On Antisemitism Ellipticalized

Considering the case of Jews in the United States in the past and present

Is the United States going the way of Weimar Germany?

I have been thinking about this question a lot recently, though not because I think it’s an especially good one. The question presumes that there’s a certain inevitably elliptical script to Jewish history, and that same script is playing out in the United States right now. It goes something like this. Jews achieve a measure of prosperity and security in a given country. They then develop a hubris about their comfortable position in that country. Suddenly, the political winds change and Jews find themselves expelled or worse.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this question is because a lot of notable pundits apparently take its relevance for granted nowadays. Jews in the United States are worried about a perceived rise in antisemitism. There were unprecedented acts of slaughter in houses of worship during the Trump era. There was street violence directed at Jews last May in the midst of the latest Israel-Gaza conflict. For conservatives, there’s Critical Race Theory; for liberals, there’s white replacement theory. These pundits think these are all indications of things to come. Jews, they argue, aren’t worried enough.

Is this the best way of looking at the political situation for Jews in the United States? No, I do not think it is. It gets American Jewish history wrong, for one. For another, writing and talking this way has discreet costs that Jews might consider before they indulge the nightmares of the Jewish past.

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A distillation of this view was offered just this past week in the journal Sapir.

In “The Necessity of Jewish Power,” Bret Stephens, the journal’s editor, makes the case for power as invested in a sovereign Jewish state. He does so, in part, by addressing the presumed precariousness of American Jews.

For Stephens, US Jews all but lack real power. What they have, he says, is “status,” by which he means non-Jews defer to their wealth and meritocratic achievements. But this, he thinks, can disappear at a moment’s notice the minute non-Jews tire of Jewish influence. Any real political power individual Jews may possess, he says, are not devoted to “Jewish” purposes.

This leads Stephens to predict that the current groundswell of antisemitism, such as it is, will likely only get more severe for American Jews in the years to come:

As for the U.S., May 2021 may be remembered as the moment after which American Jews never felt entirely safe again…The trend will likely get worse. Jewish security in the West has always rested on a set of social values and assumptions that are now being systematically undermined — on the right, through increasing hostility to the ideal of an open society; on the left, through increasing hostility to the ideal of an open mind…Whenever illiberalism overtakes politics, including democratic politics, the results never augur well for Jews.

He ends the essay with a tragic story about his Latvian ancestors who were murdered by the Nazis and how other ancestors who moved to Israel live in an entirely separate universe where Jewish power is assured and Holocausts are relics of the past. Of course, the intended implications for Stephens’ American Jewish readers are far from subtle.

Lest you think this kind of writing typifies Jewish conservative thinking, consider a piece from David Rothkopf also from this past week. Writing in the Daily Beast about his decision to apply for an Austrian passport, one he was eligible for as a result of his father’s origins in the city from which he fled in 1939, Rothkopf avers, “As dark as my father’s history in Austria had been, I had come to see echoes of his story in the United States.”

Those echoes came in several forms. There was the barrage of hate hurled at Rothkopf’s social media feed any time he wrote about Trump. There was Trump’s winks and nods at all that online odiousness. There was the January 6th coup, which Rothkopf sees as reminiscent of the illiberal politics that escorted Hitler’s consolidation of power. And then there was the endurance in GOP politics of the “Big Lie,” another latter-day motif of the 1930s.

Unlike Stephens, Rothkopf isn’t writing exclusively about antisemitism and the fate of Jews in the US. But he agrees with Stephens that the endangering of a certain kind of liberalism augurs ill for the future, and concludes on a similarly dour note: “Gaining dual citizenship would be a tribute to my father but it would be more than that. It would be a reflection of lessons learned in his lifetime. Sometimes the unthinkable happens.”

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Whether or not Stephens and Rothkopf are right to fear larger political trends in the United States I will leave for others to decide. It’s worth dwelling here, however, on how they construe the origins of Jewish security in the United States and the extent to which it stills exists. On closer inspection, they miss a lot in regards to the sources of Jewish thriving in the US.

Between the 1820s and the 1920s, somewhere in the range of 80 to 90% of Jews who chose to emigrate from their homes, wherever those homes happen to have been, came to the United States. More than 2.5 million in all took the trip, and most stuck around. Why?

Hasia Diner, a prolific scholar of American Jewish history (and, in the interest of full disclosure, one of my doctoral advisers), offers a number of illuminating answers in her most recent book How America Met the Jews. An obvious factor was the economic draw, the United States being the center of so many global industries over the past two centuries that could offer quick employment for newly arrived Jews.

