The End of The Golden Age
03-17-2024Roger Berkowitz
Franklin Foer has an essay arguing that “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.” What Foer calls the Golden Age of American Jews was not only good for Jews. The emergence of Jewish-Americans who could both be Jewish and American undergirded a new American ideal of liberalism, one that shed the assimilationist metaphor of the melting pot for the hyphenated-identity of the mosaic, the idea that Americans could also be Jewish, Arab, Catholic, Black, Asian and more. It was Horace Kallen who first argued against the melting pot idea in the early 20th century and imagined that “the hyphen was the essence of democracy. He described America as a “symphony of civilization,” an intermingling of cultures that resulted in a society far more dynamic than most of the countries back in the Old World. The genius of America was that it didn’t coerce any minority group into abandoning its marks of difference.” The 20th century became, Foer argues, the Golden Age for American Jews and also for the hyphenated idea of American liberalism.
But that Golden Age is ending, so that it now appears as a 100 year “vacation from history.” Antisemitism, relegated to the fringes of American society from the 1970s to around 2000, is back with a vengeance. It began in the wake of 9/11 with conspiracies tying the attacks to the Israeli Mossad. After the financial crisis of 2008, right wing conspiracists turned George Soros and Goldman Sachs into the villains du jour. In 2018, cosmopolitan Jews were said to be behind the migrant caravans bringing undocumented immigrants through Mexico, leading both to the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and chants of “Jews Shall Not Replace Us” by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Jews, as Eric Ward has argued when he spoke at the Arendt Center, came to be seen as the clever plotters behind the rise of multiculturalism and diminishing white power. These antisemitic movements began on the American right. But Foer argues, convincingly, that Jews now face a pincer movement of both right-wing and left-wing antisemitism. For Foer, we need to be alert to both versions, something that most American Jews only came to recognize after the October 7th attacks. He writes:
Part of the reason I failed to appreciate the extent of the anti-Semitism on the left is that I assumed its criticisms of the Israeli government were, at bottom, a harsher version of my own. I opposed the proliferation of settlements in the West Bank, the callousness that military occupation required, and the religious zealotry that had begun to infuse the country’s right wing, including its current ruling coalition.
Such criticisms were not those of a dissident—the majority of American Jews share them. The Palestinian leadership has a long record of abject obstructionism, historical denialism, and violent irredentism, but American Jews heap blame on recalcitrant right-wing Israeli governments, too. Polling by the Pew Research Center in 2020 found that only one in three American Jews said they felt that the Israeli government was “sincere” in its pursuit of peace. But whatever criticism American Jews leveled against Israel, the anger was born of love. Eight in 10 described Israel as either “essential” or “important” to their Jewish identity. And they still held out hope for peace. In that same poll, 63 percent of American Jews said they considered a two-state solution plausible. Jews were, in fact, more likely than the overall U.S. population to believe in the possibility of peaceful coexistence with an independent Palestine.
Among the brutal epiphanies of October 7 was this: A disconcertingly large number of Israel’s critics on the left did not share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own. After Hamas’s rampage of rape, kidnapping, and murder, a history professor at Cornell named Russell Rickford said Palestinians were understandably “exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence.” He added, “I was exhilarated.” A student at the same university was arrested and charged with posting online threats about slitting the throats of Jewish males and strafing the kosher dining hall with gunfire. In Philadelphia, a mob descended on a falafel restaurant, chanting about the Israeli American co-owner’s complicity in genocide. Over the three-month period following the Hamas attacks, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 56 episodes of physical violence targeting Jews and 1,347 incidents of harassment. That 13-week span contained more anti-Semitic incidents than the entirety of 2021—at the time the worst year since the ADL had begun keeping count, in 1979.
I don’t want to dismiss the anger that the left feels about the terrible human cost of the Israeli counterinvasion of Gaza, or denounce criticism of Israel as inherently anti-Semitic — especially because I share some of those criticisms. Nor do I believe that anti-Zionist is a term that should be considered axiomatically interchangeable with anti-Semite. The elimination of Israel, in my opinion, would be a profound catastrophe for the Jewish people. But I have read idealistic critics of Israel, such as the late historian Tony Judt, who imagined that it could be replaced by a binational state, where Jews and Palestinians live side by side under one democratic government. That strikes me as naive in the extreme—especially after the Hamas pogrom of October 7—and very likely the end of Jewish existence in the Levant. But not everything that is terrible for the Jews is anti-Semitic….
In the hatred that I witnessed in the Bay Area, and that has been evident on college campuses and in progressive activist circles nationwide, I’ve come to see left-wing anti-Semitism as characterized by many of the same violent delusions as the right-wing strain. This is not an accident of history. Though right- and left-wing anti-Semitism may have emerged in different ways, for different reasons, both are essentially attacks on an ideal that once dominated American politics, an ideal that American Jews championed and, in an important sense, co-authored. Over the course of the 20th century, Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism. They embraced this brand of liberalism because it was good for America—and good for the Jews. It was their fervent hope that liberalism would inoculate America against the world’s oldest hatred.
For several generations, it worked. Liberalism helped unleash a Golden Age of American Jewry, an unprecedented period of safety, prosperity, and political influence. Jews, who had once been excluded from the American establishment, became full-fledged members of it. And remarkably, they achieved power by and large without having to abandon their identity. In faculty lounges and television writers’ rooms, in small magazines and big publishing houses, they infused the wider culture with that identity. Their anxieties became American anxieties. Their dreams became American dreams.
But that era is drawing to a close. America’s ascendant political movements—MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other—would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish. They regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams. The Golden Age of American Jewry has given way to a golden age of conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, all tendencies inimical to the democratic temperament. Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good for Jews. And what’s bad for Jews, it can be argued, is bad for America.
There are few other important essays about the rise in antisemitism. David French discusses a series of legal complaints filed against Harvard, MIT, and other colleges for refusing to respond adequately to antisemitism on their campuses. The Israeli writer Dina Rubin published an Open Letter about those who are disinviting her from readings and discussions because of her support for Israel.