You could debate whether or not it was a good year for Jewish Americans, but who would claim it was a great one? About seven in 10 Jews in the United States got what they wanted, which always makes for dissatisfaction. They voted for Joe Biden, and now, like the majority of Americans, they have buyer’s remorse. Inflation, crime, and the price at the pumps are all up. No one in this land of compulsive optimism seems confident about the future.
Still, if no one wants 2022 to be a rerun of 2021, at least 2021 wasn’t a rerun of 2020. This year did not feature mobs diverting from the urgencies of “racial justice” to attack Jewish stores, as happened in 2020. Nor did America’s burgeoning legions of white terrorists massacre people in a synagogue, as happened in 2018.
The new administration did not become openly hostile to the Israeli government, either. But we did witness noxious pro-Hamas hate manifesting itself on the streets of American cities in attacks on Jews, as Israel had the temerity to defend its citizens from an onslaught of missiles raining down upon its cities in May.
Mr Kamala Harris, Doug Emhoff, politely passed through the thinnest of glass ceilings when he became the first Second Gentleman in American history. On Chanukah, Emhoff tweeted a photo of him and “Mamale” lighting that classy British export, a Spode china menorah.
The fact that we might be grateful for clearing the low bars of previous years indicates a shift in atmosphere and expectations of Jewish American life. It happened, as Hemingway said of bankruptcy, “gradually, then suddenly”. This year, we got the numbers on it, with the publication of the latest Pew Research Institute survey on Jews in America: 53 per cent said they felt “less safe” than they did five years ago.
The last Pew Report was issued in 2013. This one confirmed the trends of a community increasingly unsure of its place and purpose. The number of Jews has risen in line with the US population, and comprises 2.4 per cent of Americans. But 61 per cent who’ve married since 2010 have married out, and 48 per cent never engage in any kind of Jewish activities, including such demanding tasks as cooking or eating “traditional Jewish foods”. (Though the survey did not ask how many of them cooked the foods, then thought better about eating them.)
About half of Jewish Americans can’t be bothered. This too is in line with the American population. We are witnessing a crisis of the middle class across the West, and Jews are, in this as in much else, just like other people, only more so. On the upside, those who can be bothered, the Orthodox especially, are turning up for the future and redefining the look and politics of young Jewish Americans.
Affiliation to Israel remains high: 82 per cent consider it “essential” or “important” to their sense of Jewishness. The paradox is obvious. Half of Jewish Americans can’t be bothered to eat chicken soup, but four-fifths of them are attached to a country on the other side of the world. I suspect that, probably quite soon, the Jewish American view of 2021 will be redefined by the inevitable success of the Iranian nuclear programme. For now, most Jewish Americans seem blithely untroubled by it.
Jewish Americans who pride themselves on their people’s tremendous contributions to American culture should also be concerned by its decline. In April, the publisher Norton pulped Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth after several women accused Bailey of sexual misconduct. Personally, I find Roth tedious and limited, but there’s no accounting for taste. Roth was, by public and critical acclaim, a major American writer. Bailey’s book was the official biography and, in the current moral climate, it is hard to imagine another one being commissioned.
I put my unread press copy of Bailey’s book in a box in the basement. This would be the bibliophile’s equivalent of laying down a wine in the cellar, except that the book, like its subject, has a rancid taste, and I have no intention of opening it.
Dominic Green is the editor of the Spectator’s world edition.
