Israel must help American Jews fight antisemitism - opinion

• Published date: 15 March 2024
• Author: AMOTZ ASA-EL
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Carrying the loaded title "The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending," an Atlantic magazine cover essay by Franklin Foer maps the rise, reach, roots, and impact of America's new antisemitism before reaching the harsh conclusion that its title announces and its narrative decries

The journalistic feat is that this work, for which Foer traveled from coast to coast debriefing victims of America's new antisemitism, epitomizes the purpose of journalism, which is to write history's first draft. What an ordinary news story does to a single event, this essay does to an epoch that lasted 80 years, involved millions, and, if Foer is right, has just ended unannounced.

Author of the critically acclaimed World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (2017), Foer looks sideways, backward, and forward as he overflies the cleavage between an unfolding era of menace and a departing era of optimism, prominence, achievement, and respect.

Looking sideways, Foer visits verbal, social, and violent incidents in schools, universities, city councils, and varied public spaces in which he detects an anti-Jewish pincer movement led by ultra-progressives on the Left and old-school racists on the Right.

On the Right, he shows, for instance, a study indicating that millions of Americans blame "the Jews" for the 2008 financial meltdown. On the Left, he finds "a disconcerting number of Israel's critics" denying the Jews' "right to a nation of their own."

These are the attitudes flanking 56 physical attacks on Jews and 554 acts of vandalism on Jewish locations recorded by the Anti-Defamation League during the three months following the October 7 Massacre alone, besides 1,307 public events with anti-Semitic rhetoric and another 1,347 incidents of harassment, oral or written.

Alongside such open hostility, there is also a transforming social landscape, underpinned by "a deliberate institutional drive to re-engineer the elite" in a way that effectively sidelines the Jews, for instance, in admissions policies to Ivy League schools.

It's a stark contrast with what Foer collects when looking backward: the postwar America that canceled anti-Jewish discrimination and embraced an astonishing battery of unabashedly Jewish celebrities, from Jerry Seinfeld, Woody Allen, and Barbara Streisand to Joe Lieberman, Ruth Westheimer, and Eli Wiesel.

The golden age of American Jewry was not just an era of Jewish legitimacy and excellence, underscored by the mind-boggling fact that American Jewry...