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Carlos Eduardo Espina woke up on January 3rd to a cellphone flooded with notifications. President Donald Trump had announced on Truth Social, at 3:21 A.M. Houston time, where Espina lives, and that the United States had captured the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro. Seven hours had passed, and his TikTok feed was filled with impatient messages in Spanish:

“Carlos, wake up, bro.”

“Please tell us what is happening in Venezuela.”

“Carlos, what do you know about Venezuela? . . . Are these rumors? Or is it true?”

A meme showed him sound asleep, hugging a teddy bear.

“7:43 and he is still sleeping.”

“God, it’s 8. Wake up.”

“It’s 10 A.M. and Carlos hasn’t shown up.”

Espina proceeded to post a flurry of brief videos on social media. In the first one, twenty-four seconds long, he humorously admitted that he was embarrassed to have overslept on such a big news day—“Breaking news, mi gente! I can’t believe it.” In the videos that followed, none much longer than a minute, he celebrated the fall of Maduro, who, he said, had “done so much harm to the Venezuelan people.” But, he warned, “I’m a bit worried about what will happen in Venezuela, because we know it’s not as simple as Maduro falling and everything changing. There are other people behind him.” As thousands of Venezuelans in exile around the world celebrated what they saw as regime change (it wasn’t), Espina’s videos received millions of views.

At twenty-seven, Espina bears a slight resemblance to Gael García Bernal and likes to wear embroidered Mexican guayaberas. The minute-long commentaries, in Spanish, on breaking news are his trademark broadcasts, and he has posted as many as sixty a day. In tight closeup, he practically shouts his messages to his audience, whom he addresses as “mi gente,” in the manner of old-style radio bulletins. With nearly twenty-two and a half million followers—a figure that represents roughly a third of the American Latino population—across platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, Espina has become one of the most recognizable faces of the news-influencer phenomenon in Spanish or English, and a rare progressive voice in a space dominated by right-wing provocateurs.

Last year, the Pew Research Center asked adults in the U.S. to name the influencers whom they regularly turn to for news; Espina ranked in the top five, alongside Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. According to another Pew survey, one in five adults in the U.S. regularly get their news from news influencers; the figure rises to nearly four in ten for those aged eighteen to twenty-nine. Among them, according to Espina, are millions of Spanish-speaking Latinos—to the tune of 7.2 billion views and thirty-three million comments a year on TikTok alone—who turn to him. A typical broadcast was one that he posted on March 6th, in response to Trump’s decision to bomb Iran:

Donald Trump made a big mistake, and now we’re screwed. He thought the Iranians would be like the Venezuelans—-that after the first bombings they would all give up and hand over the country. But he is quickly realizing that this is not the case, and now we are all going to pay the price.

Espina’s emergence has coincided with a nationwide debate over rampant disinformation in Spanish-language communities—and with the departure of Jorge Ramos from Univision, the largest provider of Spanish-language content in the U.S. (During Trump’s first Presidential campaign, he had Ramos ejected from a news conference after he criticized his immigration policy, including his plan to deport eleven million undocumented immigrants and to deny their children birthright citizenship.) Ramos considers Espina “the leader of a new phenomenon” and someone who is “filling a void in political and media representation.”

Espina is the son of migrants, and their ordeal shaped his views on immigration policy. His father, Eduardo, a Uruguayan poet and essayist, arrived in Kansas in 1983 on a Rotary Fellowship and later earned a Ph.D. in Latin American literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Since 1987, he has taught at Texas A. & M., in College Station. In 1994, at a literary conference in Mexico, Eduardo met Adriana Barrios, who was working at the National Institute of Fine Arts. They married that year, and she moved to Texas on a tourist visa. Their first son, Diego, was born in 1996; Adriana was deported soon after his first birthday. She moved with Diego to a place near Eduardo’s parents in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Eduardo commuted back and forth during his academic breaks. Espina was born in Uruguay in 1998, and his father, who had just completed his naturalization process, registered him as a U.S. citizen. It took five years for the family to reunite in Texas, and Adriana didn’t become a citizen until 2013. “It was hell,” Eduardo told me over the phone. “Only someone brave, with goals and ambition, is capable of doing what millions have done. And not only that but also coming to this country and enduring what one has to endure in order to get ahead here,” Espina said in an interview early this year.

His childhood dream was to become a professional soccer player. He was a junior in high school and the captain of the varsity soccer team, in the autumn of 2015. A wave of unaccompanied minors from Central America had arrived at the southern border. Nearly two hundred of them ended up in College Station, and many of them at his school, bringing a potential infusion of talent to the team. But, in order to join, students needed to be in good academic standing, and since those students did not yet speak English that was a challenge. The team’s coach suggested that Espina tutor them during lunch hours.

When Trump launched his first Presidential campaign, he painted Latin American migrants as criminals and rapists. Espina hadn’t previously given politics much thought, but when it came to Trump, he said, “I saw he was a horrible person. I’d see him on television, and what he was saying wasn’t a real reflection of who our people are.” Espina became a Bernie Sanders supporter and got involved with voter-registration groups; too young to register people himself, he served as an interpreter assisting other volunteers when they knocked on doors. He also spent time with an immigrant-rights group, the Brazos Interfaith Immigration Network, helping migrants prepare for the U.S. citizenship test by explaining the hundred potential questions on the study guide and teaching memorization techniques. Espina graduated in May, 2017, and that fall he enrolled at Vassar, majoring in political science. While he was there, a friend from Belize was detained by ICE agents, and Espina began corresponding with dozens of other detainees, sending some of them money so that they could call their families. He later received a full scholarship to attend the William S. Boyd School of Law, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and graduated in 2024.

Espina had intended to become an immigration lawyer, but he never took the bar exam, because by then he had realized that he could be more effective on social media. He had graduated from Vassar at the start of the COVID pandemic, when job hunting was practically impossible, and was living at home, in College Station, when the Brazos network asked him to conduct his citizenship-test classes online. He started on Facebook. When he ran out of questions to explain, he began to share details of what he had learned from his correspondence with detained migrants, and to respond to comments on his time line. Some followers suggested that he also post his videos on TikTok, a relatively new platform at the time which had just become the most downloaded app in the world.

Espina wasn’t impressed by the content that he saw there. “I thought it was kind of a silly app,” he remembered. But he posted a few videos about the citizenship test, and they took off. He soon realized that there was no one offering relevant, useful information in Spanish for a U.S. audience—Latino content creators were mostly second-generation immigrants who posted in English. “There was no one producing content in Spanish for Latinos that wasn’t entertainment. I grew quickly, without competition,” he said.

His core audience was, and remains, migrants working in construction, restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and other sectors considered essential. As his reach grew, he began posting more about his own life—a birthday message for his mother, a puppy he adopted, a soccer game he watched at a friend’s house—and he started receiving requests for more information about the immigration system and policy. Espina gathered that information from a variety of sources, he told me, including immigration lawyers with whom he engages in online groups; government websites; and traditional news outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN. Influencers “rely heavily on traditional media,” he said at the International Symposium on Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin last year. He himself does not corroborate the information independently. “If something is very relevant and those outlets have verified it, I consider it credible,” he told me.

Jorge Ramos has also become an independent content creator—he is now on Substack, TikTok, and YouTube, and also hosts a podcast with his daughter, Paola. He was an anchor at Univision for nearly forty years, but, he said, “audiences were falling year after year, as if the Martians had abducted them.” He added, “They were, of course, migrating from television to digital media. The credibility and trust that the big media outlets once had were also fading. Now people place their trust in individuals.” (Many traditional news outlets, in turn, are now offering more content in the form of short videos, in which writers speak directly to audiences.) He sees this trend as a tremendous opportunity for Spanish-language journalists who have been pushed out of traditional media—Univision essentially dissolved what remained of its once ambitious U.S. digital-news operation earlier this year—and for those just beginning their careers. “When I started, everyone wanted to be an anchor. Today, trying to do that would be a very serious mistake. You have to be a surfer, navigating content across different platforms,” Ramos said. “Carlos does it better than anyone else in Spanish.”

Another factor that may explain Espina’s popularity is a stark departure from traditional media conventions: if members of his audience are in trouble, he may help them financially. Recently, he bought a van for a follower who has two children with disabilities; paid for a prosthetic leg for a young man; and covered a three-thousand-dollar bond for a migrant detained by ICE whose mother is blind, then picked him up from the detention center and drove him home. Espina has given hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct aid while also contributing significant sums to a nonprofit he has started, which aims to support both migrants and the wider community. He is also planning to one day buy land in Houston to build a community center that will serve local needs.

Espina’s earnings, he says, are considerable—and he shares that information with his followers. In January, 2025, he uploaded a video titled “Am I a Millionaire?” in which he broke down his earnings from the previous year: he made $2.79 million, more than a third of which came from selling products such as citizenship-test study cards in the TikTok Shop, another third from brand collaborations, including with Sendwave, a popular money-transfer app among migrants, and the rest from views across platforms. He said he donated around four hundred thousand dollars and transferred a million to his own nonprofit. Espina said that he made more than $3 million last year, though he didn’t disclose the breakdown in the same type of annual report—and told me that he expects to make around three million this year.

Espina is also open about his personal political leanings—and his personal ambitions. During the recent Texas Senate primary, he endorsed State Representative James Talarico over U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett, posting several videos and even appearing in an ad for Talarico. In June, 2024, he recorded a video with President Joe Biden at the White House, in which he broke down in tears thanking Biden for an executive action allowing long-term undocumented immigrants to apply to stay with their families, work legally, and pursue permanent status—something that would have benefitted his own mother. “God love you, son,” Biden said, before apologizing for not speaking Spanish—“I’m trying.” Two months later, Espina spoke at the Democratic National Convention. Tom Perez, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, who had helped bring Espina closer to the Biden White House, as part of its effort to court content creators—the 2024 convention issued press credentials to them for the first time—told the Times that Espina has “a unique capacity to separate the wheat from the chaff . . . and to explain things in ways that are accessible to people.”

Espina has said that he aspires to be President himself one day, but when I asked him about it he told me that his true ambition is to be a major advocate for Latinos. “In the next two years, I want anyone on the Democratic side—and Republicans, too, if they seek me out—who is thinking about running for President to feel that it’s important to talk with me, and to hear what the community needs and expects them to implement. I’ve already met many of the potential candidates for the 2028 Presidency, and I plan to continue building those relationships.”

Liz Kelly Nelson, the founder of Project C, an initiative supporting independent news creators, noted that Espina’s political ambitions “raise the question of whether the trust audiences place in creators is transferable, and what it means when a journalist-creator sees that trust as a political asset rather than just an editorial one. That’s genuinely new territory. But we’re seeing it elsewhere, too, like with Kat Abughazaleh, the wildly popular TikToker who is running for Congress in Illinois’s Ninth District.” (Abughazaleh came in second in the Democratic primary earlier this month, losing to Daniel Biss, the mayor of Evanston.)

“Our work in Spanish-language media always went far beyond simply delivering the news,” Ramos told me. In the absence of political representation, journalists often had to “speak up for other Latinos and immigrants. Some English-language anchors disagreed with that approach, but for us this was a fundamental social role.” Ramos, though, does not call Espina a journalist, and Espina himself acknowledges that what he does is not journalism—at least not in the traditional sense. “I’m a content creator, a law-school graduate, a community organizer, a nonprofit director. I’m many things. As I’ve learned in social media, you can be all those things and more at once,” he told me.

He added, “You don’t see traditional news anchors paying their followers’ immigration bonds. We are working in very different realms.” Yet he does admit that his influence carries obligations that look a lot like those of a journalist. “If people see me that way, then in many respects I have the responsibility to do everything that traditional journalism would do, which is to fact-check and make sure I’m not spreading outright misinformation.” ♦

Around lunchtime one recent Friday, the chef Kia Damon stood in front of a produce display at a Publix grocery store in St. Cloud, Florida, bobbing her head like a d.j. “Yeah! Yeah! Take a shower!” she said, holding a finger in the air as a sprinkler system released fine sprays of mist onto neat rows of cabbage and kale. “Me next!” Damon, who wore loose denim overalls with a baggy T-shirt and a vintage Orlando Magic hat, was eager to cool off: we’d just spent several hours on an airboat tour of the marshes of Lake Tohopekaliga, scanning the waters for gators and herons under the high glare of the sun.

