Catching up to Israel
How 21st century Americans can defeat defeatism
There’s a truism about Israel’s impact on Jewish identity you may have heard about, or at least sensed. It goes like this. The victimized Jews of the past 2,000 years transformed themselves into empowered Jews by creating Israel. A new Jew arises in the mid 20th Century, he refutes the caricature of the old Jew as crafty victim and enduring weakling, of eternal court jester and never king. The new Israeli Jew is strong. He’s not wily like prey, he’s cunning like a predator. Sure, one caricature has simply replaced another, but the fact it’s happened at all reveals a revolution in perception.
Jews in Israel are now technologically-advanced warriors. Jews in Israel don’t ask for permission. They are Westernized and as dependent on the US as any other small western nation post World War II, but they are also obstinately focused on their own survival, much to the consternation of western leftists.
The Israeli is as tough and taciturn as an American cowboy, as brutal as a special forces soldier, as brilliant as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, even better informed and than the most secretive CIA operative. This is not a shtetl Jew being forced to dig his grave with the guns of millions and millions of complicit Europeans pressed to his head.
This is not the Jew who lived for over twenty generations in Baghdad or Tehran and is shockingly forced to leave home with no property or bank account or social network or cash or possessions or any other achievement other than his heartbeat. These aren’t the Jews of Russia being smothered by Soviet domination or Jews in Ethiopia or Yemen who are, at best, forgotten by their neighbors unless they’re being attacked.
The Israeli is a new kind of Jew. Or, if you like to read, a very, very old kind of Jew.
New old language. New old land. New old identity. New old wars against new old brutal, anti-civilizational, death-worshipping neighbors.
Why did this transformation happen? This phenomenon is foreign to Americans of European descent. Sure, British people say jumper instead of sweater and drink flat beer, but an average American isn’t wildly different than an average Englishman, knowing that people can’t be averaged and life experiences are vast. Is an average Israeli different from an average Jewish American?
If your answer is mostly yes, then what does that mean for us in America — Jewish or otherwise? What can we learn from the chrysalis? How can we leverage it to answer today’s enormous challenges of extremist violence, alienation and suppression coming from the right and, now, coming from the left? And then throw in global warming, Russian imperialism, Chinese jingoism and Iranian atom splitting.
To take a step back, let’s examine the transformation that seems cliche but I think rooted in reality.
Refugees from Europe and the Middle East were profoundly new to the tasks of Israeli sovereignty: agriculture, defense, diplomacy, construction. All the myriad necessities of building a country were foreign to a landless, persecuted people that spoke a dozen different languages. Jews hadn’t developed these skillsets since losing land to the Romans in 70 AD. That seems so far ago as to be imaginary, like a book you read so long ago you can only vaguely remember the title and smell of the pages, but think to what you can remember: learning about the Holocaust as a child. Visiting Holocaust museums. Reading Maus. Watching Schindler’s List. Jews, and their millions of fellow sufferers, had been reduced to one dimension — victim. Not exactly nation builders.
If you expand your view, imagine the thousands of years of Jewish life in ancient places like Baghdad, Tehran, Cairo, Tripoli, and more — all of which ended in the 1950s. Jews had been living in what is now Iraq and Iran since the 6th century BC — over 1,100 years before Muhammad’s armies swallowed the Middle East. Imagine America being fives times as old as it is now, and then ending. That’ll give you a sense of the loss for Iraqi and Persian Jews. (And an impetus to vote for Kamala Harris.)
The European and Middle Eastern Jews came to Israel where they had to learn new skills, fast. Either that or the ditch.
Jews now face the same persecution dynamic as before, just different with enemies holding the gun. Twentieth century Arab nationalism was deeply informed by and eager partners with Nazism. The mufti of Palestine literally allied himself with the Nazis against the British.
Nazism then intertwined with extremist Islam, both Sunni and Shia, which went on to manifest in the nihilistic, death-obsessed savagery of Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and many more, most of them led by highly educated, westernized Arab men.
Get lunch in Tel Aviv to see what happened to these refugees a few generations after landing in Israel. Dating their provenance is tricky, some Jews were always in the land, many more came in the mid 1800s and then of course even more achieved statehood around 75 years ago— and with that came more Jews from Arab lands than Arab Muslims who fled Israel. It was an almost equal exchange of regional populations. However you start the date, these polyglot Jews recreated a language and built an economically-vibrant, nuclear-armed, democratic-socialist country.
They became experts at thriving, a tall order for any new country, and now consider the savagery of the region. I know I’m supposed to say “the illiberalism of the region,” but I enjoy being like a child and using my words.
If you’ve been to an Arab country that’s not in the Gulf, you know what I’m talking about. You can’t drink the water. There is no voting, no bill of rights, no rule of law. Women are literally hidden. Minorities are not fetishized by leftists as long as they limit their life story to a single visible aspect of their identity, they are the littlest man in the prison yard.
Talk to a Berber, Christian, Yazidi or Kurd to see it’s not just the Jews who write nasty Google Map reviews about their venue.
