(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)
.
American Jews are dealing with the reality of distressing Jew hatred, manifested by sporadic physical attacks and more prevalent verbal confrontations. Worse, it has become mainstreamed in the Democratic Party, with elected officials and prominent nominees unafraid to spew hatred against Jews poorly disguised as anti-Israel “activism.” Some of these Democrats are poor excuse for Jews, such as Bernie Sanders, while others, like Chuck Schumer, are so blinded by ambition that they pretend it doesn’t exist or rationalize its presence by blaming Israel.
Increasingly, this is becoming a viral strain in the Republican Party as well, engendering an insipid debate over who is or isn’t an anti-Semite, and ignoring its true causes. Why, indeed, has Jew hatred exploded in America and become commonplace across the world? Is it because of Gaza, as if Israel should have just accepted the October 7 massacre and the brutalization of its hostages, licked its wounds, and prepared for the promised, next massacre? Is it because the world has suddenly determined that Israel – alone among countries and Jews unique among nationalities – really has no right to exist? Burundi and Bhutan have an undisputed right to exist – but not the Jewish state of Israel?
That doesn’t seem credible, and for the apparently abrupt escalation in Jew hatred we must look elsewhere. As is often the case, history is quite instructive.
The United States was founded upon religious tolerance. Indeed, there were very few Jews living in colonial America (not many more than 1000 Jews lived there during the Revolutionary War), and Jews were treated well – better than well. In President George Washington’s famous letter to the Newport Hebrew Congregation in 1790, using language literally borrowed from Moses Seixas, Washington wrote: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” Tolerance? No. Jews are no different than any other group in America and are not “tolerated” but fully accepted.
As such, Jew hatred was largely unknown for almost the first century of the United States. Sure, there were some states that took time eliminating electoral provisions that barred any non-Christians (i.e., Jews) from holding public office, and General Ulysses Grant temporarily banned all Jews from entering the Tennessee territory during the Civil War, but there were few recorded attacks on Jews and Jews lived essentially unimpeded lives.
Could this be attributable to the dearth of Jews in America? Possibly, but not necessarily. There are plenty of Jew-hating countries in the world today where no Jews live. Jew hatred can flourish without Jews, as long as there are a sufficient number of Gentiles reared with this spiritual and psychological malady.
Even the large influx of German Jews to the United States in the mid-19th century did not provoke any Jew hatred, perhaps because they were generally assimilated, their temples and services reminiscent of churches, their day of rest not Shabbat but Sunday, and their intense desire to blend into American life, which they did quite successfully. In fact, there was far more fear and hatred of Catholics in 19th century America than there was of Jews.
Of the 300,000 Jews who lived in the United States in 1880, more than 200,000 were German Jews. But in the next forty years, more than two million European Jews came to America, such that by 1920, the Jewish population of the United States had increased tenfold, to over 3,500,000 people.
By the early 20th century, Jew hatred had become more common in the United States. Leo Frank was falsely accused of murder, freed, and then lynched. A host of Jewish “defense” organizations arose (they all still exist). Jews were hassled on the teeming city streets. But the 1920’s university quotas and job restrictions limiting Jewish opportunities became standard and even persisted into the 1950’s when civil rights laws cracked down on private conduct that had any public nexus.
What changed? Was it the mass influx of Jews that attracted Jew hatred?
No – it was the mass influx of European Gentiles. While two million Jewish immigrants came to America in that period, that number was dwarfed by the more than twenty million Gentiles who came – Poles, Germans, Russians, Italians, Irish, Slavs, and others. These immigrants, arriving from lands where they imbibed Jew hatred with their mother’s milk, brought their Jew hatred with them.
Jew hatred was never indigenous to the United States. It was imported, along with these millions of immigrants. Some of it was religious based – Polish, Irish, Italian Catholics reared on Jew hatred in their native lands – and some of it was sociologically based. Some of these newcomers, the lowest tier on society’s totem pole, simply sought out an ethnic group long despised in their native land, and disparaged them, persecuted them, and harassed them.
In a very short time, this imported Jew hatred spread to the establishment as well, and Jews (and blacks) became conventional targets for discrimination. For Jews it didn’t last or even sting as much because we were successful, skilled at adaptation, ambitious, educated, social climbers, and blessed. Law firms, hospitals, and country clubs didn’t want us? We just made our own, and better ones too. And built businesses. And Hollywood. In time, and the Holocaust played a role in this as well, Jew hatred receded from American life (although you wouldn’t know it from the billions of dollars spent for many decades combating it) and became unfashionable.
Jew hatred is again fashionable, and not because the culture changed, or Israel became too bellicose, or Netanyahu is unlikeable, or Jews are too successful. The same dynamic that swept America over a century ago has repeated itself in the last thirty years – the large influx of Muslims, especially radical Muslims, who have brought with them the endemic Jew hatred that characterizes their native lands.