Like Wawa, in Pennsylvania, and H-E-B, in Texas, Publix—founded in 1930 by a former Piggly Wiggly manager in Winter Haven, Florida—is a regional chain that commands an almost religious devotion. “There was a summer that I spent living with my mom when my mind was really clouded, my heart was really clouded,” Damon, who is thirty-two and grew up in Orlando, told me. “My brain was, like, Just need to go to Publix.” After perusing some locally made products—including Falling Iguana hot sauce, named for the stunned reptiles that drop from trees during cold snaps in South Florida—we got in line for Pub Subs, as the chain’s beloved sandwiches are known. For the past few years, Damon’s order has been jerk turkey with spinach and creamy Havarti on a multigrain hoagie roll; for a first-timer, she recommended a sub with chicken tenders, which get chopped up to insure optimal distribution. “I don’t trust other people’s delis,” Damon said, watching an employee behind the counter wrestle butcher paper around a heaping foot-long sub. “I trust what’s happening here.”

Publix is one of the many Florida fixtures that Damon takes very seriously. In her early twenties, after a few years of cooking in Tallahassee, she moved to New York, where she was briefly the executive chef at a California-inspired, Mexican-ish restaurant called Lalito, and then the culinary director of the women-in-food magazine Cherry Bombe. Almost immediately, she determined that being a Floridian was a liability: “They’re, like, ‘Oh, so is it true that y’all eat gator? Is it true that everyone over there is a redneck?’ ” She dreaded being stereotyped as “trashy” and “backwards,” but she also resented the assumption that she looked down on where she’d come from. “ ‘You’re just running away to the North from Florida because you hate it,’ ” she recalled people saying.

Her initial instinct was to clam up about the place she still considered home. Over time, she began to see the potential in doing exactly the opposite. As a descendant of Africans who were enslaved on Florida plantations, she felt that the state was underappreciated as part of the American South’s Black history, including its Black culinary history. Like many Southerners, Damon grew up eating barbecue, gumbo, and hush puppies; she also adored foods more specific to Florida, such as stone crab and datil peppers—a fruity, spicy variety cultivated in St. Augustine, where a free settlement for escaped slaves was established in the eighteenth century, and where Damon’s mother and grandmother were born. In 2022, she organized the Florida Water Tour, a series of dinners at restaurants in New York and other cities, featuring dishes that evoked classic Southern cooking and Florida’s sticky, tropical climate: root-beer-braised turkey necks, green beans cooked in coconut milk, roast chicken bronzed with earthy, bright-orange achiote, also known as annatto.

Online, Damon has cheekily adopted the label of Florida Woman—an epithet more likely to evoke antics of the “Tiger King” variety than those of an earnest Black millennial—and sells nineties-style “Floridacore” T-shirts in homage to such institutions as Publix and Waffle House. The recipes that she develops for her social-media accounts and for the Times and Southern Living magazine deftly combine her worldly palate and her reverence for tradition. In the caption for an Instagram post about fermenting boiled peanuts into miso, she joked, “I’m living George Washington Carver’s wildest dreams.”

The marsh tour and the Pub Subs were part of a meticulously planned itinerary that Damon had deemed a Big Florida Weekend—a primer for the uninitiated, and also a research trip for her forthcoming début cookbook, “Cooking with Florida Water: Recipes, Stories, & History of the Unsung South.” Currently, she lives in Savannah, Georgia, where she works as the culinary-operations manager for Grey Spaces, the restaurant group co-founded by the chef Mashama Bailey. On her days off, Damon steeps herself in Floridiana, studying vintage cookbooks like “Florida Fixin’s,” from 1992, and “The Gasparilla Cookbook,” a pirate-themed volume, published in 1961 by the Junior League of Tampa, that includes recipes for Cuban shrimp creole and grapefruit-aspic salad.

As an aspiring “stewardess of Floridian history,” Damon is as enthusiastic about the state’s most polarizing dishes as she is about its obvious crowd-pleasers, aiming to conjure an image of Florida beyond the loud luxury of Miami and the kitsch of the Keys. Her book will include an adaptation of the Orange Crunch Cake served at the Bubble Room, a campy restaurant on Captiva Island, and a recipe for crab chilau, the unofficial dish of Tampa, a spicy Sicilian-Afro-Cuban seafood stew. But there will also be a fried-gator po’boy and backwoods deep cuts like raccoon with sweet potatoes. “I had to make a decision. I was, like, Either it’s possum, it’s raccoon, or it’s squirrel,” Damon told me. “I don’t think I could fit all three in there.”

From Publix, we drove to Crystal River, in Citrus County, where, after an appropriately chaotic central-Florida afternoon—I briefly lost my rental-car keys in a wildlife refuge, stranding us until Damon persuaded an indifferent park ranger to help rescue them—we ended our day on the patio of a waterfront restaurant called the Crab Plant. As the sun set, and no-see-ums and mosquitoes began to feast on our bare skin, we split half a pound of steamed stone-crab claws, forking the slippery, tender meat from their shells; a pile of plump, cornmeal-crusted fried frog legs, which tasted like chicken with the texture of a firm-fleshed white fish; and a slick, snappy sausage made from gator cut with pork. Damon was especially interested in a creamy smoked-mullet dip, which was served in a small deli container with a side of crackers. Despite its reputation as a bait or “trash” fish (in the sixties, Florida’s conservation board tried to rebrand it as “Lisa”), the oily, strong-tasting mullet is so central to the state’s cuisine that Damon is considering having one tattooed around her left kneecap.

Damon knows that few of her readers are likely to try her recipes for mullet or raccoon or gator, even if she includes tips on where to order each frozen online. For her, that’s no reason not to publish them. She showed me an unedited headnote from the book, a defense of chitlins, or stewed pig intestines, a dish that she studiously avoided every New Year’s Eve for the first twenty years of her life. “There’s a joke amongst Black southerners that goes ‘We don’t gotta eat chitlins anymore because we’re free,’ ” she writes. “Why eat slave food? . . . But there’s more to it than that. At least to me. The value in chitlins is how enduring the recipe is. We’re talking centuries of true farm to table, whole animal eating.”

The next morning, we stopped at a gas station near Damon’s mom’s house for breakfast: fried chicken gizzards, fried fish, and cheesy grits pooled in butter, served in Styrofoam containers. We were on our way to the Florida Strawberry Festival, an annual event in a place called Plant City, the sort of extremely on-the-nose name that is common in Florida. (Damon was beside herself to learn, during one of our drives, that Orlando is situated in what was once known as Mosquito County.) It was at her first strawberry festival, Damon told me, that she became conscious of her state pride. “We’re driving into Plant City, and, the closer you get, you start to see all the strawberries everywhere, and the place looks like Candy Land,” she said, describing a uniquely Floridian mix of agricultural splendor and theme-park excess. As we made our way through an exhaustive list of everything she wanted to eat, including a buttermilk corn dog and a strawberry-crunch funnel cake that she’d seen on TikTok, a man about her age stopped her and asked how he knew her. It turned out that they’d worked together, in high school, in concessions at Universal Studios—a rite of passage for Orlando teens—serving Butterbeer at a Harry Potter-themed pub.

The last and most important item on Damon’s list was the strawberry shortcake from St. Clement Catholic Church, which runs a make-your-own station every year. (A sign advertised the parish as “Trinity Centered, Discipleship Driven. . . . . . & Shortcake Emphatic!”) Women wearing green aprons, with white doilies pinned to their heads, presided over comically huge metal mixing bowls of freshly whipped cream and locally grown berries, which we spooned onto small rounds of cake. “Over time, folks have been, like, ‘Oh, I don’t really care for the St. Clement shortcake, it’s just O.K.,’ ” Damon said. “But for whatever reason it’s always a ten out of ten to me. It’s never not delicious.”

To some, the Plant City fairground, pungent with the scent of livestock and swarming with people in strawberry-themed clothing, might have verged on nightmarish. It was hard to find shade; each car on an enormous Ferris wheel was emblazoned with the face of a different U.S. President. When the heat began to break, late in the afternoon, a welcome breeze turned sinister as it kicked up dirt, covering our sunscreened arms and faces in a thin layer of grime. But Damon was in her element, bounding around in a “Dirty South” jersey, a cowboy hat fitted atop the bandanna she had tied around her head. “This is it,” she had told me the day before, as we got into the car with our Pub Subs. “This is Florida. You’re hot. You’re overstimulated. The A.C. isn’t going on fast enough.” Still, she said, “I wouldn’t bother being from anywhere else.” ♦

I Climbed Mt. Whitney and All I Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt
But I also had an amazing trip up the mountain. I was with my sister. We’ve been estranged for a while. And we were connecting as much as we were climbing. It’s funny—putting yourself in a difficult physical situation (continues on back of shirt) can have a positive effect on your emotional well-being. I sometimes wonder if depression and convenience are more insidiously linked than we like to think.

I’m With Stupid
But I’m using the experience to try to learn from Stupid. Emerson said, “Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.” Although, to be frank, it’s hard to think of Stupid as my master because he insists on repeating the same paranoid conspiracy theories. And I’ve tried (continues on back of shirt) to tell him that Finland is a real country, but Stupid keeps saying, “Show me a map! Show me a map!” And then, when I show Stupid the map with Finland on it, he just says, “But who made that map?,” and kind of raises his eyebrows like he’s caught me in a trap. And so I tell him, “Rand McNally,” and then Stupid’s all, like, “Does anyone actually know this ‘Rand McNally’ guy?,” and I want to answer him, but by this point it feels moot.

Don’t Talk to Me Until I’ve Had My Coffee
And, even then, maybe don’t talk to me. We’re just sitting across from each other on the G train—why do we need to talk? And before you accuse me of perpetuating an individualist culture where we’re all “buried in our phones” (continues on back of shirt) and can’t muster any kind of real human connection, you should know that I have actually read Jonathan Haidt and impose strict phone curfews in my house. I just don’t want to talk to you until I’ve had coffee because I know I wouldn’t be my best self, and excuse me if I want to make a good impression.

New York Fuckin’ City
is what my father says whenever we talk about his retirement. He spent the past twenty years living like a monk in Hoboken and saving his cash so that he can finally retire to a modest studio apartment in the city. But, as he was responsibly planning his future, New York City turned into what he calls “a cesspool of bankers and trust-fund kids and Russian oligarchs buying ghost (continues on back of shirt) apartments while the rest of us are pushed to the outer boroughs, schlepping in every day to make their lattes and pick up their snotty kids, who will one day grow up to be the bosses of our kids as New York gets dragged to the final circle of Hell.”

Eat Sleep Spin Repeat
This is what my life has become. I am reduced to four activities, and the last one is just a demand to perform the first three again. What happened to my life? I used to be interested in (continues on back of shirt) culture. Julie and I used to go to St. Ann’s Warehouse, in Brooklyn, and the Met. Now all I do is eat and sleep and spin. I don’t even like the spinning. It hurts my calves, and the teacher always singles me out.

Rosé All Day
(continues on back of shirt) I have a drinking problem. ♦

Among the written works credited to Donald Trump is the foreword to a book from 2024 called “Alpha Kings.” The book’s author, Nick Adams, is a bearded and broad-faced former deputy mayor of a suburb of Sydney, where he tried and failed to get rid of the local pigeon population. In the foreword, Trump calls Adams, who is now an American citizen and an internet personality, “one of my favorite authors,” and praises his commitment to “fighting for the qualities that make alpha males so special.” Adams loves the restaurant chain Hooters, “ice cold domestic beers,” and belittling women. “Let me explain something to you, sweetheart,” one dialogue between Adams and a probably apocryphal woman, which he posted on X, begins. “I am an alpha male . . . I lead, you follow. You are the supporting cast, I am the main character.” In the book, Adams calls Trump a “study in peak alpha masculinity for the ages,” but “Alpha Kings” also has a larger agenda: “organizing thousands of alpha males in a way that hasn’t been done since Dwight Eisenhower assembled the troops to storm the beaches of Normandy in 1944.” His target readers are men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five who, Adams writes, “love America, love sports, have traditionally male interests and activities, and are sick of being told that their masculinity is toxic and that their generation will and should be led by women.” He offers them “Nick Adams’ Commandments for Alpha Males,” a list of forty-five (Trump, numerically) short dicta, including “Success is a low-maintenance woman, not just a hot one” and “Never apologize.” Adams does most of his lecturing on X, where he has more than six hundred thousand followers, but he also likes lecterns. In Washington, D.C., he warned one audience of Young Republicans, “It starts with the Fortnite controller and boneless chicken wings, and ends in gender pronouns and Communism.” Last year, Trump nominated Adams to become the U.S. Ambassador to Malaysia.

