Any politics of identity was bad for the Jew. On the right, the identiarians said that the Jew lacked whiteness — it was a new version of the old Nazi claim about our impurity. On the left, the Jew was said to have too much. 

The furies have been unleashed. They were everywhere you looked these past two weeks, though you won’t read about them much in the papers.

We saw them on Thursday, when pro-Palestinian protesters threw an explosive device into a crowd of Jews in New York’s Diamond District.

We saw them on Wednesday, when two men were attacked outside a bagel shop in midtown Manhattan.

We saw them on Tuesday, at a sushi restaurant in West Hollywood, when a group of men draped in keffiyehs asked the diners who was Jewish, and then pummeled them. And in a parking lot not far away, when two cars draped in Palestinian flags roared after an Orthodox man fleeing for his life. And in the story of the American soccer player Luca Lewis, cornered by a band of men in New York demanding to know if he was a Jew.

Then there was the caravan careening through Jewish neighborhoods in North London carrying people screaming: “[F—] the Jews! Rape their daughters!”

And the rabbi, outside London, who was hospitalized after being attacked by two teenagers.

And the demonstrator in Vienna shouting, “Shove your Holocaust up your [a—]!” — the crowd of young people, mostly women, cheering.

The synagogue in Skokie that was vandalized. The synagogue in Tucson that was vandalized. The synagogue in Salt Lake that was vandalized.

The pro-Israel demonstrators in Montreal pelted with rocks. And the pro-Palestinian agitators in Edmonton driving around in search of Jews.

The teeming crowds in Washington, D.C., Berlin, Bangladesh, Philadelphia and Boston and San Francisco and, of course, across the Arab world. The seemingly ubiquitous accusations of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.”

The Turkish president, reaching all the way back to the Middle Ages, accusing Israelis of “sucking the blood” of non-Jewish children.

Every hour on the hour, the celebrities posted their memes and the elected officials and the influencers — it’s hard to tell the difference — called Israel an “apartheid” regime. Apartheid regimes, like regimes guilty of genocide and ethnic cleansing, are meant to be overthrown. Violently, if need be. So bloodshed is warranted, yes?

The silence-is-violence people — those who are quick to “call out” anyone deemed inadequately antiracist, experts at digging up any dusty book passage — have been remarkably quiet when it comes to Jews being dehumanized and hunted down.

Let us dispense with the fiction, once and for all, that hating the Jewish homeland, which contains the largest Jewish community on Earth, is different from hating Jews.

It has been exceedingly difficult in our blinkered, hyper-secularized present, so removed from the primal animosities of not so long ago, to conceive of a world in which tens or hundreds of millions of people who have never visited Israel or never met a Jew want Jews dead. We’ve been blinded by the oceanic success of life under the Pax Americana. We think this is how people are.

This is not how people are. This is a wondrous aberration. There were 2,000 years of ghettos, blood libels and pogroms, of dehumanization and second-class citizenship that culminated with the Shoah. For the past several decades — a sneeze in the span of Jewish history — we American Jews have been maundering through the happy, mournful echoes of the recent past.

That recent past meant that we weren’t shocked to see this violence from the Europeans, who have never stopped hating Jews, but who had been forced, by the camps, to camouflage their Jew hate in their criticism of Israel, their obsession with it.

But America?

We were not steeped in the Old World hatreds. We were deeply flawed — who wasn’t? — but our flaws were always in conflict with our identity. One of the many problems with antisemitism, like Jim Crow, was that it made a mockery of our ideals, which made it impossible to hold onto the old bigotries forever. One had to reject Jew-hate and support the Jewish right to self-determination for the same reason one had to dismantle literacy laws that limited voting rights: It was central to the American weltanschauung. It was part of our animating ethic. The progress was glacial and uneven but inexorable. It was America becoming more American.

We were supposed to have transcended the old blood-and-soil stupidities. But they can’t be transcended. That was a beautiful myth, a myth that was fundamental to our idea of ourselves. But we are losing ourselves.

How did this happen? It’s inane to try to superimpose a tidy, monocausal explanation on all of the above.

But we know a few things for sure. America’s great institutions, and the security and stability and rhythm they once provided, have been co-opted, and this has had an unbelievably destabilizing impact on all aspects of American life. We have lost this edifice, which took decades to build and about ten minutes to tear down, because of our remarkably spineless “elite,” who seem to have no concept what role they are meant to play, or if they do, simply don’t have the cojones.

Then there is the transformation of the American left. The left used to imagine itself having one job. That job was to protect the interests of the working class. In fact, until not long ago, the left could not imagine a politics outside the framework of a Herculean struggle pitting the working class against the managerial elite, otherwise known as the Republican Party. Literally every conversation started and ended with class. Class struggle, class warfare, the working class, the middle class.

But in the last quarter of the 20th century, the old fight against economic inequality gave way to the pressures of the market and geopolitics. The Chinese gave up on violent, socialist totalitarianism and embraced a kind of retrofitted capitalism. Then came Thatcher, Reagan, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Soviet communism, the Indians (who, in 1991, embarked on a Reagan-like unwinding of the old Five-Year Plans), the internet, globalization, Bill Clinton, and the narrowing of our ideological differences. In just a few decades, traditional left-wing politics seemed to have lost its reason for being. There was a void, and a need for a new organizing principle to try to make sense of the world.

Into the void seeped the new, soft-boiled thinking about race and gender, which had been fomenting, mostly on campus, for the past two decades. Identity soon acquired a new status among liberals, who now called themselves progressives. It comported with our shifting demographics, and it gave the Democratic leadership, which could no longer talk about soaking the rich, something to talk about.

Over the past two decades, this obsession with identity has intensified and spread. Progressives are now incapable of talking about anything important without mentioning human beings’ immutable traits.

Any politics of identity was bad for the Jew. On the right, the identiarians said that the Jew lacked whiteness — it was a new version of the old Nazi claim about our impurity. On the left, the Jew was said to have too much.

In 2021, we are well-aware of the white-nationalist inanities. We have memorized the horrific footage from Charlottesville. We remember every Jew murdered in Pittsburgh and in Poway.

Read More