What Was the American Jew?

Reflections on the outburst of anti-Semitism on Columbia’s campus.

The “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia University continues. (Photo by Selçuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images.)

Thousands of our readers financially support Persuasion. That support is what allows us to staff our team, pay our authors, and keep our content free for everyone in keeping with our nonprofit mission. But we need to raise our revenue to keep paying the bills.

If you’re able to become a paying member today, we’d be grateful for the support. Or, if a one-time contribution is easier, you can donate using this link. 

With thanks,

Yascha and the Persuasion team

---

I was, as usual, scrolling through Substack and came across an article on the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser and his particularly baroque style of humor. Morgenbesser, holding court at the West End (the famed if ever-grotty Columbia student bar on West 114th St.), had a style of humor called the false-bottom joke, in which everyone would start laughing at some perfectly serviceable punch line—which was a sure sign that they hadn’t gotten the joke. The real joke was buried somewhere within it and turned, usually, on some pun related to the Talmud.

It was a cute article and it took me into a completely different and now (apparently) vanished world. Maybe that sounds dramatic, but that’s how it felt. Vanished too was my own experience of this neighborhood—the West End being if not the first place I drank alcohol then probably the first bar whose adjoining sidewalk I vomited onto. (In keeping with long-standing tradition, the West End didn’t card obviously high school or college-age students although they did draw the line at anyone with braces.) And vanished was a certain complacency: I’d been on the Columbia campus more times than I could count; I’d walked past it every year for Yom Kippur break-fast. 

Elsewhere on my phone was a very different Columbia. There were amber alerts for protests and street closures around 116th Street. (A months-long pro-Palestine student protest had attracted outside groups over the weekend.) There were stories of kids with kippahs having water thrown at them and their Israeli flags burned. And, staggeringly, unbelievably, there were videos of protestors with Palestinian flags shouting “Go back to Poland” and “Jews Jews”—and groups chanting “Hamas we love you / We support your rockets too.” A campus Jewish organization had thrown in the towel and sent an email saying, “Columbia University … cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety in the face of extreme anti-Semitism and anarchy.”

The liberal mainstream responded with a general nothing-to-see-here je ne sais quoi. Columbia’s president Nemat Shafik, in a hearing before Congress, declared that more disciplinary actions would be taken on clear anti-Semitic eruptions but that the situation was well in hand—while the presence of NYPD on campus was generally depicted as an overreaction. The New York Times, in a riveting callback to CNN’s mostly-peaceful-protests coverage in 2020, buried some of the most inflammatory of the anti-Semitic outbursts deep in its story, below the amicable image of a Jewish student chilling on a fold-out chair in front of a Gaza solidarity encampment.

See! Nothing to see here!

But it is very difficult to take what has happened at Columbia in stride. I am getting calls from old friends who are concerned about raising Jewish children in America. There’s a widespread consensus, amidst the wave of anti-Semitism, that an era of Jewish life is over. Franklin Foer, for instance, has an important piece in The Atlantic called “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending” in which he claims that Jews are now in a radically different position in America than we have been in a long time. Jews are no longer a protected minority, which was the older point of view, and they are no longer a fully assimilated part of American society, which was pretty much taken for granted from let’s say the 1960s to 2020s. Now, Jews find themselves in a different and, unfortunately, familiar role. As an Other. A scapegoat. And that transformation has happened not where anyone was looking—in the far-right, in the not-so-subtle-yet-subliminal messages of Jewish plutocrats that Trump flashed in one of his 2016 campaign ads—but in the very heart of the liberal institutions that had been so beloved by American Jews. (One of the protestors, with an almost touching atavism, held up a sign calling Columbia “a Zionist stronghold.”) 

So where does that leave American Jews? 

