(JEWISH GROUP) Franklin Foer on How Anti-Semitism Threatens to End a Golden Era for Jewish Americans

[Behind the Aegis]

The Atlantic’s April Cover Story: Franklin Foer on How Anti-Semitism Threatens to End a Golden Era for Jewish Americans



For The Atlantic’s April cover story, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” staff writer Franklin Foer reports on how the rise of anti-Semitism on both the right and the left threatens to end an era of unprecedented safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans, one that spanned the latter part of the 20th century. Foer argues that, with the first decades of the 21st century marked by conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, the liberal order that Jewish Americans helped establish, rooted in values of tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism, is being demolished.

The rise of anti-Semitism on the political right is well documented, with Donald Trump attracting the allegiance of white supremacists and freely borrowing their tropes. Foer reports from the Bay Area on the anti-Semitism that has spread on the American left since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. He writes that the brand of anti-Zionism adopted in some corners of the contemporary left “doesn’t stop with calls for an end to the occupation of the West Bank. It espouses a blithe desire to eliminate the world’s only Jewish-majority nation, valorizes the homicidal campaign against its existence, and seeks to hold members of the Jewish diaspora to account for the sins of a country they don’t live in and for a government they didn’t elect. In so doing, this faction of the left places itself in the terrible lineage of attempts to erase Jewry—and, in turn, stirs ancient and not-so-ancient existential fears.”

Foer explores how these ascendant political movements on both sides of the political spectrum are dispensing with the ideals of tolerance and pluralism, and replacing them with intolerance and even violence. Foer writes, “Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good for Jews. And what’s bad for Jews, it can be argued, is bad for America.”

Foer’s article describes in detail the golden age that Jewish writers, filmmakers, musicians, and intellectuals helped create after World War II: “As anti-Semitism faded, American Jewish civilization exploded in a rush of creativity. For a time, the great Jewish novel—books by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Bernard Malamud, inflected with Yiddish and references to pickled herring—was the great American novel. Under the influence of Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Elaine May, Gilda Radner, Woody Allen, and many others, American comedy appropriated the Jewish joke, and the ironic sensibility contained within, as its own.” Foer writes that Jews created new genres of Americana and in turn remade America’s image of itself, with “the folk revival popularized by Bob Dylan, Art Garfunkel, and Paul Simon; the movies mythologizing the decency of the American Everyman produced by David O. Selznick, Louis B. Mayer, and Jack Warner.”

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I haven't read The Atlantic article because I don't have a subscription and can't get around the paywall. Anyone read it?

[mountain grammy]

1. Hope this works. I'm a subscriber

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/us-anti-semitism-jewish-american-safety/677469/

[Mosby]

2. Its a long piece

Here's part of chapter 2

During Hanukkah, a menorah sponsored by Chabad Oakland and perched on the shore of Lake Merritt, in the center of the city, was torn apart by its branches and hurled into the water, replaced by graffiti reading your org is dying, we’re gonna find you, you’re on fucking alert. Oakland Public Works quickly painted over the message and other anti-Semitic graffiti. But when I walked the trail around the lake several weeks after Hanukkah, I found a weathered metal box, built to display a work of public art. On its side was a laminated message titled “The World We Wish to See.” What followed was a lyrical vision of liberation that imagined a future in which “all beings are treated with dignity.” But whatever display had once existed in the box had been removed. What was left were the etched words zionist killer.

In the hatred that I witnessed in the Bay Area, and that has been evident on college campuses and in progressive activist circles nationwide, I’ve come to see left-wing anti-Semitism as characterized by many of the same violent delusions as the right-wing strain. This is not an accident of history. Though right- and left-wing anti-Semitism may have emerged in different ways, for different reasons, both are essentially attacks on an ideal that once dominated American politics, an ideal that American Jews championed and, in an important sense, co-authored. Over the course of the 20th century, Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism. They embraced this brand of liberalism because it was good for America—and good for the Jews. It was their fervent hope that liberalism would inoculate America against the world’s oldest hatred.

For several generations, it worked. Liberalism helped unleash a Golden Age of American Jewry, an unprecedented period of safety, prosperity, and political influence. Jews, who had once been excluded from the American establishment, became full-fledged members of it. And remarkably, they achieved power by and large without having to abandon their identity. In faculty lounges and television writers’ rooms, in small magazines and big publishing houses, they infused the wider culture with that identity. Their anxieties became American anxieties. Their dreams became American dreams.

But that era is drawing to a close. America’s ascendant political movements—MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other—would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish. They regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams. The Golden Age of American Jewry has given way to a golden age of conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, all tendencies inimical to the democratic temperament. Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good for Jews. And what’s bad for Jews, it can be argued, is bad for America.

[mountain grammy]

4. Over an hour read

Scary facts in there.

[Basic LA]

3. Haven't received that issue yet.

Can't wait to read it, from your excerpt/description. I'm glad that it mentions Sid Ceasar in that golden age of comedy. American culture is Jewish culture to a wonderful degree.