Opinion
Even now it’s still good to be Jewish in the USA
'It’s possible to be overly pessimistic, about both America’s future and the Jewish place in it.'
October 29, 2020 12:27
3 min read
'It’s possible to be overly pessimistic, about both America’s future and the Jewish place in it.'
October 29, 2020 12:27I’ll never forget the week of the 2016 presidential election. I was sharing a vast empty warehouse flat in Manhattan with my friend, the journalist Ben Judah. Each day we would scurry around on reporting trips, to swing counties in Pennsylvania or protests outside Trump Tower, trying to make sense of what felt like the collapse of history.
So much was uncertain then, so many predictions were panicked and wrong. But Ben and I agreed on one thing — the American Jewish dream had been tarnished. “I was in New York when the Goldene Medina lost its shine,” Ben wrote in a column for the JC that emerged from one of our long witching hour debates in a diner somewhere off Times Square.
Things certainly seemed bleak. The alt-right were on the march and white supremacy was back in fashion. When it came to Jewish life, America was suddenly looking very European. And for every Trump action there was a reaction. The left became radicalised, Trump’s vehement support for Israel activated and legitimised the unseemly views of Ilhan Omar and others.
Blood and soil antisemitism was back and our worst fears were made manifest on the streets of Charlottesville in the summer of 2017, when hundreds of neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us”. Then came Pittsburgh and a chilling pogrom, 11 Jews slaughtered at shul on a Shabbat morning. And the following year Poway, another shul shooting, more holy martyrs. “Creeping fear is here,” I wrote in my own JC column.
As Bari Weiss pointed out in these pages last week, the slide away from liberalism in America, and towards a climate of radical intolerance and racial division, on both sides of the political spectrum, does not bode well for the Jews. The cushy liberal consensus that underpinned two centuries of Jewish-American flourishing is fraying.
As we stand on the verge of another presidential election, with the polls showing Trump down but not entirely out, two different futures lie ahead for this vast, magnificent and chaotic nation. But whatever America decides on Tuesday, the toxicity and radicalism we’ve seen in the Trump era won’t just evaporate. Much of it is now in the system.
And yet it’s possible to be overly pessimistic, about both America’s future and the Jewish place in it. That far-right surge of the early Trump years appears to have dissipated, at least for now. For all his nods and winks, Trump is neither alt-right nor fascist. And Joe Biden’s ascendance to the Democratic nomination and quite possibly the presidency shows that moderation has plenty of mileage in it yet.
Speaking personally, even accounting for all that I’ve just described, in my four years in America I have found it an ideal place to be a Jew.
Better than England, where my Jewishness has at times been a source of discomfort and repression. Like many English Jews I maintain a fairly strict public-private divide: at home we are a heimishe family, but in the wide world we pass ourselves off almost as gentiles. That is the silent bargain we make.
And better than Israel, where I find the Judaism either too secular and attenuated or too orthodox and intense. For a diaspora-dweller like myself, the Jewishness of life in Israel, woven as it is into every fabric of society, is a little overwhelming.
But in America it all just works, for me at least. America, where my local bakery in Washington DC sells special honey cakes on erev Rosh Hashanah. Where menorahs sit alongside Christmas trees in the lobbies of Manhattan office blocks and the bagel is a venerated national foodstuff. A country and a culture built in part by Jews, from Hollywood to Greenwich Village, Stan Lee to RBG to Philip Roth to Bob Dylan. Jewishness exists in the foundations of this country, but not alone, not exclusively or overwhelmingly. I like it that way.
There was a coda to that febrile election week in 2016. The day after Trump’s victory, Ben found love with a Jewish woman and last summer we danced the hora for them at a wedding on a beach in Cape Cod, a pleasing juxtaposition of culture and place. And soon I found love too, and someone who wears our heavy traditions with an alluring lightness that only Americans can pull off. For all its present troubles, perhaps America is still the goldene medina after all.
Josh Glancy is the Washington bureau chief for the Sunday Times
