What’s in the future for American Jews?
by Victor Rosenthal
Abu Yehuda
May 12, 2019
One of the favorite myths of American antisemites – of both the left and right – is that the Jews push America into wars for the sake of Israel, or for the sake of the Rothschild fortune*, or both. Take this newly-announced candidate for the US Congress, for example.
So President Trump’s recent tough talk about Iran is red meat for antisemites. Nevertheless, Trump is right to pressure Iran to end its nuclear program. If you are the US President, and a country that chants “Death to America” every day several times before breakfast is clearly developing nuclear weapons (despite a worthless “deal”), the rational thing to do is make them stop, right? How hard is this?
OK, Obama didn’t agree, but then … never mind. I’m talking about today.
Trump is being accused of dragging America into war, and Israel – and by extension the Jews – are dragging trump. That is precisely the point of the hateful antisemitic cartoon that created such a furor when it appeared in the NY Times International Edition recently.
I am sure PM Netanyahu and a majority of Israelis, me included, would be happy to see the US destroy Iranian nuclear facilities. The US has the power to do it, and Israel would doubtless offer to help.
But this doesn’t imply that the US would be doing it on behalf of Israel, or even more so, on behalf of the Jews. The US, as a general rule – like other nations – does what it does to advance its interests. In this case American self-interest includes protecting itself and its allies, as well as preventing the rise of a hostile caliphate in the Near East, and keeping Iran from taking control of a big chunk of the world’s oil supply.
Saudi Arabia has as much or more influence in the US than Israel, and has had a “special relationship” with the US since February, 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt met King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud on board a Navy destroyer in the Suez Canal. Indeed, when the Saudis went head-to-head with the vaunted “Israel lobby” over the sale of AWACS airborne warning and control systems aircraft to Saudi Arabia in 1981, Israel lost.
The Saudis, who are presently fighting Iran in a proxy war in Yemen, are perhaps even more worried about Iran than Israel is. But that is less interesting to those who want to blame the Jews.
A conflict with Iran could result in attacks on American bases in the region – there are more of these than you may think – or terrorism against the homeland. If this were to happen, there’s no doubt that it would be used as an excuse for anti-Jewish acts. It’s ironic that even those Jews that supported the Iran deal, hate Trump, and have no connection whatever to Israel, would find themselves targeted (ironic, yes, but it serves them right).
This is something that today’s American Jews are not ready for. Having grown up during the Golden Age of American Jewry, they are not expecting irrational, unfair treatment. They are not expecting the kind of crazy conspiracy theories that blame the Jews for 9/11 to become mainstream. They are not expecting their ideas and opinions to be discounted because they come from Jews, their children rejected from elite schools – or admitted, and then tormented and threatened there. They are not expecting to be cursed or even knocked down in the street if they look Jewish, something that seems to happen on a daily basis now in New York City.
Most do not understand, yet, that every Jew is responsible for every other Jew, and that – as someone recently said – “when visibly Jewish people are victimized, then every Jewish person is victimized.” And finally, they almost never realize that, whatever they think about it, the Jewish state – not Brooklyn and not Los Angeles – is the center of the Jewish world.
But they will learn. Either the US will follow the courageous policy of the Trump Administration and confront and defeat its enemies (who are also the enemies of Western civilization overall), or it will return to the cowardly strategy of appeasement and obsequiousness of the previous administration.
Either way, the Jews will be in the middle and it will be hard for them. And they will either learn to stick together and fight against the antisemites, or they will save themselves by giving up their Jewishness, insofar as this will protect them (it didn’t during the Nazi period).
What’s changed in the last two millennia or so?
* Full disclosure: My daughter is married to a Rothschild. They both work and are saving up to buy their own apartment. Apparently he is not one of those Rothschilds.
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More worries for American Jews
by Victor Rosenthal
Abu Yehuda
May 19, 2019
Predicting another Holocaust gets people’s attention, but history never repeats itself in precisely the same way. America today isn’t Germany of 1938, and American Jews aren’t European Jews. The most likely scenario, in my opinion, is not a disaster that will cause American Jews to flee to Israel en masse. Yes, antisemitism will continue to increase. Street violence against identifiable Jews, attacks on synagogues and other Jewish institutions, and the prevalence of anti-Jewish stereotypes and discrimination will all become more common. But barring a literally revolutionary change in government, it’s impossible for me to imagine that the institutions of the state will ever encourage or even turn a blind eye to violent manifestations of Jew-hatred. There will be no purges and no Nuremberg laws. It will not become impossible for a Jew to live in America. Things will get worse, but Jews will get used to it. They always have.
At the same time, the current process of cultural extinction of non-Orthodox Jews will continue, thanks to their below-replacement birthrate and an intermarriage rate near 70%. The problem of antisemitism will soon become moot for them, because even those that still identify as Jewish will be barely distinguishable from non-Jews. The members of “If Not Now” will not be beating on the gates of the Jewish state to enter, because they will be just another anti-Israel organization. Nobody will care if their grandparents were Jews.
For Orthodox Jews, today about 10% of American Jews, I expect that there will be increased friction with non-Jewish neighbors, who will continue to harass them as well as oppose the expansion of Jewish neighborhoods. Densely populated Jewish neighborhoods, reminiscent of European ghettos, will come into existence. Some Orthodox Jews may go to Israel, while non-Zionist factions will have no option but to concentrate in rural or urban areas that they will fortify however they can.
The Golden Age of American Jewry, which I somewhat arbitrarily designate as the period from the end of WWII in 1945 to the Pittsburgh Massacre of 2019, is over, although many American Jews haven’t noticed. Jewish history will continue, but its center will be here in Israel. Where it belongs.
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