Moments That Have Shaped American Judaism

 

12/6/1987
American Jews march for Soviet Jewry

There had been noises coming out of the Soviet Union starting in the 1960s: Jews weren’t allowed to migrate, and they were being penalized for any sort of pro-Israel or Jewish expression. That galvanized a support movement in the United States, beginning with the student movement for Soviet Jewry on campuses across the country. From there it snowballed into a massive 1987 demonstration for Soviet Jews on the National Mall in Washington, DC—some 200,000 people—that attracted every major denomination, every major Jewish organization and had the support of the Reagan administration.

It was an opportune inflection point, in part because you had Mikhail Gorbachev in power, and there were signs that he was in favor of dismantling the machinery of repression instituted by the Soviets. More importantly, it countered the idea that American Jews did not necessarily present a united front. December 6, 1987, was a rare moment and a physical expression of American Jewish solidarity—on both the movement to free Soviet Jewry and, in endorsing Soviet Jews’ desire to go to Israel, its support of the Jewish state itself.

3/3/2015
Netanyahu addresses the United States Congress

This was the day Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress to oppose the Iran nuclear deal. For years, support for Israel had been a bipartisan issue, but giving that speech at the invitation of Republican Speaker John Boehner—who invited the Israeli prime minister in secret—was seen as a deliberate rebuke of President Barack Obama. It came across as racist, especially to the older members of the Black Caucus who, because of the Black-Jewish alliance in the 1960s, were reflexively pro-Israel. They were furious. American Jews have been eager to keep Democrats on the side of Israel, but recently there have been more Democrats calling for tempering funding to Israel or conditioning it on Israel showing that they’re more mindful of Palestinians’ human rights. At the same time, American Jews understand that part of this trajectory is very much owned by Netanyahu and his recklessness in terms of his relationship with Democrats. It’s also emblematic of his and his allies’ view that the American Jewish community doesn’t matter that much to Israel anymore—that what’s more important is cultivating the right wing, cultivating the evangelicals.

11/14/2023
American Jews rally for Israel

The March for Israel brought another massive presence to DC’s National Mall, this time to show support for Israel, condemn antisemitism and demand the release of hostages taken by Hamas. Event organizers estimated a crowd of 290,000 people were there, with another 250,000 watching it live online. The organizational representation of Jews spanned nearly the entire spectrum. The anti-Zionist left wasn’t present, but everybody from J Street and T’ruah on the left to the Zionist Organization of America on the right was. So like the 1987 event, it showed the breadth and the depth of American Jewish attachment to Israel, whatever differences there might otherwise be on how Israeli governments conduct policy.

5/12/1985
The Conservative movement ordains a woman

In 1972, Sally Priesand of the Reform movement became America’s first ordained female rabbi, bringing change to synagogues throughout the United States. Thirteen years later, after a long, contentious battle, the Conservative movement followed suit with Amy Eilberg. Then, in 2009, Sara Hurwitz became the first American Jewish woman ordained as an Orthodox rabbi, or “rabba.” That year, along with Rabbis Avi Weiss and Daniel Sperber, Hurwitz created the first American Orthodox-affiliated yeshiva to ordain women—Yeshivat Maharat in the Bronx—which currently has 60 students enrolled. Women now recite blessings over the Torah and chant Torah and haftarah portions, although fewer do so among the Orthodox. Women have become cantors in the Reform movement (Betty Robbins in 1955 and Barbara Ostfeld in 1975) and Conservative movement (Linda Rich in 1978). The mechitza that divides men from women in Orthodox synagogues has become less formidable. Although Moses’s wife, Zippora, was the first woman to perform a circumcision, the ritual became the domain of men. In 1984, the first Reform mohelet, Deborah Cohen, was certified. In 2003 women became scribes, with Aviel Barclay becoming the first to finish writing a Torah scroll in 2010. In 2020, Aviva Richman became the first woman Rosh Yeshiva (seminary head) at Hadar Institute, sharing the position with Ethan Tucker. The same year, Shuly Schwartz became the first woman chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

 

10/26/1992
Traditional Jewish women are “unchained”

