told her social studies teacher that she was Jewish at the beginning of the school year. After that, her teacher never called on her to speak in class for the rest of the year. One girl told me, “I don’t tell people at school that I’m Jewish anymore. I told my best friend, and then I found out she hated Jews, and we haven’t talked since.”These are just a couple of the stories I heard. I told one group that I was shocked to hear these stories. One camper shrugged and said, “We aren’t shocked - this is what life is like as a Jew in America after October 7th, 2023.”
In the new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, author Dara Horn speaks about what Jews around this country told her while on her book tour for the first book of non-fiction, People Love Dead Jews. As you can hear, she has a way with words. No one will ever forget her book titles.
The people who approached Horn were old and young, secular and religious, from red states and blue states, big cities and small towns. Most of what they described would never be categorized as a hate crime. They were the smaller humiliations and reminders that being Jewish could still make you a target.
An aspiring actor was repeatedly told she looked “too Jewish” for a role, which happened to be a Jewish character. A couple lost two of their closest friends after those friends attended their son’s bar mitzvah and complained about “so much weird Hebrew.” There was the woman who excitedly told a friend at work that she'd just finished converting to Judaism, only to have him respond, "You're Jewish now? Give me a dollar.” And many young Jews told Horn they were shut out of leadership roles because being Jewish supposedly made them “biased.”
And this was all before October 7, 2023.
She writes that her readers were angry, but more often, confused. Their experiences contradicted what they'd been raised to believe in: the idea of America as an exception to Jewish history.
The American Jewish bargain was that we could be fully Jewish and fully American. Superman could be both Kal-El and Clark Kent.
Our children are beginning to wonder whether that bargain still holds.
After I listened to the stories of the children at Ramah, and then read Dara Horn's words, I kept coming back to one of the most familiar teachings in our tradition, one that I have probably quoted hundreds of times: Hillel's three questions. Im ein ani li, mi li? Uchshe'ani l'atzmi, mah ani? V'im lo achshav, eimatai? If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?
Maybe we have heard those words so many times that we have stopped hearing how radical they actually are. You must be for yourself; you must know who you are, and, most importantly, be willing to defend it. But the moment that self-protection becomes the whole purpose of your life, you have also lost something essential about being Jewish.
On Yom Kippur, I’m going to focus on the second question, but this morning I want to focus mostly on Hillel's first question:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
A couple of weeks ago, a Jewish friend of mine, who identifies as a ‘cultural Jew,’ confided in me that his daughter, who is in 10th grade, said, “Dad, I’m getting a lot of antisemitism in my TikTok feed even though I don’t post anything Jewish. I don’t get it.” She asked her father, “Dad, why are they posting these things on my page if I’m not religious?”
He didn’t have an answer to give her, but I do.
A few months ago, I heard Dara Horn speak to a room full of rabbis, and she made an observation that embarrassed me a little because it was so obvious. She said that American Jews have become surprisingly bad at answering the simplest question: What is a Jew?
We usually say Judaism is a religion. And Judaism certainly has a religion, but Jews are not simply adherents of a religion. There are secular Jews. There are atheist Jews. Jews disagree about belief, observance, and almost everything else. Horn's answer predates any modern category of race, religion, ethnicity, or nationality. We are Am Yisrael, the People of Israel.
And once Horn said it that way, I realized that this is not a modern answer at all. It is the first answer the Torah gives us.
Before Egypt, before Sinai and the commandments, before the synagogue and Jewish prayer, there was Abraham. When God calls Abraham in Genesis 12, God does not say, “I am going to make you the founder of a great religion.” God says, “I will make of you a great nation.”
That is where our story begins: with a people; a family that becomes a people, with a shared memory, a shared destiny, and a relationship with a land.
And I think that really matters right now, because so much of the confusion around Jews and Israel begins when we try to explain Jewish identity using categories that are simply too small for it.
If we are Am Yisrael, then wherever Jews have lived, we’ve had to figure out how to remain part of this ancient people while also becoming part of the society around us. And nowhere has that experiment been more remarkable than here in America.
But peoplehood also means that Jews in Ashkelon who are hiding from rockets, or Jews in Boca Raton who are hiding their kippot, actually share the same story because we are one people…not simply two communities who happen to share a religion.
Jewish America has its own unique story, and it is anything but boring. The story we tell ourselves is that we came here and were accepted with open arms, and that’s why we have flourished here, but that story isn’t true.
Israeli Jews fought for their place in their land, but we too fought for our place in America.
Dara Horn points out something that surprises people: sociological studies show that many non-Jewish Americans in the late 1940s and early 1950s did not respond to the Holocaust with greater sympathy for Jews. Many actually saw it as proof Jews shouldn't be let into the country. The so-called Golden Age of Jewish life in America didn't come from non-Jews having a change of heart. It came from Jews organizing, building institutions, and telling their own story until the country finally listened.
You might wonder what I told my campers after they shared these stories with me: First off, I told them all, “I am in awe of all of you. I am the grandson of four Holocaust survivors. I grew up hearing stories like this, and much worse, but I didn’t have to experience what you are sharing. But here is what I want you to know: we have one of the most extraordinary stories in human history. We’ve survived persecution for thousands of years in strange lands, only to return to our ancestral homeland in Israel, while also staying in a land where we have flourished like nowhere else before. But it wasn’t by accident; we fought for it.
The Jews who came to America did not wait for someone else to build Jewish life for them. They did not wait for the government to create Jewish hospitals to heal them, Jewish schools to educate them, homes for the elderly, burial societies, synagogues, or organizations to welcome the next wave of immigrants.
They built them.
They understood that if Jewish life was going to survive in America, Jews had to take responsibility for one another.
Which means that when our children experience antisemitism today, I do not want the lesson to be that the American Jewish experiment failed. The golden age of Jewish life in America can continue if we keep fighting for it.
Our Jewish-American ancestors who came from foreign lands knew that America was not finished. They believed that this country could become better than it was, and they were willing to do the work to make it better.
So perhaps Im ein ani li, mi li? means something different for American Jews today than simply, Who will protect us? It means: Will we still take responsibility for Jewish life here? Will we still fight antisemitism without allowing antisemitism to define our Judaism? Will we still believe enough in the American Jewish story to continue writing it?
That is why I keep coming back to Superman. At the beginning of this sermon, I described him as the perfect symbol of the Jewish immigrant who learned how to live with two identities: Kal-El, his alien name, and Clark Kent, his American name. But perhaps the American Jewish dream was never supposed to be that Kal-El disappeared so Clark Kent could fit in. The Jewish-American dream was that he would not have to choose.
Hillel asks, Im ein ani li, mi li? If I am not for myself, who will be for me? Our ancestors answered that question by building Jewish America. They did not inherit the American Jewish dream; rather, they created it.
Hillel ends with another question: V’im lo achshav, eimatai? If not now, when?
Now it is our turn.
Be proud of who you are.
Fight back against the hate, but do not allow antisemitism to define your Judaism or convince you to hide in order to belong.
And if we cannot find the courage to do this for ourselves, then do it for our children. They are looking to us, and they are no longer simply asking, “Why is this happening?” They are asking, “What are we going to do now?”
We owe them an answer.
Shanah Tovah - may the shofar we hear tomorrow give us the strength to fight not just for this year, but for the next 250 years of Jewish history in this great country. Our history is still being written, and we are its authors.
Comments