Trump was no doubt trolling the libs with this nomination. But the elevation of so-called alpha masculinity has not been incidental during his second term, which was midwifed in part by Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and lesser gods of the manosphere. Alpha-ness has become the official demeanor of American power. A few months before Charlie Kirk was killed, he visited Greenland with Trump, and subsequently said, of the President’s imperialist vision for the island, “It makes America dream again—that we’re not just this sad, low-testosterone beta male slouching in our chair.” Mark Zuckerberg recently reinvented himself as a leather-clad cage fighter, insisting that there isn’t enough “masculine energy” in corporate America. Zuck evidently can’t grow a beard, but Ezra Klein and Senator Chris Murphy have. There’s also the rise in facial plastic surgery for men—Elon Musk and John Mulaney are rumored to be among the recipients—seeking stronger chins. Penis implants have, well, risen. Trump’s Cabinet displays its alpha plumage, too: Pete Hegseth’s Crusade tattoos and “warrior ethos”; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s bench-pressing videos; Sean Duffy’s lumberjacking résumé; the mixed-martial-arts background of Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s new Secretary of Homeland Security. Even some of Trump’s female Cabinet members are cast this way. Tulsi Gabbard enjoys “Green Beret Tactical Challenges.” Linda McMahon, a former C.E.O. of World Wrestling Entertainment, is “very comfortable in a guy environment.” Recently, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, put agents through U.F.C. training, and Trump gave an endorsement of sorts to the influencer and boxer Jake Paul for political office, despite the fact that he’s not—yet—running for anything.

In the past several years, the phrase “alpha male” has seeped into the language around us, like the contamination of an underground aquifer. By the time former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called Will Smith’s attack on Chris Rock during the 2022 Oscars an “alpha male response,” I was using the term ironically. But there are plenty of American men these days who regard alpha masculinity—or “warrior mode,” or “modern knighthood,” or other such appellations—not ironically but aspirationally. There are now programs offering to help such men achieve these aspirations, or something close.

On a hot morning last August, I tailed a van speeding through the countryside of central Virginia. The vehicle contained nine blindfolded men wearing black, as they had been instructed to do. Each had paid three thousand dollars to take part in a three-day program called RISE, which stands for Ruthless Integrity and Simple Execution. It offers men an opportunity to crawl through mud, carry heavy objects, and, as its website puts it, “CHANGE YOUR STORY & UNF**K YOUR LIFE.” The van’s speakers played a high-volume mashup of construction sounds, Jordan Peterson lectures, Marine Corps drills, and mumbling voices. “All designed to keep them in the present moment and separate them from the life they were coming from,” Brendan King, RISE’s founder, told me.

The van’s first stop was a gravel lot off the Blue Ridge Parkway. After allowing a porta-potty “leak-out,” King ordered the blindfolded men to march down a trail, holding one another’s shoulders, for nearly a mile. Occasionally, King’s assistants, a pair of bulky guys with law-enforcement backgrounds, offered the stumbling line a corrective shove. Weekend hikers gave the group a wide berth. Among the sightless were Justin, a martial-arts instructor from the Seattle area; Adam, who owns a lawn-mowing business in Indiana and had lost a baby; Kevin, a people-pleasing I.T. salesman from Dallas; and James, an unemployed Army veteran living in Phoenix with his second wife. James broke down crying when King asked him why he was there. “A lot of reasons,” James stammered. “Blocks and barriers.” The men, ranging in age from twenty-nine to sixty-four, carried rucksacks containing the few items that they were allowed to bring. Sleeping bags were permitted, but not pillows or pads.

Eventually, King ordered them to stop and remove their blindfolds. The air was now cool and moist. They saw that they were standing at the midpoint of a tunnel carved into a mountain. “You see that light at the end of the tunnel?” King shouted, his voice echoing. The men squinted. “That’s where you’re headed. But you’ve got to go backwards first.” They put their blindfolds back on, turned around, and wobbled out of the tunnel.

In 1982, Frans de Waal’s book “Chimpanzee Politics” helped popularize the term “alpha male.” The book is an account of power struggles within a colony of male chimps at a zoo in the Netherlands. De Waal, a Dutch primatologist who taught at Emory University and was a director at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, challenged a number of assumptions about nonhuman primates. He noticed that the leaders of the chimps he studied were not necessarily the strongest or most intimidating but, rather, the ones who excelled at coalition-building. They kept the peace impartially, often by protecting underdogs when conflicts arose. De Waal called his alphas the “consolers-in-chief.”

It’s not clear how closely people read the book. In the nineties, Newt Gingrich handed out copies to freshman congressmen. “After that, the term ‘alpha male’ became very popular,” de Waal explained in a TED talk, a few years before his death. He continued, “On the internet, you will find all these business books that tell you how to be an alpha male. And what they mean is how to beat up others and beat them over the head and let them know that you are boss and ‘Don’t mess with me’ and so on. And, basically, an alpha male for them is a bully. And I really don’t like that.”

“Well, it’s official—you never use algebra in real life.”

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This was hardly America’s first brush with hypermasculinity. “The alpha male keeps returning as a heroic trope,” Michael Kimmel, a former professor of sociology at Stony Brook University and the author of “Manhood in America: A Cultural History,” told me. At the beginning of the twentieth century, men were increasingly working in offices, rather than in factories or on farms. Women joined them. “This was an ‘assault’ on masculinity,” Kimmel said. “People were freaked out that men were being feminized.” Scientists suggested gendered cures. In the eighteen-seventies, the physician Silas Weir Mitchell had begun advocating a “rest cure” for nervous women, sending them to bed and encouraging them to “live as domestic a life as possible.” Men, meanwhile, were told to act like cowboys, in what came to be known as the “West cure.” Theodore Roosevelt was prescribed this treatment, and later co-founded the Boone and Crockett Club and championed “rough-and-tumble” sports. The Boy Scouts and 4-H Clubs arrived in the early twentieth century, during what was later dubbed the golden age of fraternalism. More than a quarter of American men joined orders like the Knights of Pythias, and gyms grew in popularity. All of this, Kimmel explained, “was meant to help boys get away from female teachers, and, of course, Mom.”

After a great depression and two world wars, this culture began to shift. By the nineteen-fifties, efforts were under way to nurture traumatized young men who had served overseas. More public schools were built, and veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill. “We encouraged these men to move with their families to the suburbs, where they could have a little lawn and a barbecue,” Kimmel said. Another reorientation arrived in the seventies and eighties, in response to gay liberation, feminism, and greater workplace equality. In 1990, the poet Robert Bly published “Iron John: A Book About Men,” which spent more than a year on the Times best-seller list. “The grief in men has been increasing steadily since the start of the Industrial Revolution and the grief has reached a depth now that cannot be ignored,” Bly wrote. The book spawned the “mythopoetic men’s movement,” which sought a return to a “deep masculinity” through all-male wilderness retreats and the use of Native American rituals. “Mythopoetic man,” though, wasn’t quite as catchy as “alpha male.” Kimmel thinks that George W. Bush’s victory over Al Gore, in 2000, stemmed partly from this new dichotomy. “I remember Gore was called a beta,” Kimmel told me. “And Bush was alpha-male-ish.” The latter term, Kimmel came to believe, “means completely embodying the traditional notions of masculinity—the most important of which is being without apology.”

In 2022, the social scientist Richard Reeves published “Of Boys and Men,” which describes how men are falling behind in contemporary society. In the past forty years, men’s wages have decreased as a percentage of over-all family income, while broader wealth inequalities and job insecurity have grown. Girls now perform better than boys in high school and are more likely to enroll in college, setting them up for better careers. Men today are five times likelier than they were in the nineties to say that they don’t have any close friends. They are also much less likely to receive mental-health treatment than women, and four times more likely to die by suicide. “There are very good reasons for large numbers of young men to feel anxious, to worry about their future, including their relationships with women,” Raewyn Connell, a retired sociologist at the University of Sydney who is credited with co-founding the field of masculinity studies, told me. “That is perhaps what drives the circulation of the ‘alpha male’ idea.”

The alpha-beta framing now feels ubiquitous. A man in Maine recently filed a lawsuit alleging that his First Amendment rights were violated when he was told to stop calling attendees at school-board meetings “soft beta males.” Kimmel told me, “The tech bros and J. D. Vance fanboys and others seem to feel so put upon by wokeness, by political correctness, that they’re constantly being policed. The idea of being able to assert all of that and not have to apologize for being a man—boy, is that attractive to them.” Also attractive, Connell noted, is the business opportunity for “extracting money” and attention “from anxious young men.”

In 2008, Aaron Marino launched a YouTube channel called Alpha M. He was in his early thirties, broke, and the owner of a new camcorder, which he used to offer something that he hadn’t received in life: male guidance. “I didn’t care if you were gay or straight or what religious or political leanings you had,” he told me recently. “I just wanted to help you feel better about yourself.” Marino, who lives near Atlanta, built a following of millions of mostly young men who wanted to know “how to be a gentleman” and “what to do with butt hair.” He discussed sex, too. A recent Alpha M video reveals the “7 Everyday Habits KILLING your ‘Manhood’!”—Marino calls his penis Big Al—and cautions against erectile enemies like seed oils and screen time. All along, he told me, he has been trying to help create the “right kind of alpha male,” which he defines, generously, as “the best version of yourself you can be.”

During the pandemic, many of Marino’s subscribers left. “At my height, I had twenty-five million views a month,” Marino told me. “And that dropped off a cliff to, like, three million. I saw what was getting popular and what you had to say—and I just wasn’t willing to sacrifice my integrity.” Accounts run by male influencers like Andrew Tate, Andy Elliott, and Wes Watson were supplanting him. Watson, who spent nine years in prison for robbery, burglary, assault, and battery, offers the “unbreakable mind-set” to his followers on YouTube. He posts videos of his Bugatti, a romantic interest, and his buddies, most of whom, like him, have head tattoos and huge arms. “Show people that you’ve made a lot of money, have a hot girlfriend, drive a nice car, and there’s your following,” Marino told me. Also: post pejorative-laced challenges for your audience. “MEN are SOFT AF for ONE REASON!!” Watson wrote on Instagram recently. “THEY DON’T F*CKING Push Themselves Past Their COMFORT ZONE ANYMORE!!” (Last year, Watson was arrested again, for allegedly beating a man at a Miami gym where they were working out. He did not respond to a request for comment, but, in court filings, he describes the beating as “consensual.”)

Alpha-themed training programs have taken off. “It was easy when it was just hunting and living in caves,” one program’s website explains. “Now you have to compete with CEO, celebrities, plastic surgery, and some very expensive toys like Bugatti Veyron. However, in the midst of all that, some men stand out. . . . These are the alpha males.” Fourteen hours and fifteen hundred dollars later, that’s you. A four-day in-person program, in Austin, called Activate Your Alpha promised to “not only take you through the riggers [sic] of pseudo special operations training but also dive deep into the crevices of our own psyches as men.” Elsewhere, the alpha sales pitch is Biblically coded. Rise Up Kings offers a three-day “Awakening” event, in Texas and Florida, that “will transform you into the leader and the man of God you were created to be.” As with ads for many other such courses, the R.U.K. sizzle reel shows men rolling in mud, taking ice baths, and raising heavy objects in the air, like G.I. Jesus, as dramatic music plays. One R.U.K. grad says, “The old man that arrived here three days ago is now dead. And there’s a new man, there’s a king, that has risen.” Other programs sell teens on “Christ-like manhood,” which includes learning “basic auto repair” (two thousand bucks). The blog for the Art of Manliness has a primer on “How to Poop Like a Samurai”—“Legs free is good. Legs free and armed is better.” The Men of War Crucible offers to “forge modern-day warriors and restore the masculine warrior spirit,” as typified by the Knights Templar. (One industry observer told me, “They just beat the shit out of you for days on end. It’s alpha as fuck.”) Warrior Week advertises an acceptance rate similar to that of an Ivy League school. “You must FIND a way in,” the program’s site warns. I D.M.’d Warrior Week’s head coach—who calls himself “the Reverend of Truth” and has said, “Transformation is not theory, it’s war”—asking to visit a session. He called me “brother” in his response, which ended in a rejection. An automated message from another program, which also denied me, read “Thank You, Warrior.”

I had better luck with RISE. The program’s home page shows a man’s mud-flecked face, cast downward, above four short imperatives: “Build COURAGE. Earn CERTAINTY. Find BROTHERS. Become ELITE.” James, the Army veteran from Phoenix, had stumbled across it one night last June, while his wife slept. He was a chubby, mixed-race fifty-five-year-old with an earring. He wanted to be the man his wife deserved, he told me, but he was lonely and uncertain; though he’d shown bravery in combat, he didn’t feel brave anymore. Certainly not ELITE. He wanted to shed his skin. “I knew I couldn’t do it alone,” he told me. “So I’m sitting there going through the websites and looking and looking, but all I kept finding were these religious retreats. Then I saw the RISE website.” Two days later, he spoke with Brendan King, the program’s founder.

