There was something remarkable about the American Jewish experience almost from its beginning. In a world in which Jews were at best tolerated, and more often persecuted, the new American republic offered something genuinely revolutionary: equality.
In 1790, George Washington wrote to the Jewish congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, that equal citizenship was not a privilege granted by a benevolent majority. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” America, he promised, would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance”.
It was an extraordinary statement for its time. And while America did not always live up to Washington’s promise, it established the foundations of a relationship between the United States and its Jewish citizens unlike anything Jews had experienced elsewhere.
That relationship helped make America not merely a place of refuge but a home in the fullest sense. It also contributed, alongside shared democratic values and strategic interests, to another exceptional relationship: that between the United States and Israel.
For decades, support for the Jewish state was one of the few genuine bipartisan commitments in American politics. Democrats and Republicans might disagree about settlements, peace negotiations or individual Israeli governments – but the underlying alliance was rarely in question.
The midterm elections suggest that this era may be drawing to a close. The most conspicuous example is Abdul El-Sayed, the newly elected Democratic senator from Michigan, whose opposition to American military assistance to Israel was a central feature of his campaign – a position once confined to the margins of politics.
Nor is El-Sayed an isolated case. The new House of Representatives will include a slew of new members whose positions on Israel have alarmed the Jewish community. Several emerged from the Democratic Socialists of America, a movement whose growing influence on the Democratic Party invites uncomfortable comparisons with the Corbynisation of Labour in Britain.
The party once led by Bill Clinton, under whom the American-Israeli alliance flourished, increasingly accommodates a movement for which hostility to Zionism is not an occasional policy disagreement but an organising political principle. And the shift extends well beyond the party’s radical wing. Even those considered relatively moderate, such as James Talarico, who has just achieved a historic Senate victory in Texas, support ending sales of offensive weapons to Israel.
Yet perhaps the clearest indication of how profoundly American politics is changing came not from a Democrat, but from Donald Trump. On election day, the president announced that the United States would end its nearly $4 billion in annual military assistance to Israel. His explanation was revealing. “Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like El-Sayed when they (Israel) don’t need it?” Trump asked. The president effectively acknowledged that support for Israel had become an electoral liability.
Nor is there much reason to believe the policy change will achieve its intended purpose. Concessions made to ideological fanatics have a poor record of satisfying them. The next demands already concern arms sales, followed by sanctions, boycotts and a fundamental reconsideration of the alliance itself.
The other danger may lie in what these elections may mean for the Republican Party. Until now, the most vocal opponents of Israel on the American right, including Tucker Carlson and his allies, have remained largely outside the Republican establishment. They have attracted substantial audiences, particularly among younger conservatives, but have not fundamentally altered the party's congressional leadership or its commitment to Israel.
But an entire generation of Republican officeholders has just been swept aside. The war with Iran is widely seen as a major contributor to their defeat, a point even Trump has acknowledged. Who will replace them, and what lessons will ambitious Republican politicians draw from the result? The danger is that at least some Republicans will conclude that support for Israel is politically costly and that Carlson's brand of isolationism offers a more promising path to power. If that happens, the damage to the US–Israel relationship could outlast both Trump's presidency and the war itself.
There is evidence that the constituency for such a transformation already exists. A Pew Research Center survey earlier this year found that 57 per cent of Republicans under 50 had an unfavourable view of Israel.
How did America reach this point? The explanation will sound familiar to British readers. For decades, universities and other institutions shaping America's future leaders have increasingly embraced radical critiques of Western societies, with Israel portrayed less as a complex democracy than as an embodiment of colonialism and oppression. These ideas have since spread into journalism, cultural institutions and politics, helping transform attitudes towards the Jewish state.
Which raises the most difficult question: what should American Jews do? I ask this as someone who has regarded America as a political and moral reference point throughout my life. I have lived and studied in the US and spent much of my professional career working for American companies and American Jewish organisations. I have admired the country's exceptional capacity for reinvention, its openness to immigrants and its commitment, however imperfectly realised, to the principles Washington articulated more than two centuries ago.
The erosion of those principles, and of the political consensus that made America such an extraordinary home for Jews, is therefore more than a matter of foreign-policy disagreement. It demands a response.
American Jews have always voted according to their understanding of what is best for America. Indeed, the suggestion that they owe their primary loyalty to Israel is itself one of the oldest antisemitic accusations.
But their interests as Jewish Americans are also legitimate political interests. Antisemitism, whether tolerated by the left or the right, ought to be a matter of serious concern not merely to Jews but to anyone committed to the principles on which the American republic was founded.
The question is whether American Jewish organisations are prepared to confront that challenge with equal resolve, regardless of where the threat comes from. Following the elections, regional chapters of the Anti-Defamation League took the unusual step of issuing public statements expressing concern about several newly elected Democratic representatives.
The organisation's New York and New Jersey chapter, for example, warned that it “has serious concerns about DSA rhetoric and positions that normalize antisemitism, deny Jewish peoplehood or condition Jewish participation in public life based on special litmus tests.”
This is a welcome development from an organisation that has itself faced criticism for insufficiently confronting antisemitism on the political left. But statements, however forthright, are only a beginning.
Consider the Jewish vote in Michigan. A survey of early Jewish voters found that roughly 60 per cent supported El-Sayed, despite his positions on Israel or his reaction after an attacker of Lebanese background tried to bomb a synagogue near Detroit: “Hurt people will hurt people”.
Jewish voters, like all Americans, have a multitude of concerns, and no single issue should necessarily determine their vote. But the question is whether longstanding partisan loyalties risk diminishing their political influence.
In 1992, former New York mayor Ed Koch accused James Baker, George H. W. Bush's secretary of state, of responding dismissively to Jewish complaints about the administration's treatment of Israel during the dispute over settlements. According to Koch, Baker had said: “F*** 'em. They didn't vote for us.”
Baker denied making the remark. But the political calculation it expressed was unmistakable: a community that never votes for you can safely be ignored. The reverse calculation is equally tempting: a community that will vote for you regardless can be taken for granted.
Neither party should be able to make that assumption. With antisemitism increasingly a problem on both left and right, the answer is not to transfer loyalty from one party to the other. Rather, American Jews need to exercise their political influence with greater independence, judging candidates in both parties by their record on antisemitism, Jewish civil rights and Israel's security, alongside the many other issues that matter to them.
For much of American history, Jews enjoyed a remarkable degree of security because their equality was understood to be part of the country's national identity, rather than a concession to a minority. That remains an ideal worth defending and thus requires political defenders. And politicians, however principled, respond to incentives.
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