What went unmentioned was the distortion of the Black Hebrew Israelites in the discussion. Bernstein was being polite, but it shouldn't go unremarked when a violent hate group that has inspired a number of murders of Jews gets white-washed as colorful eccentrics.
None of this matters unless Jews in the states quit isolating themselves from other spiritual communities and acknowledge the broader issue. This attack they're experiencing, from the very large faction of extremist-progressives, much larger than any extremist-right faction, is an attack on those of all faiths. All of this is a campaign to once and for all bury God. The progressive cohort thinks it can achieve what no other religion has promised - heaven on Earth. It's a cult. A horrifying one at that. The Bolsheviks are at the gates. They've already begun to storm the capital.
I disagree that declining American support for Israel should be attributed to Wokeness. That assertion seems to be a diversion, allowing those who would make it to avoid real discussion about Americans' and Westerners' growing disgust for the personality, politics, and corruption of Benjamin Netanyahu. I find Wokeness an abhorrent ideology--so it is clearly not the reason for my increasing hesitancy to unquestioningly support the State of Israel. My rapidly waning support for Israel is solely a result of my aversion to and distrust of Netanyahu and his cozy relationship with the far-right Religious Zionism party.
“Jews can no longer safely go to synagogue without an elaborate set of security arrangements.” Overblowing the argument doesn’t create empathy. They absolutely can go without elaborate security just like their christian counterparts in the south who have been attacked by white supremacists.
Bigotry comes from every direction and goes in every direction. I do think people get too hyper by the likes of Kanye shooting off his mouth. You never know what's coming next from Kanye, but I don't see him pulling out a gun and shooting anyone. Or burning down a synagogue. Or supporting racist violence. I saw the term "hate speech" start to gain political tolerance nearly twenty years ago. I saw then, and see now, that the term is not about justice or tolerance. It is about political entities doing an end-run around the first amendment. I will NEVER support any hate speech law.
As for threats to Jews, some are significant. But why would we concentrate on Jews, while ignoring the violence against both black Christian churches and White Christian churches? As I said, the bigotry comes from all directions and goes in all direction. Anyone who tries to compartmentalize the bigotry is him/herself practicing bigotry.
I can't say that I don't discriminate, but I don't do it by race or religion. I discriminate based on who is being honest or dishonest. And fair and unfair. Considerate and selfish. Bigoted or tolerant. Find me a race or religion whose people fall entirely one side of those standards.
And, while we're on this subject, consider Trump and his supporters. We are routinely called racists, homophobes, xenophobes and White supremacists, even though we aren't all White. And, of course, we are called bigots. I would also point out that the most egregious institutional bigotry coming from government is aimed at Trump and his supporters. No president ever has been persecuted by banana republic partisans like Trump has been. No president, EVER. Wanton censorship in violation of both law and ethics has been practiced against Trump and his supporters. Trump supporters are fired from jobs, ejected from school board meetings, harassed by the FBI and persecuted by the DOJ. And, if you think "they have it coming", YOU are the bigot.
Can it happen here? Hard to say but consider this - had I told you five years ago that thousands of businesses would be forced to shut down, millions would be thrust into unemployment, and govt would try to make an unproven vaccine a condition for participation in daily life, would you have believed it? People readily showed their willingness to don the brown shirt. They happily cheered as nurses and doctors and military people who didn't want the jabs were fired. Their media dutifully cast the un-vaxxed as a class of humans to be shunned and un-personed. Why on earth would one history's oldest hatreds be beyond that?
With regards to the email, who is surprised? This is like the Twitter files whose release confirms everything that a number of people suspected was happening. That's not "news," per se; it's more validation of a previous belief, back when anyone who accused the govt of colluding with big tech was called a conspiracy theorist. Likewise, this is not news in the technical sense, either, other than the comfort with which the wokerati are openly hostile to Jews and, of course, to Israel. There is also no rational argument to be had with these people; it's like trying to convince the Covidians that perhaps, maybe, possibly, the vaccine is not all that we were told it is.
Traditional liberalism was drummed out of the left long ago; it no longer exists within Democrat DNA save for a very, very few exceptions. The BDS wing is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Dems. Same with the campus hatred of Jews which is documented in numerous ways, from Jewish students under attack or not wanted on student committees to decisions to never invite speakers who might be friendly toward Israel.
As an experiment, give leftists a choice: one year in Israel, or one year in Gaza, Iran, Yemen, Saudi, etc. Which do you suppose they would choose, especially the women? And the gay people. Have them live their convictions.