While the weight of DEI bureaucracies literally perverts American intellectualism until it bends and breaks in a thousand uninformed pieces of “anti-colonial studies” majors with six-figures of debt, armed men in the Middle East patrol the streets. Have something to say to them?
You can pick your choice of ruler — as long as he is a king, cleric or dictator. You can bribe someone in his family, mosque or battalion to get ahead, otherwise, enjoy your subsistence job. Every few decades life gets unbearable at this subsistence job and you can take to the streets with all of your friends and their friends and protest en masse, and then things will get worse.
Somehow Israelis bloomed in this context. The Israeli armed, fed, educated and housed herself. She raised children to be elite warriors or taxi drivers or school teachers. She went to work or to school or to career positions in the military, she ran a home or ran for office — or all of the above. This was new. It took a new person to do this.
When you see young women chatting by the Western Wall in Jerusalem with rifles slung over shoulders instead of handbags, believe your eyes. It’s different.
That’s the story for over there: there were old Jews at the start of the 20th Century and new Jews by the end of it. If I haven’t convinced you yet, let me ask you this: could the arrogant, militarized, culinarily-advanced restaurant-owning Israelis of your imagination make a movie like Annie Hall, where Woody Allen dressed as a Hasid to imagine himself viewed by his girlfriend’s WASPy family? Could an Israeli write a novel like Portnoy’s Complaint? Would Israelis consult with vote getters but never get the vote themselves? Would they ascend the very heights of American academics by advocating for liberal values only to be later excluded by liberal advocates?
It’s your choice if this inspires or depresses you. I choose the former. It’s even your choice if this is happening at all because you’re in America. You can cling to an identity informed by the experience of the vast majority of American Jews who miraculously side-stepped the Holocaust. An identity that bit by bit, generation by generation, intermarriage by intermarriage devolves from certainty to sentiment to hazy memory to… poof.
In the greatest fluke of history, millions of Jews saw how dangerous it was to live in Europe forty, fifty, sixty years before Germans elected Hitler. They evacuated to a new country and in the second greatest fluke, that new country didn’t kill them.
I can’t take credit for my great grandparents’ immense imagination and aptitude for risk that pushed them from Odessa to Trieste to Hamburg to Ellis Island, but I sure as hell relish their courage in this safe haven. I mean, relished.
Our safety is now not a given. The great era of American Jewish enfranchisement is over. You can keep calm and carry on but only if you pull up the blinders, refuse to learn about your heritage and never attend a synagogue. There’s a reason there are multiple layers at security at every Jewish institution in America. A bomb threat evacuated my former Manhattan synagogue during Yom Kippor and the people there had to pray in the street.
That’s not normal. That’s not OK. But it’s becoming both by the people who say, “well, that depends on your perspective.”
My Jewish high school buddies who had the grades and an intense drive went to Ivy League+ colleges. They did it to live their parents’ values, they did it because they are deeply curious people, they did it to be first on the conveyor belt to middle class security. Lucky for me, I was able to follow at an elite grad school, and with a scholarship to make it a very good deal. I still scramble like crazy to stay middle class. More and more it feels a chase away from something bad rather than an ascent to something better. I guess it’s OK to keep running as long as my legs hold and I never look back.
But that’s the past. Jewish enrollment is down across the elite schools that once made the most intelligent and diligent of us feel safely at home, and it’s not because we’re now less intelligent and more incurious. Columbia, Penn, Harvard, Yale — traditional bastions of Jewish advancement now have rapidly declining Jewish matriculation rates. How many times do students and faculty have to scream at Jewish students in the quad for us to get the message? How many students promote killing Jews without being sanctioned, never mind expelled, like at Columbia where this year, 2024, over 100 student groups formed an umbrella organization that foments actual violence against Jews. Among these 100 groups: the Reproductive Justice Collective, Student Worker Solidarity, Columbia Queer Association and the fearsome members of Poetry Slam. It would be easier if such wide-ranging members wore uniforms so they can identify themselves. I suggest a unisex shirt in earth tones.
But seriously, imagine a coalition of 100 student groups coming together to call for the death of [insert minority group]. Would they too be immune from expulsion?
“All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawai'i, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.” — from the Columbia website. Glad to see the Irish, Koreans and turtles so well cared for. Funny they forgot to add that other ancient minority group.
Add to this bigoted “activism” bloated, elephantine DEI bureaucracies and clever Affirmative Action loopholes, and you have the perfect solution. The anti-Jewish quotas my grandfather suffered from in the 1920s are back in the 2020s.
What’s nice about the DEI inversion that excludes Jews is that anyone can do it. You can be the enlightened, pro-working class Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and stump for Congressman Jamaal Bowman who’s entire campaign focused on blaming Jews for his poor record in office, or you can be former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke who now endorses presidential candidate Jill Stein. You can even be a Jewish like said attention-seeker Jill Stein or like senator Bernie Sanders. He wants the American superpower to shrink Israel’s military while Israel fights an existential 5-front war against Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Iran. Better yet, you can even call for this military crippling while also feeding into the false narrative, and reverse-Holocaust gaslighting logic, that accuses Israel of genocide. It's two-for-one anti-Jewish fun.
