The Jewish Establishment Tried to Silence Me
A decade ago, I wrote American Jews were going to face a wave of antisemitic violence. Jewish editors told me I was wrong.
Ten years ago, I wrote an essay about the coming tidal wave of anti-Semitism in America called “The Death of American Jewish Exceptionalism.” At the time, the US was engaging in a larger conversation about American exceptionalism, centered around Obama’s rejection of the concept. In my piece, I made the case that rising Islamist-fueled anti-Semitism around the world would be exported from Europe and the Mideast—that this was inherently a global trend that would easily cross borders, including America’s. The exceptionalism American Jews had known in their safety from violence, I argued, was about to end.
I pitched this piece to a number of national publications, including to Jewish editors at these publications. The responses I got assured me no such trend was afoot. That Jews were as safe as they’d ever been. That this “trend” (they implied) was all in my head. None accepted the piece. None even engaged with its on its merits.
The cold-blooded murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, the fire-bombing of Jews in Boulder, Colorado, and the skyrocketing rise of violent antisemitism have made it clear that it wasn’t just in my head. Rather, the denialism was in the heads of the Jewish establishment, including the bien pensant in senior positions at American publications, who didn't simply reject this idea but were offended by it.
My identifying the rise of Islamism not as a response to American foreign policy—another lie they peddling for decades, an echo of Islamist propaganda itself—but as antisemitic at its core disrupted their worldview: America was a liberal haven; immigrants from the Muslim world were integral to this conception of America; Jews were perfectly safe; and the far-right presented the only real threat of terrorism.
The piece challenged all these assumptions; so they didn’t publish the piece. Worse than that, of course, is that they refused to discuss a trend that, by that point, was already becoming evident, if not obvious. They waited until it was too late—and still now, they want to believe the problem is not as bad as it manifestly is.
The piece is in full below, unchanged from its original version.
Despite the debate raging around the question of American exceptionalism it’s difficult to deny that in one regard America truly does constitute an exception. For centuries, Jews around the world, no matter whether they were treated badly, atrociously or even tolerably, were subject to distinct national policies and social attitudes designed to deal with this category-confounding foreign element.
But almost since their arrived on American soil, Jews have been accepted as a part of the national landscape. And though they’ve been acknowledged as different (and at times subject to serious, and significant, bouts of anti-Semitism), on a whole they haven’t been considered any less American than other ethnic or religious groups. Unlike Jews of previous centuries, they haven’t suffered mass persecution at the hands of the state or the public. And unlike Jews in communities around the world today, they haven’t been forced for social reasons into Jewish enclaves that in many ways resemble contemporary ghettos.
American Jews have been free to live as Jews, as Americans and as individuals. Whether more emphasis was placed on one or the other of those categories—or on one of the categories entirely—has mostly been a matter of choice. The result is that American Jews have enjoyed the freedom to define themselves both culturally and as a group to an extent never before seen in Jewish history.
With the persistence of this freedom for almost four centuries, and with personal and group freedoms arguably stronger than ever in America, it seems there’s no reason to think anything should change. This is an attitude borne out by the current focus of many American Jewish institutions which count passive assimilation as one of the major challenges facing their communities. For individual Jews, the challenges of living life in America are not related to questions of how to be Jews in spite of being Americans, or even how to retain their Jewish identity, but, rather, to the economic, social and parental issues faced by most Americans in a similar socioeconomic domain.
But despite the well-justified confidence American Jews hold in relation to their place in American society, for the first time the exceptional character of American Jewish life is faced with a threat, the likes of which it has never before experienced. As one of the greatest geopolitical shifts of the past two or three decades, the rise of political Islamism has had profound consequences for the West, and, as we’ve witnessed in Europe, particularly for Jews.
In recent years, the world has seen how this phenomenon of Islamist targeting of Jews, which is increasingly carried out without the traditional pretext of vengeance for Israeli policy or actions, has played out in European capitals. In countries filled with churches, monasteries and parochial schools, it’s been synagogues, Jewish museums and Jewish centers that have come under attack in cities like Marseille, Brussels, Toulouse, Copenhagen and Paris.
Watching from afar, American Jews have been shocked, outraged and saddened by the outbreak of an age-old virus they (and many others) once believed was on the wane. But as they commiserate with their fellow Jews in Europe, American Jews have failed to see that, like a virus, the threat is indifferent to national borders. If the Islamist vendetta against Jews does spread to American soil it could level the exceptional character of American Jewish life and, in doing so, irrevocably alter American Jewish identity.
Looking back over its long history, it’s hard to believe that anything could challenge the centuries-old exceptionalism embodied by American Jewry. Already by the colonial period—a time, as Amos Elon notes in The Pity of it All, when Jews of Europe were still forced to enter Berlin through a gate reserved for them and for cattle—the Jews of America were recognized more or less as equals to non-Jews. In 1740, British parliament codified this acceptance with the Plantation Act, which allowed Jews of the colonies to be naturalized and went so far as to make a specific allowance for Jews to omit the words “upon the true Faith of a Christian” from the oath that was part of the naturalization process.
