Maybe it’s NOT that recent, this civil war of sorts among American Jews. Going backward, earlier generations were mostly on the Left, especially in agglomerations like New York. But from the late ‘60s or so there did ensue a split roughly between those who read “Commentary” magazine, cared deeply about Israel, didn’t like campus mayhem or weed, and eventually supported Reagan; and those on the “New York Review of Books” flank, who were “liberals” in all ways, and in some cases socialists, too, and who thought Nixon and Reagan were the devils incarnate!
But this split has recently become more visible and searing. Yes, it’s grown wider than the mighty Niagara, and here’s ME to tell you why? If possible (he says with humility)…
First off: the “why” has something to do with a unique but controversial politician named Donald Trump. Well beyond America’s Jewish community, this figure’s also ignited a profound ideological conflict in the country as a whole, one pitting committed Trumpophiles against Trumpophobes. I.e., those who value him and his policies vs. those who emphatically don’t.
But the Trump phenomenon’s also put American Jews in a bind, given that he’s the most Israel-supportive president ever, and also more forthright combating campus antisemitism (including at Harvard and other elite schools) than his Oval Office predecessor. Not to mention as a dismantler of DEI that put American Jews, along with Asians, and simply white males, and most fundamentally, merit at a disadvantage when it came to cracking into such prestigious institutions.
Boy am I on thin ice here! But let me continue anyway on this now significant divide among American Jews.
Read letters to the New York Post from those in the Big Apple, but also Florida and other places; and their authors often don’t understand (as they tell us in strong prose) how their brethren, including Messrs. Schiff, Raskin, or the Bern, lay into Trump so repetitively. At an extreme, they find such types traitors of sorts.
And maybe some have learned, too, from tragic swaths of the 20th century past? How so?
In one example, oppressed Jews in Russia before the Revolution were drawn overwhelmingly to the Left; and after the first revolt erupted in March ‘17, many enrolled as Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and yes, Bolsheviks, too. How did THAT work out?
By the ‘30s a Soviet psychopath, Joseph Stalin, killed off a slew of Russian or Ukrainian Jews, including former top Bolshies like Zinoviev and eventually, Trotsky. You’re talking many thousands here. A lady who wrote “Hope Against Hope” about the imprisonment and demise of her prominent Jewish hubby, the poet Osip Mandelstam, said ruefully that the 19th century (of the tsars) wasn’t so bad, only “we” didn’t know it!
History buffs might also consider Jews as the most prominent but vulnerable minority in Germany of the ‘20s, along with those in Freud’s Vienna. Often on the Left, too? For sure. A Left that then collapsed like a house of cards to Hitler, preceding the worst of what became called the Holocaust.
“Before the deluge,” as one writer titles his book on post-WW I Germany, would they have done better in some cases backing conservatives or moderates? During the mid-‘20s Berlin Rabbi Joachim Prinz warned in strong language that German Jews weren’t politically prescient and didn’t understand an enemy, including how easily nettled barbaric toughies (a.k.a. Nazis) can rapidly become; and how you do need friends to combat such abominable movements.
Well now there’s plenty of barbarism around, too, including in the former city of cities, New York, the one-time paradise of L.A., etc. Some American Jews obviously feel that the Trump side is now the “friend” side, the supportive side, the one that will try and protect. But at least as many on the “progressive” flank can’t ditch aany of their antipathy to the current president, no matter what he does. Including those American Jews who dug into sometimes deep pockets and made hefty donations to the Democratic party of Biden and Harris.
A civil war of sorts here? That’s what it certainly seems like. Will this conflict become even more exacerbated? Or will there eventually be some kind of attenuation and melding? To be seen …