Delivering a widely discussed Friday night sermon framed around the outcomes of recent U.S. midterm elections, prominent American Reform Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch issued a stark public assessment that the decades-long “Golden Age of American Jewry” — a period of unprecedented social acceptance, professional advancement for Jewish communities, and broad bipartisan U.S. support for Israel spanning the formative years of Baby Boomers, Gen X, and older millennials — has formally come to a close.
Hirsch laid significant blame for shifting public sentiment toward Israel on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, which relies heavily on extreme far-right, religious-nationalist allies including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. He characterized the administration’s agenda as defined by “right-wing messianism and West Bank lawlessness,” pointing to rampant, unregulated settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and provocative acts targeting shared holy sites in East Jerusalem as key drivers of growing global and U.S. opposition to Israel. As a high-profile example, he cited a September public appearance by Netanyahu, who filmed himself walking through excavation tunnels under the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem ahead of Yom Kippur, making statements that anchored Israeli territorial claims to the area adjacent to the site of the ancient Jewish Temple, steps widely viewed as deliberately provocative to Muslim communities who revere the same compound as the home of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. That same weekend, Ben Gvir and groups of Israeli settlers entered the contested sacred compound to perform public Jewish religious rituals, acts that have long sparked regional tensions.
To back his framing of rampant West Bank unrest, Hirsch cited verified data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which documented more than 2,060 settler attacks resulting in Palestinian casualties or property destruction across 300 West Bank communities between the start of 2026 and October 12 of that year. In just the final two weeks of that monitoring window, five Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces or settlers, 246 Palestinians sustained injuries, and 244 separate incidents of settler violence targeting homes, agricultural land, livestock, and civilian infrastructure were recorded. A separate October report from the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry went further, concluding that Israeli military operations and sustained settler aggression constituted a coordinated, widespread systematic attack against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.
Hirsch warned that these developments have eroded the once rock-solid bipartisan U.S. support for Israel, creating space for fringe anti-Zionist figures to gain mainstream political traction. He called out high-profile political influencer Hasan Piker for remarks stating he would vote for Hamas over Israel and comparing liberal Zionists to liberal Nazis, as well as a recent political ad that incorrectly blamed Israeli policy for driving up U.S. food prices. He specifically criticized two incoming members of Congress: House representative-elect Darializa Avila Chevalier, whom he accused of attending a rally celebrating the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror attack on Israel and refusing to condemn Hamas during her campaign, and Michigan senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, whose comment describing a violent attempted attack on a synagogue and preschool as a predictable outcome of “hurt people hurt people” Hirsch dismissed as deeply troubling. He noted that a growing cohort of incoming U.S. lawmakers are not merely critical of specific Israeli government policies, but ideologically opposed to the very existence of Israel, viewing the country as a global paragon of evil.
Crucially, Hirsch paired his sharp criticism of Netanyahu’s government with a forceful rejection of anti-Zionism, which he labeled a “hateful ideology of destruction — as illiberal and immoral as anything in modern public life.” He chided progressive political figures who fail to draw clear lines between legitimate criticism of Israeli state policy and anti-Zionist rhetoric that directly fuels rising antisemitism. He noted that while antisemitism has long existed in the U.S., it had previously been pushed out of mainstream public institutions and partisan political life, but has now become normalized across both the far right and far left of the U.S. political spectrum.
Hirsch framed the October 7, 2023, attacks as the symbolic final marker of the end of American Jewry’s golden era, a shift he said had been building for years beneath the surface. He described the recent U.S. midterm results as a broad repudiation of former President Donald Trump, driven by voter frustration over economic pressures, the ongoing Iran war, corruption allegations, trade tariffs, controversial immigration enforcement policies, and widespread personal dissatisfaction with Trump’s leadership. He cautioned that traditional American Jewish communal organizations can no longer rely on longstanding, predictable partisan political alliances to advance their interests, and called for a “searing reassessment” of long-held community strategies, urging leaders to pursue pragmatic, broad-based cross-community coalitions to navigate what he warned will be years of turbulence and rising antisemitic sentiment across the country.