Despite the surge of antisemitism, America is worth fighting for
There are reasons for pessimism about the future of Jewish life in the United States. But American exceptionalism is real, and can and must be preserved.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Jul 3, 2024
The victory of a virulent Israel-hater in New York City’s Democratic Party mayoral primary this past week was the last straw for some people.
The prospect of Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani becoming the next mayor of the most Jewish city in the United States is not merely appalling. That a man with a record of support for the antisemitic BDS movement—and who even under the pressure of an election campaign cannot bring himself to condemn the genocidal “Globalize the intifada” chants of pro-Hamas mobs—is now the darling of liberal elites is enough to cause some Jews to question whether they can or should leave the Big Apple.
As Americans make preparations to celebrate the 249th anniversary of their independence, this isn’t the time to abandon ship or give up on the United States. The promise of American exceptionalism of a nation built on the devotion of its citizens to the idea of personal liberty and equal opportunity unmatched elsewhere and untainted by the prejudices and hatreds of Europe may be under siege right now, but it is not dead.
Yet there is no denying the crisis that now faces the Jewish community.
An undeniable crisis
Mamdani, 33, a charismatic populist who tapped into the economic distress that many New Yorkers feel as well as the support for fashionable, toxic leftist ideas that are fueling antisemitism, isn’t likely to be rounding up Jews if he takes office in 2026. Still, his support for those who cheer for Jewish genocide, coupled with his record of anti-Jewish and hard-left radicalism, understandably sends a chill down the backs of the overwhelming majority of Jews who rightly see his popularity as an ominous development that cannot be ignored.
The talk about leaving New York or the United States is not the usual nonsense often heard from partisans on both ends of the political spectrum when they threaten to flee to Canada or elsewhere if a candidate that they oppose wins the presidency. Few who make such statements ever follow up them. Such pronouncements are partisan hyperbole rooted in the demonization of opponents, and in almost all cases, not something rooted in any real fear about the personal consequences of having voted for the losing side.
Coming as it did after the surge of antisemitism that has swept across the globe since the Hamas-led Palestinian attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Mamdani’s triumph is feeding into a genuine sense of peril that a portion of American Jews feel.
It doesn’t take much in the way of antisemitism or Jewish tragedies to lead some in the community to begin singing dirges for the end of American Jewish life. Yet after 21 months of witnessing mobs in the streets of U.S. cities and on college campuses chanting for the destruction of the Jewish state (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews around the world (“Globalize the intifada”), people are nervous. And more recently, three violent attacks from “Free Palestine” supporters against American Jewish targets in as many months, putting that despicable notion into effect, have brought into focus the idea that something terrible is happening in the United States.
The discussion about antisemitism isn’t catastrophizing. Who can blame people for feeling that the sense of security and acceptance they took for granted in the freest, most prosperous and most politically influential Diaspora community in history is rapidly evaporating? The places where Jews felt most at home, such as academic institutions like Columbia and Barnard, CUNY and New York University in Manhattan, are no longer safe spaces.
Elites embrace antisemitism
That so many of our credentialed elites, including a minority of left-wing Jews, are indifferent to Jewish suffering and victimization on Oct. 7, as well as the war being waged on Israel by Iran and its terrorist allies, would be troubling in and of itself. But the fact that these same people are using their bully pulpits at places at The New York Times to gaslight Jews by trying not merely to demonize Israel and its defenders, but to redefine antisemitism to allow those engaging in Jew-hatred or their enablers like Mamdani to evade being labeled as such, is even more alarming.
While the dilemma faced by Jews seems overwhelming, it’s important to place it in the context of a broader struggle that has been going on in the last decade. A new secular, left-wing faith rooted in toxic theories about the illegitimacy of the American republic and the canon of Western civilization arose in the last half-century. It was only in recent years, however, that this long march of progressives reached its goal of dominating education, the arts community and popular culture.
The turning point was the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, when, after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a moral panic took hold of the nation, causing many Americans to buy into more than just the myth of police hunting down African-Americans. The toxic concepts of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that were behind the “mostly peaceful” riots that took place, but also took over many institutions. They were at war with traditional American values that prioritized liberty. The woke attempt to radicalize society was terrible for race relations; one of the aspects of this belief system was the notion that Jews and Israel were “white” oppressors who deserved to be suppressed and forced to apologize for their success and even existence. These subversive concepts were aimed at transforming America and served to legitimize Jew-hatred among the chattering classes in a way that was unprecedented in this country. That they are echoed by a loud, though relatively small, “woke right” faction led by people like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson only adds to the gloom that Jews are feeling.
