RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the wake of last year’s 7 October pogrom, and amid rapidly rising anti-Semitism, most Jews are even more convinced of the importance of the Jewish State and the need for greater solidarity. As researchers such as Tufts Eitan Hersh and others have demonstrated, the Hamas assaults have led many in America to emphatically embrace their Jewish identity.

Yet, increasingly, these same Jews find themselves isolated and widely demonised. This reflects how much Jewish influence in the US, as I suggested almost a year ago, is itself ‘peaking’. Certainly it’s clear that Jewish media power has faded, as evidenced by the consistently biased coverage against Israel in places like the New York Times, the BBC and the Washington Post. Similar bias has become embedded in the internet, as seen by Wikipedia’s new negative description of Zionism.

As Israel faces an existential challenge, diaspora Jews confront a rising wave of anti-Semitism unseen since the 1930s. Politicians and the media alike emphasise the parallel rise of Islamophobia. Yet two-thirds of all religious hate crimes in America were directed at Jews, despite them accounting for just two per cent of the population. Last year in New York, there were over 100 anti-Semitic crimes in November and December, almost 10 times the number of equivalent crimes committed against Muslims.

Jews are frequently discovering that any sympathy for Israel now means cancellation. The progressive political and cultural establishment increasingly seeks to eliminate ‘Zionists’ and elevate those Jews, like journalist Joshua Liefer, who excoriate the Jewish state, and non-Jews like Ta-Nehisi Coates, who embrace a radical, anti-Israel perspective.

Even in traditional haunts, such as Brooklyn bookstores, elite campuses and big Jewish cities like Los Angeles, Jews no longer feel safe. Today, they are inextricably identified with Israel, whether they like it or not.

This merging of Jewish and Israeli interests seems inevitable. Already, a majority of all Jewish children live in Israel. By 2030, Israel could become, for the first time since early antiquity, the home to a majority of all Jews. This is somewhat hard to digest for left-of-centre or secular Jews, given the nature of the current Israeli government with its dependence on messianic nationalistic and ultra-religious allies. Yet, despite the relative unpopularity of Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration, the vast majority of diaspora Jews – 80 per cent in America – support the Jewish State, as do the vast majority of Jewish college students.

The gradual decline of the diaspora

If the Holocaust had never taken place, there may never have been an Israel, but there would be many more Jews. Demographer Sergio Della Pergola has posited that without the Holocaust, there could be as many as 32million Jews worldwide, compared with less than half that today.

Before the Holocaust, the long diaspora experience did provide Jews with skills, turning them into what historian Yuri Slezkine described as ‘a cohesive tribe of professional strangers’, living in nations that were largely illiterate and ill-prepared for the cash economy that emerged after the Middle Ages. These habits turned out to be advantageous with the rise of capitalism. Jews may have not been the originators of capitalism, as the Jewish historian Ellis Rivkin suggested, but they were ‘best positioned to benefit’.

In the years before the Second World War, Europe was home to a large and sometimes influential Jewish community. In 1939, there were 9.5million Jews living in Europe. At the end of the Second World War, only 3.8million remained. But Hitler’s dream of a Europe ‘cleansed of Jews’ is coming to pass now in gradual steps. More than half a century after the Holocaust, there are fewer than 1.5million Jews left in Europe.

In Britain, the Jewish population has declined over the past half century. By this century’s end, one study predicts that what remains in England will be a largely Orthodox community, constituting the majority of the country’s Jews. Eastern Europe, the centre of the Jewish world in 1939 with its 3.4million Jews, is home to fewer than 400,000 today. Germany, home to 500,000 Jews in 1933, now has as little as a third of that figure and many of those are recent arrivals from Eastern Europe.

Jews once thrived in the Middle East, playing critical roles such as serving caliphs and sultans as advisers and physicians. But after Israel’s independence, more than 860,000 fled from the Middle East and North Africa. Roughly 40 to 45 per cent of Israel’s population are Mizrahi Jews, largely descended from the Middle East and North Africa. Even North America, where over 70 per cent of the Jewish diaspora now resides, experiences at best mild demographic growth among Jews, due largely to immigration from South Africa, Iran, Russia and the Middle East. But these sources are starting to fade, as diaspora communities disappear. Israel now attracts the vast majority of Jewish migrants from across the world.

