RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jewish history has long been defined by migratory movements away from trouble and towards safer places. Over the past half millennia, the safest harbours for ‘the world’s foster children’, as David Mamet put it, have generally been English-speaking countries, first Britain, then especially the US, Canada and Australia.

This is increasingly no longer the case. The British Jewish community is being battered by a rising tide of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agitation from both the left and segments of the UK’s much larger Muslim population. In Australia, Jewish childcare centres and an MP’s office have been attacked. Even the United States and Canada, where over 70 per cent of the Jewish diaspora resides, are showing signs of increased anti-Zionist and openly anti-Semitic sentiment. Indeed, in the US, anti-Semitic hate crimes now dwarf hate crimes against Muslims, blacks or Asians. No wonder many Jews are thinking of departing for safer pastures new.

The potential decline in the Jewish Anglosphere has been presaged by a more precipitous fall in Europe and throughout Asia. The Jewish population in Europe stood at 3.5million in 1950, after the Holocaust. Today it has fallen to well under 1.5million. France is home to the world’s third-largest Jewish community, but it’s shrinking. Since 2000, nearly 50,000 Jews have left France, mostly for Israel. Even more shocking has been the virtual annihilation of Jews in Islamic countries – one million strong until the 1960s, there are fewer than 15,000 Jews living in these places today.

Anti-Semitism, driven by attacks from Islamists and their leftist allies, has been a prime driver of this decline. A survey found that barely 13 per cent of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe were traceable to right-wingers. To be sure, there’s cause to worry about some right-wing anti-Semities within the ranks of Austria’s Freedom Party (founded by former SS officers), the AfD in Germany and Jobbik in Hungary. But right now, the immediate danger lies elsewhere.

Until recently, the Anglosphere provided a bulwark against anti-Semitism. As Barbara W Tuchman explains in Bible and Sword, Jews have long had ties to Britain, reaching back to before Roman times. In 1290, Edward I did announce the expulsion of Jews, but many returned largely at the behest of Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century. Cromwell’s Roundheads drew a lot of their inspiration from the Old Testament. Of course, at the same time, Britain’s Jews have suffered considerable discrimination over the past half millenia, and were unable to vote in parliament until 1858.

In the late-19th century, Britain’s Jewish population swelled thanks to migration from Russia-dominated regions in Europe’s east, notably Poland. Many helped shape the British left, and the Labour Party, while others went off to participate in Britain’s robust economy, including as migrants to the colonies, notably South Africa, Australia and Canada.

But over the past half century, the Jewish population in Britain has declined. Today, with central London often resounding to the sound of pro-Hamas demonstrations, a vibrant centre of Jewish life has been turned into a no-go zone. As secular Jews migrate or intermarry, one study predicts that England’s Jewish community will largely be Orthodox by the century’s close.

In Canada, the Jewish population of roughly 326,000 accounts for less than one per cent of the total population of 40million. It still makes Canada’s Jewish population the fourth-largest in the world. Jews have faced discrimination and prejudice, particularly under the anti-Semitic three-time prime minister, MacKenzie King, in the first half of the 20th century. But by the 1990s, Canada’s Jews had become a relatively well-educated and prosperous population.

As in Europe, the increasingly dismal prospects for Canadian Jews stem from the alliance between the country’s left and militant parts of a Muslim population that has more than doubled in size since 2000. This has fuelled anti-Semitism within Trudeau’s partners in the leftist New Democratic Party as well as among the Liberal Party, which was traditionally the party of choice for Canada’s Jews. This drift was epitomised by outgoing Justin Trudeau’s pledge to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he dared set foot on Canadian territory.

Little wonder that 82 per cent of Canadian Jews feel less safe today than before the 7 October pogrom. Anti-Semitism now accounts for two-thirds of all religiously inspired hate crimes. Toronto, home both to Canada’s largest Jewish population and a much larger Muslim community, has experienced, by some measurements, the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents per capita in the West.

The US has provided the most hospitable environment for Jews since the first arrivals in New Amsterdam (later New York) in 1654. After the American Revolution, the new republic had no state church (although it was heavily Protestant). In 1790, George Washington, writing to the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island, said citizenship was part of Jews’ ‘inherent natural rights’.

Jews commercial spirit melded naturally with America’s entrepreneurial culture, not only in the big eastern cities but also in hyper-capitalist California, referred to by one Gentile observer in the mid-19th century as ‘the Jews’ paradise’. Even today, America is safer than Europe.

