Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli therapist, lecturer and author. He volunteers in the IDF reserves, as an MDA medic, in ZAKA, and in the Israel Police Search and Rescue Team

There is a moment in every confrontation between a Jew and a mob when the Jew decides which conversation he is having. One conversation is about whether he is permitted to exist, work, perform, pray and go home unharmed. The other conversation is about whether his accusers have any standing to raise the question. Almost all of our communal energy for eighty years has gone into the first conversation, which we have lost steadily and expensively, and almost none has gone into the second, which we would win in about four seconds if we ever bothered to have it.

Michael Rapaport, of all people, has become the most reliable practitioner in America of the second conversation. He should be studied, and what he does should be trained.

Rapaport recently sat with Craig Carton for the premiere of Carton's new OutKick program and gave an unusually flat accounting of what the last three years have cost him. A thirty-year working actor, he now gets "ghosted" by studios worried about protests online, and he described club staff being harassed and threatened simply for booking him, with shows pulled because police could not guarantee they would be there.

"The show's being boycotted. Sucks," he said, and then he described being heckled on the streets of his own city, and said what wounded him most was the thought of other Jews behind him feeling too frightened to stand up.

Notice what is absent from that accounting. There is no apology. There is no clarification. There is no carefully nuanced statement about how he has always believed in the dignity of all peoples and looks forward to a difficult but necessary dialogue. There is no waffle, because he does not believe there is anything on the other side of the table worth negotiating with.

I argued in a March ‘26 JNS article, "Stop fighting antisemitism like it's a PR problem," that the respectable Jewish response to Jew hatred has calcified into a anemic ritual of conferences, curricula, statements, awareness campaigns and interfaith panels premised on the flattering fiction that our enemies are merely uninformed. That premise is false and everyone senses it, which is why the ritual feels like theater.

Antisemitism is not a misunderstanding to be corrected. It is a functioning social technology that organizes identity, supplies a scapegoat and simplifies the moral universe for people who want it simplified. It is contained by strength, deterred by readiness and punished by consequence. What I called communal muscular-mindedness is not a metaphor for better messaging. It is a posture, and Rapaport is the least credentialed and most consistent demonstration of it in American public life.

Look at the record. In Portland in early 2024, activists papered the city with fliers accusing him of cheering genocide and demanded Helium cancel him. Rapaport's response was to circulate the fliers himself and use the attention to sell tickets. Think about the internal machinery required to do that. The flier is designed to make you feel disgusting, isolated and negotiable. He took the instrument of shame and turned it into an advertisement - not to be a viral hero, but because it’s who he chooses to be.

In Madison, when the venue folded and cancelled over what it called escalating protests, he had already told his agent the show had to go on, because he refused to hand the veto to the people demanding it.

In Chicago, with protesters outside the Vic and his earlier suburban dates already scrapped over security, he stood on the sidewalk in front of his hotel and told a local reporter that the same treatment would be unthinkable if it targeted anyone's ideas or sexuality, but that dressed up as anti-Zionism it had become acceptable, and that "I will not back down."

In Birmingham last year, when the Stardome pulled the plug, his statement was "I did not cancel. I would never cancel", and instead of flying home he went and wrapped tefillin with Chabad of Alabama and posted the photograph. That is not public relations. That is a muscular-minded counterpunch with a mitzvah attached.

And when a hundred masked (as the cowards always are) demonstrators showed up outside Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side this past spring, he did not issue a statement urging calm. He posted the video, called them lunatics in costumes, and told the governor of New York that after three years of doing nothing she should resign in shame. He named an official, assigned responsibility and demanded a consequence - all without flinching over what would surely be negative career consequences.

That is the entire content of what I mean by treating this as a security problem rather than an education problem, expressed in one post by a man with no policy portfolio whatsoever.

Now the clinical part, because this is the part that is teachable. What Rapaport has, in the language of Murray Bowen and David Schnarch, is differentiation. He holds onto himself in close proximity to people who are screaming at him. His sense of who he is does not come from the crowd, so the crowd has nothing to withdraw.

Most of our institutional responses to antisemitism are what Schnarch would call other-validated: they require the approval of the very people who are attacking us in order to feel like they worked, which is why they produce anxiety-management rituals rather than outcomes. Panels, statements and awareness campaigns are reflected sense of self dressed up as strategy.

Rapaport does not need the mob to concede that he is a decent person, so he is free to tell them their side of the conversation is wrong, that they should go to hell, and then go do his set. He is not looking forward to the holy grail of “conversation" because he knows in his bones that these cowards aren’t interested in talking, that in their staggering ignorance 99% of what they have to say is insanely wrong, and therefore there is nothing in it for a Jew who values his time and his integrity. He already knows the answer and he is not interested in performing uncertainty he does not feel in order to seem reasonable to people who are not.

So what does training in this actually look like, for a community and not just for a loud man from Queens:

• It begins with refusing the frame instead of answering inside it, which means never accepting the premise that Jewish legitimacy or Israel’s “right to exist" are the open questions on the table.
• It requires tolerating being disliked, which is the single hardest muscle for a minority that spent two thousand years surviving by cleaving to Torah but also ducking when necessary.
• It means responding to intimidation with presence rather than absence, showing up to the venue, to the shul, to the street.
• It means naming individuals and institutions and demanding that they pay a price, because diffuse condemnation sounds important but costs nobody anything.
• It means understanding that our audience was never the haters and never will be, so every hour spent trying to move them is an hour stolen from securing our own.
• And it means, as he put it after the Boulder attack, internalizing that the cavalry is not coming, which is not despair but the beginning of adulthood.

Rapaport can be crudely blunt. He is not a rabbi, a scholar or a strategist, and I would not hand him a policy brief. That is precisely why he is instructive. He proves that the decisive variable is not eloquence, funding, credentials or messaging discipline. It is a nervous system. He is a Jew who got hit, discovered he was not going to fold, and has been swinging ever since without once asking permission. Every Jewish federation in America has a communications budget larger, I imagine ,than his entire career earnings, and not one of them has landed a punch he has not landed harder and for free.

Train the posture, fund the guards, back the police, name the enemies, keep the dates on the calendar, and stop rehearsing the argument for our own existence in front of an audience that has already voted. And for those of us who concluded that the most muscular answer available to a Jew is to come home and build here in Israel, understand that this is the same instinct, only with a mortgage and a rifle.

Rapaport's message to the mobs has always been simple, and it is the only sentence in this entire war that has never once needed a clarification issued the next morning. You picked the wrong guy.