I grew up immersed in American Jewish education. Through sixteen years of Jewish day school, my teachers trained me in names and dates: the pogroms, the expulsion from Spain, the aliyot, 1948. I learned to love Israel with a kind of righteous certainty. At seventeen, I stood on the train tracks of Auschwitz wrapped in an Israeli flag, convinced that Jewish survival deserved any cost.

I arrived at college idealistic, certain of my convictions, and desperate to be on the side of justice. My professors taught me that Zionism is a colonial project, depicted Jews as European interlopers, and described Israel’s existence as dependent on the continual subjugation of Palestinians. They said, Zionism was “a structure, not an event.”

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At Stanford, like many other colleges and universities, students and professors reduced the Jewish story to a footnote in someone else’s manifesto. The intellectual left, which once claimed to welcome me, consistently dehumanized my community. And required me to do the same. Intellectual engagement demanded advocating for the literal murder of Jews. And my classmates they rolled their eyes when I named their bias: Antisemitism.

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If I could tell Jewish students one thing, it would be this: You don’t need to shrink yourself to fit someone else’s definition of solidarity. You don’t have to choose between your people and your conscience. You can carry the whole story—even when it doesn’t fit on a protest sign.