Even during the Dutch colonial period, the Dutch Sephardic Jews who are the founding fathers of American Judaism were not merely protected as a minority but unequivocally granted full status as members of Dutch colonial society. An order by the States General of the United Netherlands, which governed the colonies at the time, issued a concise but very clear directive to colonial authorities, regarding the Jews:
As they commiserate with their fellow Jews in Europe, American Jews have failed to see that, like a virus, the threat is indifferent to national borders. If the Islamist vendetta against Jews does spread to American soil it could level the exceptional character of American Jewish life.
These thirty-three words, and the Plantation Act following 90 years later, represented a huge reversal in traditional dynamics of European countries where Jews depended on the progressive laws of enlightened despots to (usually temporarily) enforce public tolerance of them. But despite the radical change, the real distinguishing feature for the lives of the Jews of colonial America was not just the degree to which they were accepted but the fact that their acceptance didn’t hinge on the condition that they abandon Jewish practices or identities.
As Nathan Glazer wrote about British colonial Jews in his landmark 1956 book, American Judaism: “Though they were Americanized, in the sense that they used English exclusively, and though they lived like other colonial worthies…these early immigrants found no difficulty in remaining Jews.”
In the following centuries, the most widespread and poignant struggle faced by American Jewry wasn’t the threat of being drowned by waves of intolerance but the possibility that their Jewishness (and their Judaism, a subtle but important distinction) would gradually be eroded by tides of acceptance. The attempts of different groups of Jewish immigrants to resolve the paradox of integrating while remaining distinct is, in large part, what shaped the political, cultural and even spiritual character of the different strains of Judaism that developed in America. But no matter what their answer to this challenge, all of the various incarnations of American Judaism were faced with the central question of how to keep Jews from dissolving into the American substrate.
Today, this is largely still the case—with the difference that much of the handwringing over Jewish identity has disappeared. For better or worse, only a small number of American Jews are deeply concerned with once hotly-debated questions like whether American Jews should be considered a “nation within a nation,” an American ethnic group, or simply a certain type of American who happens to worship in a Jewish manner.
As historian and scholar of American Jewish life Jacob Neusner put it: “After four generations to be Jewish is a mode of being an American, taken for granted by Jews among other Americans, and no longer problematical.”
Though this is a unique situation in and of itself, there is one major defining feature that makes the American Jewish condition truly exceptional, and that is its permanence. While Jews had been accepted at various times and under various circumstances in places like Napoleonic France, Weimar Germany, early 19th century Vienna, and pre- (and later, post-) Marinid Morocco, in none of these cases did this acceptance persist for anything close to four centuries.
In contrast, over the stretch of three centuries, America’s Jews developed into much more than an accepted minority living comfortably in the midst of the larger population and, instead, in evolved into a national model for how American minorities could melt into the proverbial pot without entirely losing their distinct identities. (The term “melting pot” is itself a product of American Jewish life, as it was coined by playwright and novelist Israel Zangwill to describe American Jewish assimilation he idealized.)
The roots of this special relationship between America and its Jews are many, but among the big ones are America’s founding principle of religious freedom and the importance of the mercantile role Jews played in the early colonies. But among these causes was a much more simple one: It proved too difficult to maintain Old World social hierarchies, and the restrictions they necessitated, three thousand miles from European shores and amid the uncertainty and instability of colonial life.
Looking back, we can see that many of these causes—physical and social distance from Europe, the primacy of economic considerations, and a commitment to religious tolerance—were also the ones that helped pave the way to American might and, along with it, a sense of exceptionalism that came to pervade American culture and society.
The country’s enormous natural boundaries, particularly the larges swaths of ocean separating it from its enemies, prevented it from bleeding power and resources into Continental strife. Likewise a product of America’s physical and social distance, slavery and territorial expansionism afforded the country economic advantages that helped lay the foundations for American military power.
But it’s exactly these factors, including physical distance, economic domination, and isolation from conflict, which fostered a sense of American exceptionalism among the public and political class, which have been are now facing gales of change, the likes of which the country has rarely seen.
With the rise of developing-world economies, the advent of cyber-warfare and the availability of digital mass communications, the economic, military and social distinctions that afforded America its defining strategic advantage are blurring. The most visible and maybe spoken-about of these changes has to do with the shifting nature of conflict. The emergence of asymmetric warfare fueled by radical Islamist ideologies, has meant that no longer are the shadows of bombers or fleets of warships the sole, or even primary, national security threat facing America.
With the rise of developing-world economies, the advent of cyber-warfare and the availability of digital mass communications, the economic, military and social distinctions that afforded America its defining strategic advantage are blurring.
The world has seen the effects of similar changes play out over recent years in Europe. With its relative proximity to the Mideast and Asia, an almost unprecedented freedom of movement and a cultural tolerance to foreign immigration greater than that of America, Europe has seen the inevitable effects of this attitude.
