October 7, 2023 could have been the beginning of Israel’s end. The Hamas massacre was devastating, but what might have followed in the hours and days afterwards could have been many times worse. Consider Israel securing the Gaza envelope, while also defending itself from the simultaneous uprising of Israeli Arabs; violent, large-scale attacks from Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nablus; a Hizballah invasion from the north; and coordinated drone and missile barrages from the entire Iranian axis, including Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Iran itself. All of this could have happened. If it had, three-quarters of a century of Jewish sovereignty might have ended, violently, for the third time in history.
But the Hamas massacre was not the beginning of Israel’s end. Military and intelligence officials, government leaders, thousands of soldiers, and millions of Israeli citizens showed that they are not captive to the inescapable pull of fate.
And neither are we. That’s something to remember when surveying the threats that we must now confront. China’s rise challenges American preeminence. Artificial intelligence promises to revolutionize human capabilities but also threatens to remake the nature of work and accelerate cultural disintegration. Children raised on screens show diminished capacity for sustained attention and embodied relationships. The family as a self-sustaining institution and seedbed of virtue continues its decades-long collapse across the developed world. Universities have abandoned liberal learning for ideological conformity. Historical and civilizational memory continues to slip through our fingers, leaving entire generations ignorant of what our fathers accomplished and why it matters. The return of great-power competition and spheres of influence means the global order that America built, and in which Israel has thrived, is giving way to something more chaotic and more dangerous.
But like the catastrophic scenarios that seemed plausible after October 7, the worst outcomes are not inevitable. We are not passengers on history’s predetermined course. What happens depends on choices made, arguments won, institutions defended or rebuilt, and the willingness to act rather than sigh, blink, and observe decline.
In her January 2026 essay, “Despair Not!”, Ruth Wisse reminds us that the fight against despondency is the essential precondition for self-defense. The Jews of the Warsaw ghetto took as their battle cry a teaching from Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav: “Gvald, Yidn, zayt zikh nisht m’yayesh”—Jews, don’t give in to despair. They understood that before resisting the enemy outside, they had to resist the inner temptation of resignation. That logic applies to us still. The West is being challenged from within and without, and fatalism guarantees defeat.
Mosaic is not neutral in this fight. We are committed to the defense and renewal of America and Israel, the societies shaped most profoundly by the moral and political teaching of the Hebrew Bible. The twelve essays published in 2025 were efforts to understand the deeper currents—strategic, intellectual, civilizational—that this moment of unravelling reveals. What follows is an accounting of what we published last year and why it mattered.
Two years after October 7, Israel stands stronger than nearly anyone predicted. This outcome seemed implausible through most of 2024 and into 2025, as the world’s diplomatic establishment demanded Israeli restraint, as university encampments spread, as the International Criminal Court indicted Israel’s prime minister, hostages remained in captivity, and the outcome of the war in Gaza was far from certain. Yet by year’s end, Hamas had been decimated, Hizballah crippled, the Assad regime defeated, and Iran’s nuclear program destroyed. A peace summit at Sharm el-Sheikh brought together 30 nations to acknowledge what force of arms had accomplished.
This outcome was neither inevitable nor without cost. More than 1,100 IDF soldiers died. Israeli society fractured over the hostages, over military strategy, over the future of Israeli democracy. The toll on Gaza’s population was severe, as was the moral burden on Israeli warriors for having to wage such a brutal war. During the first two years of battle, Israel faced not just its enemies’ viciousness but its supposed friends’ diplomatic pressure. The Biden administration supplied weapons while trying to prevent their effective use. European governments moved toward recognition of a Palestinian state. The gap between what Israel needed to do and what the international community would permit grew daily.
Israel’s military victory, as Arthur Herman recounted in November, unfolded across multiple fronts. It began with the ground invasion of Gaza that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant finally convinced the cabinet to authorize, proceeded through the methodical destruction of Hamas’s tunnel network and fighting capacity, extended to the pager attacks and systematic dismantling of Hizballah’s leadership, and culminated in the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes that dealt a massive blow to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Each phase faced international condemnation, in response to which Israel acted anyway.