King, who is in his early fifties, is a former marine, a motivational speaker, and a mental-health and substance-abuse professional. Before launching RISE, in 2024, he coached at Warrior Week. He and I first communicated—King in ALL-CAPS text messages—last summer. He invited me to see the culmination of his program’s “full-spectrum transformation,” held at a wooded property that he owns in Virginia. In the two-month lead-up to the event, King explained, each participant answers daily prompts: “What are the biggest promises you have broken and what has that cost you?” “Write a ruthlessly honest letter to your father.” The men share their responses with one another, and with King, through voice memos. “It’s designed to truly open a man up,” he told me, “so when you get to Virginia we have all the pieces.” King keeps notes on each participant during the event, which begins with what he calls the “beatdown.”

The beatdown started with a low crawl up King’s steep gravel driveway. Relieved of their blindfolds, the men now wore heavy rucksacks filled with colored rocks representing their anger (red), guilt and shame (black), and sadness (blue). “Listen up,” King said, as they panted at the halfway point. “What are you learning?”

“Not to quit,” someone said.

“Teamwork,” another offered.

“What about you?” King asked James, who had been grumbling.

“It’s very easy to just quit—give up, say ‘Fuck it,’ ” James replied after a moment.

“What else in your life have you been close to quitting on?” King asked.

“Myself.”

“O.K., that’s pretty generic. Give me a thing. A specific thing.”

“I’m drawing a blank,” James said.

King looked around. “Who’s not fucking his wife? Is that you?”

“That’s me,” James finally said. “I’ve made excuses. I’ve allowed myself to—”

“Don’t get overly complicated again. What’s the reason? Is she ugly?”

“No.”

“Does she stink?”

“No. It’s me.”

“Is your dick not big enough?”

James paused. “Honestly, it doesn’t work,” he said. “I suffer from E.D.”

“O.K.,” King said, softening his tone. “Here we go.”

James started sobbing. “There’s nothing worse.”

“There was a time when I was younger when I couldn’t get it up,” King offered. “And it fucking embarrassed the fuck out of me.”

“I’ve been there,” another man said. Others nodded.

“I gotta take a fucking needle to my dick,” James went on. “There is no intimacy, no romance.” He stammered. “I can’t give her the things that she needs. And it’s demoralizing. I don’t feel like a man. So why would I be capable at anything else I do in life?”

“That’s why we’re here, brother,” King said. He addressed the group: “The gift that he’s getting right now is just knowing that other men are sitting here listening to him and saying, ‘Hey, we love you, bro. We get it.’ ” He said, “See your brother in his pain.”

Later, James told King that he had experienced horror in Iraq; he could still smell the burning flesh. He hadn’t told anyone about it. “My mom’s never been the type that really knew how to be emotional,” James said. “Growing up, if I was sad or upset, she always bought me stuff. And that’s what I always equated to happiness. So as an adult, when I was alone and depressed, I would just go buy me something.” He continued, “There was times where I was so alone and I felt like I didn’t have any human interaction. At nine, ten o’clock at night, I’d go to a Walmart, and I would just aimlessly walk, just to have other bodies around.”

Others spoke up, too. Justin, the martial artist, who has suffered from drug addiction, told King, “You’re trying to trigger us.” He was wallowing in a mud pit that the men, wallowing with him, had dug together. King was spraying them with a hose, and Justin blurted out, “My childhood was fucked.” King told him to explain. “My parents used to whup the shit out of me,” Justin said. “I watched my mom stab my dad. I watched my mom run over my dad with the car. I stabbed my mom with a needle when I caught her shooting up. I’ve been through so much pain.”

“What do you take away from it?” King asked. “What’s the gift in this for you?”

“There’s always gonna be suffering,” Justin said. “It’s where you put your fucking mind. And right now my mind is not here.”

“That’s why you got high, bro!” King said. “You’ve disappeared from pain your whole life. I want you to be present. I want you to feel the cold, feel the water, smell the mud, see the mud. So that the day comes and you go, ‘I don’t ever want to fucking go back through that again!’ ”

The physical trials of RISE brought to mind the Modern Day Knight Project, a controversial forerunner that took a more intense degradation-as-realization approach. The program, launched in 2019, cost eighteen thousand dollars and attracted men who had “totally stifled” their “alpha male and . . . haven’t had an example of an alpha male,” as Bedros Keuilian, its founder, has said. Keuilian, a stout, bearded fifty-one-year-old, founded Fit Body Boot Camp, a global personal-training franchise, in 2010, and now lives in Chino Hills, California. When he was six, his family moved from Armenia to the States, where, he says, he was a “fat kid” and a petty thief. He now describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur” and has linked his work to the will of the divine; he has a million Instagram followers and a book, “Man Up: How to Cut the Bullshit and Kick Ass in Business (and in Life).” On one of his websites, Keuilian claims, “Every day over 2 million people use a product, service, or coaching program I’ve created, which gives me an incredible amount of happiness and significance.” He describes the Modern Day Knight Project in the parlance of sweary self-help hustlers: it helped men do “hard shit” and accept their “calling to greatness.” The Project’s marketing materials note, “Male chimps don’t accept disrespect, it’s not uncommon for one to kill another to defend his honor in the pack.”

The Project’s participants were instructed to fight one another and endure simulated drowning, among other humiliations and discomforts, while remaining awake for most of three days. In a 2023 blog post, a finance guy named Michael Ashcraft described it as a “75-hour men’s military Hell Week.” He hadn’t got beyond the bear crawls when he quit. “With muscles screaming, out of the bear crawl posture, I stood up,” Ashcraft wrote. “Looking at me with eyes of fury, my coach was livid: ‘Mike, get down and crawl!’ Nonplussed, I beckoned for the bell.” Ashcraft tapped out before being ordered to dig a grave, get inside a body bag, and consider his eulogy as instructors piled dirt on top of him.

The Project ended in September of 2024. Keuilian told me at one point that this was a result of Trump’s return and a diminished “attack on masculinity.” Another time, he said that it had become “too cost-prohibitive.” Also, a thirty-year-old Project participant named Richard Spoon had died after a trail run during the program. An obituary for Spoon, an electrical lineman in Westfield, New York, noted his devotion to his wife, his dog, and exercise. Spoon had seen an Instagram ad for the Project. Kaitlin, his widow, told me that the program had offered him a sense of purpose. Watching videos posted online during the event, though, she grew concerned by his obvious exhaustion: his legs looked strangely pale. “My husband took the whole ‘you can’t quit’ thing so seriously,” she said. “He wanted to be a better person so badly.” She filed a wrongful-death complaint against Keuilian, alleging negligence—there was no emergency medic present. She ultimately settled; Keuilian did not have to admit any fault. For his part, Keuilian blamed Spoon’s death on an enlarged heart—not his program—but noted that it was “heartbreaking.” He said, “A lot of people got hurt.” But nine men, he added, had told him that the Project had saved their lives. “We were touched by God for those five years,” he told me, proudly.

Keuilian more recently founded the Squire Program, which now trains teen-aged boys in six states. It is marketed as “a rite of passage for your son as he becomes a man”—or a “savage servant,” as Keuilian calls righteous men capable of ass-kicking. “Knights had squires that helped them prepare their armor, horse, and weapons for war,” Keuilian told me. “And the squires had the knights as examples of healthy masculinity.” Squire’s website portrays its work as essential to saving America: “The opposition is on a mission to weaken masculine societies and turn them into soft, confused, unsure, passive-aggressive, feminized betas.” It goes on, “Imagine how much easier it is to have greater control over a society when you have a country full of young men who are docile.” I found a YouTube review of Squire by an online observer named Charles White, Jr., titled “Father Son Alpha Male Bootcamp is Cringe.” White calls the program’s creators “scammers” who “prey upon desperate losers” and notes the site’s grammatical errors: “They just view proofreading as beta shit.” Keuilian subsequently copped to the bad grammar. But he did not apologize for “being mean, being loud, and being aggressive,” or for the program’s curriculum, which he calls “a metaphor for life.”

“Who did your work?”

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Early one morning, I visited a Squire session at a private gym across the street from a state prison in Chino Hills. It was still dark when we gathered. Keuilian wore a black Squire hoodie. He was joined by a couple of coaches, including Steve Eckert, a bald and bushy-browed former marine who functions as Keuilian’s “hammer.” I noticed a tattoo on his forearm that read “No Excuses”; a nearby wall was scrawled with the words “LIONS NOT SHEEP.” Before coming, I’d watched a 2021 video about the Modern Day Knight Project in which Eckert told Keuilian, “You’re almost racist if you’re a man these days.” Keuilian told me that Eckert, who “lost his shit on purpose” with adult participants as the Modern Day Knight Project’s “facilitator of suffering,” is more “tranquillized” for the Squire Program’s twelve- to seventeen-year-olds. Eckert had come with his homeschooled fourteen-year-old son, Tyson, who shook my hand while making penetrating eye contact. Tyson, who is training to be a U.F.C. fighter, was there to model manhood and sonhood for the aspiring squires. There were ten teen-agers who’d travelled from around the country with their dads. The parents had each paid nine hundred dollars; most had found Squire online. They all wore black-and-white Squire unis. Some sons looked stoked, others like hostages.

The day began with introductions in a garage attached to the gym. “Man, we’re just here to literally be intentional about getting him his manhood,” Chad, a dad from Dallas, told the room, gesturing to his gangly fifteen-year-old son, Will. Later, Will told me, “I’m mostly just here for my dad.”

Many of the fathers expressed a sincere desire to do better for their sons than their dads had done for them. Keuilian applauded this impulse. His father, a communist, had taught him Ping-Pong, he said, but “was very broke-minded.” At one point, a guest speaker named Keith Yackey, who describes himself online as an “Ex Pastor turned Sex Coach,” stood and asked, “How many of you guys want to grow up to be rich?” Some hands shot up. Others hesitated. “In our culture, they’re shaming you for wanting to be rich,” Yackey continued. “They shame you for wanting to be jacked and juicy. They shame you for wanting to have lots of sex and intimacy with your wife.” He went on, “When the culture is putting people like Harry Styles in a dress and on a magazine and young kids go, ‘I wonder if I’m a girl or not,’ we’re here to say, ‘Fuck that.’ ” Keuilian outlined for the group the “characteristics of a man,” at least according to the 2012 book “The Way of Men,” by Jack Donovan, who I later learned is a far-right “masculinist” and white supremacist who has argued that women should not have the right to vote. The core characteristics of a man, Donovan says, are strength, honor, courage, and mastery.

We assembled outside around a contraption that Keuilian described as a “bear trap from Alaska,” which was set to snap. “Life is full of bear traps,” he explained, noting, among other snares, “a little toot of coke” or a “red-haired girl named Kyla.” He triggered the trap with a stick, which broke in half. The dads and sons hustled to a nearby dirt patch. This was where the Modern Day Knight Project’s participants had once dug their own graves; you could still see the body-size depressions. Eckert instructed the dads and sons to run a few hundred yards with kettlebells, sledgehammers, and sandbags, then to smash open the sandbags. When they were done, Eckert declared, “Taking the heavy shit, still winning—that’s how you get the money, get the girl, get the fucking mansion and the car.”

Back inside: pullups and frog jumps. Eckert referenced “fruitcakes” and “pussies”—things to avoid being. A father lifted his son to help him complete a pullup. Another dad took a different tack, saying, “Let’s go, fat boy!” As the group hopped and grunted, Keuilian strode through the room with a video crew, shooting a Squire promo (two takes). “A father and son working together is a cheat code for life,” Keuilian told the camera.

Tyson Eckert, the fourteen-year-old, lectured about character, competence, confidence, capability, credibility, competitiveness, and courage. “You need to lift,” he told the class, displaying a shirtless photo of himself and a quote attributed to Socrates that extolled “the beauty and strength” of the male physique. Then it was off to a nearby public park for “jousting.” The boys donned headgear and faced off, one on one, with padded sticks. The coaches encouraged “kill shots” to the head. Each winner received a token, another metaphor. “Tokens mean putting food on the table for your family,” one coach said. I watched a small son get pummelled. “That was fun,” he said flatly when it was over. Heading back to the gym, one notably silent son told me that his father had made him come.

One participant quit and demanded a refund. “It was so degrading to, like, lay in the mud and spread mud all over yourself and then clean yourself off with baby wipes and get sprayed with the hose all over your face,” he said. “I wanted to fight, honestly. I was pissed.”

After a burrito lunch, and a peek at Yackey’s Porsche, Keuilian unrolled a jujitsu mat. “I didn’t think I’d be choking out my dad today,” Will, from Dallas, told me. Then there was an ice bath and an obstacle course scattered with barbed wire and nails. Keuilian had been talking up the bath all day. Each father and son shared a cattle trough, facing each other. As the timer passed seven minutes, Steve Eckert exhorted a whimpering young man to dunk his head underwater. In obvious pain, he complied.

