American Jews no longer believe “it can’t happen here”. It can and it has.
The practices of the Wasp ascendancy gradually faded, luring younger Jews into a belief that all was well for them, safe in America, as safe as assimilated Jews felt in Germany before Hitler. Then came Hamas, its pledge to kill Jews wherever they were found, and an outpouring of support for the terrorists from the affluent students who took to the streets to chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, although they could not find Israel on the map from which they wanted it erased, or name either the river or the sea referred to in their chant.
Hamas is waging a war against Israel that has succeeded in providing cover for the anti-Semitism that has always been present in America. This is not the soft, socio-economic anti-Semitism that the Wasp ascendancy relied on to keep its country clubs, co-ops and white-shoe law firms free of a Jewish presence. It is what Lance Morrow of the Ethics & Public Policy Center calls anti-Semitism of “gentiles… on their fourth glass of Chablis… [of] a discreetly covert quality… a kind of sly politesse”.
Today’s is the anti-Semitism of the gutter, broken glass at Jewish-owned shops, harassment on the streets and campuses, Jewish students cowering behind locked doors in the library of the Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln proclaimed in 1860 that we should never “be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us”, unable to walk safely across campuses at elite institutions they attended and at which I had studied and later taught.
https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2023/12/the-fightback-against-us-anti-semitism-has-begun
