Sorry for the Question

We spent years teaching people that asking about each other is dangerous. The questions didn’t disappear. They were asked to the wrong people instead.

Last week I had dinner with a woman I met at a conference. She isn’t Jewish. Somewhere in the middle of the meal, she told me she was surprised. What she sees about Israel on social media had convinced her she understood how Jewish people felt about it. When she started actually talking with Jewish people, including me, very few of us matched the image of Jews cultivated on her feed.

Then she said something I haven’t stopped thinking about. “I think it’s because people felt for a long time like they can’t speak about antisemitism,” she said. “They can’t ask questions. And now that the dam is open, it’s a flood.”

She was describing the conversation around Jews. She could have been describing the conversation around almost anyone. For a long time, asking about each other’s cultures became taboo, all in the name of tolerance.

There are good reasons why it isn’t socially acceptable to walk up to a stranger and interrogate them about their visible identity. It is exhausting to exist as a walking exhibit of one’s culture, sexuality, religion, or race. No one should be forced to hold all the answers to questions they are still working through themselves. When a gay man flinches at an “innocent” question about his life, he is drawing on data. When Black Americans decline to serve as a free seminar for every curious stranger, they are protecting something real. The guardrails came from experience, most of it bitter.

The stakes of getting this wrong became clear again this week. The J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism released its second Annual Report on Antisemitism, and it documents the deadliest year for antisemitic violence in the diaspora since the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires. Twenty people were murdered in J7 countries in 2025 alone: fifteen at a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach in Sydney, two at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur, two at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., and a grandmother in Boulder, Colorado. The Sydney attack came several days after the J7’s first Australian summit closed with a warning that threats to Jewish communities were rising. Behind those murders sits a much larger pattern of everyday hostility. The seven countries with the largest Jewish communities outside Israel recorded more than 91,000 antisemitic incidents between 2021 and 2025, with Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom each logging thousands in 2025 alone. Four of these countries saw incidents dip slightly from their 2024 peak, but the dip barely registers against the trend. Every country still sits far above where it stood before October 7, and Ireland, covered for the first time this year, shows the same climb. Two years ago, a body count like this would have been unimaginable. Now it reads as the expected outcome of a slow slide toward normalization, where each fresh attack shocks less than the one before it.

None of this violence exists because someone failed to ask a Jewish colleague a curious question at lunch. Antisemites did this. But solving antisemitism requires more than stopping attacks after they start, and one piece of that larger project is rebuilding a culture where people feel safe enough to ask honest questions instead of forming opinions from a feed.

So where did the idea take hold that asking is itself an act of aggression?

The idea that we should speak correctly to avoid harming others has its roots in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, developed in part by Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf. The idea is that the language available to a culture shapes what that culture is able to perceive. Sapir was himself the son of a cantor, raised in an observant Jewish household. He grew up speaking Yiddish. His linguistic work fed directly into a broader mid-twentieth-century American project: choosing words carefully because words carry power. The New Left and second-wave feminists built on that insight, insisting that inclusive language mattered because exclusionary language did real harm. This was a defensible and often correct idea.

Then it met a culture where every conversation is recorded, and every misstep can end a career. Cancel culture did not invent the instinct toward careful speech. It weaponized it, transforming “choose your words with care” into “do not risk the question at all.” The safer move became silence. The flood the woman at dinner described is what happens when the dam of silence finally breaks.

Americans have tried to answer each other’s curiosity. In the 1930s and 1940s, the National Conference of Christians and Jews sent a rotating trio, a priest, a minister, and a rabbi, on tour together for what became known as Brotherhood Week. For plenty of Americans in small towns, that rabbi standing next to his Christian counterparts was the first Jew they had ever knowingly met. Tom Lehrer later mocked the whole enterprise in his song “National Brotherhood Week.” The criticism that proclaimed tolerance couldn’t mask very real racial inequality was fair. The tolerance-trio format was stiff and performative. But it also put Jews in front of Americans who had no other point of contact, and it treated the resulting curiosity as normal rather than dangerous.

Sesame Street did something similar for children, introducing many diverse characters and holidays into a format built on direct, simple questions. Its limitation is built into its premise. Children ask their questions on the show. Where are adults supposed to ask them?

In his 1974 book “The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity” in 1974, John Murray Cuddihy examined an earlier collision: European Jewish intellectuals entering nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Gentile institutions built on Protestant codes of civility. Freud, Marx, and Levi-Strauss each carried Jewish culture, shaped by centuries of Talmudic argument and shtetl debate, into rooms that expected something gentler. Cuddihy called that mismatch the ordeal of civility, and the phrase describes a demand still being made today: trade a tradition built on blunt questioning for a tradition that avoids questions altogether.

We should refuse that trade. Bad-faith provocateurs like Candace Owens do not get to own the act of asking questions about Jews. Their questions function as accusations dressed up with a question mark. But the answer to bad-faith interrogation is not silence. It is confident, substantive answers to people asking in good faith.

Asking a question other people consider too rude to ask is not a break from Jewish tradition. It sits closer to its center. The Talmud records arguments that never fully resolve. Yeshiva study pairs two students against a single text and expects neither one to let the other off easy. The Passover seder includes an entire ritual around asking four questions. The seder answers the questions, instead of quieting them.

Israel has built its own modern answer to the same problem. Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster, has a recurring series called “Sorry for the Question.” “Sorry for the Question,” adapted from the Australian format “You Can’t Ask That,” gives one stigmatized group inside Israeli society an episode at a time. Transgender Israelis, Holocaust survivors’ grandchildren, autistic adults, recovering addicts, terminally ill patients: each group sits alone in front of a camera and answers anonymous questions submitted by the public, the ones people are usually too afraid or too polite to ask out loud. The show does not fix Israeli society’s own blind spots, and it has plenty. But it treats a stranger’s uncomfortable question as something worth answering honestly rather than something to dodge. Perhaps that instinct is worth borrowing, before the flood sweeps us away.