In traditional Judaism, men have control over divorce. If a man refuses to grant his wife a divorce (a “get”), she cannot remarry, but he may. If a woman enters a forbidden marriage, her children become mamzerim (illegitimate) who may only marry other mamzerim or converts. Clearly, the woman denied a divorce is vulnerable to extortion by her husband. This set of issues constitutes the “agunah problem.” (An “agunah,” meaning “chained” in Hebrew, is a Jewish woman who is unable to remarry because her husband is refusing to give her a get—or cannot be located.) In 1992, Norma Joseph (Canada), Alice Shalvi (Israel), Rivka Haut (the United States) and others founded The International Coalition for Agunah Rights. Subsequently, other organizations arose, such as New York-based Agunah, Inc., which established its own rabbinical court led by Emanuel Rackman until his death in 2008. On March 13, 2002, Yeshiva University students incorporated ORA, the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot, offering counseling to Jewish women seeking divorce. Since then, ORA has resolved more than 300 cases of get-refusal. Prenuptial agreements, enforceable in American and Jewish courts, have revolutionized the agunah problem by creating financial incentives for the husband to grant his wife a divorce. In 1992, Viva Hammer and Chaim Jachter created The Wedding Resource Center to make prenuptual agreements (renamed marriage protection agreements) a common part of Orthodox marriages. Another focus of Jewish women’s advocacy concerns domestic violence. Founded in 1993, the Shalom Task Force combats domestic abuse using hotlines, legal services and education, such as posting “help resources” in public bathrooms.

 

11/21/1997
Judith Hauptman expands the meaning of the Talmud

Traditionally, women had some access to Bible study but were forbidden to study Talmud. This is no longer the case. In all Jewish denominations, women pore over these ancient texts written by men and have written their own responses to them. For example, Judith Hauptman started teaching Talmud at the New York-based Jewish Theological Seminary in 1973. In November 1997, she published Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice, in which she explored how the Talmud sees and treats women. Neither she nor other Talmud scholars changed the text. Instead, they expanded its meaning. When Jewish women began studying Jewish law and history, they hungered for more. As a result, universities and seminaries began to offer courses in Jewish women’s studies. Research institutes and activist organizations such as Drisha (1979) and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (1997) were founded to enable women to become Judaic scholars.

5/14/2004
Anita Diamant reimagines the mikvah

In the last 50 years, women have redesigned the mikvah (ritual immersion pool) to mark personal transitions such as miscarriages as well as joyous events. In 2004, Anita Diamant opened the Mayyim Hayyim Living Waters Community Mikveh in Newton, MA. Today, this spa-like mikvah provides 1,600 immersions and over 110 education programs every year. Overall, Jewish women from all backgrounds have experimented with new Jewish rituals during this 50-year period. They’ve organized feminist seders with an orange on the seder plate and a Miriam’s cup on the table; they’ve gathered in women’s prayer groups; they’ve blown the shofar; they’ve introduced baby-girl-naming-ceremonies; and they’ve brought ushpiziyot—honored women guests from the past—into the sukkah, all attesting to Jewish women’s creativity.

9/10/1985
Adult Jewish learning is transformed

The Wexner Heritage Program held its first seminar on Jewish learning for adult laypeople in 1985, followed soon after by the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School and then various other initiatives. Wexner Heritage gave adult Jewish learning cachet and raised the bar of Jewish leadership, creating a sophisticated cadre of Jewish adults who had a new interest in texts. These programs suggested our leadership should consist of Jews who have a certain degree of knowledge and learning, not just money. I’m not saying no adult Jewish learning existed before, but these programs took adult learning out of the declining denominational structure and created more exciting institutions that nurtured a generation of educators—some of them professors, some of them not—who became superstars at teaching outside the university. Jewish adult education continues to this day with programs in the United States run by the Shalom Hartman Institute and the Hadar Institute, programs in Israel such as Pardes that solidly link Israel and American Jewry, and Jewish text resources such as the online library Sefaria.