The most damaging attacks on Jews in America come from elite universities. Jewish students face hectoring anti-Israel professors and demonstrators blocking off access to school buildings for ‘Zionists’. As Erwin Chemerinsky, Berkeley’s law-school dean and well-known progressive, wrote in the Los Angeles Times, ‘nothing has prepared me for the anti-Semitism’ now clearly evident at Berkeley and other campuses.

Increasingly radicalised teachers’ unions, through initiatives such as California’s openly anti-Zionist ethnic-studies programme, use education to dismiss Jews as white oppressors and Israel as a cruel colonialist power. Public-school educators in Oakland even held unauthorised teach-ins, which included colouring books for elementary students, featuring a Palestinian character who says, ‘a group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people’.

The rising hostility faced by Jews in the West, and particularly in the Anglosphere, resets their political and geographical trajectory. Today’s progressive Kulturkampf identifies Jews not as a historically marginalised group but as powerful white insiders.

The attacks, mostly from the left, against Jews and Israel are driving the Jewish diaspora to the right. Canada’s Jews, like their counterparts in Britain, have been drifting towards the Conservatives. In contrast, Britain’s Labour Party, as well as its Australian counterpart, has been repeatedly hostile to the Jewish State.

In America the strongest opponents of Israel tend to be ‘progressives’, like Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson. Almost all the US representatives who voted against or refused to take a stand supporting Israel after the 7 October atrocities came from the left. Groups like Black Lives Matter label Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’, while leading identitarian writer Ta-Nehisi Coates is stridently anti-Israel.

The big political struggle among Jews is within the Democratic Party, where many look to sympathetic figures like Bronx congressman Ritchie Torres and Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman. But increasingly Jews are drifting towards Donald Trump, who many feel can be counted on to be far tougher on Islamist terrorists, expel foreign students breaking the law and protect besieged Jewish communities. Most Jews may dislike Trump for his crudity and nativistic leanings, but he still won more Jewish votes than any Republican since George HW Bush in 1992. Already Orthodox Jews have become bedrock backers of the GOP.

Over time, Jews attitudinal shifts will influence where they settle. According to Pew, 51 per cent of all Jewish immigrants are migrating to Israel. Many other more secular Jews are remaining, but simply melding into the general population and losing their religious identity. Given low birthrates and assimilation even among the large US Jewish community, some pessimistically project America’s Jewish population dropping by a third by the end of the century.

The Jewish diaspora in both America and Britain will become increasingly Orthodox, sustained largely by groups like the ubiquitous Chabad movement. For those who do not want to be led by pious rabbis, Jews will seek their community in places that they consider safe and welcoming.

This used to involve moving from the inner city to the suburbs. But the big move in America now is towards certain regions, primarily in the South, once considered the home of antidiluvian racism and religious prejudice. In the 1930s, 60 per cent of American Jews lived in the north-east. Today the north-east is home to barely 40 per cent while the percentage of Jews living in the South has grown from nine per cent in 1960 to 22 per cent today.

The largest growth has occurred in big metros like Atlanta, Houston, Dallas and Miami. Jews are also thriving in smaller southern cities, which often had small but well-established Jewish communities. Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston is the nation’s second-oldest synagogue, and Savannah’s Mickve Israel was founded in 1735, shortly after the city’s founding.

Jews have long been prominent players in places like Charleston. Former police chief Ruben Greenberg, a half-Jewish, half-Black Houstonian, reclaimed the city’s streets during the 1980s. He also humiliated the white nationalists by personally leading the protection of a Ku Klux Klan march in the 1980s, something that was never repeated. Today one feels safer as a Jew in downtown Charleston than in Paris, London or even New York.

Jewish students are also headed south. Most schools ranked safest for Jewish students by the Anti-Defamation League are in the South, while Ivy League colleges and top University of California campuses rank least safe.

This shift in college attendance could accelerate the southward movement, as students often stay close to where they attend school. Already the first- and third-largest Jewish student populations are at the University of Florida and University of Central Florida. These Southern schools, known for viewpoint diversity as well as football and Greek life, are ascendant, attracting ever more students from the West Coast and north-east.

In the wake of the crisis initiated by the 7 October massacre, Jews across the Anglosphere are reassessing their politics and location. The most sustained anti-Semitic tide since the 1930s will continue to inflict both physical and psychological dislocation. But as they have done for millennia, Jews will have to survive and hopefully thrive by adjusting to changing realities.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.