Like most American Jews I know, I spent Oct. 7 scrolling through social media, listlessly pushing my toddler on a playground swing as I swiped between images of burning kibbutzim, fixing dinner to television images of a modern-day pogrom. Yet for all the horror of that day, I was not especially surprised that a group founded in 1987 to destroy Israel by killing Jews was doing just that. Hamas was, in comedian Chris Rock’s famous formulation, the tiger that “went tiger.”
It was the response of American progressives that left me by turns outraged and perplexed. As a group, we American Jews had proven ourselves to be reliable liberals who have voted Democratic for decades. We had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and fought to preserve Roe v. Wade. Some of the closest advisers to Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden were, or are, Jews.
None of that mattered anymore. Suddenly, our shade of blue was no longer palatable to factions of the liberal establishment. Oct. 7 marked the final phase of a rupture that had been widening for years. No longer is the Left’s hostility to Jews a fringe preoccupation. Since the Hamas attacks, large swaths of American elite culture have treated Jews like a transplanted organ the body suddenly refuses to accept. If history is a teacher — and history rarely misses an opportunity to teach the present a thing or two — we may be heading down a path any healthful democracy should strive to avoid.
The surety and swiftness of the progressive response felt almost like a catharsis, as if an antisemitism long held in abeyance was finally allowed to explode into the open. After all, some seemed to conclude perversely, what better time to heap scorn on the Jews than while they are being massacred?
So the podcaster Edward Ongweso Jr., whose critiques of Big Tech I had previously appreciated, posted a video of Gazans smashing through Israeli border defenses that morning. “This is a glorious thing to wake up to,” he wrote. “Staring down the barrel of a fascist government that has put you in a cage for your entire life and is itching for an excuse to kill everyone in it with you, I can’t imagine anything braver.”
Later, I messaged Ongweso to say that I was disappointed by his jubilant message precisely because I respected his thinking on other subjects.
In response, he simply blocked me.
It is telling that so much of the progressive response was recorded on X, formerly Twitter. The site had become a conservative clearinghouse since it had been purchased by Elon Musk, sanctimonious misinformation “experts” such as Ben Collins of NBC News had claimed. But much of the hate was now coming from the Left. If that animosity was somewhat more sophisticated than edgelord Pepe-in-Auschwitz memes, that only made it worse. The people celebrating Hamas or blaming Israel for the attack were not lonely teenagers looking to get attention by trolling. They were elites expressing genuine satisfaction at seeing Jews killed.
The celebration continues: On X, Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brown mocked the Israeli women who were sexually assaulted by Hamas, while on the hard court in Salt Lake City, fans holding pro-Israel posters were told to put the signs down because they offended Dallas Mavericks player Kyrie Irving. Irving is an unabashed antisemite and an imbecile to boot — he believes the Earth is flat, or at least once did. The culture, such as it is, treated the Salt Lake City incident with a shrug. But that’s the whole point: Increasingly, imbecilic antisemitism is a perfectly acceptable means of self-expression, much as a Chinese character tattoo was a few years ago. And like regrettable ink, it could stick around for a while, seeping deep into the body politic.
Political realignments are routine, and it is easy enough to assume that Jews spurned by the Democratic establishment will find their way into Republican arms. But I submit that something more nefarious is happening, something beyond politics. Because as any expert in antisemitism will tell you, Jew hatred is usually a symptom of a broken society headed for collapse. A society where young men can find no meaning, where factionalism reigns and politics solves nothing, where suicide is an increasingly common means of escape.
“I’ve never seen Jews so concerned,” Dov Hikind, a former New York state legislator who works to combat antisemitism, told me. Hikind, who is an observant Jew hailing from a heavily Jewish section of Brooklyn, said a woman recently called him posing the kind of question thousands of Jewish families must have posed as they watched the Nazis come to power in Germany: “When will we know?”
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In 1901, the faculty of Heidelberg University decided to dissolve the school’s Jewish fraternity because, it said, its “very existence” was “sufficient to endanger peace among the students.” The famed school was one of Germany’s most liberal, a model for American colleges. But antisemitism was burrowing ever deeper into the national consciousness, and many institutions could only respond with assent — sometimes eagerly, sometimes grudgingly. And even very bright people are subject to the myopia that is part of the human condition. We cannot see the future as anything but the continuation of the present. No one at Heidelberg could have imagined that, less than half a century later, their quaint college town would serve as the garrison of the United States’s Seventh Army. Most of the Jewish students who’d been kicked out of their fraternities 45 years earlier were either dead or exiled.