9/11/2001
Al-Qaeda attacks the United States

For the resurgence of antisemitism and the concern over American Jewish security as a real communal issue, I would go back to 9/11. After the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks, there were hints of the promulgation of antisemitic conspiracy theories, or what security experts at the time called “chatter.” The digital age allowed all sorts of hate groups to interact and to connect around the world. What was so striking about the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh 17 years later was that this was a guy who was radicalized online, who heard about the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) in chat rooms and believed it was bringing in “invaders” as part of a white genocide. This was the impact of new technology, and it gives you a sense of how historical change happens. Sure, there were people who believed the Jews controlled the world long before 2001, but lots began to be said and believed about Jews that moved from the periphery to the mainstream just about the turn of the millennium. As these technologies began to take over, so did their impact.

 

10/7/2023
A new cohort of young Jewish leaders emerges

We will look back and say that October 7, 2023, was a turning point for the American Jewish community, just as 1967 was. It’s a very different kind of turning point, but is likely to be viewed as one. I have watched what some people have called “the surge,” i.e., the rise of Jewish engagement since October 7 (“October 8 Jews” as they call them in Israel). It has created a whole new generation of leaders; the college students who led at Harvard and Columbia and Brandeis and so on are going to be the next generation of Jewish leaders, especially if we cultivate them and have the good sense to work with them. This is what happened in the late 19th century when young Jews such as Cyrus Adler and Henrietta Szold worked to fight antisemitism and revitalized the American Jewish community.

4/16-20/1978
NBC broadcasts the miniseries Holocaust

NBC’s Holocaust first aired in the United States in April 1978 over four evenings. It was a Hollywood production, and there was much to criticize about it. Though Elie Wiesel hated it, it cannot be denied that it instigated an unprecedented national conversation about the Holocaust. Many commentators credit it with introducing the very word “Holocaust” to a broad American audience. Newspapers and educational institutions produced special supplements on the topic, and local media outlets sought out survivors to tell their stories.

NBC’s Holocaust first aired in April 1978. Though Elie Wiesel hated it, it instigated an unprecedented national conversation.

The series, despite its historical shortcomings, not only captured American Jews’ imagination, it captured America’s imagination. And it led, seven months later, to President Jimmy Carter establishing—at the urging of his special adviser on domestic affairs, Stuart Eizenstat—the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. The commission was chaired by Wiesel and tasked with developing ideas regarding the establishment of a memorial to those who died in the Holocaust.

That in turn led to the building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, DC. The museum opened to the public on April 26, 1993, bringing the Holocaust into the mainstream of American culture and validating for American Jews that this country understood what the trauma of the Holocaust represented. Since the museum’s opening 32 years ago, more than 49 million visitors have entered its doors. Sometimes, I go to the museum and sit quietly in its entry hall and watch the world go by.

10/27/2018
A gunman attacks the Tree of Life Synagogue

This tragedy shocked American Jews in a profound fashion. It brought the threat of antisemitism home in an overwhelming way. Parents had to explain to their children and to one another how it was possible that a group of Jews who had gathered for Shabbat services had been targeted by an antisemite who killed 11 people and wounded six. One of the pictures that sticks in my mind is of three or four young girls, clearly from Haredi families, standing outside the Tree of Life synagogue holding each other and weeping. The extreme emotion they were expressing was emblematic of how this event was impacting the entire Jewish community. No one was saying, “This happened to them, but it wouldn’t happen to us.” Everyone felt vulnerable. It was, in a way, a unifying event. It is sad that it’s tragedies that unify us, but that may be emblematic of the Jewish experience.

12/5/2023
Congress grills presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn

Following October 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza, the rise in antisemitism, on college campuses in particular, has had a profound impact on the Jewish community. Over the last 30 or 40 years, with the integration of Jewish studies, the proliferation of Hillel centers and the establishment of Chabad houses, the college campus has represented Jewish success and full integration into the world of higher education. One could comfortably go to the best schools in the nation, if not in the world, and still live full, open, celebratory Jewish lives. But the recent explosion of not just anti-Israel sentiment but the antisemitic expressions that came with it have really taken Jews back.

It was disconcerting and shocking to see mostly young white men, many in matching khaki pants and button-down shirts, marching with tiki torches, and to hear them chant “Jews will not replace us.”

