Foer and Against

In 1948, the American Jewish scholar Simon Rawidowicz published a text later translated into English as Israel: the Ever-Dying People in which he noted that throughout history Jews had seen themselves as “a being constantly on the verge of ceasing to be, of disappearing.” Their remarkable endurance throughout the centuries was a matter of historical record, and yet it had been accompanied by the constant invocation of imminent extinction. This kind of pessimism, he cautioned, was no more accurate a guide to the future than its obverse: “optimism and pessimism are only expressions or indications of our fears, doubts, hopes and desires.” What he recommended instead was a “dynamic Jewish realism” that saw things whole.¹

There has been little indication since then of anyone heeding his call. It is too tempting, it seems, to scan the heavens or, more typically, to gaze into the abyss: the literature on the state of the Jewish people remains by and large one long exercise in communal existentialism. Odd though it may seem, given the overwhelmingly positive experience immigration to the USA proved to offer Jews, this is true for studies of American Jewry in particular. In the second half of the twentieth century, as social scientific research into American Jews became a growth industry whose findings were published by communal organizations or academic journals, commentators seesawed endlessly between euphoria and pessimism. In 1985 the historian Henry Feingold, a key figure in the establishment of Jewish Studies as an academic field in the US, wrote of the contrast in scholarly perceptions of the future of the community: “Some may think American Jewry is threatened by a raging antisemitism while others see it drowning in a sea of perfume exuded by a society anxious to absorb it.” What these opposing views shared was a version of social science as threat level risk assessment that purported neutrality but in fact guaranteed to get the blood racing. Debating the optimists at about that time, political scientist Charles Liebman warned of “a grim outlook” for American Jews. Forty years later, his antagonist in that particular bout had come round to his corner: owning up to what he now regarded as his former complacency, Steven Cohen saw a “disturbing picture” and in his turn criticized the deniers of decline who insisted that change was coming that would “make American Jewry great again.”²

The articles and position papers from which these extracts are culled are not the sort of material I usually spend time with and to be frank I find it difficult to read too many of them. Replete with graphs, statistical surveys and opinion polls, and written in the quasi-scientific mode of mainstream American political science, they use concepts such as “Jewish life” and “Jewish meaning” whose sense—at least to me—is anything but obvious. But this endless doomsday litany, for whom optimism is always a thing of the past, with despair just round the corner, is by no means finished. In March a recent journalistic contribution to the genre by Franklin Foer entitled “The Golden Age of American Jewry is Ending,” appeared in The Atlantic. Weaving a strand of contemporary America’s gossipy social media craziness into its tapestry of apocalyptic dread, it otherwise conforms to the optimism/pessimism dichotomy identified by Rawidowicz decades ago. Foer’s prognostication of a rising tide of antisemitism is premised upon his evocation of a vanished Amero-Jewish Golden Age—placed somewhere in his boyhood years—when Bellow, Mailer and Roth were in their prime, and Israeli soldiers came across as really cool. But how Golden was that era truly and is the situation now as dire for American Jews as he paints it?

Foer opens his essay with the panic last October felt by some Jewish parents in California, fearful for the safety of their children as teachers and pupils in their public schools stage a series of pro-Palestinian events. Setting stories of hurtful antisemitic jibes against a backdrop of teach-ins and walk-outs that appear to be designed, in Foer’s words, “to mold students into advocates for a maximalist vision of Palestine,” the article heralds the appearance of a new form of antisemitism. Distinct from the more familiar conspiracy theorizing of the extreme right that returned in force after the Trump 2016 victory, this is—Foer tells us—an antisemitism of the progressive left, a tale of political correctness gone rogue.

Rebutting the charge that this is simply a misreading of a shift in public sentiment towards a stance that more sympathetic to Palestinian national aspirations and more openly critical of Israel, Foer equates what he called “intense outbreaks of anti-Zionist harassment” with antisemitism. How does this critique of Israel differ from the reservations of critical Jews like him? According to him: “whatever criticism American Jews leveled against Israel was born of love.” To which one wants to respond: “What’s love got to do with it?”

A sea of emotions courses through this account and the one Foer wants to talk about is not love but its opposite: if American Jews “love” Israel and see it as key to their ‘’Jewish identity,” the new protesters he believes hate it, driven by an irrational anger that Jews should have a state of their own (thereby also suggesting perhaps that American Jews opposed to a Jewish state are by definition self-hating). And yet, it seems to me that Israeli policies against Palestinians may well engender deep anger without implying hatred against Jews. It is here—in the conflation of antisemitism with what we will have, for the sake of brevity, to call anti-Zionism—that a key conceptual battle is being waged.

