The American Question

American Jews experience unprecedented safety, integration, and success in the United States while retaining historical memory of how security elsewhere ended in exclusion, violence, murder, or expulsion. The erosion of democratic institutions and the rise of fascism enabled Nazism, shaping personal sensitivity to these dangers. The United States is not compared to Weimar Germany or Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement because constitutional protections, independent courts, federalism, a free press, and civil society reduce the risk of state persecution. Jews participate fully across civic life rather than being treated as a tolerated caste. Israel’s founding creates moral and political tension tied to security concerns, including the UN partition plan and subsequent invasion of the newly created Jewish state.

"American Jews have achieved unprecedented safety, integration, and success in the United States, yet we carry a long historical memory in which periods of apparent security elsewhere, again and again, ended abruptly in exclusion, violence, murder, or expulsion. I grew up with a deeply personal connection to the Holocaust and with sensitivity to how the erosion of democratic institutions and the descent into fascism enabled the rise of Nazism."

"Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that the United States is not Weimar Germany or Eastern Europe's Pale of Settlement, where deadly pogroms against Jews were a regular feature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. America's constitutional order-independent courts, federalism, a free press, and a robust civil society-provides formidable safeguards against the translation of social hostility into state persecution."

"Jews are not a tolerated caste here but full participants across every sector of civic life: business, academia, media, the professions, government, the arts. Jewish confidence in America's resilience is not foolish. The challenge is to hold that warranted confidence alongside a warranted fear."

"And yet, for Jews, the question of security for Israel requires its own response to that historical vulnerability, and Israel's founding created a moral and political tension that many of us find it difficult to reconcile. In 1947, the United Nations adopted a partition plan that contemplated two states, one Jewish and one Arab. It treated that decision as a legal basis for Jewish sovereignty, even as it was rejected by the Arab world, which responded by invading the just-born Jewish state. The invasion failed."

Read at The Atlantic