ve-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….
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….
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.
It's an alarming development. The old white right wing antisemitism never quite went away, and the black Nation of Islam antisemitism under Louis Farrakhan has been festering for a while now, but what seems to be new is the spread of antisemitism – often barely disguised as anti-Zionism – across the universities, and across the liberal progressive class that Jews had every reason to think would be on their side, campaigning with them against the hate. Well….it ain't so.
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