Context matters, of course. We learned that from Liz Magill, who paid for that doozy of an insight, offered during a now-infamous House hearing on collegiate antisemitism, with her job as the president of the University of Pennsylvania. We are not Germany in 1901, or anywhere close, but our own elite institutions — our colleagues, foundations, even Ben & Jerry’s ice cream — are now giving in to the same Jew hatred that plagued the likes of Heidelberg. And if history rhymes, we might be coming upon a long, tough verse.
For years, we were told that antisemitism was a right-wing phenomenon. And it is true that Donald Trump’s arrival on the political scene in 2015 coincided with a sharp spike in antisemitic incidents, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The killer of 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life in 2018, as well as subsequent anti-Jewish attackers, tended to be adherents to fringe racist beliefs. It was lazy to group those beliefs with Trump but not all that difficult.
For many observers, antisemitism was a natural consequence of his infamous take on the 2017 white supremacist riot in Charlottesville and his overheated rhetoric on immigration. Yes, increasingly loud liberal critiques of Israel could edge dangerously close to antisemitism, but Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) wasn’t showing up at synagogues with an AR-15. “There’s too much worry about the Left and not enough worry about the Right,” the respected Jewish studies scholar Susannah Heschel of Dartmouth College told me in 2019, reflecting prevalent views.
But all the condemnation of white supremacy and right-wing conspiracy failed to account fully for what was happening on the Left. A burgeoning tendency among intellectual elites to think of everything in terms of race and, even more crudely, quite literally in terms of skin tone meant that Jews were increasingly regarded by liberal institutions, including universities, foundations, and not-for-profit organizations, as part of the oppressive white power structure. We were being pushed out, but most of us didn’t know it quite yet.
It should have been telling that none of the tough conversations we were having about race seemed to meaningfully involve Jews on our own terms, the way black and brown people insisted on being treated. “The way in which Jews are a minority is different from the ways other minorities are a minority,” explained David Baddiel, a British comedian and the author of 2021’s prescient Jews Don’t Count. For one, Jews weren’t really regarded as white by either Europeans or Americans. There is also the complex question of whether Judaism is a religion or a race. We don’t quite have the space to adjudicate that here. I only mean to point out that pigeonholing Jews has always been difficult. Mostly, it is those who have wanted to eradicate Jews altogether who have yearned for such classification.
But in the intersectional fever dream of the Left, all Jews became Israelis, and all Israelis became white Jews imposing an “apartheid” system on Palestinians who were brethren to American minorities. It mattered little that there are many nonwhite Jews in both Israel and the U.S. or that Israel has a large and patriotic Arab population hardly subject to apartheid restrictions. To be a Jew, by the end of the last decade, was to support President Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly conservative government, to support genocide and colonialism, and, maybe worst of all, to support the White House occupant who sanctioned and supported it all: Trump.
In 2019, I had described the Left’s “slow-motion ghosting” of American Jews. By the following year, there was nothing slow about it. During the protests that followed George Floyd’s killing in the late spring of 2020, the Palestinian cause became a subsidiary of Black Lives Matter. “Palestinians for Black Power,” read a poster foisted at a demonstration in New York that June.
The summer’s protests gave rise to a diversity, equity, and inclusion regime that metastasized across the landscape, from corporations to universities to government agencies. “Diversity initiatives generally don’t include Jews,” Baddiel said. “Jews are not recognized as a minority that suffers from racism.” In many elite spaces, antisemitism donned the more respectable garb of anti-racism. The Palestinians were Floyd, the Israelis were Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis officer charged with his death, and American Jews were the bystanders who, to use a popular phrase, were complicit in their silence.
In 2021, two Jewish mental health counselors sued Stanford University over a DEI training that they said was hostile to Jews. In a subsequent lawsuit, the two counselors described a training where participants “invoked the anti-Semitic trope that Jews are wealthy and powerful business owners. These DEI committee members reasoned that because Jews, unlike other minority group, possess privilege and power, Jews and victims of Jew-hatred do not merit or necessitate the attention of the DEI committee,” according to the complaint.
If the white supremacists could not countenance the notion of Jews as whites, progressives refused to see Jews as anything but white. The white supremacists sometimes committed horrific attacks against Jews and other people. But lone gunmen cannot change the course of an entire society. The people who run Stanford can.
“The antisemitism on the Left is harder to spot and harder to fight because the Left’s antisemitism masquerades as enlightened thinking,” said Rabbi Josh Beraha of Temple Micah in Washington, D.C., where my family belongs. Micah has members who aren’t white and many who are gay or lesbian. We run a shelter for battered women and work on various liberal causes. But none of that matters because, these days, a large Israeli flag hangs from the synagogue’s entrance, facing Wisconsin Avenue. Some members of the synagogue don’t like it. They think it makes us unsafe. And maybe it does. If that is the case, however, the danger is not from the usual suspects.