American history is replete with failures and open breaches of the principles of the founders, of which the most prominent was the decision to tolerate slavery until a civil war that cost the lives of 750,000 Americans ended it. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence were often honored in their breach, but they remained the aspirational touchstone of the long arc of progress through which liberty eventually expanded to the point where its words have been given full expression.
But if we are to remain locked in the ideological dead-end of woke ideology, not only will that progress unravel amid racial and ethnic quotas mandated by “equity” that ends the hope of equality and a colorblind society. We will then find ourselves living in a nation where Jews are forced to see this as not an exceptional nation, but just one more failed attempt at building a home in the Diaspora.
As important as it is to face the facts about this dire situation, it’s equally important to think rationally and soberly about it. As bad as things are, the situation that American Jews now face is not the same as that of the Jews of Germany in 1932 or any other Holocaust or annihilation analogy. They are not weak. They have considerable economic and political influence.
Jews are not alone
More importantly, they are not alone. The vast majority of Americans are not only philosemitic and emphatically pro-Israel, even after the deluge of anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda being foisted on them by a leftist-dominated press. Many people in this country recognize the problem and are beginning to address it by pushing to roll back the woke tide.
Mamdani, along with his fellow leftists and Israel-haters among the progressive “Squad” in the U.S. House of Representatives, may have gained ground, may have gained ground, but their power is, as of yet, minimal. They might be on the cusp of a takeover of a Democratic Party that is shifting to the left, as well as against Israel, and are—their professions of concern for Jews notwithstanding—opting out of the fight against antisemitism.
That said, they are not in control of the country and are highly unlikely ever to do so.
President Donald Trump’s campaign to punish the universities that have tolerated and even encouraged antisemitism since Oct. 7 is evidence that Jews have powerful allies, even if some in the Jewish community are so immersed in the hyper-partisan spirit of the times that they refuse to recognize it. Indeed, in much of the country outside of the deep blue coastal enclaves where most Jews continue to live, the reaction to the uptick of hated and rise of radicals like Mamdani is the sort of disgust and outrage that should reassure the Jewish community that talk of giving up on America is as wrongheaded as it is counterproductive.
If nothing else, the U.S. and Israeli military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities that posed an existential threat of another Holocaust are evidence that America is not a lost cause.
So, as much as it may seem tempting or even rational to talk of abandoning America, that would be a terrible mistake. Though Israel and Zionism still represent the Jewish future in a way that America cannot, Jews cannot give up on this country and certainly shouldn’t even think of doing so without a fight.
We must do so not merely out of a desire to defend our lives here but because a strong America that has not abandoned the best of Western civilization and values is essential to the worldwide struggle against the forces of tyranny—both Marxist and Islamist—that threaten Israel and Jews everywhere.
If Jewish life is unsafe in America, then it will be unsafe everywhere. That’s why it is essential that, rather than giving up or giving in to hysterical talk about the end of liberty and even the end of Jewry in the States, we must recommit to the fight to roll back the woke tide and defeat it.
This may be a generational struggle in much the same way that leftist efforts to impose these false beliefs on America were. Yet it is a battle that is necessary not just to save American Jewry, but to save the canon of Western civilization on which our freedoms rest.
The quintessential American response
A year from now, this nation will attempt to celebrate the 250th anniversary of its independence, and the battle over how to commemorate it has already begun. The contempt for traditional patriotism and belief in the truth that the American republic, flawed though it might be, is a force for good in the world has already been made clear by left-wing elites. As discouraging as this discourse may be, it is a reminder that the stigmatizing and targeting of Jews is part and parcel of the same struggle other citizens are engaging in. The American republic is and has always been exceptional. But it will only remain that way so long as a broad cross-section of Americans—Jews and non-Jews, liberals and conservatives, Democrats as well as Republicans—are willing to stand up against the woke forces seeking to traduce its founding values.
The appropriate answer to attacks on Jews is not flight or a call to shelter in place. The appropriate response is for Jews to speak up and not abandon the streets to antisemites and woke mobs. The rejoinder to anti-Jewish violence is for Jews to act in the most quintessential American way possible: to arm themselves (verbally, legally and literally) and make it clear that they will not be intimidated or silenced.
Those who hate the founding principles of the United States are wrong about the end of American greatness or the need to transform it into some pale reflection of Marxist or Islamist concepts. And so, on this Independence Day, rather than writing off America, we should be embracing it all the more enthusiastically—and pledging to defend it against those who wish to tear it down.
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