The new anti-Semitism

The 7 October attack exacerbated and unleashed a pre-existing, pervasive hostility to Jews and Israel. Even before the Hamas pogrom, 90 per cent of European Jews believed anti-Semitism was growing, while 30 per cent reported experiencing harassment. Only some of this could be attributed to rising ultra-rightist movements in Russia, Poland, Belgium and parts of Germany. Dislike of Jews in Germany, for example, is sadly widespread. More than 40 per cent of Germans think Jews ‘talk about the Holocaust too much’. And only slightly more than half of Europeans believe in Israel’s right to exist.

Increasingly, the primary driver of this new anti-Semitism comes from Muslim migrants. A detailed survey from the University of Oslo found that in Scandinavia, Germany, Britain and France, most anti-Semitic violence comes from Muslims, including recent immigrants. Similarly, a poll of European Jews found the majority of incidents of anti-Semitism came from either Muslims or from the left; barely 13 per cent traced it to the far right. Violence against Jews is worst in places like the migrant-dominated suburbs of Paris or Malmo in Sweden.

Even in North America, where Muslim populations are relatively smaller, but growing, anti-Semitism is rising. Recent surveys suggest that 60 per cent of all Jews also feel unsafe, and some even hide their Jewish identity. The tension is felt particularly in elite universities. Jews were once a dominant presence within academia. Between 1901 and 2022, Jews accounted for well over a fifth of all Nobel Prize winners, despite comprising just 0.2 per cent of the global population. But now they are finding themselves under attack from faculty and students at universities often sponsored by Middle Eastern plutocrats.

Some of these faculty and students have been planning a ‘Week of Rage’ on campuses to mark the anniversary of 7 October. It won’t be pretty. The University of Toronto’s student union voted to restrict the sale of kosher food. Professors and students at elite Ivy schools like Harvard openly celebrated Hamas’s pogrom, and one Cornell University professor even referred to it as ‘exhilarating’. Little wonder that the Jewish presence at Ivy League schools has declined. At Harvard, it has dropped from roughly one quarter in the 1920s to less than 10 per cent today. The Ivies are becoming more Judenrein.

The pervasive anti-Semitism is obvious to all but the most deluded. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley school of law and a well-known progressive, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that ‘nothing has prepared me for the anti-Semitism’ now clearly evident at Berkeley and other campuses. Jay Sures, a member of the University of California board of regents, responded to a statement released by his university’s ethnic-studies faculty council complaining about the regents’ condemnation of the Hamas attacks, pointing out it was full of ‘falsehoods, inaccuracies and anti-Semitic innuendos’. He said that it sought to ‘legitimise and defend the horrific savagery of the Hamas massacre of 7 October’. When the president of the University of California, Michael Drake, suggested more balanced teaching about the Middle East conflict last November, 150 professors urged him to ‘rescind’ his proposal.

More worrisome still has been attempts by teachers unions to impose a so-called ethnic-studies programme. California’s ethnic-studies programme, shaped by critical race theory, is openly anti-Zionist and largely dismisses Jews as white oppressors and Israel as a cruel colonialist power. In Toronto, children as young as eight were ‘compelled’ to attend anti-Israel rallies at the behest of their progressive teachers.

A changing political dynamic

The fallout from 7 October has revealed the growing power of an ascendant alliance of Islamists and left-wing activists. This is part of a larger Kulturkampf being waged against Western civilisation. If Hitler saw the Jews as dangerous outsiders to European culture, the left today blames them for being too linked to Western values. Persecuted for millennia as Asiatic outsiders, they now are regarded as oppressive examples of detested white supremacy.

This has caused some whiplash, particularly among left-of-centre Jews. For much of the past century, Jews played important roles backing social-justice causes, famously the African-American drive for civil rights. Much the same was true in Europe, with Jews traditionally backing Labour in Britain, Socialists in France and the Liberals in Canada. As the campaign against Zionist-led ‘genocide’ has grown, left-of-centre politicians have become ever more tepid in their support for the Jewish State. Green parties, in particular, tend to support the BDS movement, which aims to demonise and eliminate the Jewish State.

Not surprisingly, Jewish voters have headed more to the right, even to the point of supporting Marine Le Pen in France, while gradually moving towards the Canadian Conservative Party and US Republicans. Recent polls show Harris ahead of Trump among Jewish voters, but by a far smaller margin than has been the case historically. If the Republicans had nominated a sane human being, Jews would likely vote in droves against Kamala Harris, who is surrounded by advisers hostile to the Jewish state.