But military operations alone do not explain what happened. Ran Baratz opened 2025 at Mosaic by diagnosing why October 7 was possible in the first place: a generation of IDF doctrinal failure rooted in the Revolution in Military Affairs. Two transformative waves had corrupted Israeli military thinking: cold-war nuclear deterrence theories like Mutually Assured Destruction, and post-cold-war “shock and awe” concepts that prioritized psychological effects over operational art. The 2006 Lebanon War exposed these failures, but the warnings were ignored. Israel paid in blood for adopting paradigms that promised technology could substitute for manpower, and a new generation of soldiers had to relearn through combat what its predecessors, at great cost, had already known.
That capacity to relearn under fire came from somewhere. Daniel Polisar’s June essay on Israeli reservists explained how a citizen army kept up the fight despite predictions of a 50–60 percent collapse in reporting rates. Instead, reservists continued showing up at a rate of 80–90 percent. These were not professional soldiers following orders but citizens who understood what defeat would mean. Polisar tells of men serving 293 days when called for emergency duty, losing jobs after 250 days of service; tank officers with five children accumulating over 300 days while their sons and daughters had nightmares about their fathers dying. The existence of m’supahim—fighters who volunteered for extra duty beyond their assigned units—captured something essential. In an astonishing demonstration of Israeli society’s internal strength, the reservist ethos sustained Israel when professional militaries might have collapsed.
As a result of their courage, a new regional architecture emerged in which Israel stood not as a pariah but as the indispensable power. Yet even as Israel won militarily, the diplomatic and political establishment insisted on solutions that would corrode victory’s staying power. Rafi DeMogge explained in February why demands for territorial concessions miss the fundamental nature of the conflict. Israel’s fight is not over where its borders should be drawn but over whether it should exist at all. Polling revealed that 70 percent of Gazans supported the October 7 massacre, while 33 percent of Palestinians prioritize the “right of return”—meaning Israel’s elimination—over actual statehood. Palestinian rejection of offers in 2000, 2001, and 2008 revealed an enduring conviction that having no state alongside Israel is better than having to acquiesce to the idea of Israel’s permanence. DeMogge showed that territorial withdrawals increase Israel’s isolation by triggering wars, not preventing them, a pattern visible from the 2000 Camp David rejection through the second intifada, from the 2005 Gaza withdrawal through Hamas’s coup and October 7—and thus ultimately increase global hostility.
Elliott Abrams further developed this line of argument in September by examining why Palestinian statehood remains impossible. Even veteran negotiators like Hussein Agha, Yasir Arafat’s former confidant, and Robert Malley, an adviser to Barack Obama, acknowledged in their book that “October 7 was Palestinian to the core.” The longtime Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat has admitted that his bosses had, in 2000 and 2008, declined offers of statehood in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank. Time and again, measures of popular opinion show that Palestinians favor confrontation over statehood. In the 2006 election, Salam Fayyad, who ran on a platform of institution-building and economic improvement, won his party 2.4 percent of the vote, while Hamas took 44 percent. September 2023 polling showed 57 percent of Palestinians opposed the two-state solution; May 2025 polling found 64 percent of Gazans opposed disarming Hamas. Abrams advocated for the only alternative for the West Bank that matches political reality, a confederation with Jordan. Most Palestinians already live under the Hashemites, and Jordanian pragmatism offers a counterweight to Palestinian maximalism.
These essays on Israel’s strategic situation share a common insight. The conflict is existential, not territorial. Solutions that begin from the premise of dividing the land miss the most important fact of all, that Israel’s enemies do not want a different border settlement; they want Israel wiped from the planet. Every NGO, multilateral organization, or political candidate who insists on treating this as a territorial dispute perpetuates the conflict by denying its actual character.