Millions of Arabs and Muslims have immigrated to the United States in the last fifty years, many claiming refugee status because of the depraved conditions in their countries of origin. To be sure, not every Arab or Muslim is a rabid Jew hater (any more than all of the twenty million European Christians who came to the US were), and many have become productive citizens, embodying the American ethos. But many have not.
Armed with literal fortunes in money – donated by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Muslim countries – they have poisoned the American bloodstream with their radical ideas, even insisting in some locales on the implementation of Sharia law. They have infiltrated local school boards and endowed university chairs, not surprising then that most Jew hatred in America has emerged on college campuses. Their culture is one of hatred of Jews and Israel, if not America itself. And it did not take long for some of their most radical imports – immigrants or children of immigrants, like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Zohran Mamdani, and others – to achieve important political positions.
They did it very slyly, cleverly, and surreptitiously. Who would have thought that a radical Muslim NYC mayor could preside next month over the 25th anniversary of the Arab terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001? It is because their PR teams and useful idiots in the media immediately identified the major crisis in US life after 9/11 as “Islamophobia,” statistically insignificant as a social phenomenon but dominant and pervasive as a deflection. What better evidence than the universal hesitation to characterize the attacks of 9/11 as “Arab” or “Muslim”? Instead, it is just a date, 9/11, no perpetrators need be identified, for propriety’s sake.
Not only is “Islamophobia” used as a shield against exposing odious behavior on the part of Muslims, but it also rests on a fundamental hypocrisy. “Islamophobia” is premised on the reasonable idea that all Muslims should not be blamed for the detestable acts of a violent few, or even many. Yet, that same deference is not showed to Jews, who must be held accountable, hounded, beaten, attacked, vilified, and persecuted for the (righteous) acts of the State of Israel.
It is not just that “Islamophobia” is a crock of drivel as a real phenomenon, but rather that it is employed as armor against any criticism of even the most radical Muslims, and in turn is used as a weapon that has intimidated many Americans into silence and acquiescence in the transformation of their country.
Similarly, the infiltration of billions of petrodollars into the university system in the US has changed curricula and radicalized students. When American campuses erupted in anti-Jewish fury on October 8 (!), with spirited defenses of the Hamas massacre and vile accusations of genocide in Gaza even before Israel had responded militarily (!), these campuses had literally been preparing for years for just such a moment. Tents, signs, fences, loudspeakers resolutions had all be readied in advance, and pressure points against vulnerable Jews had already been identified.
And, just like a century ago, the Jew hatred that emigrated to America along with the Arabs and Muslims, slowly spread to other classes as well – including some American blacks and Hispanics (who are disproportionately assaulting Jews in NYC for no discernible reasons) and the old WASP class that has long resented Jewish success.
Undoubtedly, the Jew hatred in Europe over the last several decades has a similar provenance – the large, and until recently, unstoppable incursion of Arabs and Muslims into the UK, France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, and elsewhere. It is no surprise that all those countries, like the USA, has been visited multiple times by Arab mass terror attacks, and no surprise that Jews are repeatedly victimized there. The Jew hatred in Australia and New Zealand follows the same pattern – Muslim immigration that is accompanied by Muslim Jew hatred. But go ahead and blame Israel for it.
Is there a solution to this problem? A century ago, time played the largest factor and Jew hatred receded within several decades because of our prosperity and societal integration, each a divine blessing of sorts. But time may not be our ally here. And the hoary staples of outreach and dialogue will be of limited value when dealing with an entrenched, religious-based hatred, which is not to say it won’t be tried, and when it fails, tried again.
America is changing. Its establishment is reproducing itself far below replacement rates and thus it is becoming ever more distant from the Enlightenment roots that spawned the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Hence, the current demand of the Socialists to gut the Constitution, the product of dead, white, European males. Jews, who do have a homeland that will welcome them happily if they so choose, will mostly try to ride out the wave, making deals with the devil when necessary (including turning on Israel), and wondering why the US continues to elect more and more radical Jew haters rather than the pareve Protestants who made the US such a palatable home for so many for so long.
Is it possible that the children of radical Muslim immigrants will over time mainstream and Americanize, what once was the dream of every class of immigrants? It certainly is possible, but the early returns are not good. The children of radical Muslim immigrants are just as radical but they have sufficiently acclimated to American society to perceive how to attract votes, money, and support, how to camouflage the most despicable ideas behind the toothiest and oleaginous smiles.
Immigration changes every nation, and many for the better, the United States among them. But some types of immigration transform in ways that obscure the national purpose and obliterate the founding ethos. That is what has occurred in Europe and is occurring now in the United States.
This is one of the ways in which exiles come to an end.
Rabbi Pruzansky's Blog 