Bret Stephens
The Year American Jews Woke Up
Oct. 4, 2024
Opinion Columnist
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American
Jews were aware, before the pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, that antisemitism was once
again a problem in our collective life.
We
were aware, if we belonged to a synagogue or worked out at a local Jewish
Community Center or sent children to Jewish day schools, that squad cars were often present
outside and that the security procedures and
budgets of Jewish institutions kept growing. We were aware
that, in Williamsburg and other Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Jews were
being routinely shoved and sucker-punched by local bullies. We were
aware of the white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, Va., and
of the far-right murderers who stormed synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, Calif., and of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s
obsession with Rothschild space lasers, and of Donald Trump inviting Kanye West to Mar-a-Lago after the rapper
had threatened to go “death con 3” on “JEWISH PEOPLE.”
We
were aware of the antisemitism that infected the leadership of the Women’s March and
of the enduring popularity of Louis
Farrakhan within influential segments of the Black community.
We were aware of the F.B.I. statistic,
from 2021, that Jews were the victims of more than 50 percent of all
religiously motivated hate crimes, despite being barely one-fiftieth of the
overall population. We were aware that a British Muslim man traveled 4,800
miles to Texas to take hostages at a synagogue — and much of the news media chose to ignore the plainly antisemitic
angle of the story.
We were aware. But unless we had been directly affected by
it, the antisemitism didn’t feel personal. The calls were in the news, but not
quite in our lives.
Awakenings
After
Oct. 7, it became personal. It was in the neighborhoods in which we lived, the
professions and institutions in which we worked, the colleagues we worked
alongside, the peers with whom we socialized, the group chats to which we
belonged, the causes to which we donated, the high schools and universities our
kids attended. The call was coming from inside the house.
It
happened in innumerable ways, large and small.
The
home of an impeccably progressive Jewish director of a prominent art
museum was vandalized with
red spray paint and a sign accusing her of being a “white supremacist Zionist.”
A storied literary magazine endured mass resignations from its staff members
for the sin of publishing the work of a left-wing Israeli. A Jewish
journalist scrolled through Instagram and recognized an old friend from
Northwestern gleefully tearing down posters
of Hamas’s hostages while saying “calba” — dog in Arabic — to
the pictures of kidnapped infants and elderly people. A leading progressive
congresswoman was asked during a TV interview about
Hamas’s rapes of Israeli women and called them an unfortunate fact of war
before quickly returning to the subject of Israel’s alleged perfidy. An
89-year-old Holocaust survivor petitioned the Berkeley City Council to pass a
Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation in light of the resurgence of
antisemitism and was heckled by demonstrators.
An on-campus caricature depicted an affable
Jewish law school dean holding a knife and fork drenched in
blood. A Columbia University undergraduate posted on Instagram: “Be grateful that I’m not just
going out and murdering Zionists.” Tucker Carlson platformed a Hitler apologist. Trump warned Jews that
he is prepared to blame them should he lose the
election.
All
these stories became public, but what could be at least as upsetting were the
stories you heard about only over meals with friends and acquaintances. A
publishing executive who wanted to promote a novel set during the Holocaust but
faced internal resistance from staff members who saw it as “Zionist
propaganda.” A college freshman with a Jewish surname being the only person in
her dorm to have anti-Israel leaflets pushed under her door. A student who
suggested to me, during a give-and-take at Harvard’s Kennedy School of
Government, that Israelis should heed the words of the Book of Matthew and turn
the other cheek. It reminded me of Eric Hoffer’s quip that
“everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.”
At
some point, an awakening of sorts occurred. Perhaps not for every American Jew,
but for many. I’ve called them the Oct. 8 Jews — those who woke up a day after our
greatest tragedy since the Holocaust to see how little empathy there was for us
in many of the spaces and communities and institutions we thought we
comfortably inhabited. It was an awakening that often came with a deeper set of
realizations.
One
realization: American Jews should not expect reciprocity.
Few minorities have been more conspicuously attached to
progressive causes than American Jews: Samuel Gompers and labor unionism; Betty
Friedan and feminism; Harvey Milk and gay rights; Abraham Joshua Heschel and
civil rights; Robert Bernstein and human rights. A proud
history, but whatever we poured of ourselves into the pain and struggle of
others was not returned in our days of grief. Nor should we expect much
understanding: In an era that stresses sensitivity to every microaggression
against nearly any minority, macroaggressions against Jews who happen to
believe that Israel has a right to exist are not only permitted but demanded.