If by "it" you mean a Holocaust-style massacre, no. It's just not in the DNA of the US.
The real dilemma American Jews face is assimilation into a secular society. Being Jewish is almost (not quite) no big deal. Half of American Jews who get married, marry non-Jews. It's a dilemma and not a problem because problems have solutions and there's no solution to this except to turn your back on liberal democracy and become Orthodox.
Mr. Bernstein is quite right in his fears that liberal democracy is being undermined. No one can predict where this will go. All I can say is that I feel a sense of unease about the future of liberal democracy.
Going to Israel is no solution because, as the latest election proves, Israel is increasingly turning towards hard core ethnic nationalism.
I cant add a lot to what has already been said by others but Ill pose a question. Why are there Jews?
To my eye, the Jewish people were nearly extirpated by the Nazis, and one, if Jewish, could wonder why or how it could ever be that the chosen people of the only god there is required saving by essentially the rest of the secular world since there were none the sorts of supernatural interventions so commonplace in the past?
Its an academic point of course, but where I Jewish this would be the nail in the coffin of belief for me. As well as for most of the customs given that they are so often based, like Passover, in their god not murdering their first born etc.
And right on time, this week's episode of Haaretz Weekly podcast features Yofi Tirosh talking about the antifeminist policies that Smotrich will try to advance in the government such as limiting women's roles in the military and giving more power to all-male religious courts. (I think it is paywalled.)
The reasoning employed here to make it appear that the threat level against American Jews is astronomically high is identical to that used by BLM activists to rhetorically attempt to make anti-Black hate crimes or violence against blacks by police into a "pandemic."
(NB: that figure includes hate crimes of every variety, not just those involving physical attack--e.g., vandalism and other offenses against property, which are typically much more numerous than serious attacks against persons).
That means the chances the average American Jew would be the victim of any kind of hate crime (I repeat, including all types of such offenses, not just the most egregious that get reported in national media, but also things like some idiot writing something offensive on a sidewalk) in 2021 was 1 in 11,242.
Would it be really great to have the number of hate crimes against Jewish Americans *and* aggravated assaults against all Americans at zero? Sure, it would. That's not going to happen in the real world, though. Stupid people who commit such crimes will always exist.
But the odds against being a victim of an aggravated assault in America in 2021 are pretty low, and the odds of being a victim of an anti-Semitic hate crime are much, much lower even than that. Neither of those two rises in statistical terms to the level at which a reasonable person should be spending tons of time gripped by the terror that it's going to happen to him.
Stupid people committing crimes are not the only thing that will always exist. What will also apparently always exist is people with an absolute commitment, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to the idea that America is a murderously dangerous place for minority groups of various types.
But presumably the email writer doesn't want to start at zero in formulating the "unlivable" rate, so let's take triple the number of American Jewish casualties from anti-Semitic shooters starting at the 2018 rate (that's when the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that left 11 dead and 6 wounded happened.)
So triple that 2018 figure would yield 51 American Jewish casualties. That works out to a risk of about 1 in 150,000.
Now, how about let's compare that to the risk of all Americans being murdered in 2021? Not just shot, mind you, but murdered.
Given an American population in 2021 of around 333 million, that yields almost a 1 in 15,000 risk of being murdered. So the average American is about 10 times more likely to be murdered than the average American Jew is to be shot by an anti-Semitic shooter, even in a hypothetical year when we're working with a total of Jewish casualties that is three times higher than the highest number in recent history.
(Yes, yes, if you're really committed to the ideological rhetoric, you could look at this and go "But American Jews are facing *both* the overall murder risk and the anti-Semitic shooting risk, and that's what's so unfair!" I can't quickly locate reliable online data on the murder rate specifically for Jewish American victims but it is certainly comparatively quite low given that murder victim rate correlates strongly with socioeconomic status and Jews as a group in the US are highly concentrated near the top end of that stratification system. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/11/how-income-varies-among-u-s-religious-groups/ So if you calculated just the average murder risk for non-Jewish Americans--remember Jews are a tiny percentage of the overall US population--you'd certainly find a risk level there much higher than the combined murder and anti-Semitic violence risk for American Jews.)
The average American Jew who is convinced the chances he's going to be attacked at synagogue are really high is indistinguishable from the Black person who thinks there's a huge risk every time a cop stops him for running a stop sign that his life is in danger. Both beliefs are neatly falsified by evidence. They are also both arguably fueled to a significant degree by ideologues irresponsibly talking about these phenomena without getting into the statistical realities.