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Highly assimilated, prosperous, and comfortable, German Jews were famously regarded as “more German than the Germans.” Sigmund Freud had two sons who had served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. He steadfastly refused to leave Vienna even after the Nazi Anschluss, reluctantly fleeing to London at the preposterously late hour of 1939.
American Jews are equally successful, on more or less the same terms. There have been Jewish quarterbacks in the NFL. The comedian Tiffany Haddish is Jewish, bat mitzvahed at 40. Yes, the breakout star of Girls Trip is Jewish. Take that, Hitler.
But since Oct. 7, we have come to realize that our place in American society is not quite as secure as it might seem. At the very least, our suffering does not elicit quite the same outrage as it might warrant. And when outrage becomes difficult, violence becomes easy.
The antisemitic rampages that took place on campus throughout the last several months, the strange unwillingness of prominent organizations to condemn Hamas without somehow also blaming Israel: These strange phenomena can at least partly be explained by the fact that many of our elite institutions are home to many fewer Jews than they had been in the past.
In a brilliant, widely read article for Tablet, “The Vanishing,” published in early 2023, Jacob Savage wrote, “It’s gauche to count but you can’t help yourself: In academia, Hollywood, Washington, even in New York City — anywhere American Jews once made their mark — our influence is in steep decline.”
There are, today, fewer Harvard Law Review editors than there had been only a decade ago, almost no Jewish artists in the Whitney Biennial, and almost no recipients of the MacArthur “genius” awards, Savage pointed out. Jews are finding it increasingly harder to get into Ivy League schools, which is why supporting Hamas in Harvard Yard did not seem to flummox Cambridge until Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) came along.
Diversity initiatives were supposed to beat back racism and white supremacy. Instead, diversity came at the expense of Jews, a minority that always punched above its cultural weight. “Jews are being disproportionately purged from liberal institutions because Jews disproportionately exist within those institutions,” Savage wrote. We were all too easy to sacrifice, we reluctant whites who are more white than whites.
You may well question the worth of a Harvard education. Mocking the incoherent installations that pass muster at the Whitney Biennial these days is well justified and has been for a long time. You could say, as some have said, that we need neither Harvard nor the Whitney. We have Tiffany Haddish!
But if what Andrew Breitbart said about politics living downstream of culture is true — and I am certain that it is — then we have good reason to fear a culture whose attitude toward Jews vacillates between indifference and hostility. If nothing else, it is foolish to suppose that the cruelties those sentiments engender will be confined to the Jews.
“A university professor won’t be the next person to beat up a Jew on the street or attack a synagogue,” Temple Micah’s Beraha told me. “However, it’s the power of ideas in the long run that poses a more profound danger, capable of escalating violence and fostering hatred.” In other words, a culture primes a population, sharpens its loyalties and animosities. And it all happens much faster than you think. In the 1920s, Germany had a Jewish German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau — granted, he was assassinated, but not necessarily because he was a Jew. Less than two decades later, most Berliners watched passively, or approvingly, as Jews were herded out of their apartments, sent for “resettlement” in the east.
Similarly, today’s left-wing antisemitism may well lead to a cataclysm far worse than Tree of Life if the hatred of Jews becomes an acceptable societal norm. At a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square on Oct. 13, a young black man carried a sign that said “Settlers are not civilians,” presumably meaning that all Israelis are colonizers and thus deserve to be killed. The sign bore a hashtag: #LoveHamas.
I know that many young people have little sense of what chants such as “river to the sea” actually mean. Many probably can’t find Israel on a map, let alone differentiate between its borders in 1948 and 1967. But that’s my point. They don’t have to. The hatred of Jews has become instinctive, a cultural reflex growing stronger by the day. And as that muscle grows, others atrophy.
I do have some hope, however, that most Americans’ aversion to the tactics of the pro-Hamas mob could overcome the baleful influence of TikTok. Then there’s the courage of elected officials such as Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA). Germany could have used a few more Fettermans back in the day.
And tough questions are finally being asked of the DEI regime, which had been lecturing us for years about “microaggressions” but sat by silently as American Hamasniks celebrated the murder of Jews. The same crowd that told us to “believe all women” has cast shameful doubt on the horror stories of sexual assault perpetrated by Hamas. It may be that the liberal cultural regime simply collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
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I am confident that Democrats will pay for their refusal to support Israel, but this is about more than politics. Jews are central to the American idea and have been since the 17th century. Acknowledging as much should be beyond politics or ideologies.
“People on the Right want to make sure that antisemitism on the Left is seen as worse and vice versa,” Rabbi David Wolpe, of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, told me. “My concern is not to rank them but to battle them.”
Alexander Nazaryan writes about politics and culture.