Diplomas were distributed. Then a coach filmed testimonials. “Zac looked at me, and he was, like, ‘I don’t know if I can do it,’ ” a dad from Oregon said, referring to the ice bath. “We locked eyes and we exchanged a look that was, like, ‘You got this, bro,’ and we went back down under and we emerged again victorious, and that moment will be seared in my brain forever.” His son nodded. The dad declared, with boosterish enthusiasm, “Bring your sons. Turn them into men.” I asked a son—not his—if he would tell friends back home about Squire. Probably not, he said: “They might think it was weird.”

On the final night of RISE, after the participants peered into one another’s eyes around a campfire and shared what “power” they beheld, the men walked one at a time through the murmuring dark to a small clearing in the woods. A cracked mirror leaned against a tree. Before it, a pile began to form: the stones each man had carried for two days. One by one, they dropped their metaphorical anger, guilt, shame, and sadness and gazed into the glass. “He’s got some things to say to you,” King, standing nearby, told each man. “You’ve got some things to say to him.” Most of the men cried. “I hated what I was looking at,” James, the veteran, told me later. “I hated who I was. I hated all—just all the shit I’ve done. And that was me, I guess, in a way, getting out that last little bit of anger.” He went on, “I just told myself, like, ‘You are different. You’re not this bad person you always are trying to make yourself be—and you’ve got a lot to look forward to.’ ”

King had sold these men on something like a Very Tough Mudder, but it turned out to be more touchy-feely than that. Regardless, he assured me, the program “works for the guys who show up.” Other male-development programs make similar promises. Some likely do real harm. But I glimpsed a heartening shift in some of the men at RISE. King didn’t mention the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s essay “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” from 1949, which argues that people need a familiar language with which to work through their problems on their own terms. But it seems clear that some men, turned off by New Agey lingo or the sterile setting of traditional therapy, may need the bro talk and the mud to begin the work of confronting deeply uncomfortable feelings.

The next morning, the men hiked up to a grassy mountaintop to watch the sun rise. King had saved this view, and their first decent cup of coffee, for the end of the course. The men were each journaling when I approached. “At first, it was, like, ‘I’m weak. I’m the worst out of the group,’ ” James told me. “And then I realized I needed that to show me that I can trust in other people.”

Adam, the youngest participant, sat close by. “When my daughter passed away, she was two months old, and I never got to spend more than a few hours with her,” he told me, staring at the horizon. “I’ve carried that guilt for a very long time, and I can’t do it anymore. My kids deserve a better father than that.” His eyes were wet.

One man was missing from the mountaintop. The night before, Justin, the martial artist, had thrown off his pack during the final ruck. He’d demanded, and received, a ride to his car. I ran into him at the airport the next day. “It was so degrading to, like, lay in the mud and spread mud all over yourself and then clean yourself off with baby wipes and get sprayed with the hose all over your face. I wanted to fight, honestly. I was pissed,” he said. “I could have stayed at home and had my wife spray me down with a hose and tell me what I was doing wrong.” He shook his head. “It’s, like, ‘Carry this log all day, and then when you get rid of the log tell me how you feel.’ Of course you’re gonna feel like a weight is lifted off you.” He later got a refund.

Trump’s nomination of Nick Adams as Ambassador caused protests in Malaysia, and ultimately lapsed in the Senate. Adams claimed that, in fact, he’d been “promoted.” Earlier this month, the State Department announced that he is now the “Special Presidential Envoy for American Tourism, Exceptionalism, and Values.” He continues his alpha shtick. When the U.S. men’s team defeated Canada for an Olympic gold medal in hockey, Adams declared on X, “Canadian beta males will be celebrating their silver medal with a Taylor Swift singalong, but only after the land acknowledgement.” He received eight thousand likes for this. I wanted to ask Adams if it was lonely in his man cave while he came up with this stuff, but he didn’t respond to my e-mail.

King sees rise as the next step in the evolution of the alpha-male ideal. “I attempted suicide at seventeen, walking into traffic,” he told me. “I was a mess—drugs and alcohol, the whole nine. I thought that becoming alpha—that tough, badass guy—was going to be the thing. And I ruined my first marriage because of it. In my second marriage, I realized the man that my wife wants to see, it’s not that man. She wants the man that can sit there and hold space.” He’d recently landed on a term for this man: “sovereign male,” someone who “takes the best parts of the alpha and the best parts of the beta.” King acknowledged that getting there need not involve crawling through mud. “You can do therapy, yoga, microdosing, ayahuasca—I’m sober, so that’s not for me,” he said. “But real men need to learn to connect and console.”

Six months after the RISE event in Virginia, most of the participants were still in touch, texting frequently in a group chat. “Man, I’ve got fifty unread messages today,” James told me recently. He felt a degree of change. His wife had told him that he was more present. “She says I’m getting softer, too,” he said. “I think that’s a good thing.” ♦

Early one morning last fall, Nathaniel Felder left his home, in Maplewood, New Jersey, dressed in a navy sweatshirt and a gray yarmulke. After putting on a backpack, he walked to Irvington Avenue, the location of Congregation Beth El, a Conservative synagogue in neighboring South Orange. Outside the shul’s entrance, a sign greeted visitors: “We Stand with Israel and We Pray for Peace.” Felder reached into his backpack and unfurled a sign of his own. It proclaimed, “Starvation Is Against Jewish Values: Our Support of Israel Cannot Be Unconditional.”

Felder angled his sign so that it would be visible to people driving past and also to parents who would soon be dropping their kids off at a Hebrew school that the synagogue runs. Before any congregants showed up, however, a police car pulled into Beth El’s parking lot, and a pair of officers from the South Orange Police Department stepped out. One of them told Felder that the precinct had received a complaint about a trespasser at the synagogue. Felder explained that he was a member of the congregation and that his kids attended the Hebrew school. After going inside the synagogue to verify this, the officers warned Felder that posting a sign without prior approval was prohibited—if he did not leave the property, he would be arrested, and potentially banished from Beth El. Felder agreed to stand on the sidewalk, which is public property, but he refused to leave or fold up his sign.

When Felder joined Beth El, in 2020, the “We Stand with Israel” sign hadn’t yet been mounted. It was hung roughly a year after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, to express solidarity with the twelve hundred people who were murdered—in the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—and with the two hundred and fifty-one people Hamas had abducted. (“Bring Them Home Now!” was inscribed on the other side of the sign.) Felder understood the impulse behind the shul’s decision. The yarmulke he was wearing had originally belonged to his maternal grandfather, an observant Jew who had profoundly shaped Felder’s understanding of Judaism and his sense of right and wrong. His grandfather had been an ardent Zionist who, in 1975, sold his house, on Long Island, and moved to Beersheba, a city in southern Israel. Felder grew up in Montclair, where he joined Habonim Dror, a progressive Zionist youth movement. In 2001, after graduating from high school, he deferred college to spend a year in Israel with some Habonim friends, living for a while on a kibbutz and then in Karmiel, a city in the north. That year, marked by the suicide bombings of the second intifada, was tense and bloody. Felder returned to America with a heightened appreciation of the trauma and insecurity that pervaded Israel—a sentiment that resurfaced when he learned about the October 7th attack. He was especially upset to learn of the carnage at places such as Nir Oz, a kibbutz that reminded him of the one he’d lived on.

But Felder also feared that the attack would provoke unprecedented violence against Palestinians, and believed that being Jewish required adhering to certain moral precepts. Last spring, when he read reports that famine was intensifying in Gaza because Israel was blocking food and other humanitarian aid from entering the territory, the “We Stand with Israel” sign began to trouble him. Among other things, he was worried that neighbors would assume that he and his fellow-worshippers condoned Israel’s blockade, which Felder saw as a desecration of what his grandfather had taught him was the most sacred Jewish tenet: protecting human life. As the crisis in Gaza intensified, he sent an e-mail to Jesse Olitzky, Beth El’s senior rabbi, and Rachel Marder, the associate rabbi, in which he shared his distress and asked the rabbis to reconsider the sign. He was told that it would remain. Two months later, Felder wrote to the rabbis again. By this point, experts were warning that half a million people in Gaza were at risk of starvation, and organizations such as the Rabbinical Assembly, an association of Conservative rabbis, were urging immediate action to alleviate civilian suffering. Felder suggested that the Beth El rabbis send out a congregation-wide e-mail offering guidance on how to respond to the humanitarian crisis—say, by directing members to relief groups or by encouraging members to contact their representatives in Congress to exert pressure on Israel.

No such e-mail was sent. By late August, Felder had started to think about staging a demonstration at Beth El—even though he had never attended a protest and disliked drawing attention to himself. Felder, an architect with an obsessive streak, thought extensively about the design of his banner, ultimately opting for a white sign with lettering the precise shade of blue as the Star of David on the Israeli flag. He was equally exacting about the sign’s message. Instead of criticizing Israel, he decided, it should emphasize a core value of Judaism. Felder hoped that this would bring the members of Beth El together.

As he soon learned, the sign had the opposite effect.

“Go fuck yourself—you’re trash!” one man shouted at him.

“Get a life!” another person yelled.

Not only did some members disagree that Israel bore moral responsibility for the famine in Gaza; they were furious that Felder was making this insinuation at the place where they came to worship and to educate their kids about Judaism. But other people came up to Felder and engaged him in dialogue. Before heading off to the shul that morning, he had texted a photograph of his banner to a WhatsApp group for synagogue members who were distraught about the destruction of Gaza and dismayed by the lack of attention it was receiving at Beth El. Felder notified the group that he would be standing “outside the parking lot entrance.” An hour and a half later, a person in the chat uploaded another photo, which showed several members of the group standing alongside Felder and his sign.

Half a century ago, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of the magazine Commentary, published an essay in the Times in which he observed that American Jews “have all been converted to Zionism.” The event that had precipitated this change was the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a surprise assault on Israel launched by Arab forces on the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. The attack had punctured an air of invulnerability created by the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel had swiftly captured the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and Gaza from its Arab neighbors. The American Jewish community responded to the Yom Kippur War, which killed nearly three thousand Israeli soldiers, by flooding Israel with donations; doctors and students volunteered to join the war effort. Podhoretz found it striking that among the converts were many Reform Jews, who had often expressed opposition to the idea that Jews constituted a nation, and Orthodox Jews, who had previously seen Zionism as a heresy, believing that only God could end their people’s perpetual exile. Even some left-wing socialists had come around, Podhoretz noted, among them Irving Howe, the editor of Dissent, who admitted that his emotional reaction to the Yom Kippur War had been “astonishingly intense.”

It would not have been unreasonable to assume that, after October 7th, this dynamic would repeat and that the determination to bring home the Israeli hostages—twelve of whom were U.S. citizens—would galvanize a new generation. There was no such unity. For some American Jews, the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas, followed by the eruption of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, sparked a renewed sense of collective identity and Ahavat Yisrael—love for the Jewish people. For others, Israel’s merciless assault on Gaza, which has killed more than seventy-two thousand Palestinians, and the increased settler incursions into the West Bank alienated them from the Jewish establishment and from Zionism itself.

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Even the word “Zionism” now stirs fierce debate. In the view of Israel’s founders, few American Jews today would qualify as Zionists, since they have chosen to live in another country rather than to participate in the building of a Jewish national home in Palestine, which was classical Zionism’s chief aspiration and goal. But, for many American Jews, Zionism has come to represent the belief that there should be such a home—both because of the Jewish people’s ties to their ancestral land and because of the centuries of persecution that Jews endured, culminating with the Holocaust. This form of Zionism remains deeply rooted in the American Jewish community, particularly the Modern Orthodox branch. At many Jewish institutions, rejecting Zionism is indeed regarded as a form of sacrilege. But more and more American Jews are having a hard time reconciling other core features of their identity, such as a belief in equality and social justice, with support for a country whose current leaders—a far-right alliance headed by Benjamin Netanyahu—pass racist laws and espouse Jewish supremacy. Some Jews have gone further, condemning Israel as an illiberal “ethno-state” that oppresses Palestinians and should be abolished in its current form.

This past October, a survey by the Washington Post found that forty-six per cent of American Jews supported the war in Gaza and forty-eight per cent opposed it. Thirty-nine per cent believed that Israel had committed genocide. Disagreements over the war have disrupted family dinners, upended friendships, and splintered congregations. Last fall, in a sermon delivered during Rosh Hashanah, Angela Buchdahl, the senior rabbi at Central Synagogue, in Manhattan, declared that she had never been more afraid to talk about Israel, for fear of offending some worshippers. “I want to tell you about my unconditional love for the Israeli people and our beleaguered homeland, still desperately struggling to bring its hostages home, still trying to eliminate Hamas terrorists that not only refuse to lay down their arms but intentionally trap their own people in a combat zone,” Buchdahl said. “But if I tell you these things, all of which I believe, some of you will stop listening and decide that I’m no longer your rabbi.”