A
second: “Zionist” has become just another word for Jew. Anti-Zionists deny this
strenuously, because a vocal handful of Jews are also anti-Zionist and because
outright antisemitism is still unfashionable and because they’d like to believe
— or at least tell others — that their objection is to a political ideology
rather than to a people or a religion.
But
when the wished-for dire consequences of anti-Zionism fall directly on the
heads of millions of Jews and when the people the anti-Zionists seek to
silence, exclude and shame are almost all Jewish and when the charges they make
against Zionists invariably echo the hoariest antisemitic stereotypes — greed,
deceit, limitless bloodlust — then the distinctions between anti-Zionist and
antisemite blur to the point of invisibility.
And
a third: This isn’t going to end anytime soon.
It
won’t end because anti-Zionism has a self-righteous fervor that will attract
followers and inspire militancy. It won’t end because politics in America are
moving toward forms of illiberalism — conspiracy thinking and nativism on the
right, a Manichaean view on the left that the world is neatly divided between
the oppressors and the oppressed — that are congenial to classic antisemitism.
And it won’t end because most Jews will not forsake what it means to be Jewish
so that we may be more acceptable to those who despise us.
Illusions
You
can’t have an awakening of this sort unless you’ve been asleep — or at least
living with certain illusions.
There
was the illusion that a secure Jewish community would remain so.
“In the last decade we have witnessed a significant and
encouraging decline in the number and intensity of antisemitic acts in
America,” Abe Foxman, who was then the director of the Anti-Defamation
League, said in a 2014 news
release. “The falling number of incidents targeting Jews is another indication
of just how far we have come in finding full acceptance in society.”
In
2013 the A.D.L. recorded just 751 antisemitic incidents in the United States.
In 2023 the organization counted 8,873
incidents, an increase of over 1,000 percent. That included over
1,000 bomb threats to Jewish institutions, thousands of acts of vandalism and
harassment, the desecration of graves and more than 160 physical assaults.
Unless this changes, the American Jewish community is on its way to living how
the European Jewish community has for decades: apprehensive, suspected and
under ever increasing layers of private and state protection.
There
was the illusion that, having achieved a sense of belonging in America, we
would keep it.
In
the 1990s, Jewish America seemed indistinguishable from America itself. Yes, we
had overcome discrimination in the past, particularly from the snobbish corners
of the American establishment. But now we had arrived. We were Jerry Seinfeld and Cher Horowitz from “Clueless” and Adam Sandler
crooning his “Hanukkah Song” on
“Saturday Night Live.” We were Alan Greenspan, the celebrated maestro of
central banking, and Rick Levin, the first Jewish president of Yale, and Nora
Ephron, the country’s most beloved screenwriter, and Steven Spielberg, the most
acclaimed director.
Today
there’s a palpable sense of things going backward. Backward in the Ivy League,
where Jewish enrollment has plummeted and Jewish students feel unwelcome and
at times threatened. Backward in cities like Oakland, Calif., where Jewish families pulled their
kids out of public schools in protest of an antisemitic curriculum.
Backward in literary circles, where being identified as a Zionist — even if
it’s of the most progressive kind or has little to do with an author’s work —
can lead to ostracism and cancellation.
Backward in human rights organizations that could barely register sorrow over
the butchery of Oct. 7 before finding fresh ways to indict Israel. Backward in
social justice organizations, many of no apparent relevance to the Middle East,
that nonetheless feel called to demand the end of the Jewish state. Backward,
most certainly, in politics.
For
those versed in statistics, or Jewish history, this going backward has a term:
regression toward the mean. Hopefully it will end differently than it did for
other once flourishing Jewish communities, from Córdoba to Cologne to Cairo.
There was the illusion that antisemitism was a fever-swamp
prejudice, to which virtually all educated people were immune.
But
antisemitism is a shape-shifting virus, which has persisted over centuries and
across cultures and political systems because it is able to attach itself to
the reigning (or at least fashionable) convictions of the day. It also casts a
spell on leading members of the thinking class, from Martin Luther to Karl Marx
to T.S. Eliot to Alice Walker. People
attracted to grand theories of everything, as intellectuals often are, tend to
gravitate toward singular causes, sweeping solutions, unsuspected “facts” and
decisive explanations.
A
century ago, the grand theories were about the evils of capitalism or the
hierarchies of race — and Jews wound up on the wrong end of both theories.