But what’s illustrative about the situation there is that in addition to high-profile national attacks there has been a parallel track of attacks against Jews and Jewish communities. Though these attacks have been carried out by a range of terror groups, as well as by lone wolves, they are in truth united by an underlying ideology. In fact, aside from the general animus towards the West, it might be the hatred for and targeting of Jews that cuts to the core of Islamism’s supremacist ideology and serves as a connecting thread between Islamist groups as different as al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas and Hezbollah. Seen in this context, attacks on Jews are not only a sine quo non of radical Islamism but also a valuable recruitment tool that helps expand the movement.
Given all this, there’s a reasonable possibility that Jews in American could find themselves, like Jews in other parts of the world, targets of Islamist terror. In October, ISIS released its first message directed towards Jews in which a masked ISIS fighter speaking Hebrew (in what sounds like a Israeli-Arab accent) threatens not only to target Jews in Jerusalem but “until we eradicate this disease from the world.”
Where the individual is concerned, the distinction between violence committed for ideological reasons versus that committed for any other reason may seem abstract. After all, so long as the same or similar methods are used, the victim who suffers violence suffers it the same way no matter what the intentions of its perpetrator. But this is precisely the point: the very act of targeting someone in the name of ideological terror forces the individual victim into a member of a group.
The targeting of a Jew—or an African American, Latino, Christian or Muslim—serves, in effect, to put on notice not all other members of that group, but all individuals whom the perpetrators of violence deem to be a member of that group. In this sense, the violence committed in the name of racially or ethnically motivated ideological purposes is of a second order. Much more than just physical, it’s a violence committed against the individual and the individual’s right to determine his or her own identity.
This is much more than a theoretical point. The moment a group of people is targeted for what they are, instead of who they are, the nature of their relationship with the place where they live changes instantly, and sometimes irrevocably. This is something the history of Jewish experience in the world illustrates quite starkly as Jews, in various times and places, who have been subject to systematic violence have had to change the way they dress, worship, eat, marry, work, and educate their children.
The violence committed in the name of racially or ethnically motivated ideological purposes is of a second order. Much more than just physical, it’s a violence committed against the individual and the individual’s right to determine his or her own identity.
We can see these types of changes being manifested today in European countries like France, where attacks have taken place outside a Jewish school in Toulouse, against a man carrying a Torah in Marseille, and at a kosher supermarket in Paris. In response, both French government authorities and Jewish community leaders have instructed French Jews not to walk in public wearing yarmulkes or other visible Jewish symbols. But the question of outward appearance soon becomes existential, something starkly and directly experienced by French Jews who ended up on a publicly distributed kill list.
If the Islamist vendetta against Jews does spread to American soil it could level the exceptional character of American Jewish life and, in doing so, irrevocably alter American Jewish identity. American Jews who choose to self-identify as conservative, reform or Orthodox; as liberal or right-leaning; as gay or straight; or who don’t self-identify as Jewish at all but are simply singled out, for whatever reason, as Jews, will have to find ways to respond. In many cases it will be by modifying the choices they make regarding their identities and they ways they express them.
There is a counter-argument that’s often made regarding these kinds of adaptive changes, which is that they amount to “giving in” to terror or to “letting the terrorists win.” But terror often does win, which is why it works. It’s also a phenomenon that Jewish history has repeatedly demonstrated, whether in the form of adaptation made in response to the mob-terror of the pogrom, the state-terror of Nazi fascism, the religious-terror of the Inquisition or the ideological-terror of Stalinism.
Throughout history, Jews have changed as the world around them changed. But more, importantly, they’ve changed as the attitudes toward them, and events involving them, have changed. It’s a paradox of Jewish life that change forms a continuum for the Jews, yet the existence of that continuum somehow defies the forces of change.
There is a counter-argument that’s often made regarding these kinds of adaptive changes, which is that they amount to “giving in” to terror or to “letting the terrorists win.” But terror often does win, which is why it works.
It seems unimaginable that this kind of systemic attack on American Jews could ever take place, and wondering where and how it might produces only a kind of mystification. Could it possibly occur in New York, a city so Jewish it suspends street parking regulations for major Jewish holidays? What about the quiet, profoundly unassuming Jewish suburbs that dot the country? Somehow, this prospect seems even less likely than an attack on the metropolitan Mecca of American Jewish life.
Thankfully un-targeted by terror, American Jews have been shocked and outraged as the Jews of Europe continue to be attacked, their cemeteries and memorials desecrated, and their children sent to school under armed guard. Commiserating and maybe despairing, Jews of America have asked, “How can we prevent our fellow Jews in Europe from enduring these terrible crimes?”
This question is compelled by much more than just good intentions but a heartfelt sense of brotherhood that transcends language and geography. But in assuming that the rising phenomenon is unique to that particular, and distant, place, it’s a question premised on the same illusion that has also been shattered in Europe—namely, that it can’t happen here.
America has been able to resist some of the darker trends that have bloomed in Europe, especially where Jews are concerned. But if it does transpire, and American Jews find themselves targets as French, Danish, Argentinian, Turkish, Israeli, Belgian, Swedish Jews have, the American exceptionalism which offered Jews a history-defying opportunity to live their lives and understand themselves first as American individuals will be overridden by a more enduring exceptionalism: that of being Jewish.