In the wake of that shock came the December 2023 Congressional hearings. And there was that chilling moment in the hearing of December 5 when each president was asked if calling for the genocide of Jews was antisemitic. The simple question was: Would they discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews? But they couldn’t bring themselves to just say yes. Instead they said it depended on the “context,” forever giving the word “context” a terrible legacy. I am not suggesting that any one of these presidents is antisemitic. They aren’t. But their responses indicated a moral fuzziness concerning Jew-hatred. Bottom line: There was a failure to take antisemitism seriously, as seriously as you might take attacks on other minority groups, other ethnic religious groups. The hearing encapsulated American Jews’ deep, deep distress about what was happening on American campuses. It wasn’t the hearing alone but what it represented about the best universities in America being unable to grasp the threat of antisemitism.

8/11-12/2017
Unite the Right rally exposes vile hate

It was disconcerting and shocking to see mostly young white men, many in matching khaki pants and button-down shirts, marching with tiki torches, and to hear them chant “Jews will not replace us,” thus implying that the Jews were helping to degrade racial parity in this country.

Following October 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza, the rise in antisemitism, on college campuses in particular, has had a profound impact on the Jewish community

The rally and violence that followed introduced more Americans to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which often involves the false idea that Holocaust survivor and philanthropist George Soros heads up an effort to replace white people in the United States with racial minorities and illegal immigrants. That antisemitic trope, along with then-President Donald Trump’s statement that there were “very fine people on both sides” at the rally, fed the hate that fueled future antisemitic attacks.

 

10/27/2018
Mass shooting at the Tree of Life strikes terror

On this date, a right-wing extremist attacked the Tree of Life-Or L’simcha Congregation synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA, in the deadliest attack on Jews in American history, according to the ADL. The Tree of Life became a place of death that shook the larger American Jewish community profoundly. The synagogue had been thought of as a safe place, a refuge. It was especially traumatic because of the age of the victims, who were mostly seniors. The elderly being singled out for death recalled the victims of the Shoah. Faced with a heightened sense of vulnerability, synagogues and Jewish schools and community centers were moved to increase security measures.

 

10/30/2023
Columbia and Barnard faculty sign anti-Israel statement

The way the October 7 attack by Hamas was characterized in the letter signed by over 170 faculty members at Columbia University and Barnard College was alarming. The letter defended a statement by students, saying the statement aimed “to recontextualize the events of October 7, 2023” and characterized the attack as a “military response” and “an act of resistance.” This was just after Israel launched its offensive in Gaza, and there was a hostile attitude toward Jews on campus. Jewish students were subjected to verbal abuse and were in a way exiled from their campuses. This was especially distressing given the history of quotas for Jews at Ivy League schools and the role higher education has played in the success of Jews.

3/7/2025
Trump administration moves to cut grants to Columbia

This was the beginning of Donald Trump’s attack on universities in the name of fighting antisemitism. (First of all, the notion that he’s against antisemitism is absurd. He invites Holocaust deniers to his dinner table. He makes vaguely antisemitic jokes, like, I only want short guys with skull caps counting my money. He doesn’t denounce antisemitism on the right, and so on.) Suddenly he’s attacking Columbia, Harvard and other universities in order to protect the Jews, because the universities haven’t done a good job of it. Now, there certainly is antisemitism at some of these colleges—at my own alma mater, Columbia, in particular. But it’s become quite clear to anyone but the most naive that Trump’s desire to protect the Jews is just a pretext to humiliate liberal institutions. One of the paradoxes is this: The president is attacking basic scientific research; however, there are so many Jews among graduate students in the sciences that this alleged attempt to protect Jews will wind up hurting them. And generally, the universities are very angry over all of this reduction of funding that is supposedly to protect the Jews. That sets up the Jews as the heavies, which could be tremendously important in the life of American Jews going forward.

Fall 1976
Lilith magazine debuts

Even though I have patrilineal Jewish heritage, I grew up in a Baptist church. But I was still very much attracted to Judaism as a child and finally did a formal conversion in the 1990s. Decades before that, I had decided that I would have to be secretly Jewish until Jewish women became more feminist. And then I discovered Lilith magazine and its understanding of Lilith as a disciple of freedom, and it made me realize that there were many Jewish women wanting to move away from the Orthodox into more feminist views of Judaism. An article published in Lilith’s first issue in 1976, “A Woman’s Wrath,” also gave me insight into Ashkenazi Judaism that was not just Fiddler on the Roof, and it really moved me. I had understood facts about the Holocaust, but I did not realize the significance of poverty in Eastern European Jewish life.

