Anti-Semitism Poisons America
Attacks on Jews are also attacks on our ideals of liberalism and pluralism.
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Oct. 30, 2023 5:40 pm ET
WSJ Opinion: Harvard and UFL's Contrasting Responses to Israel Attacks
01:10 / 04:49
After Hamas's atrocities in Israel, one would expect universal condemnation from U.S. college administrators. The University of Florida's Ben Sasse showed Harvard how to do it. Images: AFP/Getty Images/Zuma Press Composite: Mark Kelly
As students and, worse, professors, at elite universities across the U.S. exulted at the news of mass murder and torture of Israeli Jews by Hamas terrorists, Jewish students were warned to take precautions on campus. Across the U.S., anti-Semitic incidents including vandalism, harassment and assault are up roughly 400% since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7.
That is a problem, and not only for American Jews. The beliefs that have made the U.S. a uniquely hospitable home for Jewish citizens are essential to national cohesion and strength. If we lose faith in what was once proudly called the American Way, there is little chance that society can summon the energy and unity to withstand attacks from our enemies abroad.
While doing research for my recent book, “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel and the Fate of the Jewish People,” I was struck by the deep connection between America’s relative (and I stress relative) immunity to the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism and American faith in democracy and pluralism.
From the Middle Ages to the present day, violent anti-Semitism has flourished best among those who reject liberal ideas. Medieval Christian zealots trying to build a seamlessly Christian Europe, nationalists striving for “pure” societies in which a particular ethnic group establishes its own culture and institutions without the “alien” influences of ethnic and religious minorities, Islamists who want a pure Islamic state—none of these projected utopias have room for proud and free Jews.
The U.S. stands on a different foundation. For America to work, many different religious and ethnic identities must coexist under a common commitment to constitutional politics and the rule of law. That happens to be the kind of society in which Jews can flourish, and the America we live in today owes much to the energy, creativity and patriotism of its Jewish citizens.
America’s vital center is defined by the conviction that people of different cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds together can build a peaceful and prosperous society in which all can follow their consciences while upholding the framework of our common life. While America remains imperfect, the efforts of people of different races, ethnicities and religions over the centuries have created a miraculously prosperous and open society.
Three things unite 2017’s white nationalist marchers in Charlottesville, Va., on the illiberal right with today’s bile-spewing campus radicals. Both sides worship ethnicity, despise the American Way, and hate Jews. The illiberal right claims that America is a Caucasian ethno-state, and that Jews, blacks and other “inferior” groups want to destroy it through immigration and subversion. The campus left shares this conviction but reverses the polarity: Nonwhite ethnic groups are the good guys, and the white Founders are racists whose legacy needs to be buried. Both groups think Jews are part of the problem.
Jew hatred is the most damaging piece of the “horseshoe” consensus that brings the far left and far right together. This hatred is a sign of mental incapacity and is a barrier to learning. Someone who thinks “the Jews” control banking doesn’t understand how modern economies work. Someone who thinks “the Jews” control America’s media and political systems from the shadows can never really understand how American institutions work. And people who embrace conspiracy theories aren’t eager to learn because they think they already understand everything.
Jew hatred is both a disabling mental virus and a social blight. Societies dominated by irrational hatreds and conspiracy theories are rarely well-governed. Where Jews are hunted in the streets, no one’s liberty or property will long be secure.
Surging illiberalism and rising Jew hatred aren’t only a domestic problem. The world order Americans have tried to build since World War II is a projection of the American Way abroad. People from different ethnic and religious backgrounds can, the U.S. has argued since 1945, work together to build a peaceful and prosperous world. We cannot uphold these beliefs abroad if we no longer believe in them at home. And a society whose educated elite has contracted a destructive mind virus in our citadels of learning will neither govern itself well nor have much to contribute to the world.
These trends worry me deeply, but not to the point of despair. The last big surge of anti-Semitism was in the 1930s and very early 1940s, when the Depression had shaken faith in the American Way. But as our overseas enemies sought to take advantage of what they saw as America’s weakness, their deeds gradually revealed the unspeakable depravity and uncontrollable aggression to which illiberalism leads. We united, we rallied, and we overcame.
History offers hope but shouldn’t make us complacent. We face grave challenges abroad even as the foundations of unity and concord at home have corroded to a dangerous degree. Those whose job it was to preserve the health of our educational institutions have dramatically and horribly failed while those charged with American foreign policy failed to prepare for the challenges coming at us overseas.
The Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 unleashed a storm abroad and a storm at home. More storms, and worse ones, are likely as a disordered America struggles for balance in a disordered world.
