I could feel myself retreating, spending more and more time with people who saw things the way I did, and less and less time with people who did not. I had a running joke with friends that I had moved into a shtetl in my mind, surrounded only by people who understood—people with whom I did not need to plead.
Travelling to Israel several months after the war started, while heartbreaking, felt like a relief. I did not have to plead or make polite small talk. At the end of my visit, as I waited at the airport to catch my flight back home, I ran into a guy from a kibbutz I’d visited whose brother had been killed on October 7. He was heading to the US to start the speaking tour he’d told us about. He was nervous about what he might encounter, and when he mentioned he was visiting a couple of college campuses, I was nervous for him.
As I watched him line up for his flight, I thought about how, before October 7, I had lived my life as if I were an “American of the Mosaic persuasion,” and he had lived his life as if he were an Israeli—but maybe we were both still just Jews. Maybe we hadn’t escaped history after all.
Many Jews have been wondering whether we still have a place in America, whether we still belong. As I consider everything I’ve seen since October 7, and before then, I don’t think this question has a simple answer.
On the one hand, as the historian Jonathan Sarna reminds us, “Antisemitism is more foreign to American ideals than to European ones.” America today is not mid-twentieth-century Europe. Nor is it mid-twentieth-century America. I appreciate what Nathan Diament, a leader in the Orthodox movement, said during a meeting with President Biden at the White House soon after October 7. Diament remarked that back in the 1940s, when rabbis requested a meeting at the White House to talk about the plight of European Jews, they were refused. But today, Jewish leaders are sitting down with the president of the United States, who cares deeply about the Jewish people.
I’d like to think Americans are generally not the college students harassing their Jewish classmates on campus. But if I’m wrong and things do continue to get worse in America, I imagine, as Yossi Klein Halevi has said, that it would look more like America in the 1930s and 1940s than like Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.
But then I consider the other voice in the dialogue that points out how, these days, antisemitism is coming from both the right and the left. And I worry about what’s known as the “horseshoe theory,” the moment when the two ends of the political spectrum come together, and the horseshoe takes the shape of a noose.
It worries me that people on both ends of the horseshoe are trafficking in those old tropes about Jewish power, depravity, and conspiracy. They’re accusing Jews of “privilege,” which is another way of saying that Jews have too much power. In fact, a few years ago, white nationalists started using the hashtag “JewishPrivilege” as they posted claims about Jews controlling financial institutions and media outlets. Then people on the far left started using the hashtag as well, but to post claims that Jews are oppressors.
People at both ends are also accusing Jews of genocide (of Palestinians says the far left, of white people says the far right), the ultimate act of depravity. And both sides are convinced Jews are in a conspiracy, pulling the strings behind the scenes to let all those immigrants into America or to manipulate the US government into supporting Israel.
When people start blaming Jews for their problems, rather than addressing what’s actually causing them, that’s not just dangerous for Jews. Given all these questions and uncertainties, how, exactly, should we live as Jews in this new era?
We need to be realistic. I often encounter Jews who insist that if we just had the right PR campaign, the right arguments and social media posts, then we could stop antisemitism. I appreciate the ambition, but there are just 15.7 million Jews, compared with eight billion people total, and we are dealing with habits of mind that have been worn into the world’s psyche for many centuries and are embedded in the religious traditions of half the world’s population.
As the journalist and author Matti Friedman points out, after the Dreyfus affair and the ensuing explosion of antisemitism in the late 1800s, Theodor Herzl didn’t run around France trying to persuade people to like Jews. He did not start a PR campaign against Jew-hatred with branded merchandise and celebrity spokespeople, seeking to “shift the narrative.” He realized there was nothing Jews could do to dispel the clouds on the horizon. They were always there, and if Jews were to be safe from the inevitable storms, they would have to build an ark.
So do we.
[Missing Credit]
This piece was extracted from AS A JEW: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us by Sarah Hurwitz, published by HarperCollins £25. Available to buy from Waterstones.
