American Jews Ask: How Did We Get Here?

Many friends have asked me, in one form or another, “How have we, as Jewish Americans, come to the current state of affairs?” This essay is my attempt to answer that question. But I think the question is larger than the condition of American Jews alone. Historically, Jews have often been a kind of canary in the coal mine: hostility toward Jews can be an early warning that a society is losing confidence in its own liberal values, its commitment to pluralism, and its willingness to defend equal citizenship. So the question is not only how American Jews got here, but how America itself got here and what that may tell us about where the country is heading.

Jews have enjoyed extraordinary acceptance and success in America, but history warns us never to assume that our security is permanent. October 7 exposed several converging dangers: the explicitly antisemitic ideology of Hamas and Hezbollah; Iran’s threats against Israel and America and its support for terrorist proxies; and the remarkable success of a pro-Palestinian information campaign that transformed Israel, in much of public opinion, from the victim of a horrific terrorist attack into an alleged perpetrator of genocide.

There is bitter irony in that accusation. Genocide requires not only civilian casualties or the horrors of war but, critically, the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. Many reputable authorities and scholars reject or strongly dispute characterizing Israel’s war against Hamas as genocide. I believe they are right. Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. Whether Israel’s conduct meets the legal standard for genocide remains fiercely disputed, but the critical question is intent. Israel says its objective is to destroy Hamas, not the Palestinian people.  By contrast, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Iranian proxies have repeatedly advocated eliminating Israel and have frequently accompanied those objectives with explicitly antisemitic rhetoric; Iran has coupled calls for Israel’s destruction with state-sponsored antisemitism and Holocaust denial. The distinction between the horrors of war and an ideology of genocidal annihilation has been largely lost in the information war.

Zionism is something Jews should proudly explain and celebrate, not apologize for. Zionism is the joyous realization of a 2,000-year-old Jewish longing for national self-determination in our ancestral homeland and is deeply intertwined with Jewish history, religion, culture, and identity. It does not require supporting every Israeli government or policy; Israelis and Zionists vigorously disagree among themselves. Anti-Zionism goes much further than criticizing Netanyahu, settlements, or the Gaza war: at its core it rejects Jewish national self-determination  and denies Israel’s right to continue to exist as a Jewish state. Criticizing what Israel does is political argument; denying Israel’s right to exist as the Jewish state is fundamentally an antisemitic proposition.

The Islamist challenge is not merely a Jewish or Israeli problem. It is a challenge to Western civilization and its values: religious pluralism, individual liberty, equality before the law, freedom of speech and religion, democracy, and the separation of religious authority from government. Those principles grew from many sources, prominently including the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the Enlightenment. Americans understood the danger of violent Islamism viscerally after September 11. A quarter-century later, much of that memory has faded.

We should distinguish Islam, a religion practiced peacefully by millions of Americans, from Islamism, a political ideology that in its extremist forms seeks to subordinate democratic government and individual liberty to religious rule. However, we must listen and act when violent Islamist movements tell us what they believe. Al-Qaeda’s attack on America, Hamas’s October 7 massacre, and the declared hostility of Iran and its proxies are reminders that their struggle is not simply over Israel: the most extreme Islamist movements explicitly reject fundamental features of the liberal Western order itself and seek to replace them with an Islamist political order.

Part of how we got here lies in an increasingly dysfunctional K–12 and university educational system that too often teaches students what to think rather than how to think. Identity politics, intersectionality, and simplistic oppressor-versus-oppressed narratives can substitute predetermined moral categories for critical thinking, competing viewpoints, history, and civics. Jews and Israel can then be assigned the role of powerful “oppressor,” while history and context disappear behind the label.

The same intellectual environment helps explain the appeal of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) and socialism among young Americans. Their economic frustrations may be legitimate, but too few have been taught what repeatedly happened when political and economic power became concentrated in the state. Democratic socialism and communism are not identical, but the distinction becomes considerably narrower when organizations such as the DSA advocate replacing capitalism and collective ownership of key economic sectors, and prominent democratic socialists have even spoken of “seizing the means of production,” objectives that are historically central to socialist and communist economic doctrine. The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Maoist China, Cuba, and other communist regimes should make us deeply skeptical that ever-greater state control can deliver both equality and freedom. They produced repression, secret police, suppression of dissent, economic stagnation, and too often an equality of shared scarcity and poverty. Capitalism is imperfect and requires rules and reform, but combined with democracy, private property, competition, and individual liberty, it has generated extraordinary prosperity and opportunity.

American Jewish success may itself have contributed to our complacency. My professional life has been spent in engineering, research, and innovation, and one lesson of technological change is particularly relevant here: even enormously successful systems become vulnerable when they fail to recognize that their environment has changed. Survival does not necessarily belong to the strongest or even the smartest incumbent. It belongs to those who recognize a paradigm shift and adapt before it is too late.