She continued, “I also want to tell you how my heart breaks over the civilian deaths and tragic suffering in Gaza, the shattering destruction of Palestinian homes and cities. I want to denounce settler violence in the West Bank and the rhetoric from far-right government ministers who talk about annexation of the West Bank and the expulsion of Gazans. . . . But if I tell you these things, all of which I also believe, some of you will stop listening and decide that I’m no longer your rabbi.” The conversation about Israel was “ripping our community apart,” Buchdahl observed. She described her effort to navigate the fault lines as “the most painful experience of my rabbinic life.”

When Buchdahl gave the sermon, Israel and Hamas had not yet reached an agreement to stop the Gaza war. But tensions within the American Jewish community have hardly dissipated since a peace deal was signed, in October, 2025. Only weeks after the ceasefire, the mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani—who called the Hamas attack a “war crime” but also described the Israeli response as “genocidal”—prompted more than a thousand rabbis to sign an open letter condemning the “political normalization” of anti-Zionism, a development that they linked to Mamdani’s refusal to condemn phrases such as “globalize the intifada.” (Mamdani has discouraged use of the phrase but has also said that, for Palestinians, it can represent an appeal for equality, not a call to violence.) The sentiment voiced by the rabbis did not stop several prominent Jewish politicians in New York, including Representative Jerry Nadler, whose district spans much of Manhattan, and Brad Lander, then New York City’s comptroller, from endorsing Mamdani. It also failed to dissuade roughly a third of Jewish New Yorkers from voting for him, according to an exit poll. And in late February, just as attention began to shift away from Gaza, Israel and the United States launched a joint attack on Iran—a potentially epochal war that may end up dividing Jewish Americans no less than the Gaza war did, particularly if the conflict drags on and casualties mount.

Liba Beyer, a Beth El member who considers herself anti-Zionist, and her mother, Rena. Liba helped create a WhatsApp group that allowed participants to engage in critical dialogue about Israel.

To be sure, many Jews in America hold ambivalent views, feeling both a connection to Israel and a contempt for the Netanyahu government. (In the Washington Post poll, fifty-six per cent of respondents said that they felt “very” or “somewhat” emotionally attached to Israel, but fewer than a third approved of Netanyahu’s performance.) Arguments about Israel in the American Jewish community are also nothing new. In “Jew vs. Jew,” a book published in 2000, the journalist Samuel G. Freedman documented how Israel had gone from being a unifying subject among American Jews to a source of strife. The cause of the shift, he argued, was the Oslo peace process of the mid-nineties. Jews who were unaffiliated or who attended Reform synagogues largely favored the process, which created areas of limited Palestinian self-governance, whereas a majority of Orthodox Jews, who lean conservative, opposed it. But the debate that Freedman described was a clash between two strands of Zionism, pitting doves who accepted territorial compromise against hawks who believed that Israel’s security depended on the borders it had acquired during the Six-Day War. The new division runs deeper, raising fundamental questions about what it means to be a Jew. The debates have grown especially vexed at synagogues and other Jewish institutions that subscribe to liberal Zionism, which has long sought to combine devotion to progressive political values with fealty to Israel, allegiances that recent events have made difficult—some would say impossible—to maintain.

Immediately after the Hamas attack, the mood at Beth El was sombre, but there were few signs of discord. At morning minyan—the weekday service—worshippers began concluding the proceedings with a prayer for Israel. On Shabbat, the Acheinu, a prayer for liberating those held in captivity, was recited from the bimah, an elevated platform where sermons are often delivered. For several weeks, the name and the age of each hostage was read aloud.

In the weeks that followed, a detailed account of a different captive’s story was read every Shabbat, attesting to a lingering collective grief. The pain was particularly acute for worshippers who knew people who had been murdered or kidnapped by Hamas fighters. (Multiple Beth El members had loved ones among the hostages.) But some congregants’ anguish over October 7th was compounded by dread about Israel’s brutal, indiscriminate response. One such member was Liba Beyer. On October 9th, she attended a listening circle during which congregants consoled one another and cried. Six weeks later, she and two friends invited several dozen Jewish acquaintances to a meeting at Beyer’s home. The meeting was private, and no cameras were allowed, so attendees could speak freely. After bagels and coffee were served, the participants began sharing feelings that many had been afraid to articulate—including discomfort with narratives that cast Israel solely as a victim, and shame about the escalating civilian death toll in Gaza.

“I’ve done a lot of growing. When you broke up with me, I was a guy with clean and dirty piles of clothes. Now I’m a guy with clean and dirty baskets of laundry.”

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The gatherings continued, and the group acquired a name, Tzedek soma. (“Tzedek” is Hebrew for “justice,” and “soma” is local shorthand for South Orange-Maplewood.) Only a handful of people at the initial meeting attended Beth El. But more members started showing up, and the Beth El contingent created a WhatsApp group that allowed congregants to engage in critical dialogue about Israel and to post messages about events of shared interest, such as local vigils calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. By the time I visited Beyer at her home, last fall, the group had fifty members. Beyer, who has a warm smile and bright-pink glasses, did not hide her satisfaction. “I’ve built so many amazing relationships, and we’re having these meaningful conversations inherent to our identities,” she said, after leading me through her kitchen to her back porch, where we sat beneath a sukkah decorated with portraits of Hannah Arendt and other prominent Jewish women. (A sukkah is a hut, erected for the weeklong festival of Sukkot, that evokes the fragile structures the Israelites inhabited while wandering the desert.) Beyer also did not conceal her frustration that, within Beth El, virtually all criticism of Israel had been relegated to an unofficial text chain.

She had joined Beth El in 2013, drawn to the synagogue because of its demonstrated commitment to progressive values, an ethos reflected in the gay-pride and trans-pride flags displayed in the foyer. In the intervening years, Beyer co-led a committee to help settle Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan refugees. She had also undergone a shift in her own Jewish identity. Originally from Dayton, Ohio, she’d grown up in a “super Zionist” household, she told me, and attended an Orthodox school. In college, she volunteered at the Hillel chapter. But, on a trip to Israel during this period, she joined a group of female peace activists who stood at checkpoints in the West Bank to document human-rights abuses. Beyer eventually became a director at Human Rights Watch, which, in 2021, published a report accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid in the West Bank. At the time, she still identified as a Zionist; she found the report’s conclusion deeply upsetting but fair. During the Gaza war, as images of schools and hospitals in ruins filled newspapers, she felt that a genocide was occurring, and her attachment to Zionism loosened, then gave way. “I would definitely call myself an anti-Zionist,” she told me.

Beyer was aware that saying this openly at her synagogue would not endear her to everyone. Her own husband, a right-wing Zionist who is the son of Moroccan Jews, disagreed passionately with her. “We’re a mixed marriage on Israeli politics,” she joked. She’d received her share of icy glares at Beth El, particularly when she came to services wearing a watermelon-print yarmulke—a symbol of solidarity with Palestinians, whose flag has red, green, and black elements. But there had also been times when a person she didn’t know approached her to ask for one of the “Jews for Ceasefire” pins she carried in her prayer-shawl bag. “A lot of shuls have a candy man—I’m the button lady,” she said with a laugh. These encounters had convinced Beyer that many congregants were wrestling with how to square their sympathy for Jewish Israelis with the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. “I really believe most people are struggling,” she said.

Beyer, who has two teen-age children, also noted that, although she stood out ideologically even among the WhatsApp participants, many of whom retained some connection to Zionism, her views were increasingly common among younger Jews. A month or so after the October 7th attack, Beth El hosted an educational program for teen-agers on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Afterward, a student in the audience complained to his parents that, at the event, the deaths of Palestinian civilians had been characterized as collateral damage—a regrettable but unavoidable consequence of the battle against Hamas. Beyer said, “Who do the rabbis think are going to be their congregants in eight, nine, ten years?”

In June, 2024, during the summer holiday of Shavuot, which celebrates the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai, roughly fifty Beth El members gathered in a lounge behind the sanctuary to participate in a discussion about antisemitism. Six months earlier, the Anti-Defamation League, a group that monitors antisemitism, had issued a press release saying that more than three thousand such incidents had taken place in the U.S. in the three months after October 7th. The figure was alarming, exceeding the total in some previous years, though one reason the number had soared was a change in the A.D.L.’s methodology—a decision to define more anti-Zionist events, like antiwar protests led by such groups as Jewish Voice for Peace, as acts of hate.

For those who believe that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” as Jonathan Greenblatt, the A.D.L.’s national director, has argued, including these kinds of incidents is clearly warranted. The A.D.L. and its supporters have raised alarms about Jewish students who identify as Zionists being vilified on college campuses, and about protests against Israel’s occupation of Gaza that include chants like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—a slogan that many hear as a call for Israel’s destruction.

At the Beth El event, which was titled “Wading Into the Gray: Understanding and Disentangling Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism,” a different perspective was presented. After the room filled, the moderators, both of whom belonged to the WhatsApp group, passed out copies of a document called “The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.” Published in 2021 by a team of scholars in such fields as Jewish studies and Holocaust history, it was created to help distinguish hatred of Jews from criticism of Israel. This distinction was missing both from popular discourse, the academics felt, and from an influential definition of antisemitism associated with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which lists numerous examples of antisemitism related to criticism of Israel. (Among them are “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel that were not expected of other states.) In recent years, many countries have adopted the I.H.R.A. definition, including the U.S. An executive order signed by President Donald Trump mandated that federal agencies consult the I.H.R.A. definition when investigating complaints about discrimination toward Jews; at many colleges, this has emboldened efforts to punish pro-Palestinian speech.

The Jerusalem Declaration attempts to be more nuanced. Applying classical anti-Jewish stereotypes to Israel—such as suggesting that its leaders control the banking system with a hidden hand—is clearly antisemitic, it says, but other criticisms, including “opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism” and holding Israel to moral standards not demanded of other countries, might not be. “Hostility to Israel could be an expression of antisemitic animus, or it could be a reaction to a human-rights violation, or it could be the emotion that a Palestinian person feels on account of their experience,” its authors observe.

At the Beth El event, the moderators asked the attendees to signal whether they considered certain expressions to be antisemitic. Among them was “From the river to the sea,” which, according to the Jerusalem Declaration, can be used to express support for a binational state where Jews and Palestinians are accorded equal rights. The meeting broke into discussion groups—and soon erupted in anger. An older man stood up and told the moderators that they should be ashamed for having planned such an event on a Jewish holiday. A woman had walked out, informing the moderators that she found the discussion offensive. “It was very tense,” Avi Smolen, one of the moderators, acknowledged. In his view, the awkwardness underscored the value of having such a session; several people “came out of the woodwork” to thank him afterward, he said. David Mallach, a Beth El member who participated in the event, was more critical. Sharing the Jerusalem Declaration but not the I.H.R.A. definition “created a stilted conversation,” he told me. But Mallach did not disagree that the event had usefully exposed a rift in the community. “It made it very clear how deep the divisions within the synagogue were,” he said.

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Mallach has been a Beth El member for thirty-seven years. Before retiring, he worked at United Israel Appeal, a subsidiary of the Jewish Federations of North America, which forges ties among synagogues and other Jewish groups. Over coffee one day in Maplewood, he recounted a split within the congregation sixteen years ago that had been sparked by a personality clash between the senior rabbi at the time, a woman, and the cantor, an older man. After the synagogue’s board voted to dismiss the cantor, scores of families who were loyal to him left. Mallach referred to this event as “the great schism.” Since the exodus, Beth El’s membership had recovered and indeed grown, he said, but now another schism had formed.

At one point, Mallach pulled out a pen and made two drawings on a napkin. The first was a gentle bell curve; the second was a jagged line, with two sharp peaks—one on the left, the other on the right. “If we posit that there was a spectrum of opinion on Israel like this,” he said, pointing to the first line, “post-October 7th, we have a fissure like this”—he tapped his finger on the second. As congregants were pulled in opposite directions, he said, the middle ground shrank. Although the Beth El community was overwhelmingly Democratic, he added, more congregants he knew had shifted to the right than to the left. (Over all, American Jews represent a solidly liberal voting bloc, with seventy per cent identifying as Democrats.)