Beck’s breakaway hit in 1994 used to be ironic.
“I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?”
Now it’s just scary. Jews are losing in America.
This is. Unfamiliar.
But wait, there’s more. There’s now a popular left-wing movement advocating for war against Israel and, funnily enough, that means it targets synagogues and Jewish social clubs right here in America. They’ve been successful enough to stop a Jewish vice presidential candidate from running for office who would carry a swing state in the closest election in American history. What’s more, they’ve been so successful that you’re not allowed to ask if that even happened or why you’d choose an obviously out-classed governor from Minnesota in such a monumental election. You just have to shut up and vote. (Which I did, for Harris Walz. As the most anti-Israel president of my lifetime Obama liked to say, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.)
Jews forgot they had lanes to stay in. You can advise the vote getter, but no more. You can celebrate your holidays, but don’t tell anyone where the building is and make sure you coordinate with the police every single time you gather. And even then, be prepared to be evacuated.
For many American Jews, especially those who don’t attend synagogue or feel comfortable asking why Walz not Shapiro, this model of Jewish servility is 100% sustainable — as long as you don’t ask what happens in the end.
We can entertain, advise, buy, earn, vote — but only for certain candidates, get educated — but only in certain schools. We can speak at a bookstore, run for office, make a movie, publish a book or ride the subway — but only if we disavow our indigenous lands to those who fetishize indigeneity.
We are only allowed to shrug when we see a person — like the young woman near me on a recent Amtrak ride — who wears a headscarf keffiyeh that symbolizes the rape and violent death of Jews. That same person can graffiti swastikas, shout seig heil in front of a grocery store and boycott our people, our products and our spaces — and instead of fighting back, we are only allowed to hope more folks don’t follow them.
They can make a fairly obscure political movement of the late 1800s into a bigoted insult repeated infinitely in the media; but in turn, we can’t mention their gender, ethnicity, background or sexuality without a sensitivity guide and ideally while we’re blind-folded and gagged, so as not to offend. And really we should be bound too, because it would be a horror to be ableist.
Or we can do something different.
Jews and our friends who also imagine a better future, a more moral 21st century, we can take the lesson of how a tiny minority transformed themselves in a forbidding region and apply that here at home. We can become a people who don’t look backwards to the adaptation of 20th century refugees for lessons that no longer apply in a host culture that now only conditionally accepts us.
Instead, we can look forward to how others tackled these same problems and thrived. We can look to Israel.
Many of us already have. We’ve joined synagogues if we’re knowledgeable and invested in our culture with its ancient languages and, in this time of year, seemingly never ending agriculturally-sequenced rituals. We've bonded with social communities we didn’t realize were so important to our sense of belonging and safety. We’ve learned Hebrew and traveled to Israel not as tourists, but as postmodern pilgrims.
When we sing about building the walls of Jerusalem, we mean it. When we face east in prayer it’s not a symbolic gesture, it’s an orientation of our moral compass.
We stand up for ourselves by suing universities that elevate some minorities while denigrating others. We subscribe to the few media outlets we can find (like the Atlantic, the Free Press, frenetic substackers like yours truly ) that thread the needle between reporting and intellectual honesty. We turn away from outlets that gaslight us by labeling their selective advocacy as neutral objectivity.
We form alliances with people we didn’t know cared and loved us and who share common values with us, just as our own values adapt and evolve to fit each changing moment.
What Israel did for Israelis, Israel can do for American Jews — and for our friends who face similar challenges against similar orthodoxies on the left and the right. In many ways, Israel has done this already. There’s now a cleavage in the American Jewish community that’s grown more pronounced since October 7th. About 85% of American Jews support Israel, 15% do not. Over time, these groups will grow further apart as most synagogue-going, Hebrew-speaking, culturally-invested Jews deepen their transnational bonds to Israel and to the richness of American life, and those who rely on universal social justice vibes and less on specific Jewish practice — because wouldn’t that be exclusive and chauvinistic to focus on only one culture instead of all of them? I mean, what about turtle island? Save the turtles!
Yes, I have chosen a side in this debate.
There are 20th century liberals holding onto a worldview that no longer applies to current problems but feels like home. To get along, you simply have to abandon your differences that the majority never really liked. Or there are 21st century Jews who say, “now that you’re screaming in my face and making me feel scared for sharing my thoughts out loud, I guess I am a Zionist.” Then you invite your non-Jewish friends to Shabbat as an act of resistance, and in hopes they bring a good side dish.
We literally have no other option other than standing up for ourselves and realizing a vital Jewish nation is necessary for Jewish vitality anywhere in the world. This realization, in and of itself, is both liberating and transforming. It’s applicable to more than Jews — the light on the hill doesn’t ask who sees it, all you have to do is look.