I didn't expect to say goodbye to my America so quickly. The America that I had heard about for so, so long but somehow only reached when I visited for the first time last year. The Goldene Medina, as they called it in the shtetl, the country that glittered, that was best for the Jews.
Growing up in Europe, I never really understood American Jews. But as I got to know them, I became jealous of their apparently seamless identity. Jewish, American, it seemed so easy. I was jealous of the way that American-Jewish identity seemed fused with the American story itself, woven into the fabric of the nation.
American Jews in turn looked at me full of pity and shock as I talked about everyday antisemitism in Britain and France. The dog-whistles, the Twitter trolls, the synagogue guards, the Facebook warriors, the nervous jokes about will-we-ever-end-up having to make Aliyah.
Impossible, they told me. Unimaginable. It can never happen here. Over and over, I was told America was structurally philosemitic. That, as Leon Wieseltier, put it, the last Jew leaving Europe for Zion or the Goldene Medina, should turn around, and - "spit."
The more I visited of Washington, Manhattan and Brooklyn, the more I fell in love with the American exceptionalism, which allowed Jewish exceptionalism, the comfortable diaspora of Sandy Koufax, Saul Bellow and Jon Stewart. They didn't have trade off their yiddishkeit to fit in as Americans, as most British Jews feel they have to.
They should stop attracting so much attention
I was so enthralled, obviously, I phoned my mother to tell her. But she was very sceptical of all this Medina talk. "They have synagogues the size of cathedrals here," I gushed. "They should be smaller," she puffed. "They should stop attracting so much attention!"
Now it seems my mother was right to be sceptical when I said - "No, don't be silly… it's not like Europe."
The dog whistles came with Donald Trump. He spoke of Hillary and cabals of bankers. He warned of behind the scenes forces and implored voters to smash "The global special interest", as the faces of George Soros, Lloyd Blankfein and Janet Yellen, three famous, financial Jews, flashed in his final ad.
Online, the dogs were barking in America. My friends - mostly Jewish, mostly journalists - the ones who had told me they had never experienced antisemitism before, came under a machine gun attack of hate tweets. The ADL recorded 2.6m antisemitic tweets in a year. Journalists' faces were cropped onto Auschwitz and Der Jude Süss.
The same Jewish friends who had never experienced antisemitism, who looked me as if I was a refugee from Kristallnacht as I talked about George Galloway and my family in Paris, suddenly started to sound, well, just, like British Jews. Tense. Nervous. Embattled. Aghast at what was running amok in the Grand Old Party of American politics.
I was in New York when the Goldene Medina lost its shine.
The results came in. Trump triumphed in white America. Black America and Hispanic America rejected him. So had the Jews. So, much so, that as a proportion more Jews (76 per cent) had voted against Trump than Hispanics (71 per cent). It was underscored and underlined: Jewish America and Trumplandia were two different states of mind.
I was walking through the neon glinting, Manhattan Midtown, the streets of Scorsese, flashing through feeds on my phone, when the results hit. Trump's face, and Electoral College count, was shimmering, illuminated onto the face of the Empire State building.
America had become a European country again in front of my eyes. A country where antisemitism is a background melody in political life, and whilst perfectly safe, Jews are not entirely comfortable either. I used to feel better here than I do in Britain, now I feel exactly the same.