1994 & 1998
Kulanu and Be’chol Lashon champion Jews of color

Two organizations were founded in the 1990s that embraced Jews of color—Kulanu in New York City (1994) and Be’chol Lashon in California (1998). And it wasn’t just Jews of color but Jews from India, Jews from China, Jews from Latin America. I think of Kulanu (Hebrew for “all of us”) as the first responder to any group anywhere on Earth that decides they’re Jewish and then asks: What does it mean to be Jewish? How can we go about being Jewish? Are we Jewish, or are we really a form of Christianity pretending to be Jewish? Kulanu is not afraid of these questions. Be’chol Lashon (Hebrew for “in every language”) supports Jews of color worldwide through leadership camps, conferences and infrastructure investments. Each organization invests in different things—hospitals, schools, synagogues—with an impulse to open up Judaism, understanding that, quite frankly, as painful and universal as the Holocaust was, there are Jews from many other origins who are part of the story. For example, as a descendant on my father’s side from the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, I’ve often felt like I wanted to add more about the crypto-Jews to the larger story of the Jewish people. Doing so feels like an important moment for American Judaism. So does creating opportunities for prospective rabbis, say from Uganda or elsewhere, to come to the United States to study and get formal training, as both of these organizations have done.

8/28-30/2022
Theater J launches “Expanding the Canon”

In 2022, Theater J in Washington, DC, launched “Expanding the Canon,” selecting a cohort of Jewish artists to write plays that would, in essence, tell Jewish stories beyond Eastern Europe. I was selected as one of seven participants and wrote a play on the life of my great-great-grandmother Mary Ann Lumpkin, who was the concubine of Robert Lumpkin, one of the most notorious slave owners in the United States. She had five children (seven pregnancies) with Lumpkin, her first when she was thirteen. Lumpkin left Mary all of his property when he died, on which she later founded Virginia Union University, an HBCU. I’m not saying that my story changed American Judaism, but I think Theater J’s impulse to “expand the canon” and tell stories of other kinds of Jews signals that American Judaism needs us.

8/7/2000
Al Gore chooses Joe Lieberman as his running mate

The candidacy of Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman (z”l) for vice president in 2000 shattered an imaginary ceiling for Jews in political life. This was especially historic given the level of Jewish observance that accompanied his political success, underlined by his avoidance of work on Shabbat and holidays.

The candidacy of Joe Lieberman (z”l) for vice president in 2000 shattered an imaginary ceiling for Jews in political life.

We have since seen Jewish majority leaders of the U.S. House and Senate and several Jewish White House chiefs of staff: Josh Bolten, Rahm Emmanuel, Ron Klain and Jeff Zients (as well as Jack Lew, who was also Shabbat observant and served as treasury secretary in addition to White House chief of staff).

12/17/1979
President Jimmy Carter lights a menorah near the White House

Public menorah lightings, especially the lighting of the National Menorah in Washington, DC, which was inaugurated by Carter in 1979 and has been hosted by every U.S. president since, ushered in a new sense of strength as a proud expression of Jewish identity in the public square. It was initially opposed by many Jewish organizations, who, fearing a weakened separation of church and state, supported lawsuits all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to try and remove such expressions. Most of the Jewish community leadership, however, has come to appreciate them, with leaders of the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, B’nai Brith, Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and others attending and praising these events. The public support for them has been seen as a watershed in American Jewish life, inspiring many similar celebrations in capitals around the world where it once would have been unthinkable.

11/7/2000
Joe Lieberman’s candidacy confirms fading of a stigma

One great development I’ve seen in the American Jewish story over the past 50 years was the loss of any significant stigma for Jews in American politics and government. Let’s use the year 2000 as a somewhat arbitrary milestone: the year when a Jewish candidate for vice president, Joe Lieberman, was on a ticket that won the popular vote. Of course, by then we had a Supreme Court with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, enjoying near folkloric fame, and Stephen Breyer to boot. Elena Kagan would join them in 2010, and congressional leaders since have included Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer and House Republican Eric Cantor. The significance of these Jewish political success stories is not what was said about their being Jewish but rather how little that fact played in their ascent.

