Jews, Israel, and the Future of Freedom: Douglas Murray Delivers 2025 Rabbi Allan Mirvis Lecture

Apr 11, 2025 By: ɫ��

“Game on,” declared bestselling author and public intellectual Douglas Murray to a packed Fifth Avenue Synagogue, concluding a powerful reflection on the battle between Western civilization and its enemies. The occasion was the 2025 Rabbi Allan Mirvis Lecture, hosted by the Zahava and Moshael J. Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at ɫ��, and generously sponsored by Ted Mirvis in memory of his father.

The event centered on Murray’s new book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (Broadside Books, 2025), and featured a public conversation with Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik, Director of the Straus Center. More than 200 attendees filled the synagogue auditorium, among them Moshael J. Straus, visiting Israeli Duvdevan soldiers, former hostage Moran Stella Yanai, Judge Steven Menashe, National Review Board Chair Jerry Raymond, and investor Daniel Loeb. Following the main event, Murray joined Straus Scholars, alumni, and faculty for a private roundtable discussion.

Ted Mirvis introduced the afternoon with a poignant reflection drawing upon the sermon of his father, Rabbi Allan Mirvis, delivered in 1949 at Bnai Israel Congregation in Hampton, Virginia. The sermon, titled “Frogs,” examined the biblical description of the second plague—“one frog” covering the land of Egypt—and the rabbinic debate over its meaning. In his father’s words, it revealed a hidden truth about what happened in Egypt, where liberality seemed to reign, where Joseph had risen to the highest rank, and where Jacob and his family were given a warm welcome. How would it be possible for the dominant people to become so bigoted and cruel, changing into cruel taskmasters and throwing an entire people into bondage? The lone poisonous frog, his father suggested, represented how antisemitism can reemerge through a single voice, emboldening others to surface from hiding. Seventy-five years after the sermon, Ted asked the audience: “Are we now witnessing one frog delivering other frogs?” “Or one frog freeing up other frogs who have always been there?”

Rabbi Soloveichik then offered his own introductory remarks, praising Murray for making “the case that needs to be made—for Israel against Hamas, for civilization against the barbarians—and to do so drawing on the heritage and treasures of Western civilization that we at the Straus Center seek to teach to our students, and whose values we seek to uphold and defend. No one has done that like Douglas has.”

The War Against Life

The conversation opened with the tension at the heart of Murray’s latest book: the clash between democracies and death cults. Rabbi Soloveichik referenced Israel’s terrorist enemies, who openly claim to love death more than Jews love life, and asked how one responds to such a boast.

“This necrophilic boast of the adoration of death seems, in some way, to be almost unanswerable,” Murray admitted. But what some enemies view as Israel’s weakness—its reverence for life—is, in fact, its greatest strength. “It is true that enemies use your strengths against you,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean that what they perceive as a weakness is in fact a weakness.”

In fact, he remarked, visiting Israel is the greatest antidote to despair. “There you see the willingness to fight for life, the willingness to stand up for it.”

This, Murray argued, stands in stark contrast to grievance and victimhood culture in the West. Many had dismissed the rising generation as fragile or aimless, but the bravery of Israelis—especially the young—suggests otherwise. While extraordinary times can produce extraordinary people, Murray warns that this is no guarantee, and Israel sets the right example: “Who are the people you create before the moment of trial?” he asked. “It’s crucial that you have cultured and cultivated people up until that moment—not just that they know what they’re fighting against, but what they’re fighting for.”

He in part credits the Jewish sense of memory, which he learned from his friend, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l. Though some Jews see memory as a burden, Murray noted, it is a source of strength and survival.

In stark contrast to the vibrant and life-affirming Israel which continues to survive, all that the death cults have earned is their own destruction. Reflecting on his experience sitting in the living room chair where Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was ultimately located and killed by the IDF, Murray described the scene of devastation and rubble. “This is his legacy,” he said of Sinwar. “Utter devastation. That is all he achieved.”

The Nature of Antisemitism

Drawing on the writings of Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman, Murray emphasized a key theme: antisemitism tells us nothing about Jews—and everything about those who hate them. “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of,” Grossman wrote, “and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.”

Murray applied this principle to the regimes and movements that condemn Israel. Ayatollah Khomeini calls Israel a colonizer—but, Murray pointed out, it is the mullahs who have colonized Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Turkish President Erdoğan decries Israeli occupation, yet NATO member Turkey has occupied half of EU member Cyprus since the 1970s. “No one has shut down a street in New York or Washington DC [about that],” Murray noted. “This tells you nothing about Israel, this tells us a lot about Erdogan.”

He tied this phenomenon to a broader Western crisis. Young people are taught they are guilty by birth—of white supremacy, genocide, occupation—but this guilt offers no path to redemption. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, Murray warned of a culture shaped by inescapable guilt, and in his last book, War on the West, Murray had wondered where this psychosis would lead. The result? The youth find a target on which to offload all the slurs they’ve been made to bear. Thus, tweaking Grossman’s dictum, Murray stated: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you believe you are guilty of.”

The Stakes of the Fight

Murray emphasized that the West’s connection to the Jewish people and Israel is existential. Israel’s enemies know this too. Murray noted that anti-Israel activists have said as much in their manifestos, openly stating their desire to dismantle Western civilization. “One of the reasons they go for Israel is they realize that if you take this out, you cut the tree at the root,” Murray warned. “In a way, they’ve chosen their target well. You don’t need to take out Denmark—lovely as Denmark is... Go for the Jews. They have realized this. I realize it too,” he concluded. “We’re just on different sides. But fine. Game on.”

A Private Roundtable with Straus Scholars

Following the public lecture, Murray joined Straus Center students, alumni, and faculty for a private roundtable conversation. Despite his formidable erudition—citing Shakespeare, Auden, Wagner, C.S. Lewis, and more—Murray spoke with warmth and humility. His message to students: don’t just preserve the Western canon—add to it.

In response to a question from Sruli Friedman (YC ‘26) about whether the cultural decline described in The Strange Death of Europe could be reversed, Murray replied with hope: “I believe in repair.”

He recounted a moving experience at a performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger in London. During a song celebrating the purity of Jewish art, in which Wagner’s antisemitism and German nationalism come through, the London chorus incorporated the names and images of great German-Jewish figures. “They reclaimed the work,” Murray said approvingly. “Key to German art is the great German-Jewish tradition—Mahler, Heine… This is possible.” You can’t survive without Goethe and Schiller, he said, but you also must not repeat the catastrophe. The real task is to live in the tradition and add to it. Indeed, Murray asked the students, “What would we be doing if we weren’t doing this?”

Douglas Murray’s admiration for the great works of the West was not simply academic—it was deeply personal and infectious. In reply to Rabbinic Intern Yonatan Kurz’s (YC ‘23) question on technology-induced distraction and the humanities, Murray emphasized the importance of forming habits of daily reading and cultivating the patience required. Candidly, he told the group: “I tell myself that for pages 1-2, it will take a while, because my brain is on ‘media speed’ and I need to get down to the speed of the book. Then, when I’m there, I’m in heaven.”

Then, quoting the words of C.S. Lewis's sermon “Learning in Wartime,” Murray shared: “If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.”

If the main lecture celebrated one of Israel and the West’s most courageous defenders, the private seminar showed the Straus students a model of how to build the intellectual foundation upon which such courage must stand—rooted in memory, conviction, and a love of learning. It offered them an example of how to pursue that learning with the curiosity, generosity, and clarity that Murray embodies. As Rabbi Soloveichik concluded the event, “We as Jews have no right to expect friendship such as this that you’ve shown us as a people, and so I hope you will accept our humble thanks to you.”

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