Among those whose commitment to Israel had intensified after October 7th, numerous sources told me, was Olitzky, Beth El’s senior rabbi. A few weeks after having coffee with Mallach, I met Olitzky in his office, a small room appointed with prayer books, family photographs, and, on the top shelf of a bookcase, a shrine to the Baltimore Orioles—the star-crossed baseball team he’d rooted for since his grandfather began taking him to games. “There’s nothing more Jewish than being a baseball fan and believing that this year is the year,” he said with a smile. Nothing except getting into fierce arguments with fellow-Jews, some would say, which Olitzky—who has a round, boyish face and a conciliatory manner—portrayed as a privilege rather than a burden. “I’m blessed to be a rabbi of a community that understands the importance of wrestling, and that creates space for conversation,” he said.

The notion that Beth El had split into polarized camps was false, Olitzky insisted. But he acknowledged that “heightened emotions” had been stirred. Immediately after the Hamas attack, one of the emotions that overcame him, he went on to say, was a sense of abandonment. He had long been active in an interfaith clergy association whose members worked together during times of crisis, coördinating actions after such events as the murder of George Floyd, for whom Beth El organized a symbolic shiva. After October 7th, he did not hear from any of the clergy association’s members. The lack of outreach prompted him to co-write an article with two other local rabbis which struck a plaintive tone. “Clergy we have stood side-by-side with at rallies in support of LGBTQ+ rights and protections or raising our voices together to speak against racial injustice have simply disappeared,” the rabbis wrote. The silence “has gutted us.”

Alex Willick, a Beth El member who was told that he could not share a story at services about a school for Palestinian children that Jewish settlers had bulldozed in the West Bank.

That silence was also instructive, some prominent American Jews said. In a column in the Times, Bret Stephens noted that the good will many Jewish Americans had assumed would be extended to them after October 7th never materialized. Instead, some progressive allies rushed to denounce Israel’s military response while either praising or refusing to condemn Hamas. Stephens called people who had been politically activated by this dynamic “October 8th Jews,” a term that has since gained wide currency. Last year, in an address on the “State of World Jewry,” at the 92nd Street Y, the author Dan Senor celebrated this awakening. “There was a crack, an opening, in Jewish consciousness on October 8th,” he said. “People started wearing Jewish-star necklaces for the first time, they went to rallies, they donated hundreds of millions to emergency campaigns and sent supplies to I.D.F. units, and, yes, by the hundreds of thousands, they listened to podcasts about Judaism and Israel.” (Senor is the host of “Call Me Back,” a podcast whose popularity surged after October 7th.)

Senor and Stephens are neoconservatives who hardly needed to be convinced that the members of progressive movements were not friends of the Jewish people. But the shift in consciousness they described was not confined to Jews on the right. It was arguably even more pronounced among Jews who thought of themselves as liberals—people such as Olitzky, who, in 2017, was among a group of rabbis arrested at the Trump International Hotel for protesting Trump’s executive order barring travel from seven Muslim-majority countries. The value of diversity, and of peace, had been instilled in him from an early age, he told me. In 1995, when he was in sixth grade, his parents took him to Madison Square Garden to attend a memorial for Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who’d been assassinated by a right-wing extremist after signing the Oslo Accords. Olitzky’s father, Kerry, was himself a rabbi and the founder of Big Tent Judaism, a movement that sought to open the doors of temples to people who had previously been excluded, like queer Jews and interfaith couples. (A “Big Tent Judaism” sticker can be found on Beth El’s front doors.)

At our meeting, Olitzky said that he still prayed for peace every day. He emphasized that his love was for the people and the land of Israel, not for its current government, and least of all for extremists such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national-security minister, who has repeatedly praised violent Jewish settlers as heroes. Olitzky referred to Ben-Gvir as a booshah, a “disgrace.” But he also made it clear that none of the controversial things Israeli leaders had done in recent years—from allowing settlers to terrorize and humiliate Palestinians in the West Bank to blocking food and water from entering Gaza—had changed the fact that Beth El was a Zionist congregation committed to supporting Israel.

This was evident in the themes of his sermons. In one delivered a year after October 7th, he described breaking down when he learned of the death of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli American hostage whose body had been found in a tunnel in Rafah. The tears he’d shed for Goldberg-Polin symbolized “the pain of peoplehood,” he told the congregation, an ethos that bound Jews together and justified prioritizing their suffering over that of others. The previous day, Olitzky had similarly endorsed focussing exclusively on the plight of the hostages in response to a letter from Liba Beyer. He rejected her request to pass out buttons inscribed with the words “B’Tselem Elohim: ALL Life Is Holy” during the High Holidays, for congregants whose grief about the Gaza war extended equally to Israelis and Palestinians. Some time later, Olitzky also rejected Beyer’s request that Beth El host a reading group centered on the book “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza,” by the journalist Peter Beinart, who has argued for Israel becoming a binational state. She told Olitzky that eighteen members had wanted to attend. In an e-mail, Olitzky wrote to Beyer, “Sponsoring a conversation that offers the conclusion that Israel shouldn’t be a Jewish state isn’t a program that makes sense for us as a synagogue to host.”

Last fall, at the start of Yom Kippur services, Olitzky spoke about the meaning of the “We Stand with Israel” sign he’d put up outside the synagogue. This was about two weeks after Felder had mounted his demonstration and after many other Beth El members had expressed discomfort with the sign, in e-mails and in private conversations, with some suggesting alternatives such as “One People, One Heart” and “We Stand with the Israeli People.” In his sermon, Olitzky began by recalling the mood on October 7th. He had walked home with his daughter after services and explained to her what had happened. In response, she asked if they could hang an Israeli flag outside their home. A flag still waved there, he told the congregation. Olitzky acknowledged that the “We Stand with Israel” sign lacked nuance. But it served as an invitation for conversation, he said, and affirmed an unwavering bond. “Saying ‘I Stand with Israel’ means ‘I believe in Israel, what Israel is, and what Israel can be—the Israel I dream of,’ ” he proclaimed.

Many worshippers loved the sermon, including Keren Siegel. She and her husband had joined Beth El in 2021, after the birth of their twins, drawn by the fact that it was a Conservative shul (they both strictly observe the Sabbath) with a growing community of young families. Siegel, whose father is Israeli and who has many relatives in Israel, assumed that the worshippers there supported Zionism. In the days after the October 7th attack, which she spent frantically texting cousins to make sure that they were safe, she turned to Beth El for succor. The realization that many members did not have the same connection to Israel, and even sympathized with its critics, startled her. Last July, the son of one of her cousins died while on a military operation in Gaza, and she later memorialized the death by placing a sticker bearing the relative’s name on the “We Stand with Israel” sign. When she learned the news about her relative, she wondered whether some people at Beth El might think that his death was justified—she had heard about protests where pro-Palestinian demonstrators had shouted, “Death, death to the I.D.F.!” Olitzky’s Yom Kippur sermon was a welcome affirmation of the synagogue’s core values, Siegel felt. “We are a Zionist community and synagogue,” she told me. “And, just like we support economic justice and gender and racial rights, one of our values is that we believe in the right for Israel to exist as a Jewish state.”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

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Felder’s reaction to the sermon was, of course, very different. Since standing outside Beth El with his banner, he had come to find that his views were more widely shared among congregants than he’d understood. On his way to the Yom Kippur service, he was optimistic that their voices were being heard. Olitzky’s sermon left him crestfallen. So much for Big Tent Judaism, Felder thought while driving home. So much, too, for applying Beth El’s progressive values to Israel—a disjuncture that had struck him a month or so earlier, when he’d learned that the rabbis at Beth El were planning to lead a service outside an ice detention facility. When he saw the e-mail about the ice service, he told me, “that was the moment I printed out my sign. Because I am horrified by what’s going on with ice and immigration, but there was no mention of the biggest thing that was touching the Jewish community at the time. For me, we had lost our moral authority to advocate for social justice at that ice facility by ignoring the mass starvation of a civilian population. It made the ice protest hollow.”

Nothing Olitzky could have said about the Gaza war would likely have pleased all the members of Beth El. This is why, as the conflict entered its second year, rabbis at many American synagogues strained to avoid the subject.

Some rabbis who were privately appalled by Israel’s actions in Gaza stayed quiet for fear of being branded traitors. Sharon Brous, the senior rabbi at IKAR, a synagogue in Los Angeles, told me that pro-Israel advocates often resort to a discourse that she called Defend, Deflect, and Denounce. “First, defend Israel at all costs, even when Israel is blatantly wrong,” she said. “Then deflect—‘Why aren’t you talking about Sudan?’ And then denounce any person who refuses to play by the rules.” Back in 2012, amid an exchange of rockets between Israel and Hamas, Brous experienced this directly, when the Jerusalem rabbi Daniel Gordis accused her of “betrayal” in a column in the Times of Israel, citing a message that she’d sent to her community in which she expressed compassion for Israelis and Palestinians in “absolute balance.” The accusation stung, she told me, both because Gordis had been a mentor and because it prompted personal attacks on her, including rape and death threats. Not long after October 7th, on a Zoom call with more than a hundred influential figures in Hollywood, Brous emphasized her profound sympathy for Israelis; two board members at her synagogue had relatives in Israel who’d been killed or kidnapped by Hamas. But she also voiced concern for civilians being forced to leave northern Gaza. Brous recalls that the A.D.L.’s Greenblatt, who had joined the meeting and described anti-Zionism as a form of genocide, abruptly cut her off. “Please stop!” he snapped. “Don’t blame the victim. . . . We can humanize them when they stop dehumanizing us.” Then he hung up.

Rabbi Paul Golomb and his wife, Deborah Golomb, at their residence on the Upper West Side. Deborah said, “What’s going on in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank breaks my heart.”

The Jewish establishment has long demanded uncritical support for Israel. “Israeli democracy should decide, American Jews should support” was reportedly the motto of Abraham Foxman, Greenblatt’s predecessor at the A.D.L. This stance, however, has not stopped some of the establishment’s members from criticizing Israel—from the right. The journalist Joshua Leifer, in his recent book “Tablets Shattered,” points out that many prominent American rabbis publicly assailed Yitzhak Rabin for signing the Oslo Accords. One called Rabin’s government a Judenrat, the Nazi term for Jewish councils appointed to oversee ghettos.

Although the Jewish establishment’s effort to silence criticism has sometimes proved effective with rabbis, it has not prevented Jews who care about Palestinian rights from joining groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace. Indeed, attempts to muffle criticism have backfired, some observers believe. Nomi Colton-Max, a Beth El member and a former president of the synagogue, told me, “If we could have had open conversations about Israel, the same way that we’ve had open conversations about everything else, the situation might not have reached this point.” Colton-Max co-chairs New Jewish Narrative, an organization that supports justice and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians, and is a vice-president of the American Zionist Movement. Congregations throughout North America, she feels, have long embraced a notion of “inclusion” that, when it comes to Israel, stretches from just left of center to the extreme right. “We allowed the tent to go further to the right but never to the left,” she said. Shalom Bayit—a Hebrew phrase meaning “peace within the home”—“has always been about including only those on one side.”

In December, 2024, a Beth El member named Alex Willick received an invitation to speak in the synagogue’s main sanctuary on Shabbat about a recent visit to Israel. The rabbis had asked several members who’d made trips there to talk about their experiences while standing on the bimah, before the Acheinu prayer was read. Their presentations had all covered similar ground, relaying the resilience of the Israelis they’d met. Willick, who works at the New Israel Fund, a social-justice and pro-democracy nonprofit, was asked to talk about an “interaction” he’d had in Israel, “something that would inspire the community.” He decided to talk about his encounter with Yinon Levi, a Jewish settler who, among other things, is known to have rammed a bulldozer into an elementary school in Zanuta, a Palestinian village in the West Bank’s South Hebron Hills. (In 2024, the Biden Administration imposed financial sanctions on Levi and three other Jewish settlers for allegedly inciting violence against Palestinians, but the Trump Administration removed the sanctions last year.) During his visit, Willick had gone to the site of the attack and surveyed the ruins, which were strewn with children’s drawings and broken crayons. While Willick was there, some settlers drove by in a white pickup and smiled—including Levi.

Before Willick spoke, Olitzky and Marder asked to see his remarks, so that they could offer feedback. He agreed, and found their suggestions helpful. Afterward, he texted the WhatsApp chain, encouraging people to come to his talk. But, the week before he was scheduled to speak, he received an e-mail informing him that the invitation had been rescinded, and suggesting other venues at Beth El where he could tell his story. Olitzky said that this decision was made because there needed to be “conversation and dialogue” about such a topic, and because the bimah was a special place where the community came together to feel “a sense of hope.” Willick was not convinced by this explanation, noting that many graphic and upsetting stories had been shared from the bimah in the past two and a half years—stories about violence perpetrated by Hamas. Although the theme of Willick’s intended talk was dark, it opened with a description of his deep connection to Israel. Later in the talk, he would address those who might wonder why he was speaking about a Palestinian school in a space reserved for Jewish stories. His experience was a Jewish story, he explained: “Everyone involved, aside from the victims, are Jewish—the perpetrators, the enablers, and the observers.”