How did the Arab world reach a point where rejection and violence came to be valued over any sort of successful political compromise? Hussein Aboubakr Mansour’s July essay looked deep into the history of Arab thought, tracing the corrupting influence of German idealism—beginning when European émigrés brought Hegelian historicism and romantic nationalism to Cairo and Beirut in the late 19th century. Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, returning from Paris in 1831, created new Arabic terms, including hurriyya (liberty) and tamaddun (civilization), that fused European concepts with Islamic revivalism. Antoun Saadeh founded the Syrian Social Nationalist Party in 1932 with a “total doctrine” and a swastika as its symbol. Sayyid Qutb transformed from secular romantic poet to Islamist revolutionary, applying German romantic hermeneutics to Quranic interpretation. The result was a tradition of political thought that valorized violence, rejected pluralism, and imagined history as the unfolding of collective destiny rather than the product of human choice.
Alas, American intellectual life has also been susceptible to bad ideas. Eric Cohen and Samuel Helyar demonstrated in August how similar patterns of corruption, combined with deep institutional rot, afflict American universities. At Harvard and Yale, 80 percent of grades awarded in 2023 were A’s or A-’s, while institutions ostensibly dedicated to free inquiry have become engines of ideological conformity. Research output and selectivity, the metrics by which universities measured themselves, proved entirely disconnected from a commitment to liberal learning. When the intellectual monoculture turned against Israel and the Jews, as for generations it had already turned against America, university administrations either cheered or looked away.
Jack Wertheimer’s October essay examined why American Jewish organizations proved unable to combat the explosion of anti-Semitism that followed October 7. Over 160 organizations exist with this mission—Jewish community-relations councils, anti-defamation groups, Holocaust-education programs, interfaith partnerships. Some achieved tactical victories, but suffered strategic failure when partnerships collapsed. The Massachusetts Teachers Association, representing 117,000 members, circulated images of Stars of David made from dollar bills and passed genocide resolutions, driving Jewish educators from the organization. Pittsburgh, which had rallied around Jews after the 2018 Tree of Life massacre, reversed course post-October 7, with community leaders seeing Jews as “pro-genocide” and skipping commemorations. Brown University’s Choices Program was shut down one month after a March 2025 report exposed anti-Israel content. Decades of relationship-building yielded little; when the moment of crisis came, they were tested and found wanting.
What connects Mansour’s intellectual history, Cohen and Helyar’s analysis of higher-ed, and Wertheimer’s organizational autopsy is a pattern of ideological capture. In each case, institutions ostensibly serving one purpose were redirected to serve another. Arab intellectual life, which might have produced renaissance or reform, instead produced totalitarian movements. American universities, which are lavishly funded in order to cultivate serious learning, instead enforce political orthodoxy. Jewish communal organizations, which exist to serve and protect Jewish interests, instead pursued partnerships that subordinated those interests to progressive coalition politics.
The corruption in each case had philosophical roots. Just as Allan Bloom sought to show the influence of German philosophy in America, Mansour showed how European ideas about history and the state distorted Arab political thought. Universities absorbed similar ideas about power, oppression, and justice that made it impossible for them to serve their own purposes. Jewish organizations adopted the language and methods of social-justice activism, which left them defenseless when that activism turned against Jews. The underlying failure is the same: the substitution of ideology for thought, of programmatic solutions for genuine inquiry, of group identity for individual judgment.
Against this institutional collapse, we published essays that pointed toward renewal through recovery and reengagement with foundational sources. Doron Spielman’s April essay on the archaeology of the City of David showed what recovery means in the most literal sense. Charles Warren discovered in 1867 that biblical Jerusalem lay outside the medieval Old City walls by following water systems to Warren’s Shaft, the secret passage from the mountaintop to Gihon Spring that David used to capture the city. In 2000, when the Palestinian Authority tried to buy the Givati parking lot to stop excavations, their haste in fencing it before the deal closed exposed the plan and the site’s eleven civilizational layers. But physical evidence endures: the 8th-century BCE Siloam Inscription describing Hezekiah’s tunnel construction and clay seals bearing names of King Josiah’s servants. The stones testify to what ideologues sought to deny.
