By Howie Silbiger
On the night of Purim, when Jews around the world were celebrating survival against those who once plotted their destruction, someone stood outside a synagogue in Toronto and opened fire.
Twenty shots were fired into a synagogue in North York late Monday night, only hours after families had gathered inside for a Purim celebration. Windows were shattered and the building was damaged. It is a miracle no one was injured. Parents, children and congregants had just been inside celebrating one of the most joyous holidays on the Jewish calendar, the holiday that commemorates the survival of the Jewish people in ancient Persia after a decree was issued to destroy them.
It is hard to ignore the symbolism. Purim is the story of a genocidal decree against the Jews. And in 2026, in one of the largest cities in North America, Jews finished celebrating Purim and hours later their synagogue was riddled with bullets.
This is the moment we are living in.
And if this moment teaches us anything, it is that Jews once again need strong activist leadership that is prepared to put the Jewish people first. For too long, the Jewish world has tried to convince itself that quiet diplomacy and polite statements would be enough to protect our communities. The theory was simple. If Jews behaved well, spoke softly and avoided confrontation, society would return the favor. History has never supported that theory.
What we are seeing today is a rising anti-Jewish climate spreading across Western societies. Jewish schools are targeted. Synagogues are vandalized or shot at. Jewish students are harassed on campuses. Jewish institutions require heavy security simply to function normally.Yet the instinct of much of the Jewish establishment remains the same instinct that has failed us repeatedly throughout history. Do not make waves. Do not speak too loudly. Do not provoke.
The problem is that Jewish history is not written by those who kept their heads down. It is written by those who stood up.
Look at Chanukah. Today we celebrate it with songs, candles and jelly doughnuts, but the story behind it is far less comfortable. A small group of Jews refused to accept a regime that sought to erase Jewish identity and Jewish practice. The Maccabees organized, rebelled and ultimately reclaimed their Temple and their independence. Chanukah is not the story of quiet accommodation. It is the story of Jews who fought for their survival and their faith.
Purim tells the same story in a different way. A genocidal decree was signed. The Jewish people were marked for destruction. The response was not quiet acceptance. It was political courage, communal organization and Jewish self defense.
Throughout Jewish history the pattern repeats.
When the Nazis tried to annihilate the Jews of Europe, resistance movements formed even under impossible conditions. The fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto knew they could not defeat the German war machine, but they fought anyway because Jewish dignity demanded resistance.
Jewish partisans fought in forests across Eastern Europe. Prisoners revolted inside death camps. Jews with almost no weapons and almost no chance of survival still chose to fight back because surrender was not an option. They were not asking permission from polite society, they were putting Jews first.
In the modern era one of the most controversial figures to embrace that idea was Rabbi Meir Kahane.
To many Jews today, the mere mention of Kahane creates discomfort. He was a deeply polarizing figure and much of the Jewish establishment rejected him. He was treated as a pariah by major Jewish organizations and much of the Jewish political world. Yet it is impossible to understand Jewish activism in the late twentieth century without understanding Kahane’s message.
Kahane argued that Jewish survival required organized Jewish self defense and unapologetic Jewish leadership. In 1968 he founded the Jewish Defense League in New York, a movement built around a simple but powerful slogan that resonated deeply in the post Holocaust world; Never Again.
For Kahane, Never Again was not an empty phrase, it was a policy. Jews would never again allow themselves to be helpless while enemies threatened their survival. The Jewish Defense League became known for aggressive activism on behalf of Soviet Jews trapped behind the Iron Curtain. While much of the world ignored the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union, Kahane and his followers forced the issue into public consciousness.
Eventually Kahane moved to Israel and entered politics. In 1984 he was elected to the Knesset where he built his platform around the idea that the Jewish state must unapologetically prioritize the safety and sovereignty of the Jewish people. His proposals regarding Arabs were highly controversial and widely condemned. Many Jews rejected them completely and feared his rhetoric would isolate Israel internationally. As a result Kahane was ostracized by much of the Jewish political world and pushed to the margins of mainstream Jewish leadership.
But Kahane never retreated from his central belief that Jewish leaders had become too timid and too afraid to defend Jewish interests openly. In 1990 he was assassinated by an Al Queda gunman, in the first Al Queda attack on US spoil, during a question period after speaking at a Jewish event in Manhattan.
Whether one admired him or rejected him, Kahane represented something that is largely missing today. Unapologetic Jewish advocacy. He asked uncomfortable questions about Jewish survival and Jewish power. In fact, one of his books was literally titled Uncomfortable Questions for Comfortable Jews. That title alone captures a central tension inside the Jewish community.
Too often Jewish leadership becomes focused on maintaining comfort and acceptance rather than confronting threats. Leaders worry about how Jews are perceived rather than whether Jews are protected, but the enemies of the Jewish people have never required Jews to provoke them. They have always found reasons.
The story of Ze’ev Jabotinsky illustrates the same point from another angle. Jabotinsky argued that Jews needed strength, deterrence and political clarity in order to survive in a hostile world. Like Kahane decades later, he was frequently criticized and marginalized by more moderate leaders of his time. Yet many of his warnings about Jewish vulnerability proved tragically accurate.
Jewish history is filled with figures like this. People who were inconvenient and often ostracized in their own time, but who spoke truths others preferred not to hear.
Today the Jewish world once again faces a choice.
We can continue to rely on quiet diplomacy and carefully worded press releases while synagogues are shot at and Jewish institutions live behind security barriers or we can rediscover the tradition of Jewish activism that runs through our history.
Activism does not mean abandoning Jewish ethics. It does not mean embracing hatred. But it does mean refusing to apologize for defending Jewish life. It means demanding accountability from governments when Jews are targeted. It means confronting anti Jewish hatred wherever it appears whether on campuses, in politics or in the media. It means recognizing that Jewish safety cannot be outsourced to people who do not share our fate.
Above all it means remembering a lesson that Jewish history has taught again and again; The Jewish people have survived for thousands of years not because others protected us. We survived because Jews stood up for Jews.
On Purim this year a synagogue in Toronto was sprayed with bullets, the message behind that attack was clear. The answer must be equally clear.
Never again is not an empty phrase. Jews are not going to sit by idly while being attacked. We will be loud, we will be proud and we will stand up and defend ourselves, our country, our community. The world must understand and our leaders must proclaim loudly:
Never again means never again.
Howie Silbiger is the host of The Howie Silbiger Show on truetalkradio.com and Political Hitman on israelnewstalkradio.com. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Montreal Jewish News