Willick told me all this while we walked through a New Jersey nature reserve where he likes to go running. A father of two young children, he described the day he visited the bulldozed school as “the darkest moment in my history of Zionism.” Now, he said, he was no longer sure that he considered himself a Zionist. “If I can’t dissociate that action from that word within my own community, I don’t even know how I feel about the word at all anymore,” he said.

As disappointed as Willick was, he had no intention of leaving Beth El. Neither did the other WhatsApp-group members I met. “I don’t want to burn it down—I’m only here to make it better,” Liba Beyer said, adding that her son would soon be having his bar mitzvah at the synagogue, which was also where her father’s memorial took place and where her daughter had celebrated her bat mitzvah, in 2024. Beyer hoped that, just as congregations had learned to welcome and accommodate L.G.B.T.Q.+ and interfaith families, so, too, they would evolve to make space for people with diverse views on Israel.

Not everyone believes that such accommodation should be made. In November, Nolan Lebovitz, the senior rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom, a synagogue in Encino, California, wrote an article for Tablet in which he stated that Jews who have forsaken Zionism “have removed themselves from our shared sense of peoplehood.” His argument echoed the thesis of a 2021 essay by Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy, also published in Tablet, that labelled defectors from Zionism as “un-Jews.” Since October 7th, Lebovitz wrote, the differences between Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox denominations paled next to the only division that now mattered: “Zionist or anti-Zionist.” A number of congregants who had rejected his shul’s “strong and unequivocal commitment to Israel” had quit, and Lebovitz had welcomed their departures.

Many Jews have stopped attending temples that refused to acknowledge their concerns about Israel. In January, I had tea in New York with a woman I’ll call Rivka. (She did not want her real name used.) A musician in her thirties who works at a social-justice nonprofit, she had joined a synagogue on the Upper West Side upon moving to New York several years ago. After October 7th, the synagogue sent out an e-mail collecting donations for the I.D.F., which she viewed as an “occupation army.” Then she overheard a member of the congregation say, “There are no innocent people in Gaza.” She left the temple and started searching for a place of worship that was more aligned with her values. By the time we met, she had found one—an anti-Zionist minyan in Harlem that she’d started herself. On Friday nights, the group met in a member’s apartment for Shabbat services and a potluck dinner. In the past year, many similar minyans have formed in such places as Brooklyn and Boston. Rivka no longer felt a connection to Israel, though her spiritual journey was hardly that of an “un-Jew.” Before launching her minyan, she’d spent months studying Jewish liturgy so that she could lead services. She’d also improved her Hebrew. “My faith has definitely gotten more intense,” she said, propelled by a desire to prove that Judaism “belongs to all of us—Zionism doesn’t have a monopoly.”

After meeting Rivka, I visited B’nai Jeshurun, a nondenominational synagogue on the Upper West Side. Although it was a blustery evening in the middle of the week, the synagogue was packed with people who had come to attend a panel discussion, “The Jewish Tent at a Crossroads,” about the rupture over Israel and Zionism. Before the event began, I chatted with a man sitting behind me, a retired rabbi named Paul Golomb, who had once served as the vice-president for programming at the American Zionist Movement. He was still holding out hope for “a Zionism that is liberal and just,” he said. His wife, Deborah, who was seated next to him, appeared to be less hopeful. “What’s going on in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank breaks my heart,” she said.

Rabbi Irwin Kula, the panel’s moderator, asked the participants to describe their biggest fear or nightmare. One of the panelists was Peter Beinart, the writer whose book had been deemed unfit for study at Beth El. Beinart, who continues to attend an Orthodox synagogue, said that, in addition to worrying that God will judge his community for doing too little to stop the carnage in Gaza, he feared that he would soon be banished from this community. “Shabbat is not Shabbat if you spend it alone, and I sometimes feel like that’s my future,” he said. Another panelist, Elliot Cosgrove, the senior rabbi at Park Avenue Synagogue, on the Upper East Side, said his main worry was that, at a time when the Jewish people did not lack for external enemies, “we are making internal enemies.” He called for summoning a “capaciousness of spirit.” It was a heartfelt message but a somewhat surprising one from a rabbi who had recently inflamed tensions among Jews. A few months earlier, Cosgrove had delivered a sermon about Mamdani, insisting that the candidate posed “a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community” because of his opposition to Zionism.

Cosgrove’s sermon inspired the rabbinical letter denouncing Mamdani. It urged Americans to “stand up for candidates who reject antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric, and who affirm Israel’s right to exist.” Although the letter drew more than a thousand signatures, it was controversial. Many rabbis refused to sign it because they believed that clerical leaders have no business intervening in an election. Others feared that singling out Mamdani could stoke Islamophobia. Still others worried that the letter, which was titled “A Rabbinic Call to Action: Defending the Jewish Future,” would actually sabotage the “Jewish future” by alienating young Jews who were excited about Mamdani. Rabbi Hara Person, the chief executive of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional organization for Reform rabbis, said, “If we tell this entire swath of young people that their ideas and concerns are not welcome, we’re going to lose them.” Her fear was borne out on Election Day: although Andrew Cuomo, who attacked Mamdani repeatedly over his views on Israel, carried Hasidic neighborhoods, such as Borough Park, Mamdani won the Jewish vote in progressive strongholds such as Park Slope.

Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, of Park Avenue Synagogue. Cosgrove delivered a sermon calling Zohran Mamdani “a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community” because of Mamdani’s opposition to Zionism.

Cosgrove, in his sermon on Mamdani, asserted that Zionism and Israel were “inseparable strands” of his Jewish identity. The day after Mamdani was elected, I went to Park Avenue Synagogue to speak with Cosgrove. He has pale eyes and a contemplative bearing, and appeared to be in a reflective mood. When I asked whether he thought that the American Jewish community today shared his feelings about Zionism and Israel, he paused for nearly thirty seconds. “I’m not sure,” he said, finally. Later, he handed me “For Such a Time as This,” a book he wrote about the Jewish “awakening” after October 7th. Mamdani’s victory seemed to have surprised and unsettled him. “As certain as I am that these last two years have prompted many Jews to draw closer to Judaism and to Israel, so, too, there are many Jews for whom these last two years have prompted the opposite,” he said.

As Mamdani’s election showed, the Jewish community is as divided about antisemitism and concerns over Jewish safety as it is about Zionism and Israel—issues that are now inextricably related. “It’s become impossible to have a conversation about antisemitism without Israel-Palestine arising,” Dov Waxman, a political scientist and a professor of Israel studies at U.C.L.A., noted. In 2016, Waxman published “Trouble in the Tribe,” which centers on the growing debate about Israel in the American Jewish community. He is now working on a study of the equally fractious debate about antisemitism. Two decades ago, Israel’s conduct primarily affected the lives of Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. Today, Waxman told me, what happens in the region profoundly shapes the security and perceptions of Jews in the diaspora. On one side were the “October 8th Jews” who were preoccupied by the growing influence of the anti-Zionist left at a time when violent attacks on Jews were becoming increasingly common: last spring, in Washington, D.C., two Israeli Embassy staffers were killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum; in Michigan, a man recently rammed a truck filled with explosives into a synagogue. On the other side were Jews who tended to be far more concerned about the resurgence of antisemitism on the right, from the likes of Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, and believed that Israel’s aggressive actions were partially responsible for making Jews unsafe. As some news outlets reported, the suspect in the Michigan attack, a Lebanese American named Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, had recently attended a memorial for four members of his family who were killed by an Israeli air strike in eastern Lebanon. (Israel has claimed that Ghazali’s brother was a member of Hezbollah, a charge that Hezbollah has denied.) The argument about Mamdani was “a microcosm of the larger debate,” Waxman said. “Should we be concerned about anti-Zionist speech and phrases like ‘globalize the intifada,’ or should we view Mamdani as an ally because what’s most needed is an alliance in the face of rising Christian nationalism and a racist far right?”

Within the Beth El congregation, many members on the WhatsApp text chain were initially heartened that neither Olitzky nor Marder had signed the open letter criticizing Mamdani. But, a week before Election Day, Olitzky did sign it. Soon afterward, Marder followed suit. To the chat-group members, her signature came as a particular disappointment, because she was seen as more sympathetic to their concerns. Last fall, in a Rosh Hashanah sermon, Marder declared that her heart ached “for the innocents who are suffering in Gaza” and “for the thousands of Palestinians who have died in this war, and the many who are starving and suffering.” She also acknowledged “the trouble in our tent.” Remaining Am Echad—one people—“depends on our ability to tolerate diverse views,” she said.

The disappointment in Marder was short-lived. A few days after she endorsed the open letter, she took her name off it. When I asked Olitzky if I could talk with Marder, he demurred, telling me it was important that the synagogue leadership speak in “one voice.” (Marder declined to be interviewed, but in an e-mail she explained that she “didn’t feel comfortable as a spiritual leader having my name attached to a petition that endorsed or condemned a candidate.”) Olitzky expressed no regrets about signing the open letter, affirming his commitment to “call out antisemitism,” which he did not distinguish from anti-Zionism. After our meeting, he sent me a link to a sermon he gave in which he described the litany of hate crimes targeting Jews in places such as Staten Island, where a man wearing a yarmulke was assaulted with a metal bat. Such incidents had caused him to wonder whether he should cover his head with a baseball cap on train rides at night, or even on walks through his own neighborhood.

At Beth El in January, Marder led a discussion of anti-Zionism in politics. It was far less contentious than the one that had taken place two years earlier, during Shavuot. As the furor over the October 7th attack and the Gaza war subsides, such gatherings have become easier to organize, several Beth El members told me. “The temperature has been turned down—we’re in a different moment,” a board member said. “The rabbis have facilitated some sessions where people have been able to have productively uncomfortable conversations.” Olitzky and Marder recently returned from a listening tour of Israel and the West Bank, organized by the nonpartisan group Encounter. The trip raised hopes among some members on the WhatsApp chain that expressions of empathy toward Palestinians will become more common at Beth El, both from the bimah and in synagogue-wide communications. An e-mail that the rabbis sent to members after the outbreak of the Iran war began, “We prayed and continue to pray for the safety of our friends and family in Israel.” But it went on to extend “prayers for peace and freedom, peace for the entire region, for Israel, for Palestinians, for Iran, and for all of Israel’s neighbors.”

Although a space for dialogue has opened, the distrust has hardly gone away. A reminder of this came in late January, after Israel announced that it had recovered the remains of Ran Gvili, the last remaining hostage in Gaza. A day later, Olitzky sent out a congregation-wide e-mail sharing the news, which, after eight hundred and forty-three days “full of anguish, uncertainty and heartache,” marked “the end of this period of mourning.”

Some Beth El members shared Olitzky’s sense of closure and relief. But others were in a different frame of mind. One member of the WhatsApp group wrote a pointed response to Olitzky. When Beth El’s leaders “speak as though the community is unified around a single moral framing (especially after years in which many felt unseen, unheard, or unsupported),” the member argued, “it risks becoming a form of gaslighting. It suggests consensus where there is none.” Molly Rodau, another Beth El member, wrote a poignant note to Olitzky. “How can we declare our mourning ‘concluded’ when the killing continues?” she asked. “What has brought us to a place where we can mark the end of one group’s suffering while another’s continues—as if our lives and theirs exist on separate moral planes?”

Olitzky’s e-mail did contain some seemingly welcome news for these Beth El members. Now that the hostages were home, he announced, the “We Stand with Israel” sign would be removed. A couple of days later, on a frigid morning, dozens of congregants gathered in the synagogue’s foyer, bundled in hats and scarves. They followed Olitzky outside, along a concrete path slick with ice. After several prayers were recited, Olitzky trudged through snow and took the sign down.

Beyer, who attended the ceremony, was struck by the balanced tone of the proceedings—which she credited both to the sombre occasion and to the letters that her WhatsApp peers had written. She was especially moved when Marder came forward to read “Prayer of the Mothers,” a poem co-written by Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum, who is Israeli, and Sheikha Ibtisam Mahameed, who is Palestinian. “May it be your will to hear the prayer of mothers,” it began. “For you did not create us to kill each other / Nor to live in fear, anger or hatred in your world.”

Felder, who was also there, had more mixed feelings. As he watched Olitzky pull down the sign, he felt relief. But he also felt frustrated about an upcoming change at Beth El. The synagogue’s leaders had decided that a new emblem would replace the sign outside: an Israeli flag. ♦