American Jewish exceptionalism is ending, here’s what must come next - opinion

Growing up in Argentina, I found American exceptionalism and how it held up Jews as inextricable from the national fabric to be a source of both bewilderment and envy.

Argentinean Jews are patriots. My childhood hero was José de San Martín, the Argentine George Washington. As a teenager, I had a poster of Raúl Alfonsín (the president who brought democracy back to Argentina) on my wall, and you can see me go insane when the national soccer team plays.

That was how Jews everywhere felt throughout their long exile. Even when they didn’t experience persecution or discrimination, there was always an insecurity that they accepted as one of the facts of life.

Not so in America, where I moved in 2012. American Jewish intellectual Will Heber claimed in his 1955 book “Protestant, Catholic, Jewish” that “The American Jew does not live in exile; he lives in a land he regards as his own, and it is within that land that he shapes a Jewish identity that is voluntary, confident, and thoroughly American.”

Even when, in past decades, Jews experienced discrimination, they could point towards an unequivocal positive trajectory of integration. Instances of antisemitism weren’t seen as disproving American uniqueness. Instead, the way Jew-hatred receded in the postwar years was seen as further evidence that America was “home” in a way that no other diaspora ever was.

Until now.

American Jews have lost something invaluable in the last decade: the feeling that their country and their community are exceptional.

Jews here are starting to feel like their brethren throughout history; they can’t fully trust America. It is as though Jewish history has finally caught up with them.

After the murderous Hamas raids in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that feeling of lost trust grew by orders of magnitude. The places that had come to symbolize the integration of Jews in American society, like universities and cultural institutions, became overtly hostile to us. The explosion of progressive antisemitism showed how alone Jews were politically and culturally. The conceptual structures that Jews had helped build — such as the human rights doctrine and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — were weaponized against them.

Then came the realization that the left and the right will only fight antisemitism when it’s politically expedient, and that both sides will, to degrees small and large, kowtow to their extremists.

Many voters didn’t see Mamdani’s statements as antisemitic. But that makes the problem even worse. If somebody uses the N-word, we don’t conduct a philological study of the word to determine its true meaning. We simply accept that it’s offensive to Black people because that community told us so. But it’s antisemites, not Jews, whom enlightened society gives the power to define antisemitism.

At first, one could assume the main factor in Mamdani’s election was affordability. But the Mamdani-endorsed insurgents who won the city’s recent congressional primaries centered much of their messaging around Israel, AIPAC and Jews. Antisemitism doesn’t seem to be a bug in the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America to power inside the Democratic Party, but a feature; it’s perhaps one of its most powerful energizing mechanisms.

Every Jew has wondered, at some dark hour, whether their neighbors would have hidden them from the Nazis. After elections like the recent New York primaries, that question returns in a more mundane but painful form: Would they even inconvenience themselves politically to protect us?

It can be argued that the current wave of antisemitism and its mainstream legitimization have not totally dismantled the objective conditions of American Jewish exceptionalism. America had dark patches in its history and managed to grow out of them. The country’s legal and institutional scaffolding remains largely intact, and the basic narrative of America is widely held. One can argue, as President Bill Clinton did in his first inaugural address, that “there’s nothing that is wrong with America that cannot be solved by what’s right with America.”

But the opposite can be argued as well. Both the far left and the far right in the United States seek to deconstruct the basic story of America. The former wants to present America and its history as a corrupt story of oppression; the latter falsely claims that America was founded as a “Christian Nation.”

But a debate about whether American Judaism is still exceptional would miss the point. Exceptionalism has never been a set of concrete data points, nor was it a set of policies that benefited Jews – after all, France has policies that, on paper, are more friendly to Jews, including funding Jewish schools and criminalizing antisemitic speech. It’s a gestalt: a sense of stability and belonging that led American Jewry to feel radically different from any other community in history.

The question is not the viability of Jewish Life in America. My experience in Argentina shows that Jews can thrive in both left- and right-wing populist regimes and even in an autocracy. But can they really feel at home in a country that allows those forms of government? Can they fully trust a country in which the institutions of democracy may not be strong enough to protect them?

To a certain degree, the question that Franklin Foer asked in his seminal Atlantic essay, “The Golden Age of American Jewry is Ending,” is not the right one. There can be a golden age even when Jews feel existential insecurity. What is changing is the subjective relationship many American Jews have with America.

I believe that antisemitism will recede, and things will “go back to normal,” because antisemitism always ebbs and flows. But we can’t unsee what we’ve been seeing in the last few years. What may be ending is not the Golden Age of American Jewry, if there was ever such a thing, but American Jewish exceptionalism.

American Jews will now need to look at America the way that Jews have looked at every other host country in our long exile – as a place that can turn against them at any time. Will I ever look at my neighbor the same way when, after I told her that Mamdani made my family and me unsafe, she shrugged and voted for him anyway?

Either we were never that exceptional, or our exceptionality is not as protective as we thought. In both cases, we face a painful reckoning with reality: We are more similar to other diasporas than we ever thought.

So what are American Jews to do with this realization?

First, recognizing the truth can be liberating. Yehuda Kurtzer, CEO of the North American Hartman Institute, has urged Jews to embrace “political homelessness.” Whether or not one agrees with all his arguments, the essential insight stands. Jews should stop searching for a permanent home in either political party and begin acting as independent political agents.

Second, we must invest far more in Jewish education, identity and pride. If our place in American society is conditional, our own identity must be unconditional.Judaism — with its depth, history, and purpose — must fill the void before despair or self-rejection does.

The only collective Jewish project is Israel. That is not an ideological statement but a fact. That, of course, doesn’t mean blindly accepting any Israeli policy or not fighting for Palestinians’ rights. The opposite: if Israel is our only collective project, we must engage with it from the inside, defending its democracy and its liberalism and fighting against the dark forces that seek to capture it.

Finally, we must stop apologizing for defending Jewish rights. Changing hearts and minds about antisemitism is, at best, an improbable task. Antisemitism rises and falls for reasons largely beyond our control. What we can do is protect ourselves — physically, legally, politically and culturally — and use every legitimate tool available to defend our community.

Jews should stand in solidarity with other oppressed minorities because it is the right thing to do. But we should cease having naïve illusions about others standing up for us. We need to continue “building bridges” — but we need to learn when to burn them. In the case of Mamdani, for example, we’ve seen that opening the doors of Jewish institutions to him has not moderated his views. It has led him to double down. Indeed, after a rabbinical organization honored him at its gala dinner as a way of “building bridges,” Mamdani went on to call an American Zionist group “monsters.”

This American Jewish moment is painful and unsettling, but it’s an opportunity to rethink some of our basic premises and plan according to new principles. Thinking less about our exceptionalism may be liberating. Sometimes it’s good to let go. That energy used to keep aloft something that is collapsing can then be used to enrich our own identity and rediscover our tradition. Clinging to delusions won’t help — looking reality in the face just might.