The Double Bind of Liberal Jews |
Maybe it’s the political instability and undermining of norms in Trump’s America, the erosion of support for Jews and the Jewish state, and the return of something that feels like the 1930s – authoritarians, ideological camps and hot wars, uncertainty about the future, and the sudden washing away of what had seemed like firm foundations, the erosion not only of the guardrails but even of the very ground in which the foundations of those guardrails are planted.
And maybe it’s been filtered for me through my recent reading of the satirical novels of Aldous Huxley (other than Brave New World), describing England in the 1920s and 30s, when there was a similar shaking of the foundations. They didn’t know then – in 1929, when WWI poet Robert Graves wrote Goodbye to All That, or even in 1936, when Huxley wrote Eyeless in Gaza – but we know now the horrible catastrophe that was just about to come, and so soon after the War to End All Wars.
Rabbi Yohanan in the Babylonian Talmud says: “Since the destruction of the Temple [by the Romans in 70 CE] there is no prophecy, except in fools (and children).” Like those future‑blind 1930s authors, none of us today are actual prophets; we don’t know what’s coming in the next few years – a US‑China cyber war? A global climate catastrophe? An AI apocalypse?
And maybe it’s because, on the way to a college reunion last fall, on the 16‑hour autumn drive from Toronto to Boston and back, while counting the cars on the New York State Thruway, I listened to It Can’t Happen Here, a novel from 1935 in which Sinclair Lewis imagined a fascist dictatorship taking over America based on a populist demagogue, fueled by the resentment of the dispossessed. The parallels to today’s anti‑woke deplorables, who now seek revenge through their own forms of cancel culture and norm‑corruption, are hard to miss.
So I find myself here and now: Judeophobes to the left of me, Judeophobes to the right of me, and I’m stuck in the middle with me. And I can’t seem to find any safe place to rest my thought‑tormented head, any contemporary soundtrack that feels like a safe harbor for my Jewish soul.
North American and Israeli Jews now find themselves in a painful bind: the very forces that appear to guarantee Israel’s survival are also eroding the liberal foundations on which many Jews, in Israel and the Diaspora, have long depended.
I grew up with the assumption that liberal democratic Israel was the United States’ natural, essential, dependable ally, regardless of which party held Congress or the White House. Over the decades, different presidents tilted more or less warmly toward Israel, but the underlying partnership felt steady and bipartisan. That sense of stability has eroded as attitudes in both American parties shifted, especially from Obama onward, when parts of the Democratic base began to turn harshly against Israel even as figures like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden remained strongly supportive.
In his first term, Donald Trump sharpened this tension. On one hand, his policies were unmistakably pro‑Israel: in 2017 Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassy there; in 2018 the US fully reimposed Iran sanctions after withdrawing from the Obama‑engineered JCPOA nuclear agreement (many of the key “sunset” provisions of that deal were slated to begin expiring around October 2025); and in 2020, under the leadership of his son‑in‑law Jared Kushner, came the Abraham Accords – US‑brokered peace agreements between Israel and Arab states (the UAE, Bahrain, later Morocco and Sudan).
On the other hand, Trump’s “America First” populism, flirtation with white‑Christian nationalism, corruption, and especially his eagerness to weaken liberal democratic norms all sit uneasily with the political culture in which American Jews have historically flourished. Trump became a president who was “good for Israel” in a narrow, strategic sense, but deeply threatening to the broader liberal order that has........