POL ITICS

ere’s More to Being Jewish an

Fighting Anti-Semitism
A new book looks at the ght against resurgent hatred in Trump’s
America, but its prescriptions can’t address the other crisis facing
American Judaism.
E MMA G RE E N MAY 4, 2 0 1 8

People wear yarmulkes, or Jewish head coverings, as they protest an anti-Semitic attack in Germany in April.  (FABRIZIO BENSCH /
REUTERS)

A Jewish journalist lives in the big city. He is largely secular and proudly de es religious
traditions; he runs easily with his generation’s cohort of elite writers and thinkers. When
evidence of virulent anti-Semitism begins to emerge around him, he is shocked. Jews
must wake up and recognize their dire situation, he thinks. If only they could band
together, he imagines, Jews could not just survive, but thrive: a light unto the nations,
modeling humanitarianism and tolerance.

is was the story of eodor Herzl, who is credited as the founder of political
Zionism and the father of the State of Israel. But it is also the story of Jonathan
Weisman, a New York Times reporter who has written a book, (((Semitism))), about the
peculiar challenges of being an American Jew in 2018. Both men became aware, rather
suddenly, of the potency of anti-Semitism; both have called for a strengthening of
Jewish identity in a time of relative Jewish empowerment. Herzl looked east, aspiring to
create a Jewish state in Palestine. More than a century later, the success of Herzl’s
solution has become Weisman’s major grievance: e writer complains that American
Jewish organizations have all become “enthralled with [the] same mission … all spoke
of, lobbied on, and raised money for Israel, Israel, Israel.” Meanwhile, he says, neo-
Nazis grab headlines, shouting slogans like “Hail victory!” and “You will not replace us!”
at rallies on the National Mall. When this happened last summer, Weisman says, “e
Jews slept.”

Weisman’s book never overcomes this foundational aw: It is based on the wildly
inaccurate claim that American Jews are not talking about, thinking about, and calling
out anti-Semitism. Weisman, alarmed by swirling hatred and lack of Jewish communal
cohesion, seems to have cast about for someone to blame and settled on Jews
themselves; his facts are wobbly and his prescriptions are thin. Yet the urgency of his
project— nding a uni ed Jewish identity in a time of fracture, assimilation, and
recurring bigotry—marks a development that has been unimaginable to Jews for two
or three generations: Once again, hate toward Jews is rising. Once again, Jews are
distressingly divided. Once again, there is no easy solution to protect Jews’ moral,
political, or physical future.

As its title suggests, Weisman’s book identi es virulent anti-Semitism as the major
existential challenge facing American Jewry, a perpetual nightmare that reemerges,
cicada-like, in every generation. e Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish organization
that most actively tracks anti-Semitism in the U.S., reported a major spike in anti-
Jewish hate in 2017. Weisman himself has been a target. Like other prominent
journalists, he had his Twitter account ooded with hundreds upon hundreds of anti-
Semitic memes and slurs. He was marked for the onslaught when a user placed triple
parentheses around his name, allowing trolls to locate him easily through a clever web-
browser tool. He now wields the parentheses de antly in his Twitter pro le.
Appropriately, the marks also decorate the title of his book.

While the problem of anti-Semitism is not novel to the Trump era, Weisman argues,
the president has not actively discouraged bigotry, blowing enough dog whistles and
making enough excuses to leave far-right agitators feeling empowered. “Whether he
knew it or not, Donald Trump ran the most anti-Semitic presidential campaign in
modern American history,” Weisman writes. “Haplessness is not a defense.”

Two issues have further exacerbated this rise in anti-Semitism, Weisman argues. One is
that Jews are divided among themselves, and have a weak sense of collective identity.
Some Orthodox Jews fear that intermarriage, widespread disengagement, and remixed
traditions have left liberal and secular Jews unmoored—even tainted. Similarly, many
liberal Jews see the Orthodox as “ardently tribalist,” politically conservative, and
dismayingly “fecund,” as Weisman puts it. Although Weisman clearly disapproves of
Orthodoxy, he is also irritated by the Judaism Lite that seems to de ne so many Jews’
identities, who “observe or don’t, join a synagogue or attend the occasional Jewish lm
festival, read Philip Roth, eat bagels and babka, say ‘oy’ ironically.” He sees this as one
cause of “the strange, ungrounded nature of American Jewry,” which, he claims, has
struggled to articulate a response to the alt-right. “e Jews who are most interested in
a liberal, internationalist future, who wish to live progressive, assimilated existences free
of threat, are disappearing,” he says. At the same time, “those willing to accept the
rising tribalism—to keep to themselves and fortify the Jewish state as an escape hatch or
a fall-out shelter—are growing in number.”

is is another reason Jewish leaders have failed to address anti-Semitism in America,
Weisman claims: ey are too focused on Israel. “e American Jewish obsession with
Israel has taken our eyes off not only the politics of our own country, the growing gulf
between rich and poor, and the rising tide of nationalism but also our own grounding
in faith,” he says. Sheldon Adelson and other Republican mega-donors have “grown so
obsessed with Israel that the overt and covert signals of anti-Semitism beamed from the
interior of the Trump campaign appeared to be disregarded.”