In the activism now common across American schools, a kind of broad social justice agenda has indeed been focused on sensitizing students to oppression at home and abroad and encouraging them to fight it. On the whole this has had both good and bad consequences, and it is certainly producing a generation keenly conscious of the world’s inequities. Among these they see Palestine and above all, since late October, the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. One may find this striking, even strange: and yet that is no reason to discount their concern or to write it off as irrational. What is true is they may not see antisemitism as something to be as careful about as they should perhaps because they do not see American Jews, or Jews worldwide, as in need of the protections other minorities require. One can easily see how Jewish students, especially those brought up with the conventional attachment to Israel, might feel threatened especially if they felt the concern and solicitude normally extended to other ethnic and minority groups were not being shown them. Antisemitic slurs are no doubt thrown about, along with all the other discriminatory slurs to be found in the playground and in social media. They are by definition hurtful and may sometimes come across as threatening. The answer to all this, alongside implementing protocols that currently exist to respond to real threats, may well be better education. But then many groups and not only Jews will have had cause to wish for this for decades.

Foer is struck that in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas massacres some commentators failed to express sympathy for the Israeli victims. And yet I do recall widespread expressions of sympathy for Israel’s victims as we learned of the grisly carnage of that day and I suspect that had the IDF not gone into Gaza in the way it did, this sympathy might not have been overlaid so quickly by outrage at a sustained and indiscriminate assault which had all the resources of one of the world’s best-equipped armies behind it. My own impression is that many commentators have in fact had no difficulty in acknowledging the suffering on both sides. Partisanship can go both ways and Foer’s decision to focus on the massacres of October 7 and on the supposedly inadequate response to them, comes across as a refusal to engage with what has been going on in Gaza and in the other occupied territories. But he is certainly not the only one to demand this kind of unqualified recognition of his side’s suffering. “Context me no contexts” wrote Simon Schama in the FT on October 13, as if to bar any effort to try to comprehend the atrocities in the light of Israeli occupation policies.³

Public debate over events since October 7 has thus become a contest over who is allowed to say what and whose suffering comes first. But behind all this is another contest—that between those who say the meanings of terms are straightforward and those who acknowledge their ambiguity. The slogan ‘Free Palestine’, for instance, has been described by some as calling for the annihilation of the Jews and hence genocidal in intent and antisemitic. But in reality it can mean several quite different things. One might be the vision of a free Palestine in the occupied territories alongside an Israel that has returned to the pre-1967 borders: this is in fact the two-state solution the international community advocates. Another might be referring to a single state in which Arabs and Jews live together, which would mean the end of a Jewish majoritarian state but is hardly genocidal. And a third connotes a single state under Palestinian control with few if any Jewish inhabitants thus effectively spelling the end of Jewish life in the region. These are three distinct scenarios and when we hear protestors chanting this, we do not in fact know which of these they mean. Some of them may not know either.

There is ambiguity in Foer’s article too. He says for instance he does not want to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism, but his argument scarcely bears him out. At first he seems to regard the one-state solution, such as was once espoused by Tony Judt and others, as falling on the right side of the line. At the same time, he warns that contemporary anti-Zionism desires the elimination of the world’s only Jewish-majority nation and sees this as standing in ‘the lineage of attempts to erase Jewry.’ We are left unclear whether anti-Zionism is necessarily antisemitic or not. But while Foer remains on the fence, others quite clearly wish to rule out any criticism of Israel at all. Israel they see as so much part of Jewish identity that you cannot separate them. Their stance is revealing. Unlike in the past, mostly what we are now talking about when we talk about antisemitism is, in one way or another, about Israel.

Before 1945, antisemitism was originally and primarily a European problem, one that chiefly concerned the place of Jews in the states in which they found themselves. Today what we find ourselves debating is something else entirely: the place of Israel in the world, its character and its actions. Israel’s relationship with American Jews and with the USA more generally is at the heart of this for the ties could scarcely be closer. For one thing, between them the USA and Israel account today for over 80% of the world’s Jewish population. For another, Israel receives the lion’s share of American overseas military aid and it is dependent upon American support in a way it was not, say, in the 1950s. American Jews, who overwhelmingly espouse some degree of emotional identification with Israel, have been vital elements in the health of this special relationship. In recent years, however, polls show a growing willingness on the part of the younger generation to be critical of Israeli actions—in much the same way as younger Americans in general do too. It is these trends that form the backdrop to Foer’s sense of imminent gloom.