Today, the grand theory concerns so-called settler colonialism. Not
surprisingly, Jews got the short end of this stick, too. Zionism, which since
the days of the Maccabees has been the most enduring anticolonial struggle in
history, is now the epitome of what college activists seem to think is
colonialism, the only solution to which is its eradication. When people argue
that education is the answer to bigotry, they often forget that bigotry is a
moral failing, not an intellectual one — and few people are more dangerous than
educated bigots.
Finally,
there was the illusion that America was different, that it couldn’t happen
here, that our neighbors and colleagues would never abandon us, that, as a
people and a government, America would do right by the Jewish people at home
and abroad.
That’s
one illusion I still hold dear. My mother came to the United States after World
War II as a stateless, penniless refugee; she, and therefore I, owe this
country everything. I desperately want to believe that what’s happened since
last year on college campuses won’t go far beyond the quads; that Joe Biden
won’t be the last Democratic president to also be a sincere Zionist; that the
Republican Party will snap out of the populism and nativism into which Trump
has sunk it, which invariably produces antisemitism; that Black America won’t
turn sharply against the Jews; that America’s exhaustion with being the world’s
de facto policeman won’t lead it to forsake small countries faced with
aggressive totalitarian neighbors; that Greene and Rashida Tlaib will never
hold leadership positions in their parties; that young Americans drawn to
anti-Israel politics will rethink their radicalism as they grow older; that
envy won’t replace admiration as the way average Americans view personal and
communal success; that an America that exists somewhere between Morningside
Heights in Manhattan and Berkeley, Calif., still hasn’t lost its moral decency
and common sense.
I
want to believe all this. I’m just finding it harder than ever to do so.
Reckonings
There is a moving passage in “Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood” in which the
German historian Joachim Fest recalled that his Catholic father, Johannes, had
a personal fondness for their Jewish friends, along with his analysis of where
German Jews had gone wrong politically: “They had, in tolerant Prussia, lost
their instinct for danger, which had preserved them through the ages.”
I’ve
often wondered whether that isn’t also a fair description of the last two or
three generations of American Jewry — that in tolerant America, we had mostly
forgotten much of what it meant to be Jewish. Not merely the languages our
forebears spoke or the religious rituals they observed but also the visceral
understanding that, despite most outward appearances, we were and would always
be different. That there will always be those who hate us. That nothing we can
do — whether through acts of religious renunciation or cultural erasure or
conspicuous achievements or abundant generosity — would ever entirely ease that
hatred. If anything, it might aggravate it.
Oct.
7 and the worldwide reaction to it began the jarring process of restoring that
ancestral knowledge. Most of us still don’t quite know what to do with it.
Do
we carry on more or less as before, on the Solomonic view that this too shall
pass? Do we go on offense by withholding donations to the institutions that
have harmed us or suing them or calling for congressional hearings or taking
out Super Bowl ads to raise alarms about antisemitism? Do we reach out to
communities (within and without the Jewish world) from whom we feel alienated
so that they may hear from us, and vice versa? Do we invest more heavily in
Jewish education, so that more Jewish parents can have good options for an
affordable Jewish day school and more 18-year-olds can have meaningful gap
years in Israel?
I
don’t know; maybe all of the above. But these strike me as essentially tactical
issues. There are larger strategic and perhaps moral ones. Namely: Are we going
to be proud Jews or (mostly) indifferent ones? And if proud, what does that
entail?
It’s
an open question that each of us will have to answer for ourselves. For my
part, the answer goes something like this:
To have been born a Jew is the single most fortunate thing
that ever happened to me. It is a priceless moral, spiritual, intellectual and
emotional inheritance from my ancestors, some of whom were slaughtered for it. It’s a precious
bequest to my children, who will find different ways to make it their own. It
is therefore worth the time it takes to explore and worth the cost — including,
tragically, the cost in bigotry and violence — it so often extracts.
To
be a Jew obliges us to many things, particularly our duty to be our brother’s,
and sister’s, keeper. That means never to forsake one another, much less to
join in the vilification of our own people. It means to participate in the long
struggle for our survival not only against enemies who mean us harm but also
against those who excuse those enemies or those whose moral apathy speeds their
way. And it means to embrace — often as a thoughtful critic but never as a
hateful scold — the great, complicated, essential project of a Jewish state. To
imagine we can do without it is to forget how close we came to extinction
before it was born.
Oct. 7 shook our illusions and reawakened us to where we
stand as a diasporic community. Now we must reckon with who we are and what we
must do.