A renewed Jewish identity, he argues, should reorient away from “the Israel diversion,”
which “is proving to be a trap.” Instead, American Judaism should be rooted in a
principled, uni ed opposition to those who hate Jews and their authoritarian allies.
“is is an era that calls for fearlessness,” he writes, “but also a refusal to play along.”
American Jews “need to assert a voice in the public arena, to back our institutions and
mold them in our image.”

roughout the book, Weisman seems to think he is the only Jew in America who sees
the need to stand up to the forces of authoritarianism. He is worried about the tendrils
of the far-right movements that have poisoned American discourse and terrorized
victims on- and offline. Anti-Semitism is on the rise, he argues, and yet the Jewish
community is asleep.

e trouble with his argument is that it’s wrong. A quick search of the New York Times
archives shows that Weisman’s paper explicitly discussed America’s troubling pattern of
rising anti-Semitism dozens of times over the last year; columnists from Bret Stephens
to David Leonhardt, both Jewish, have addressed it forcefully. Jewish institutions, from
synagogues to activist groups to local community centers, have hosted innumerable
events on this topic since President Trump was elected; it is the concern I have heard
most frequently in my reporting on Jewish communities over the past three years.
When e Atlantic posted video of the white supremacist rabble-rouser Richard
Spencer hailing Trump with language reminiscent of the Nazi era, the media—and
American Jews —reacted with outrage. If anything, conversations about the rise of anti-
Semitism under Trump have crowded out discussions of racism, anti-Muslim rhetoric,
and other forms of bigotry.

Weisman makes a number of claims that seem at odds with available evidence. For
example: He says Jews have not made “any organized effort to rally around” the Anti-
Defamation League when it has come under attack. He points to Josh Mandel, the
Jewish, Republican Ohio state treasurer who criticized the ADL for releasing a report
on the alt-right. is was “the essence of an assault on a century-old Jewish institution,”
Weisman says. But this incident—one tweet from a marginal state official—has been
covered extensively by Jewish publications like Tablet and e Forward, always
critically. Last fall, the organization reported a 1000-percent increase in its donations
after the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville that left a woman dead. It also
received support from outside the Jewish community: $1 million from the media
mogul James Murdoch and half a million from JP Morgan.

Weisman also claims that major Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish
Committee and the Jewish Federation of North America, have not called out anti-
Semitism. In an op-ed for the Times that accompanied the publication of his book,
Weisman asserted that the heads of these groups have been “remarkably quiet” about
the “brewing storm” in America, instead focusing exclusively on Israel. Maybe he just
isn’t signed up for the right press releases. Both of these organizations and their local
counterparts discuss anti-Semitism in the U.S. and abroad constantly. Both direct
signi cant institutional resources toward countering bigotry.

Ultimately, he blames American Jews for not being concerned about the problem of
bigotry. He calls on Jews not to “play the game” of “creeping totalitarianism,”
lamenting that they have not replaced “We Stand with Israel” signs with ones that read
“We Stand against Hate.” But Jewish groups and leaders have been some of the most
outspoken anti-Trumpers, marching against the travel ban and getting arrested in
Congress. He claims Jewish “politics, once almost wholly liberal and Democratic, are
now dispersed between the parties,” even though roughly three-fourths of American
Jews lean Democratic, according to Pew. Nonetheless, he directs signi cant ire toward
that band of Jewish Republicans, a small but in uential group.

e book is equally confused about the way that fractured Jewish identity is
complicating this moment in American Jewish life. Weisman twice repeats data from
the Pew Research Center suggesting that many Jews consider having a good sense of
humor more central to Jewish identity than following Jewish law. “Oy,” he says
sardonically, both times, a sign of both clichéd humor and bad editing.

But even with this lament, it’s not clear what he wants from Jews. He yearns for a
response to bigotry “grounded in a principle, a belief, a morality,” but doesn’t get any
more speci c about what that would mean. He seems to call notional, cultural Jews
back to the roots of Judaism, but dismisses ritual and tradition as nothing more than
the “mechanics of religiosity.” He makes many generalizations about what American
Jews are like—often in the same weird idiom anti-Semites use, like “the Jew thrived” or
“the Jew ourishes”—but he doesn’t spend much time excavating the experiences and
differences among real, living people.

It’s worth chronicling these failures in part because the book fails in interesting and
telling ways. Weisman does not excavate enough Zionist history to recognize the
uncanny parallel between his fears and those of Jewish thinkers past, but this ripple of
anxiety through the generations is one of the reasons why this moment in America
politics is so powerful. Like the Jews of today, many of Europe’s early 20th-century
Jews were highly secular and assimilated, and this may have made them slower to
address the deadly threat of rising bigotry in their time. Anti-Semitism provides a
framework for thinking about other problems of extremism and xenophobia, as well.
Its patterns often echo kindred hatreds; its persistence is instructive for thinking about
what’s ahead.

Like Herzl, Weisman has called on Jews to see what’s happening around them, to refuse
complacency and act. In the short time since it was published, his book has already
gotten much attention and rankled Jewish leaders, so perhaps it is ful lling its purpose.

Fundamentally, though, the book rests on an empty vision: that Jews can de ne
themselves solely through progressive activism, and by opposing those who hate them.
It is a version of peoplehood without a core; it lacks the distinctiveness for which
Weisman, and so many other Jews, seem to yearn. Weisman is clearly struggling to
make meaning out of this new experience of feeling marginalized, this discovery that
he, too, is despised for being Jewish. Yet he is unsure what being Jewish really means.

Weisman was the wrong reporter for the right assignment. But the frustration he feels
—his sense that Jews have lived through this history before, and so have a special
obligation to to stand up against hatred—is not his alone. Writing about anti-Semitism
matters. It is an attempt to articulate the relationship between Jewish power, identity,
and moral responsibility; to chronicle Jews’ perpetual vulnerability, even when they’re
otherwise thriving; to answer questions that have followed Jews wherever they have
gone. Like Herzl’s generation, today’s Jews are grappling with a crisis of identity and
fear. But they’ll have to look elsewhere for answers.

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