Turning 50 and having grown up, in his words ‘at the apex of the Golden Age’, Foer finds the prospect ahead alarming. He remembers another time, in which being Jewish was an unquestioned source of pride, and so was Israel. Everyone it seemed read Anne Frank’s diary at school and watched Seinfeld at home. It was the era when Barbra Streisand performed on The Stars Salute Israel on primetime and antisemitism ceased to be socially acceptable, Jewish artists shaped American culture and, not least, “Jews in America embraced Israel.” This is the world he has lost.

However nostalgia can be misleading. For one thing, Foer’s lament for a lost liberalism slights, as so much political commentary on American Jewry does these days, the important role of the left in Jewish life well into the postwar era. Second, it ignores the intense internecine struggles that took place between American Jewish groups in those very years: there was plenty of gloom as analysts worried in particular about what they called ‘the declining middle’ of American Jewry as they saw the population splitting between an increasingly Orthodox grouping on the one hand, and a non-observant group often marrying out, on the other.

Above all, Foer omits the changing context of American-Israeli relations. Long after the 1967 war, the image persisted in Western culture of Israel as the valiant underdog, brave and surrounded, threatened by its dastardly neighbors, a little oasis of Europe in a desert of barbarism. This image was reinforced by the 1972 Munich massacre, the 1973 war and not least the dramatic footage of the Entebbe raid, promptly immortalized in three films. The country’s image as a constructive partner for peace was enhanced by its withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and by the Camp David accords. But things began to change with the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the Sabra and Chatila massacres, the era of Likud dominance and the consequent rapid expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and elsewhere. It was in these years that AIPAC rose to become the predominant pro-Israel lobbying organization in Washington, pushing a more extreme line than its more genteel predecessors had done. It was in those years too, as historian Peter Novick has charted in The Holocaust in American Life, that the wartime genocide of European Jewry became a central trope of Western culture, temporarily guaranteeing the Jews a kind of unassailable victimhood. Victims and yet strong: it was a heady combination, and one which Foer remembers fondly.

The truth is that Foer’s so-called Golden Age of American Jewry was too good to last. At home, other groups laid claim to their place—with far greater plausibility so far as American history was concerned—in the struggle for victim status. Why, African Americans reasonably asked, was a Holocaust museum built in Washington before there had been any comparable national memorialization of slavery? Why this sense that the Final Solution had been turned into a mass death standard against which all other instances of suffering could be found wanting? Academic debate moved on: the Holocaust of the historians ceased to be a story of unique suffering beyond compare and turned instead into a means of contemplating—and understanding—other genocides past and present. A new generation was born with no memory of the Six-Day War but saw the rise of an extreme pro-settler movement in Israel whose scorn for the Palestinians was palpable. The stage was set for a country, and a generation, both Jewish and not, more willing than their parents to see Israel as something other than a victim or a beacon of hope. The more repressive Israeli policies became in the territories, and the more obvious it seemed that its rightwing administrations were doing what they could to make a two-state solution impossible, the more international support dropped away.

One thing this article does articulate with eloquence is the discomfort that many older American Jews feel on hearing Zionism singled out as a problem. But the other—which is even more fundamental—is the difficulty they have in seeing the other side of all this—that is to say, the existence of a suffering Palestinian people, and a political goal called Palestinian independence, as something worthy of real attention at all. Rawidowicz was right: pessoptimism (to use writer Emile Habibi’s pithy term) gets in the way of understanding what is happening. Today the old appeal to Jewish extinction functions as a means of refusing to see what Israel has now become—which is to say, a state very different from that which arose in 1948 or which existed in 1967, a state which has now run a military occupation of escalating harshness for more than half a century culminating in the unprecedently punitive devastation of Gaza. As Foer’s article shows, there are rhetorical devices available for warding off the recognition of this. But much of the world, and an increasing proportion of public opinion in the US, refuses the refusal. It mourns the Israeli dead and the Palestinian dead too. And it insists that you still then have to answer the question of what sort of government continues in this way and what kind of government supports it. To demand that something be done may, for many younger Americans, be simply a moral imperative and have nothing to do with antisemitism. Generational shifts are always hard to navigate, not least when accompanied by existentialist anxieties. But this one exists and constantly invoking the mantra of antisemitism will probably not change it. What is more likely over time is that the term will be emptied of its original meaning. And who exactly will that serve?

1. Simon Rawidowicz, ‘Israel: the Ever-Dying People’, Judaism, 16:4 (Fall, 1967), 423-433 ↩︎
2. Henry L. Feingold, ‘Finding a conceptual framework for the study of American antisemitism’, Jewish Social Studies, 47:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1985), 313-326; S. M. Cohen and C. S. Liebman, ‘The quality of American Jewish life’, American Jewish Year Book, 118, (2018), 3-49 ↩︎
3. Simon Schama, ‘Let us be, to grieve, rage, weep,’ Financial Times, October 13. ↩︎