Hanukkah After Bondi Beach: We Must Not Retreat

The attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach took place at a public Hanukkah celebration — an openly Jewish gathering marking a holiday meant to symbolize continuity, restraint, and survival. Candles were lit. Families had gathered. Jewish life was visible and unhidden. Violence arrived anyway. That fact matters. This was not random disorder that happened to occur near Jews. It was an assault on Jews gathered publicly as Jews.

For Jewish communities around the world, the message was immediate and chilling: a basic assumption — that peaceful religious celebration in a public space is protected — no longer feels secure.

Bondi Beach was not an aberration. It was a signal that even the most ordinary expressions of Jewish life now take place against a backdrop of heightened risk and weakened moral confidence.

Since October 7, 2023, Jewish communities have been forced to absorb a series of shocks that, taken together, reveal something deeper than a temporary spike in antisemitic incidents.

Jews have watched crowds chant “death to Jews” in major Western cities. We have seen synagogues, schools, and community centers require armed security as a baseline condition of existence. We have watched public officials hesitate, equivocate, or retreat into procedural language when confronted with explicit calls for Jewish death.

In that context, even violence that is not explicitly ideological is experienced differently. Bondi Beach occurred in a world where rage, intimidation, and public disorder have been steadily normalized — and where antisemitism is too often treated as a contextualized grievance rather than a moral emergency. It is no coincidence that Hanukkah celebrations across Europe, North America, and Australia this year are being guarded as potential targets rather than assumed civic fixtures.

For Jews, these are not abstract concerns. They shape daily life in quiet but consequential ways. This Hanukkah, many Jews will decide whether to light publicly or privately, whether to post photos or remain discreet, whether to wear a kippah or tuck it into a pocket, whether to gather openly or behind security checkpoints.

These are not acts of panic. They are acts of realism — born of a recognition that the social consensus protecting Jewish life is weaker than it once was. I have felt this calculation myself, not as fear but as prudence — an awareness that Jewish visibility now requires forethought in ways it did not a decade ago.

Hanukkah is often softened into a generic story about “light in dark times.” But that framing misses its harder truth.

Hanukkah commemorates a moment when Jews confronted a society that had lost its sense of limits — when desecration was tolerated, when power displaced law, and when public authority proved unwilling or unable to defend moral boundaries. The Maccabees did not revolt because they rejected pluralism. They revolted because pluralism had collapsed into coercion.

That distinction matters now.

Across Western democracies, restraint is increasingly treated with suspicion. Rampage violence is explained as inevitable. Public disorder is described as expressive. Antisemitic chants are reframed as political speech. Leaders and institutions speak fluently about process and context, but struggle to say plainly that some acts are beyond the pale.

The result is a dangerous permission structure. Not a conspiracy. Not a single ideology. But a cultural habit of hedging when clarity is required — of explaining rather than condemning, of balancing rather than drawing lines. Violence thrives in that space. So does antisemitism.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that societies depend on shared moral frameworks to restrain individual impulses. When those frameworks weaken, violence becomes expressive rather than exceptional. Rampages become signals — not just of individual breakdown, but of collective uncertainty about what can and should be enforced.

Jews recognize this pattern because history has trained us to. Antisemitism rarely begins with laws or decrees. It begins with atmospheres. With what is tolerated. With what is explained away. With what authorities are reluctant to name because naming it might require action.

The Bondi Beach attack belongs to this broader moment. It targeted a Jewish holiday gathering, but it also reflected a wider failure to defend basic moral boundaries in public life. Violence does not emerge in a vacuum. It feeds on ambiguity — on the sense that enforcement is conditional and outrage selective.

Hanukkah offers a counterpoint to that ambiguity.

The story of the oil is not a story about optimism. It is a story about responsibility. Someone chose to protect what was sacred when it would have been easier to surrender it. Someone insisted that desecration was not normal, that collapse did not deserve accommodation, and that continuity required effort.

That insistence feels increasingly countercultural.

In recent years, Western elites have grown uncomfortable making firm moral judgments. Everything must be contextualized. Everything must be balanced. Everything must be filtered through the language of grievance. But pluralism does not survive without boundaries. And minorities suffer first when those boundaries dissolve.

For Jews, the post-October 7 world has made something painfully clear: condemnation of antisemitism has become conditional. Calls for Jewish death are weighed against political narratives. Jewish fear is treated as inconvenient. Jewish safety is discussed as a variable rather than a nonnegotiable.

Hanukkah rejects that logic entirely.

The holiday is not only about light. It is about continuity — the refusal to disappear quietly when the world becomes less hospitable. It is about maintaining Jewish presence, practice, and confidence even when public space feels uncertain.

Lighting the menorah is not an act of provocation. It is an assertion that Jewish life does not require permission to endure.

Bondi Beach will be remembered as one more moment when Jews understood something before others were ready to say it plainly: a society unwilling to enforce moral limits cannot protect its most vulnerable members. Rampage violence and chants of “death to Jews” are not separate phenomena. They are different expressions of the same failure.

A society that cannot say, without hesitation, that calling for Jewish death is beyond the pale is not morally neutral. It has already chosen sides.

The menorah burns not because darkness recedes on its own, but because someone insists — again and again — that darkness does not get the final word.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.