10/7/2023
The Hamas attack shakes Jewish confidence

October 7 has shaken Jewish confidence in everything from Israel’s vaunted intelligence, to its political leadership, to what had appeared to be its future in a pro-American, anti-Iranian Middle Eastern alliance. Antisemites have taken the Israeli military actions that followed as confirmation of their hateful view of Jews. October 7 has led to protests that blur the line between antisemitism and criticism of Israel and to the strange predicament we find ourselves in today: Autocratic attacks on universities are justified as necessary for our protection, a degree of protection that very few of us have asked for or welcomed.

12/15/1993
Schindler’s List is released in theaters

Steven Spielberg’s gripping, three-hour black-and-white drama is uncompromisingly bleak and brutal in its depiction of German atrocities and Jewish suffering, yet it is also a celebration of heroism and resilience in the face of unspeakable evil. The film was a huge commercial and critical success, winning seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Viewing it became the equivalent of a required high school history course for Jews and non-Jews alike. “I implore every one of you to go see it,” President Bill Clinton declared after attending the Washington, DC, premiere. Not everyone loved it. New York Times critic A.O. Scott, while praising Spielberg’s cinematic artistry, wrote that the film “helped to domesticate the Holocaust by making it a fixture of American middlebrow popular culture.” For Spielberg, making the movie was part of a process that led him back to Judaism after a childhood of alienation—a not atypical experience among Jewish baby boomers. “I was so ashamed of being a Jew, and now I’m filled with pride,” he said. For many American Jews, the film likewise became a touchstone moment that deepened their sense of Jewish identity, while making them more alert to contemporary genocidal atrocities in Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan. Spielberg emerged afterward to become one of the country’s largest philanthropists for Jewish causes, donating all his profits from Schindler’s List to create the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which has filmed and archived interviews with some 53,000 Holocaust survivors. He donated millions more to create an archive of Holocaust and World War II footage and to establish the Righteous Persons Foundation, dedicated to Holocaust education and championing human rights activists.

 

5/4/1993
Angels in America opens on Broadway

A panoramic exploration of homosexuality and the AIDS crisis, Tony Kushner’s two-part, seven-hour play is not overtly Jewish in content, but it has several recognizably Jewish characters and moments, including two caustically humorous scenes between Roy Cohn, the predatory and closeted super-lawyer who is dying of AIDS, and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, whom Cohn had helped railroad to the electric chair for her alleged role in divulging atomic secrets to the Soviets. But the most powerful scene involving them takes place in Cohn’s hospital room after he dies an agonizing death. When a young Jewish man named Louis Ironson struggles to recite Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, Ethel’s angry but compassionate ghost intervenes and gently guides Louis through the ritual, then addresses Cohn’s corpse at the conclusion as “you son of a bitch.” The play has been revived several times since it first opened on Broadway—most notably in 2003 in the acclaimed six-part HBO miniseries directed by Mike Nichols, which dramatically expanded its audience and impact. What makes it particularly powerful and relevant now, as America’s LGBTQ population is being mercilessly scapegoated again, is its focus on a minority group that was reviled, abused and marginalized even as it was ravaged by a pitiless epidemic.

9/30/2004
The Plot Against America is published

Philip Roth’s brilliant 2004 novel about a fascist takeover of the United States was an unusual act of historical imagination for a novelist whose most famous works explored American themes, Jewish identity and male lust. The novel offers an alternative history of early 1940s America in which the renowned aviator Charles Lindbergh defeats President Franklin Roosevelt’s bid for a third term and takes office on an America First, antiwar and blatantly antisemitic platform. The book (along with the 2020 HBO miniseries adapted from it) painstakingly recounts the impact on a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Newark, NJ, patterned after Roth’s own. Lindbergh quickly signs a peace treaty with Adolf Hitler’s Germany and sets about creating an Office of American Absorption, whose task is to reeducate and relocate Jews from urban centers in the Northeast to southern and western rural areas, where they can learn to become “real Americans.” Jews who resist lose their jobs and are singled out for humiliation. One intriguing aspect of the novel is the way Jews themselves divide over the growing threat. At the time, the novel sharpened American Jewish awareness of their power—and their vulnerability. Roth, who died in 2018, isn’t around to see how chillingly resonant his novel reads in 2025. Once again, Jews and antisemitism are at the heart of the national debate over civil liberties and public order, as the Trump administration wields charges of antisemitism as a club to punish dissent.