I don’t want to come off crass, but I don’t see any hard evidence here linking the left and anti semitism. I can concede that there are many pro Palestine/anti Zionist activists on the left (imo mostly Muslims) who are genuine bigots and seem to genuinely hate Jews.
As for the climate change analogy, maybe. Sorry, anti semitism is endemic to the right. Historically and in the present, from western Christians to eastern Muslims, hatred of Jews is largely found on the right.
If you had told me a year or two ago that we were on the verge of prohibiting the recognition of the differences between male and female biology, I would have said you were psychotically paranoid. It can happen here. Anything can happen here.
White nationalists are the heritage of southern rednecks affiliated with the Democrat Party. Today’s liberal Democrats should look to their submission to leftist ideology as ginning up antisemitism.
This is so interesting. I loved Glenn and John’s discussion and I’m fascinated by this response. The prevailing sentiment among many today is “stop complaining, Jews, you can’t be victims since you turned out okay, and you’re no saints yourselves”. This paves the way for all manners of abuse, from synagogue shootings down to most Jewish college students reporting they are afraid to let anyone know they are Jewish. In a time where most people flaunt their intersectional status, that one strikes a nerve.
The issue here isn’t limited to Jews - it’s what happens anytime you put “The” in front of the identity - The Jews, The Blacks, The Asians, The Gays - it dehumanizes the individual to a point of tacit approval to blame the Collective for perceived or real harms by any one member. As Kmele Foster noted recently, who wants to be blamed or lauded for the failures or successes of other people, just because we share immutable characteristics? How did we devolve to that point?
What went unmentioned was the distortion of the Black Hebrew Israelites in the discussion. Bernstein was being polite, but it shouldn't go unremarked when a violent hate group that has inspired a number of murders of Jews gets white-washed as colorful eccentrics.
None of this matters unless Jews in the states quit isolating themselves from other spiritual communities and acknowledge the broader issue. This attack they're experiencing, from the very large faction of extremist-progressives, much larger than any extremist-right faction, is an attack on those of all faiths. All of this is a campaign to once and for all bury God. The progressive cohort thinks it can achieve what no other religion has promised - heaven on Earth. It's a cult. A horrifying one at that. The Bolsheviks are at the gates. They've already begun to storm the capital.
Who killed more Jews this year?
White nationalist or blacks?
I disagree that declining American support for Israel should be attributed to Wokeness. That assertion seems to be a diversion, allowing those who would make it to avoid real discussion about Americans' and Westerners' growing disgust for the personality, politics, and corruption of Benjamin Netanyahu. I find Wokeness an abhorrent ideology--so it is clearly not the reason for my increasing hesitancy to unquestioningly support the State of Israel. My rapidly waning support for Israel is solely a result of my aversion to and distrust of Netanyahu and his cozy relationship with the far-right Religious Zionism party.
“Jews can no longer safely go to synagogue without an elaborate set of security arrangements.” Overblowing the argument doesn’t create empathy. They absolutely can go without elaborate security just like their christian counterparts in the south who have been attacked by white supremacists.
I like everything about this essay. However...
Bigotry comes from every direction and goes in every direction. I do think people get too hyper by the likes of Kanye shooting off his mouth. You never know what's coming next from Kanye, but I don't see him pulling out a gun and shooting anyone. Or burning down a synagogue. Or supporting racist violence. I saw the term "hate speech" start to gain political tolerance nearly twenty years ago. I saw then, and see now, that the term is not about justice or tolerance. It is about political entities doing an end-run around the first amendment. I will NEVER support any hate speech law.
As for threats to Jews, some are significant. But why would we concentrate on Jews, while ignoring the violence against both black Christian churches and White Christian churches? As I said, the bigotry comes from all directions and goes in all direction. Anyone who tries to compartmentalize the bigotry is him/herself practicing bigotry.
I can't say that I don't discriminate, but I don't do it by race or religion. I discriminate based on who is being honest or dishonest. And fair and unfair. Considerate and selfish. Bigoted or tolerant. Find me a race or religion whose people fall entirely one side of those standards.
And, while we're on this subject, consider Trump and his supporters. We are routinely called racists, homophobes, xenophobes and White supremacists, even though we aren't all White. And, of course, we are called bigots. I would also point out that the most egregious institutional bigotry coming from government is aimed at Trump and his supporters. No president ever has been persecuted by banana republic partisans like Trump has been. No president, EVER. Wanton censorship in violation of both law and ethics has been practiced against Trump and his supporters. Trump supporters are fired from jobs, ejected from school board meetings, harassed by the FBI and persecuted by the DOJ. And, if you think "they have it coming", YOU are the bigot.
