Decline of Golden Age for American Jews
“Jewish Adam Sandler’s ‘Chanukah Song’ was what people played on the FM radio. Dr. Ruth, whose bubbe [grandmother] had fought in the Haganah [Israel’s original armed defense force], was America’s sex expert. There were two Jewish Supreme Court justices,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, he said. “And then in 2000 you had a very observant Jew [Joe Lieberman], who fell 537 votes of becoming short of becoming vice president. And nobody ever really questioned his identity as an American. Everybody accepted him.”
Soon after, however, things changed. “It took me a while to accept the fact that this golden age was in decline,” said Foer. His investigation began before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, he said, sparked by a call from his brother, whom he described as more observant. The brother, who was wearing a yarmulke, related having someone follow him down a street in Brookline muttering “Trump, Trump, Trump.”
As he began researching “the long arc of American Jewish history,” what he found was an old story. Following 9/11, “a rolling series of crises” had each brought an uptick in antisemitism.
“When things [happen] that are difficult to comprehend, like a pandemic, people begin searching for something to blame,” he explained. As happened in Europe during the Middle Ages when the Black Plague hit, that “something” was the Jews.
“People may not even realize that they have this reservoir of narratives. But when events happen, Jews get depicted as the villains.” He cited Trump’s disparagement of former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and philanthropist George Soros. Once such antisemitism became acceptable, he said, “it started pouring out.”
At that point, Passow raised a point from Foer’s article, asking what form contemporary antisemitism assumes on either side of the political spectrum.
From the right, Foer said, it takes the form of the so-called great replacement theory, whose adherents believe Jews are conspiring with Black and brown people to replace white Christians. In this theory, he said, Jews “are agents who can pass in white society but are seen as doing the bidding of Black and brown people.” For example, “George Soros getting blamed for the ‘invasion’ on the Southern border.”
On the left, he continued, it takes a different form. “Increasingly it’s integrally tied up in debates about Israel” and the war in Gaza.
“There are very non-antisemitic ways to criticize the state of Israel,” he pointed out. “Much of American Jewry is very critical of Israeli policy.”
Still, he continued, there is a strain of anti-Zionism that utilizes ancient tropes to blame Jews, reviving the myth of a cabal of Jews more loyal to Israel than to America. “It alleges that American Jews are manipulating American foreign policy; they’re manipulating American universities.”
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“There were certain ideas that Jews played a role in championing and helped to develop. One of these we can broadly describe as liberalism: There was cultural pluralism; there were ideas about tolerance. There were ideas about the universal protection of minority rights and civil liberties.”
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This trope also calls into play “one of the classical elements of antisemitism,” said Foer: “This notion that Jews are bloodthirsty.”
As the evening wound to a close, Passow asked Foer about any findings that didn’t make it into his article but should have. Foer responded the intensive editing and fact-checking process had driven any such thoughts from his mind, but he did share one observation.
“A lot of my piece is about the things that enabled the golden age of American Jewry,” he said. “There were certain ideas that Jews played a role in championing and helped to develop. One of these we can broadly describe as liberalism: There was cultural pluralism; there were ideas about tolerance. There were ideas about the universal protection of minority rights and civil liberties.
“Jews embraced those because they were good for America, but they were also good for Jews. And so as the golden age has gone into this period of decline, what we see is that it’s just a symptom of a democratic culture and of institutions that have abandoned the liberalism that made the golden age possible.
“So I think the thing that would most help American Jewry and reverse this climate is if we could restore democratic culture to the country, if we could dispense with some of the worst parts of liberalism that didn’t actually work, but save and preserve the soul of liberalism as the guiding ethos of American institutions and of our society.”
Clea Simon is a Harvard correspondent at the Harvard Gazette. This article is published courtesy of the Harvard Gazette, Harvard University’s official newspaper.