1/2/1997
Genetic discoveries reveal vital information

The paper “Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests” by Michael Hammer, Karl Skorecki, et al. was published in Nature on this date. Analyzing the Y-chromosome markers of 188 Jewish men from Israel, North America and England, the authors found that 97 out of 106 who identified themselves as descended from Kohanim, or Jewish priests, shared a specific Y-chromosome haplotype. This provided genetic evidence supporting the traditional belief that Kohanim are descended from a single male ancestor, possibly Aaron, the first high priest. While this was a fascinating study, it was the revolutionary ability to peer into the DNA of Jewish history that took off, opening an exciting world of ancestral DNA analysis. For me, and for many others, this strengthened a personal connection to the conglomerate of tribes that make up the Jewish people and made it possible to trace relatives lost to the mists of time. Worldwide, many non-Jews also learned that they were of Jewish descent. Another groundbreaking discovery: Long before the human genome was sequenced in 2003 and we learned that all humans share approximately 99.9 percent of their DNA, geneticist Mary-Claire King, in a talk at the American Society of Human Genetics on October 19, 1990, presented evidence that a single gene was linked to increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer. King’s identification of the BRCA1 gene, along with the later identification of BRCA2, revolutionized the understanding and prevention of breast and ovarian cancer, particularly for Jews of Ashkenazi descent who are more likely to carry the mutation.

7/2/2016
Elie Wiesel dies, and Trump platforms antisemitism

Elie Wiesel’s death was deeply sad for me on a personal level and also sad for American Jewry, since he was as close to a moral barometer and spokesperson as anyone in the community. Something else happened on July 2, 2016, that had long-standing consequences: At 3:19 p.m., then presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted “Crooked Hillary—Makes History!” along with an image of Clinton superimposed over a pile of cash and, next to her face, the words “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” inside a red six-pointed Jewish star. After many people criticized this as an antisemitic dog whistle, the star was replaced with a circle, but not before Trump had signaled to far-right antisemites on the fringes of society that if a presidential candidate could use antisemitic imagery against his rival, it would be acceptable for them to enter the mainstream. They did, leading to the spread of antisemitic imagery and behavior, including attacks, some fatal, on Jews and people perceived to be Jews in the United States.

 

5/21/2025
A pro-Palestine activist kills two in Washington, DC

These murders were committed in cold blood on the street outside a Jewish museum where an American Jewish Committee peacemaking event was being held for young diplomats.

What sets the May 2025 shootings apart is that Milgrim and Lischinsky weren’t killed by someone steeped in right-wing conspiracy theories that glorify antisemitic violence. Rather, the suspect is a pro-Palestine American activist apparently radicalized in online left-wing social media spaces.

After shooting Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, the alleged assailant entered the museum and soon after shouted “Free, free Palestine!” Milgrim, a young Jewish woman from Kansas, and Lischinsky, an Israeli-born Christian Zionist with German citizenship, became the latest additions to a list of people who have been killed in the United States in the past few years simply because they were Jews or perceived as Jews. What sets the May 2025 shootings apart is that Milgrim and Lischinsky weren’t killed by someone steeped in right-wing conspiracy theories that glorify antisemitic violence. Rather, the suspect is a pro-Palestine American activist apparently radicalized in online left-wing social media spaces where talk of violence against Jews has become normalized. The killings came a few weeks after April 13, 2025, when a man set fire to the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania while Governor Josh Shapiro and his family were sleeping—shortly after the family had held a seder to celebrate the first night of Passover. He accused Shapiro of orchestrating “plans” against Palestinians and demanded he “stop having my friends killed.” Most recently, on June 1, 2025, a man, who was reportedly in the United States on an expired visa after coming from Egypt three years ago, yelled “Free Palestine!” and threw Molotov cocktails at a group in Boulder, CO, who were demonstrating for the release of hostages held by Hamas. These dates are directly linked to October 7, 2023, and the war in Gaza, which opened the floodgates to a new and dangerous level of pro-Palestinian rhetoric in the United States.