American Jews must ask whether we failed that test.

Survival has never depended solely on being strong, educated, or successful; it also requires recognizing when the environment has changed and adapting quickly to it. Too many of us became secure in the belief that our professional success, political influence, friendships, and acceptance into American society were permanent, even as attitudes toward Israel, particularly among younger Americans, were changing dramatically and antisemitism toward American Jews was rising sharply. Nowhere was that change more disturbing than on some of America’s most prestigious university campuses, where Jewish students faced harassment, intimidation, exclusion, and even physical assault, often because of their Jewish identity or their actual or presumed support for Israel. My own alma mater, Columbia University, became a particularly painful example. History does not tell us that America today is Germany in the 1930s, but it does teach Jews never to wait until hostility becomes unmistakable before taking it seriously. We need to recognize changing paradigms early, understand how others increasingly perceive us, and adapt before dangerous ideas become entrenched.

Organized American Jewry must also ask itself whether it adapted quickly enough. Many Jewish institutions developed during decades when antisemitism appeared to be declining, Israel enjoyed broad American sympathy, and alliances with the larger liberal community seemed secure. Their commitment to universal causes reflects an admirable Jewish tradition, but at times it may have distracted from an equally fundamental organizational responsibility: protecting Jewish life, confronting antisemitism, defending Israel’s legitimacy, educating Jews about emerging threats, and providing American Jewry with a clear sense of mission. Some organizations responded more forcefully than others, but October 7 and its aftermath revealed how intellectually and institutionally unprepared much of American Jewry was for the speed and intensity of what followed. Caring about the welfare of others is an important Jewish value; ensuring the security, continuity, and future of the Jewish people must once again be a central priority as well.

Confronting Iran requires similar clarity. A cease-fire is a pause in fighting, not necessarily a path to peace when an adversary remains committed to the same revolutionary objectives. Repeated cycles of cease-fire and kinetic action allow an enemy to regroup while consuming finite inventories of expensive offensive missiles and defensive interceptors. A cease-fire is not victory if the underlying threat survives. Trump should have given Americans the equivalent of an FDR-style “fireside chat”: explain why confronting Iran was necessary, define victory, identify the sacrifices required, and explain why bearing those costs today could prevent vastly greater ones for our children and grandchildren. Even temporarily higher energy prices from disruption of the Strait of Hormuz must be weighed against the far greater danger of a future in which a revolutionary Iran possesses both long-range missiles and nuclear weapons.

Immigration and assimilation are also part of this story. America has been enormously strengthened by immigrants, including generations of Jewish immigrants, but successful immigration requires something beyond admission: newcomers must become Americans. Assimilation should never require Muslims, Jews, Christians, or anyone else to abandon their religion, culture, or heritage. But it should require acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law, equal citizenship, religious pluralism, freedom of speech, democracy, and loyalty to the country one has chosen to join.

Europe offers a warning: parts of Europe have struggled to integrate large immigrant populations, with problems that include residential segregation, parallel communities, Islamist radicalization, and conflicts between illiberal religious practices and Western civic values. America should learn from those difficulties rather than assume that successful assimilation happens automatically. The lesson for America is to insist upon assimilation into our common civic culture. The Constitution and American law, not Sharia or any other religious law, must be supreme. The relevant question about an immigrant is not “What is their religion?” but “Do they accept the American civic compact and want to become part of it?”

America should welcome immigrants who want to become Americans, contribute to our society, and embrace its constitutional principles, while being far more cautious about admitting those who reject those principles or embrace ideologies hostile to them. The historic American ideal E pluribus unum, “Out of many, one” cannot mean merely assembling ever more separate communities within the same borders. Immigration succeeds when newcomers are free to preserve the pluribus while genuinely joining the unum.

The way forward begins with confidence in that same American ideal: E pluribus unum. We may remain different in religion, race, ethnicity, and culture while sharing a larger identity as equal American citizens. Pluralism without that unifying civic identity risks becoming tribalism.

America must again teach the next generation civics, American history, and, above all, how to think critically, not what to think. Jews must relearn another ancient lesson: we must be capable of defending ourselves intellectually against lies and antisemitism and physically against those who would harm us. We must also remain vigilant, adaptable, and willing to recognize when old assumptions no longer fit new realities and to respond before emerging threats become entrenched. Israel must possess overwhelming military strength, and America must remain strong enough to deter enemies of the democratic West.

E pluribus unum gives us the civic ideal worth defending; Jewish and American history teach us that ideals survive only when people have the knowledge, confidence, courage, adaptability, and strength to defend them.

Successful societies, like successful technologies, survive not by assuming yesterday’s world will continue forever, but by recognizing change and adapting to it. Jews have learned that lesson many times throughout history. We shouldn’t have to learn it again.