Can it happen here? Hard to say but consider this - had I told you five years ago that thousands of businesses would be forced to shut down, millions would be thrust into unemployment, and govt would try to make an unproven vaccine a condition for participation in daily life, would you have believed it? People readily showed their willingness to don the brown shirt. They happily cheered as nurses and doctors and military people who didn't want the jabs were fired. Their media dutifully cast the un-vaxxed as a class of humans to be shunned and un-personed. Why on earth would one history's oldest hatreds be beyond that?
With regards to the email, who is surprised? This is like the Twitter files whose release confirms everything that a number of people suspected was happening. That's not "news," per se; it's more validation of a previous belief, back when anyone who accused the govt of colluding with big tech was called a conspiracy theorist. Likewise, this is not news in the technical sense, either, other than the comfort with which the wokerati are openly hostile to Jews and, of course, to Israel. There is also no rational argument to be had with these people; it's like trying to convince the Covidians that perhaps, maybe, possibly, the vaccine is not all that we were told it is.
Traditional liberalism was drummed out of the left long ago; it no longer exists within Democrat DNA save for a very, very few exceptions. The BDS wing is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Dems. Same with the campus hatred of Jews which is documented in numerous ways, from Jewish students under attack or not wanted on student committees to decisions to never invite speakers who might be friendly toward Israel.
As an experiment, give leftists a choice: one year in Israel, or one year in Gaza, Iran, Yemen, Saudi, etc. Which do you suppose they would choose, especially the women? And the gay people. Have them live their convictions.
If by "it" you mean a Holocaust-style massacre, no. It's just not in the DNA of the US.
The real dilemma American Jews face is assimilation into a secular society. Being Jewish is almost (not quite) no big deal. Half of American Jews who get married, marry non-Jews. It's a dilemma and not a problem because problems have solutions and there's no solution to this except to turn your back on liberal democracy and become Orthodox.
Mr. Bernstein is quite right in his fears that liberal democracy is being undermined. No one can predict where this will go. All I can say is that I feel a sense of unease about the future of liberal democracy.
Going to Israel is no solution because, as the latest election proves, Israel is increasingly turning towards hard core ethnic nationalism.
I cant add a lot to what has already been said by others but Ill pose a question. Why are there Jews?
To my eye, the Jewish people were nearly extirpated by the Nazis, and one, if Jewish, could wonder why or how it could ever be that the chosen people of the only god there is required saving by essentially the rest of the secular world since there were none the sorts of supernatural interventions so commonplace in the past?
Its an academic point of course, but where I Jewish this would be the nail in the coffin of belief for me. As well as for most of the customs given that they are so often based, like Passover, in their god not murdering their first born etc.
Free Palestine now - from a Jew who lost 25 family members at Auschwitz.
And right on time, this week's episode of Haaretz Weekly podcast features Yofi Tirosh talking about the antifeminist policies that Smotrich will try to advance in the government such as limiting women's roles in the military and giving more power to all-male religious courts. (I think it is paywalled.)
The reasoning employed here to make it appear that the threat level against American Jews is astronomically high is identical to that used by BLM activists to rhetorically attempt to make anti-Black hate crimes or violence against blacks by police into a "pandemic."
The total number of all FBI reported hate crimes against American Jews in 2021 was 676. https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/antisemitism-jews-target-of-58-percent-of-all-religiously-motivated-hate-crimes-in-us-678228
(NB: that figure includes hate crimes of every variety, not just those involving physical attack--e.g., vandalism and other offenses against property, which are typically much more numerous than serious attacks against persons).
The total number of Jews in the US is around 7.6 million. https://www.jns.org/opinion/how-many-american-jews-are-there-and-does-it-really-matter/.
That means the chances the average American Jew would be the victim of any kind of hate crime (I repeat, including all types of such offenses, not just the most egregious that get reported in national media, but also things like some idiot writing something offensive on a sidewalk) in 2021 was 1 in 11,242.
For comparative purposes, note that the odds of the average American being a victim of an aggravated assault in 2021 were about 1 in 413, or nearly 30 times greater. https://www.statista.com/statistics/191231/reported-aggravated-assault-rate-in-the-us-since-1990/
Would it be really great to have the number of hate crimes against Jewish Americans *and* aggravated assaults against all Americans at zero? Sure, it would. That's not going to happen in the real world, though. Stupid people who commit such crimes will always exist.
