Last year, feeling gloomy, I wrote a piece in Tablet Magazine arguing that no matter who won the presidential election, American Jews had already lost. To the right, I moaned, were hoards of haters, thugs of an organized movement that was increasingly more visible and vocal with its bigoted agenda. To the left were fiends of a different stripe, enlightened folks who celebrated diversity as long as it didn't wear a yarmulke, and who advocated endless compassion for the world's most murderous regimes and none for its only Jewish state. With these twin terrors egging each other on, I argued, the golden age of American Jewry which lasted more than half a century and spawned Bellow, Spielberg and Bader Ginsburg among others was over.
That was then. To the general sense of dread I wish to add another mournful observation: our detractors may be out in full force and sprawling in all directions, but we American Jews aren’t blameless. Celebrated for being the torchbearers of a luminous intellectual and moral tradition, we’ve made political calculations that are bafflingly short-sighted, often opting for gestures over principles.
Talk to most of Trump’s Jewish supporters and they’ll tell you how their hero will soon reaffirm Washington’s commitment to Israel by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, as if that act would succeed where millennia of Jewish prayer had failed and somehow make our holiest city great again. For this symbolic bit of theatre, Trump’s Jewish fans would disregard the vileness of an administration seriously entertaining profiling citizens based on nothing but their religious beliefs, as if what’s true for Muslims today wasn’t yesterday true for Jews or couldn’t befall them again tomorrow.
The majority of Jews, however, didn’t vote for Trump. They voted for Clinton and before her for Obama, and continue to see the departing president as a paragon of American righteousness. In their admiration, illuminated more strongly by their disdain for Trump, they fail to hold Obama accountable for allowing the massacre of of innocents in Syria or for vigorously promoting a policy that ceded influence and handed a fortune to the homicidal regime in Tehran, a key architect of the same massacre.
These are not just political but moral qualms. The American Jewish community used to take pride in speaking on behalf of those who had no voice. It’s why so many lent time and bodies to the Civil Rights movement and thrust forward until the Soviet refusniks were freed. But we’re silent now, left and right, willing to put up with all sorts of perfidy as long as it comes from what our side of the aisle.
Maybe it’s because we feel sufficiently at home in America in 2017. Or maybe it’s because we, like all Americans, are too distracted by the fury of a public life lived primarily on Facebook and cable TV. But with Trump a new age begins and we’ve no choice but to once again become the people who bear witness. We must become the people we have always been.
This makes Jewish journalism more essential than ever. A decade ago, too many of us American Jewish journalists were guilty of thinking the great good always lay elsewhere, anywhere outside our shtetl, with daily newspapers and general interest magazines that were somehow more respectable
Now, however, we’re blessed with outlets that take seriously journalism’s duty of placing a mirror in front of its community and demanding they look not only at reality but also at themselves without excuses. We may get death threats on Twitter from our haranguers on the alt right and we may face a commander in chief who appears to disdain the very notion of an unfettered press but for journalists, particularly us Jewish journalists, there’s never been a more thrilling time and a greater sense of urgency. To paraphrase a late, great president, when it comes to the press waking up from its stupor and rising to the occasion, it’s now morning in America.
Liel Leibovitz is senior writer for Tablet magazine