But, beyond that, Diner identifies a number of key elements:

1. Race — Jewish males, by virtue of their white skin, were essentially guaranteed citizenship upon arrival. With citizenship came easy access to the American judicial system, the ability to advance political priorities at all levels, the opportunity to participate in an array of economic activity, and many other rights that were contested for Jews in their places of origin.
2. Insiders — Very much connected to the racial issue, Jews were never in the US seen as the penultimate outsider. That unenviable distinction was reserved for people’s of non-white skin, whether it was blacks or natives. What many commentators often miss, however, is that Jews were also not seen as outsiders among the streams of other immigrants who flocked to the US at the same time they did. The bigotry Jews faced in the US never approached what was aimed at Irish immigrants, who sometimes faced actual violence at the hands of anti-immigrants mobs, not to say anything of the state- and federal-based legal discrimination that afflicted immigrants from China and Japan.
3. Religion — One reason the Irish, as well as Italians, fared worse than Jews in the United States is because America, understood by many to be a Protestant country, had a long tradition of anti-Catholicism. In a way that Jews never did, Catholics had to justify their presence in the United States. There was plenty of anti-Jewish bigotry too, but it would be wrong to argue that any kind of sustained anti-Jewish tradition obtained here on par with anti-Catholicism.
4. Politics — Because the United States was a two party rather than a parliamentary system, there was no political party that exclusively represented a peasantry, clergy, or aristocracy. Unlike in some European countries, therefore, for much of the 19th century and 20th centuries, neither of the two American political parties had much incentive to demonize Jews. As white males, Jews could vote, and Republican and Democratic politicians, for the most part, wanted them.

Diner’s analysis, of course, pertains mainly to the period of mass immigration that ended in 1924. So we might ask: do the factors that explain why so many Jews once identified America as uniquely salubrious still obtain in our own day?

In my view, yes they basically do.

American Jews still benefit today from the privileges that derive from white skin. True, a reckoning over race is currently transpiring in the United States, and that reckoning has to some extent undermined what WEB Dubois once famously referred to as the “wages of whiteness.” But by any metric, Jews have achieved a measure of power and influence in American politics and culture which until recently was simply unimaginable to nonwhites. That power and influence won’t disappear any time soon. (Incidentally, last week also saw the publication of an article by Samuel Goldman which nicely captures the astounding success and current influence of American Jews; see here.)

Moreover, today, as in the past, Jews are not seen or treated as outsiders. No anti-Judaism tradition has ever coalesced in US political culture, and none exists in the present. I’m sure some anti-antisemitism zealots would scoff at the previous sentence, but can anyone really say that Jews and Judaism are depicted as foreign or dangerous in the United States in any way that is congruent with, say, how some Americans perceive of Islam?

Finally, today as in the past both political parties are eager to court Jewish votes. Even as most Jews have for decades and still in our own day opt for the Democratic party, both parties continue to feverishly campaign for Jewish favor. Neither is especially eager to run afoul of pro-Israel voters, and both fear the accusation that fringe members of their caucus harbor anti-Jewish views. Doubtless, each side in American politics portrays the other as inveterately hostile to Jewish interests, but the fact is that they’re both fairly accommodating to a suite of Jewish priorities.

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Please note that my argument here is not meant to be predictive. We simply cannot know what lies in store for American Jews, and you should be hesitant to believe anyone who says they do. Maybe things will stay the way they are, maybe they’ll get worse.

What we can say, however, is that the elliptical theory of antisemitism that many pundits accept as easily applicable to the United States is lacking in historical rigor and fails to account for some of the special circumstances of American Jewish prosperity. And that matters for a few reasons.

One is that the more American Jews talk like we’re living in the twilight of Weimar, the less meaning this metaphor, and wider claims about antisemitism, will have. Lots of different groups in the United States face discreet challenges nowadays, and Jews should look to all of them to forge strategic alliances against bigotry. If we want people of good faith to take antisemitism seriously, however, we might start by framing the threats Jews face in ways that are more cognizant of historical trends, clear-eyed about the power Jews actually do possess, and prudent regarding future outlooks.

Another is that the more American Jews talk like they’re living on the precipice of calamity, the more other American Jews are liable to believe it. Unlike Rothkopf, the vast majority who become convinced by the faddish pessimism will choose Israel. And while that may be good for Israel it’s decidedly less so for American Jewry, which outside of Orthodox Judaism has been in the throes of a decades-long attrition crisis. American Jewish institutions need American Jews who care to remain in the US and involved in Jewish life. This approach instead would induce some to leave, and possibly convince others who stay behind to remit even more of their philanthropic dollars to Israeli instead of American Jewish causes.

The Cassandra-like writings of Stephens, Rothkopf, and many others, then, is not only grounded in questionable historical assumptions, it’s also unhelpful for American Jewish thriving going forward. There are other narratives of American Jewish history that are more historically-grounded and that better position American Jews to meet the challenges of the present moment to boot.