RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/anti-semitism-is-a-national-security-threat

Here’s a partial summary of what it was like to be Jewish in America this past month.

In Los Angeles, an elderly Jewish man was struck on the head by a pro-Hamas protester and later died of his wounds. In New Orleans, a Jewish student who tried to stop a classmate from burning an Israeli flag was attacked and had his nose broken. In Manhattan, a Jewish woman was assaulted and sustained injuries to her face and neck after she confronted two passersby tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli citizens. The list goes on.

How should we think about these attacks?

We could see them as further proof of our political culture’s descent into incivility and rage. We could note that they’ve been made possible, at least in part, by a movement to defang our police and turn our largest cities into ungovernable danger zones. We could say that the $4.7 billion in Qatari cash that poured into American universities between 2001 and 2021 might have helped transform our formerly fine institutions of higher learning into breeding grounds for feverish, bigoted ideology.

Each of the above is true as far as it goes. Ultimately, anti-Semitism animated these attacks. And anti-Semitism is not only a threat to Jews but also to America’s national security.

Look only at spreadsheets, and the statement seems absurd. The number of American Jews murdered in domestic terror attacks is blissfully low, and the perpetrators, for the most part, are white supremacists, not ISIS enthusiasts. But take a deeper dive, and a more troubling picture emerges. Because if the past ten years—to say nothing of the past 2,000—taught us anything, it’s that what begins with the Jews soon metastasizes, and that agitation about events unfurling thousands of miles away has a nasty way of bubbling over and spilling into American backyards.

Consider Tashfeen Malik, who, together with her husband, killed 14 people at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California in 2015. Or Mohamed Barry, who, a year later, slashed four diners at an Ohio restaurant with a machete. Or Omar Mateen, who in 2016 killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Or Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose explosive devices claimed three lives and wounded 281 people at the 2013 Boston Marathon. Or Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, who, on Halloween 2017, rented a truck in New Jersey, drove it to lower Manhattan, and used it to mow down pedestrians in Hudson River Park, killing eight.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-paradox-of-jewish-liberalism

After the October 7 terrorist attack, many American Jews have stomached two shocks: the shock of Hamas’s brutality, and the shock of their putative political allies’ support for the brutes. Liberal Jews are not only horrified by campus chants of “there is only one solution: Intifada, revolution.” They are also surprised.

Less surprised are those of us among the one in six American Jews who are conservatives. The anti-Semitic elements of the American Left, from funders to campus activists, have been obvious for years, even decades. It is at turns refreshing and off-putting, therefore, to see other Jews wake up to what we already knew.

At this moment, Jewish conservatives should resist any compulsion to tell their liberal brethren “I told you so.” This is an opportunity, rather, for making hard truths plain. Many American Jews are liberals out of a profound, identity-level connection between their Judaism and their liberalism—a connection that developed alongside Jewish-American identity. It is this association that consistently blinds them to the anti-Semitism of others on the left; only by unearthing this tension can they overcome it.

American Jews, it should be emphasized, are remarkably liberal. In Pew’s 2020 survey of Jews, 71 percent identified as Democrats, versus 26 percent as Republicans. Half of Jews describe themselves as “liberal” compared with 16 percent “conservative” and the remainder “moderate.” By these proportions, Jews are more Democratic than Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims; they are more liberal than blacks. Jews are also more Democratic than those who earn as much as the average Jewish household does. As Milton Himmelfarb, the longtime research director of the American Jewish Committee, famously put it, “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.”

Most Jews, in fact, express their Jewish identity through liberal values. Asked by Pew which aspects of Judaism were “essential” to what it means to be Jewish, Orthodox Jews said leading an ethical and moral life, observing Jewish law, and continuing family traditions—all of which are, if not the same, then highly related for observant Jews. For the non-Orthodox, though, the top slots went to remembering the Holocaust, leading an ethical and moral life, working for justice and equality, and being intellectually curious. These last two, especially, identify Judaism with liberal values of intellectual independence and commitment to social justice.

This association between Judaism and liberalism is not new. Since Jews first immigrated to the United States, they have articulated their identity in the language of liberalism. Indeed, Jewish ethnogenesis—the process by which Jews became Jewish-Americans—has often entailed making Judaism synonymous with progressivism.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-shock-of-facing-american-anti-semitism-00acc234?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

It’s a long story how I came to be standing some years ago in Archbishop’s Palace in Naples alongside six Italian-Americans from New York—four academics, a monsignor, and a New York Supreme Court judge—to meet with the cardinal. Each of the others kissed his ring as he went down the line. I, at the end, turned his hand vertically and shook it. His eyes widened. Someone explained that I was Jewish, which delighted him, and for the next hour he directed all his answers to me, regardless of who had posed the questions.

Outside afterward one of the academics asked why I didn’t kiss the cardinal’s ring. Before I could explain that we kiss liturgical objects, not men, the judge shouted: “They only kiss a—.”

They.

Two of the others physically restrained me from drop-kicking his family jewels into the Bay of Naples. I was in my 40s, and this was my first authentic, unambiguous anti-Semitic comment from the mouth of another American.

I assumed that it was a one-off and rarely thought of the judge for years. But now I can’t stop thinking about him—that is, how much company he has and apparently always did. How could I have missed that? How had we all?

There isn’t an American Jew I know whose worldview wasn’t trampled by the anti-Semitism that has been displayed in this country with such fervor and pride since the barbaric attacks in Israel on Oct. 7. Millions more Americans than we ever imagined consider us less than human and would like to see us dead. That’s a lot to deal with so suddenly and unexpectedly.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/jews-get-kicked-out-of-the-progressive-club/

To sustain the alliance between leftists and Islamists, something had to give. And that something was Jews.

After a while, it became a parody worthy of classic comedy skits: the Biden administration’s reflexive need to launch into a condemnation of “Islamophobia” every time the discomfiting topic of antisemitism came up — which, you may have noticed, it does quite a bit these days.

Progressives hate antisemitism. Not, unfortunately, the concept . . . the word. It holds a mirror up to their internal contradictions.

Jews have been among the most consequential, cutting-edge progressives in history. A few months back, I reviewed Democratic Justice, Brad Snyder’s biography of Felix Frankfurter, who may have been as responsible for forging the dominance of American progressivism as Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president he zealously served. Alas, Frankfurter would not be welcome today in what’s become of his movement — not least because of another project on which he collaborated with his mentor and fellow Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis: Zionism. That project is anathema to today’s progressives. It honors the old order and the uniqueness of a people reified in their ancestral homeland, one in which they dwelled for millennia — before Islam existed and, 14 centuries later, the notion of “Palestinians” was conceived.

Moreover, to highlight antisemitism is intolerably inconvenient to the collaboration of highest priority for modern progressives: Their partnership with sharia supremacists — so-called Islamists, adherents to “political Islam.”