Are US Jews Ignoring the Small Shofar?

As the contradictions of the American Empire metastasize and crumble under their own weight, US Jews find themselves increasingly isolated, with their conditional acceptance pulled out from beneath them.

The small shofar, as described by Chief Rabbi Avraham Yitzḥak HaKohen Kook, is blaring.

Rav Kook spoke of three shofarot beckoning the people of Israel home.

The first, the greatest, is an impulse to return home in order to participate in fixing the world and bringing history to its goal.

The medium sized shofar is national consciousness, somewhat resembling that of other peoples — smaller, yet still kosher.

But the small shofar carries no brakha. It’s sounded by our haters and enemies — a horn from a non-kosher animal, forcing us to confront the uncomfortable truths we’ve previously refused to face.

We currently hear that third shofar in the unraveling of the American Jewish story.

When a figure like Zohran Mamdani wins a mayoral race in New York City on a populist, anti-establishment platform — pairing a Muslim identity with overt anti-Israel positions and a critique of the capitalist system — many Jews begin to fear for their futures. 

The Jewish reactions have been predictably defensive.

But this anxiety reveals something deeper – that for over a century, US Jews have been living a dishonest existence, not only for being outside of their land, but also for investing in a false identity. 

In exchange for some material comforts and a false sense of security, US Jews discarded the parts of their identities that they saw as preventing them from fitting it in. The values of classical liberalism and the “American way” became sacred – and ancient Jewish sources that appeared to challenge these values had to be downplayed. And the State of Israel, once it reemerged, was celebrated as an outpost of “Judeo-Christian civilization.”

But history has caught up. The contradictions of that “Judeo-Christian” synthesis are imploding.

Since the murder of Charlie Kirk, the MAGA movement’s internal fractures have deepened, with Jews at the center of the schism. 

America First, a new iteration of the movement that sought to stay out of the “Jewish war” in Europe, is once again grappling with how the Jews have sucked them in to yet another war that runs contrary to American and Christian values.

Many Jews have taken the reactionary position of Ben Shapiro, who argues that a truly “America First” position is one deeply supportive of Israel. This has largely been seen, particularly by young conservatives, as exemplary of the exact behavior they deem unpatriotic and treasonous.

The schism isn’t going away and rightist commentators are coming under pressure to take sides.

Brett Cooper, a former employee of the Daily Wire, said that pro-Israel Jews like Mark Levin should “just move Israel” – heard by Diaspora Jews as a call back to the taunts hurled in European countries in previous centuries. 

Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes have been championing an Israel-critical America First for a long time but the chorus is growing. 

This position simply has more ideological longevity in the current political climate and is more authentic in the wider scope of the history of Western civilization (and perhaps even truer from the perspective of Jewish historiography).

Vice President JD Vance – a potential future US president – has made this calculation clear: to win, he must harness America First momentum without the Israel baggage. His turn to overt Christian nationalism signals the ideological trajectory of the post-liberal American right.

This precarious position is set to blindside the Jews who spent years building the American right. As Jewish conditional whiteness is challenged, right-wing Jews find themselves subject to the very rhetoric they once authored against other oppressed minorities. Right-wing American Jews have become public enemy number one within what they thought was their own camp. 

Rather than trying to cling to the dying breed of Republican politics that President Donald Trump helped to usher out, these Jews should instead heed the warning and advice of the America First crowd. 

They should recognize that Tucker Carlson was correct in calling out the heresy of Christian Zionism and start the process of aliya (they might also want to drop their insistence that Israel continue to reflect values and policies “acceptable” to the American right).

Diaspora Jews are once again being cast out of their host society, or worse, as symbols of what went wrong. The American right is rediscovering its Christian core, and with it, shedding the “Judeo” prefix. Figures like Carlson and Fuentes speak openly of Christian nationalism without Jewish partnership. They are correctly calling out this false and forced matrimony. 

The myth of the Judeo-Christian West is collapsing, and those Jews still clinging to it are finding themselves increasingly stranded.

Conservative Jews in the US have become the last Judeo-Christians — relics of an arrangement that no longer serves the powerful; and never actually served us.

This is why Rav Kook’s third shofar does not warrant a brakha. While our brothers and sisters should heed it, it is definitionally b’diavad. It’s the sound of history reminding us that our salvation cannot be attained in foreign lands and that our destiny cannot be outsourced to foreign empires – that being outside of our land is inherently unnatural.

This shofar may not be kosher, but its call is holy — because it forces us to return to what is kosher: our own identity, our own land, our own ideological paradigm, our own destiny.

The tragedy of US Jews isn’t so much that the empire is crumbling — but that they built their identities on the assumption that it never would.

The third shofar is sounding. It’s a blast from the past and it’s calling us home. This Shofar doesn’t screech to preserve the last remnants of a dying Judeo-Christian illusion, but wails because so many of our people have forgotten Israel’s historic mission.

Jews mustn’t bemoan the rise of a new Pharaoh but rather liberate ourselves from any subservience to Pharaoh. Our people mustn’t mourn the end of a comfortable exile, but rather utilize this moment to return home and embrace our redemption.