What is clear is that an old, nourishing identity has fractured. As Foer puts it, what had been remarkable was that assimilation and prosperity occurred by and large without sacrificing identity. Jewishness was seen as amusing and admirable and—at least in public discourse—was unaccompanied by the stereotypes that were so prevalent in so many parts of the world. And, as the cherry on the cake of the golden age for American Jews, sympathy towards Israel was in no way incompatible with a proud, overarching American identity: Israel was a valued ally and (let’s not forget) had a compelling narrative as an underdog. 

The pressure of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, of the outburst of vitriolic anti-Israeli sentiment on the left, means that that delicate best-of-all-possible-worlds consensus is broken. American Jews find themselves having to choose: do we “stand with Israel” or are we pro-“social justice”—which has come to mean “free Palestine” and, implicitly, the end of Israel. I find myself talking out of different sides of my mouth with different members of my extended family, making hair-splitting (alright, Talmudic) differentiations between contrasting positions: in complete solidarity with Israel after October 7 but advocating a degree of moderation in its response; understanding the need for deterrence in proportion to Hamas’ depredations but critical of the Netanyahu administration; concerned about civilian casualties in Gaza but balking at accusations of war crimes or genocide. 

What’s ironic is that the sort of default position of liberal American Jews—highly sympathetic to Israel but with significant daylight from Netanyahu—is the same as that of the Biden administration, but the left-wing demonstrations collapse all those distinctions. Support for Israel becomes “Zionist.” Zionism means a “settler, colonial” state—usually with “white supremacist” thrown in—and “Zionist” is also, clearly, the catch-all for “Jew.” Protestors, whom I witnessed, shouting “we don't want no Zionists here” on the Upper West Side—a predominantly Jewish neighborhood—got that point across.

Foer traces out a history of the resurgence of anti-Semitism which has to do with shifting coalitions on the left. The left, from the era of Roosevelt, meant “minorities and liberal activists locking arms,” and Jews (there’s a real irony here) were trailblazers in developing identity politics. But the coalition turned towards something else—the oppressed, easily identified by the hue of their skin, against the oppressors. And the affluence of American Jews and Israelis, plus the relatively light skin of Ashkenazi Jews, meant exile from the new progressive bloc. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how that shift would have occurred, but the speed with which it came about is dizzying. There’s a simple, more geopolitical explanation as well, which is that the conservative American Jewish community, above all through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, over-assiduously aligned itself with the Israeli right-wing, and a new conservative illiberalism took inspiration from the fortress-state tendencies of Israel—a development that did not go unnoticed on the left. 

In any case, what that means in terms of identity politics is that American Jews are left without a leg to stand on. There was always a degree of pride in resisting the chauvinist, nationalist narratives of Israel. (I remember, as a 22-year-old on Birthright, earnestly explaining to the guides/proselytizers that I didn’t need a home in Israel, I already had one in New York.) And now it’s more than clear that American Jews, probably even the fold out-chair kid in The New York Times story, are not welcome on the social justice left. After nearly a century of being told by Israelis that the diaspora is not safe for Jews, and that only a nation-state can provide security, American Jews are more vulnerable than they have ever been—as a direct result of the tie to Israel. The irony of it is hard to miss. 

American Jews are left being told by everybody that they have to make a choice—with Israel or against it; condemning “genocide” or complicit in it. And what American Jews have to do, I believe, is to have the courage not to choose. As an identity, being an American Jew is rooted in a liberal, cosmopolitan vision—in the Morgenbesser jokes with the double meanings, in a bone-deep religious and ethnic identification with Judaism that is fully compatible with an immense national pride in the United States.

This was a robust identity when I was growing up; I took it entirely for granted. Now, in short order, it seems to be fading out of existence—with both sides attempting to collapse a heterogenous, multi-faceted Jewish identity into “Zionism.” But I refuse to accept that. Being an American Jew is its own proud, often paradoxical idea. I can only hope that it survives this wave of anti-Semitism and all the others that are sure to come after it. 

Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.

---

Follow Persuasion on X, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below: