Moment Debate | Will America Turn On Its Jews?

Will America turn on its Jews?

Adam Scott Bellos: The question lacks nuance: No country ever turned on its Jews overnight. Wherever we were kicked out, it was a slow, methodical process of changing a collective consciousness. Could the cultural zeitgeist of America undergo the changes that took hold in other civilizations or nation-states, where antisemitism permeated their mindset and eventually led to their own collapse?It could happen.

If you look at the trend from 2020 to today, especially post-October 7, you see exponential increases in antisemitism and in conspiracy theories about Jews, world Jewry, American Jews’ connection to Israel and the role Israel plays in American politics. Even more alarming is the growth of the conspiratorial mindset among young men in Gen Z, who are now even beginning to argue that they can’t afford homes in the middle class because of the role Jews and Israel are supposedly playing behind the scenes in world finance and global politics, instigating wars that drain countries’ GDPs, creating the migration problem.

Jewish leadership has failed to cohere in response to these emerging problems that have allowed extremists to gain strength at both ends of the horseshoe, left and right. That could destabilize the American political discourse and catch American Jews in the middle of the horseshoe.

Menachem Rosensaft: I don’t disagree with Adam’s basic premise that there has been a troubling increase in antisemitism on both the far right and the far left, especially since October 7. I read with interest Adam’s recent piece in The Jerusalem Post arguing that American Jews can no longer trust Vice President JD Vance to stand against antisemitism. But I don’t see Vance as necessarily the determinative figure.

I am much more impressed by Senator Ted Cruz, who is equally conservative but has taken on Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, effectively channeling the late William F. Buckley, who worked to purge the conservative movement of the John Birch Society and Pat Buchanan.

We have a problem, but we in the Jewish community are not dealing with it alone. Significant voices in both parties are pushing back against antisemitism. Although the Democratic Party has strong anti-Israel and anti-Zionist voices, such as the new mayor of New York City, it has many centrists—including governors Josh Shapiro, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger—pushing back hard against it. The off-year elections were a Democratic, mostly centrist rout. I don’t believe we are in danger of losing support from the center right and center left. We need to be concerned and alert, but I don’t see the sky falling anytime soon.

Take university campuses, where I’ve been more directly involved. Of course, there are problems. Columbia had significant problems under President Minouche Shafik. But today, the acting president, Claire Shipman, is taking the necessary steps and providing leadership opposing antisemitism. The same thing is true at Harvard. At Cornell, where I teach, President Michael Kotlikoff has been a strong ally throughout, fighting against any form of discrimination. The pendulum on university campuses is swinging in favor of support for Jewish students, and opposition to antisemitic extremism, on campus after campus.

Bellos: Menachem makes an eloquent case, but there’s a generational difference between us in the way that we interpret the realities on the ground. To say JD Vance is not the voice of the future is ridiculous. He is the known front-runner to replace Donald Trump as leader of the Republican Party. If anything, our allies in the center-right and the center-left and everything in between are starting to shrink. That’s true among conservatives in general and also among conservative evangelical Christians.

It’s a mistake to downplay the sweeping cultural changes taking place. The popularity of people like Ted Cruz is falling because of them. Both sides need to be able to purge themselves of demonic rhetoric. The eyes of American Jewish leadership have not been on the ball while hate crimes rise and campus incidents multiply and high school students get pennies thrown at them because they’re Jewish, or they’re afraid to wear their kippahs. So I wish I had your optimism.

Rosensaft: The problem is not American Jewish leadership. The American Jewish community is not now, has not been, and will never be monolithic. A great deal of the antisemitism or anti-Zionism that we have been experiencing, especially since October 7, is linked directly to actions that are taken by the government of Israel. I’m not personally criticizing any of the IDF actions in Gaza or questioning their legitimacy. But as long as there is a feeling that criticizing those actions is illegitimate or problematic, we’re not going to speak in one voice.

Bellos: Given the state of affairs among American Jews, that you are focused on somebody else’s backyard and not your own backyard right now is ridiculous, in my opinion. These are the same arguments that have been made for the last 30 years by the American liberal Jewish establishment. I understand that American Jews are not a monolith, but because of that inability to get past our own sectarian differences or organizational differences, we’ve become a weakened minority that is easily fractured. A great example of that would be Barack Obama’s campaign to divide the American Jewish community around support of the Iran deal.

At the end of the day, the boomer generation created an American Jewish community that was completely divided and prone to misreading the landscape. At the recent American Zionist Movement conference, I presented to high schoolers about building modern Maccabees and bringing Hebrew and self-defense to the Jewish diaspora. Every single one of those teenagers was expressing a great deal of fear about the future. Many youth do not feel that any Jewish institution has their back. To say we are in a better place is naive.

Rosensaft: I don’t know that I said that we are in a better place. I said we are in a better place among universities than we were during the immediate aftermath of October 7. And we are not going anywhere, whatever the Tucker Carlsons of the world may want.

Change is needed, but it won’t be done by saying we have to start from scratch and throw everything out. We’ve been there before. I remember when Meir Kahane started the Jewish Defense League with many of the same arguments: We need our own Maccabees, we need our fighters. I’m not suggesting that you are creating a new JDL. But the American Jewish community, if it is to survive, will survive as a continuum. The American Jewish community’s future is not going to be determined through the fears of high schoolers.

Bellos: We will never be able to fight this properly if this is how we continue to see ourselves. If we were a little bit more organized and a little bit more cohesive, maybe it would be easier for the American Jewish community to rebuke Israel over certain things. As things stand, though, instead of worrying about criticizing the Israeli government, we should be assessing the current reality of the political situation here and how to prepare if anything gets worse. What preparations are necessary to make our community safe? Why are we not ethnically together as a political voting bloc to consolidate our power to move the political needle if we need to? Why are we losing political commentators who are influencing the next generation in massive numbers, in the millions?

I grew up in Cincinnati, OH. The Hebrew Union College campus for Reform rabbis has had to close because there were so few rabbis going through the program. Non-Orthodox or non-Zionist communities are disappearing. So the political strength of Jews in America over the next 20 years will be a completely different type of strength. This is the difference between conservatives and liberals: Conservatives understand that we have to consolidate our political strength as a political base, and return mentally to being an ethnic people, a tribal people, and see ourselves as an ethnic minority. That’s the only way that we’ll prevent the safety of American Jewry being depleted in America.

I see the world through 3,500 years of Jewish civilization, not just the American experience. Antisemitism has always made less headway against strong Jewish communities that are rooted in being Jewish, not only in observance, but in a mindset of sovereignty. But a community like that has never existed in the diaspora.

Rosensaft: You misunderstand where I’m coming from if you think I’m viewing Jewish history through a narrow prism. As a child of Holocaust survivors, as someone who was born in a displaced persons camp, as someone who experienced the American Jewish community as a newcomer, I would agree that it is changing. But we will never be a monolithic voting bloc with identical interests. Even just in New York, the Satmar Hasidim in Kiryas Joel are not going to vote the same way as the folks on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Pogroms, historically, happen when Jews can’t count on the protection of the police. These days, we have police at our synagogue doors, defending Jews. The government’s Homeland Security department gives grants for synagogue security. Do you think it’s possible that U.S. or local authorities would stop protecting Jews?

Rosensaft: Anything is possible, but I don’t think it’s likely. The police are protecting Jewish communities, synagogues, schools, not just in New York and Los Angeles but in the Midwest, in the South and elsewhere across the board. Certainly, the day when a U.S. administration decides that Title VI protections no longer apply to Jews, or when a police department looks on and lets antisemites target a synagogue, is a day for us to start thinking about moving. But that is not happening. One incident where the police don’t come up to snuff—and the next day, the police commissioner calls them to task and fixes it—doesn’t mean there’s an endemic problem.

Bellos: The most important thing for the Jewish community is to build its own independent security and never rely on outside security, as that has never worked for us historically. What’s most important is that Jewish communities are self-reliant. Outside security can be there to assist. In no way, shape or form do I promote relying on anybody who is not a part of our community.

Rosensaft: We have never been in a position where the safety of the Jewish community was exclusively and successfully in the hands of the Jewish community. It didn’t work in the days of Bar Kokhba, who led the revolt against the Roman Empire. It doesn’t work today. We need the support of the communities in which we live.

Bellos: To bring up Bar Kokhba is ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with promoting self-sustaining security amongst the Jewish people. Wouldn’t Jews be safer if, over the next ten years, we decided to reallocate Jewish philanthropy and tear down institutions that are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on PR and compensating Jewish executives to the tune of millions of dollars a year, who have no measurable results for anything and have only overseen the American Jewish community through the greatest decline of prestige and security in this country’s history? What type of diaspora do we want to live in—weak or strong? A diaspora has to exist, for safety and stability, but no one wants to live in a weak one.