Ethan Dor-Shav’s May essay offered something else: an entirely novel interpretation of Genesis that takes both the ancient text and modern science seriously. His evolutionary reading proposed that the two creation accounts are parallel, with the first chapter of Genesis covering Day One of creation through Day Seven cosmically and biologically, while chapters 2–11 expand the same seven days focusing on human development, with Abraham marking Day Seven’s completion. The adam of Genesis 2 represents evolutionary seed, not literal homo sapiens. Day Four correlates with both the Solar System’s alignment and the Cambrian explosion; Day Five with reptiles (the serpent); Day Six with mammals and the first homo sapiens (Noah). Unconventional, yes, but Dor-Shav’s essay aims to show how biblical wisdom and our best observations of the natural world can illuminate each other when approached with genuine curiosity.
Mathis Bitton and Jack Sadler demonstrated in March how Jewish day schools can preserve what universities have abandoned. While 94 percent of U.S. public schools provide personal devices and colleges embrace platforms like ChatGPT, Jewish schools have charted a different course, with the best of them focusing on the primacy of teachers and texts. Research vindicated their resistance: OECD studies found students using computers frequently perform worse; handwriting develops brain regions typing doesn’t; physical books prove superior to digital for retention. Tikvah’s Jewish Parents Forum successfully led the campaign to ban smartphones in dozens of Jewish day schools. What looks like resistance to innovation is actually fidelity to a deeper understanding of how genuine learning happens.
Hillel Halkin’s December reflection on ending his Philologos column after 25 years showed how renewal depends on maintaining connection between present language and its deeper sources. Language is the vehicle of thought and memory, the means by which we transmit tradition from generation to generation. Writing under the pen name Philologos enabled him to explore etymology without scholarly anxiety and for a large, engaged audience. This work of cultural philology kept alive knowledge that Jewish languages are defined by their Hebrew core, that words carry centuries of meaning from biblical and rabbinic sources. The column’s end marks a loss, but its achievements show what it means to investigate how contemporary discourse unintentionally points to a patrimony and provenance that, in drawing from, it sustains.
These four essays model what civilizational renewal requires: archaeological recovery of buried truth, serious engagement with foundational texts that opens our eyes to the natural order in a fresh way, institutional resistance to well-meaning but corrupting technological innovation, and the precious study of words that maintains the connection between present expression and ancient sources.
The essays we have been describing join together to form Mosaic’s record of 2025. They take ideas seriously, which means tracing their origins and consequences. They take texts seriously, which means reading closely and thinking about the implications of what one discovers there. They take history seriously, which means understanding how we arrived at the present moment and what that reveals about possible futures.
Israel’s victory in the two-year war that October 7 began was military and strategic. It was also moral and intellectual, though that victory is harder to see and easier to deny. Israel won because it was willing to stand alone, to endure condemnation, to persist when the entire diplomatic establishment demanded restraint. That willingness came from a people who know their history and who refuse to accept the world’s terms of accommodation, which point to extinction.
We in America face no comparable existential threat, which is precisely why our institutions could afford to indulge unserious and damaging delusions for decades. Universities could promote theories that undermine their own foundations because no army was coming to destroy them. Community organizations could maintain doomed partnerships because no one was forcing them to choose. The price of such indulgence is now coming due, as the anti-Western and anti-Jewish worldview promoted around the university seminar table has emerged so forcefully to shape our public affairs. The twelve monthly essays that we published in 2025 are a counterweight to that worldview, published in hopes that we’ll rise to meet the challenges of 2026 with courage and sound judgment in due measure.