But the odds against being a victim of an aggravated assault in America in 2021 are pretty low, and the odds of being a victim of an anti-Semitic hate crime are much, much lower even than that. Neither of those two rises in statistical terms to the level at which a reasonable person should be spending tons of time gripped by the terror that it's going to happen to him.
Stupid people committing crimes are not the only thing that will always exist. What will also apparently always exist is people with an absolute commitment, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to the idea that America is a murderously dangerous place for minority groups of various types.
It is claimed in the email that "Jewish life" would be "render[ed]...unlivable" if "domestic shootings" of Jews tripled. Tripled from what base rate? In 2021, there were zero American Jewish casualties from anti-Semitic terrorists. That's 0.00. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/2021-saw-highest-ever-number-of-incidents-targeting-jewish-americans-report/ar-AAWBsYz.
But presumably the email writer doesn't want to start at zero in formulating the "unlivable" rate, so let's take triple the number of American Jewish casualties from anti-Semitic shooters starting at the 2018 rate (that's when the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that left 11 dead and 6 wounded happened.)
So triple that 2018 figure would yield 51 American Jewish casualties. That works out to a risk of about 1 in 150,000.
Now, how about let's compare that to the risk of all Americans being murdered in 2021? Not just shot, mind you, but murdered.
There were about 23,000 murders in the US in 2021, in a population of around 333,000,000. https://www.foxnews.com/us/us-murder-rate-continued-grim-climb-in-2021-new-fbi-estimates-show
Given an American population in 2021 of around 333 million, that yields almost a 1 in 15,000 risk of being murdered. So the average American is about 10 times more likely to be murdered than the average American Jew is to be shot by an anti-Semitic shooter, even in a hypothetical year when we're working with a total of Jewish casualties that is three times higher than the highest number in recent history.
(Yes, yes, if you're really committed to the ideological rhetoric, you could look at this and go "But American Jews are facing *both* the overall murder risk and the anti-Semitic shooting risk, and that's what's so unfair!" I can't quickly locate reliable online data on the murder rate specifically for Jewish American victims but it is certainly comparatively quite low given that murder victim rate correlates strongly with socioeconomic status and Jews as a group in the US are highly concentrated near the top end of that stratification system. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/11/how-income-varies-among-u-s-religious-groups/ So if you calculated just the average murder risk for non-Jewish Americans--remember Jews are a tiny percentage of the overall US population--you'd certainly find a risk level there much higher than the combined murder and anti-Semitic violence risk for American Jews.)
The average American Jew who is convinced the chances he's going to be attacked at synagogue are really high is indistinguishable from the Black person who thinks there's a huge risk every time a cop stops him for running a stop sign that his life is in danger. Both beliefs are neatly falsified by evidence. They are also both arguably fueled to a significant degree by ideologues irresponsibly talking about these phenomena without getting into the statistical realities.
I don’t want to come off crass, but I don’t see any hard evidence here linking the left and anti semitism. I can concede that there are many pro Palestine/anti Zionist activists on the left (imo mostly Muslims) who are genuine bigots and seem to genuinely hate Jews.
As for the climate change analogy, maybe. Sorry, anti semitism is endemic to the right. Historically and in the present, from western Christians to eastern Muslims, hatred of Jews is largely found on the right.
If you had told me a year or two ago that we were on the verge of prohibiting the recognition of the differences between male and female biology, I would have said you were psychotically paranoid. It can happen here. Anything can happen here.
White nationalists are the heritage of southern rednecks affiliated with the Democrat Party. Today’s liberal Democrats should look to their submission to leftist ideology as ginning up antisemitism.
This is so interesting. I loved Glenn and John’s discussion and I’m fascinated by this response. The prevailing sentiment among many today is “stop complaining, Jews, you can’t be victims since you turned out okay, and you’re no saints yourselves”. This paves the way for all manners of abuse, from synagogue shootings down to most Jewish college students reporting they are afraid to let anyone know they are Jewish. In a time where most people flaunt their intersectional status, that one strikes a nerve.
The issue here isn’t limited to Jews - it’s what happens anytime you put “The” in front of the identity - The Jews, The Blacks, The Asians, The Gays - it dehumanizes the individual to a point of tacit approval to blame the Collective for perceived or real harms by any one member. As Kmele Foster noted recently, who wants to be blamed or lauded for the failures or successes of other people, just because we share immutable characteristics? How did we devolve to that point?