Hi, readers.
Phyllis Bottome Dennis, a British novelist and short-story writer, once said:
To be a Jew is to be strong with a strength that has outlived persecutions
It is to be
wise against ignorance,
honest against piracy,
harmless against evil and
kind against cruelty.”
I believe in the first two, dear readers. Which ones do you believe in?
This quotation came to mind when I was reading the above-cited article by literary scholar David Stromberg, who analysed the dynamics of “The Burden of Being Jewish in America’s Race War” in the June 2026 issue of Haaretz, Israel’s longest-running daily newspaper, after seeing a 1909 postcard depicting Jewish immigration from Russia to the U.S.
According to David Stromberg, the history of U.S. Jews and the history of Jews in Palestine developed in parallel. While American Jews focused on integration, civil rights, and religious pluralism within a liberal democracy, Jews in Palestine pursued national self-determination, the Hebrew language, and the rebuilding of a sovereign homeland (Zionism). Merging these histories to criticise the State of Israel is an anachronism, which means placing something in the wrong historical or chronological period.
The position of Jews in America is delicate when viewed against the country’s racial order, in which partial acceptance into whiteness has brought them both privilege and a sense of isolation and hostility.
On 4 March 2024, Franklin Foer, an American journalist, author, and staff writer for The Atlantic, published an article titled
“The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending” in The Atlantic.
This was a cover article in which Foer argued:
“An unprecedented period of safety, prosperity, and political influence for Jews in the United States was coming to an end.”
He suggested that this Golden Age might be ending not only for Jews, but also “for the country that nurtured them”. Foer warned that “abandoning the Jew in your country often means the end of your society as you know it”.
Although it is not an iron law of history (ILH: various philosophical and historical observations), there was an air of prophecy in this pronouncement, suggesting that the prediction was an inevitable truth.
ILH states that “luxuries tend to become necessities and spawn new obligations.” Foer agreed but did not explain what ultimately created problems for American Jews.
It is perhaps the complicated and fraught history of racial passing in the United States in a pursuit of survival and socioeconomic mobility at the cost of profound personal loss, isolation, and fractured identity.
Since I could not access the article published in The Atlantic, I asked Copilot, an AI tool, to provide me with the crux of the article, which appears below.
In The Atlantic, Franklin Foer argued that American Jews had lived through an exceptional historical period in the decades after the Second World War, during which they achieved unusual levels of security, prosperity, cultural acceptance, and political influence without having to abandon their Jewish identity. Restrictions such as university quotas, housing discrimination, and exclusion from elite institutions disappeared.
This enabled Jews to become prominent participants in American intellectual, political, and cultural life, while pluralism replaced forced integration as a national ideal. This “golden age” is now eroding because hostility, prejudice, discrimination, and hatred directed against Jewish people, whether as a group or as individuals, have returned from two ideological directions:
One is far right which according to Foer portrays Jews as cosmopolitan elites who control finance, the media (two of the three fears that Hitler always kept in mind), immigration, or demographic change. Foer connects such ideas to conspiracies surrounding the slogan “Jews will not replace us.” This phrase and its variants were central antisemitic and white-supremacist slogans chanted during the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The second ideological direction comes from parts of theleft, which argue that hostility towards Israel gradually leads people to treat Zionism, and even Jewish communal identity itself, as inherently oppressive. After Hamas’s 7 October attack, disturbing statements appeared to excuse the murder of Israeli civilians or to hold American Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions.
One of Foer’s convincing examples relates to universities and schools, where, according to him, Jewish students encounter intimidation, exclusion, or pressure to reject Israel to participate in progressive movements. In his view, legitimate criticism of Israel sometimes crosses into antisemitism when it denies Jews a right granted to other peoples or assigns collective guilt to Jews.
He warns that the danger extends beyond the Jewish community. The liberal order that allowed Jews to flourish was founded on pluralism, individual rights, institutional restraint, and protection for minorities. If Americans become comfortable excluding Jews, or any minority, based on ideological or ethnic categories, the country itself will abandon the principles that made its modern democratic success possible.
According to Foer, the issue is not only the increase in antisemitic incidents; Jewish security is also a test of liberal democracy.
Historically, Jews have been imagined as an invisible force behind capitalism, communism, immigration, war, or cultural change. What Foer did not mention is that these fears were also present in Hitler’s thinking; their return could facilitate re-emergence of authoritarian or conspiratorial politics.
Foer links antisemitism on the right and the left without claiming that the two are identical. The far-right casts Jews as the architects of multiculturalism; the radical left casts them as representatives of colonialism or racial privilege. In both cases, Jewish complexity disappears.
Foer emphasizes the conditional nature of acceptance. Jewish success can create the impression that antisemitism has vanished, yet the same
visibility can be reinterpreted as evidence of excessive power.
Prosperity therefore does not necessarily protect a minority from conspiracy theories; it may furnish those theories with material.
Foer demonstrates a serious deterioration in the climate for Jews, particularly in certain schools, universities, and online spaces. However, he does not establish that Jewish participation in American civic life has broadly collapsed. Rather, the pattern is uneven, and some campuses are less hostile than public discussion suggests.
The “golden age” was not equally golden for everyone, as Orthodox Jews, visibly Jewish people, poorer Jews, Jews of colour, and communities geographically distant from major metropolitan centres may have experienced American acceptance differently. Nevertheless, the symbol risks treating a largely affluent and institutionally successful segment of American Jewry as representative of the whole community.
Foer is right that criticism of Israel can reproduce antisemitic ideas or impose collective guilt on Jews. But opposition to Israeli policy or even to political Zionism is not automatically hostile toward Jewish people. He argues that radical criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic.
October 7 may both reveal and distort the longer-term trend. The attack and the war created an intensely polarised atmosphere. Genuine antisemitism was exposed, but the crisis also made it harder to distinguish durable social change from a crisis-driven surge in rhetoric and hostility.
Conclusion
Foer is convinced that American Jews will no longer believe that antisemitism is rare in society or exists only within a single political group. Rather, they will assume that it is a widespread, mainstream problem spanning the entire political spectrum.
He questioned whether the treatment of Jews reveals that pluralism remains historically and politically significant?
Foer has not decisively proved that the golden age has already ended, but his evidence supports the conclusion that it has become fragile, contested, and no longer taken for granted.
He has successfully sounded the alarm that Jewish life in America may cease to flourish, warning that the institutions and norms sustaining it are under pressure.
See you next time.
Take care. Bye.