Over time, it’s highly likely that the Democratic Party, despite the resistance of figures like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, will become ever more anti-Israel. The nine congresspeople who voted against supporting Israel in the immediate aftermath of the 7 October pogrom were all Democrats. Hamas supporters even succeeded in partially shutting down the California Democratic Party convention this year. In contrast, the strongest support for Israel now comes from Republicans.

Yet it seems like American Jews are not quite ready to jump ship en masse. Instead, some Jewish Democrats have waged targeted campaigns against the most radical anti-Zionists in Congress. By pouring funds into selected races, they have succeeded in eliminating two members of ‘the Squad’ – Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush – and have been active as well at the more local level.

From ascendancy to self-defence

In the longer run, these triumphs could prove to be fleeting. One in five younger Americans believes the Holocaust is a myth, while half think Israel should be ‘ended’ and handed to Palestinians. Particularly troubling is the influence of social media. According to Pew, about one in three Latino teenagers says they are ‘constantly’ on the largely pro-Hamas, CCP-controlled TikTok. Overall, in the US, a country where most still support Israel and express positive views of Jews, blacks, Latinos and even Asians express more negative sentiments, particularly among the younger generations.

These tensions make life difficult even in cities historically friendly to Jews. In southern California, where I live, pro-Hamas demonstrations have forced at least one local synagogue to relocate its services, others have been vandalised, while demonstrators halted traffic in the traditionally Jewish Fairfax District. The home owned by Michael Tuchin, president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), was recently attacked with smoke bombs and spattered with fake blood. Jews in London, Paris, Berlin, Brooklyn and San Francisco have experienced similar attacks.

Progressive, anti-Zionist Jews are a diminishing force and have little future. They now make up roughly 10 to 15 per cent of the campus Jewish population, according to Hersh’s research. Indeed, for many Jews, 7 October spelled the demise of the whole logic of progressive Judaism – the ‘heal the world’ mantra of Reform and liberal Jews. Such heady notions lose their lustre when Jews’ very survival is at stake. Ultimately, Hersh suggests that most anti-Zionist students, being from secular backgrounds and disproportionately ‘nonbinary’, are unlikely to remain deeply attached to the broader community or produce much of the next generation.

Orthodox Jews already largely segregate themselves in selected neighbourhoods and send their children to religious schools. One recent study suggests that, as a percentage of the American Jewish diaspora, the Orthodox community will likely more than double in size by 2063 – reflecting the below-replacement birth rates among non-Orthodox American Jews. On college campuses it’s the Orthodox Chabad, the ministry of the Lubavitcher movement, that is most present.

Of course, most Jews may remain Reform or non-aligned. But in the current circumstance, even left-of-centre Jews cannot be too picky about allies, such as Christian evangelicals or Hindu fundamentalists, who have generally supported Israel and a Jewish presence in the West.

Author Joseph Epstein suggests that the time has come for Jews to practise some ‘self-segregation’, much as in the past. This new inward-looking turn can be seen in the growth of groups like Hatzolah, which provides free security and emergency services in heavily Jewish parts of New York and Los Angeles. Some of the volunteers come from the ranks of the US military as well as the Israel Defence Forces. Throughout the diaspora, Jewish schools and institutions are paying for elaborate security systems.

Jewish geography is also changing. In a remarkable shift, Jewish students are beginning to migrate away from big cities, ditching Ivy League colleges and their equivalents for more tolerant schools in, of all places, the deep South, which tends to be less hostile to Israel and Jews in general. An exodus of Jewish talent and genius – not yet extinct – could now benefit these red states much as America benefited from the Nazi-induced migrations in the 1930s.

Although some Jews, facing a harsh environment, will choose to hide their identity, there are signs that many are coming together across sectarian lines. On some campuses, such as mine at Chapman University and my daughter’s at ultra-leftist Sarah Lawrence College, students – both Orthodox and Reform – are collaborating to present Israel’s side of the story, and to defend their rights on campus.

This is the new reality of a Jewish community that is both more assertive and less progressive. At a time when the diaspora’s glory days have passed, a shift to pragmatic politics and self-defence has become urgent. It marks a return to attitudes and approaches that have allowed for Jewish survival for the past three millenia.

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.