Protecting Jews Means Protecting Democracy
Jewish safety and our democracy are intricately linked and cannot exist without the other. When democracy has historically been threatened, Jews everywhere are less safe and more vulnerable to discrimination and persecution. We don’t need to look very far back in history to see this repeated time and again. Jewish Americans have been protected by our democracy, our civil liberties and free speech, free markets, pluralism, the rule of law, free and fair elections, which have afforded our communities security for generations.
But the everyday protections afforded to us are often not visible to the naked eye. As highlighted recently by The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell, democracy is abstract and malleable: “Voters know democracy by its fruits, not its roots…voters care about the particular things American democracy confers, but are not necessarily animated about the concept itself.”
Discourse and discussions over the past several months and in the lead-up to the midterm elections, around Jewish safety have continued to collapse into the same partisan divide, no matter how it starts. In my work, I focus on fighting antisemitism, upholding our democratic institutions and protecting free speech. The people I talk to disagree with each other constantly, some are AIPAC funders, some are J Street funders, and everything in between. But when I frame the conversation around fruits instead of roots, something shifts. Almost everyone agrees that antisemitism is rising. And almost everyone agrees that American Jews, like all Americans, depend on free speech, free markets, pluralism, the rule of law, and free and fair elections to be safe, to be heard, and to be full participants in this country. That agreement is not nothing. At the core, it’s close to what being an American Jew means to me.
I grew up with one set of my grandparents in Waukegan, Illinois, twelve miles from the Wisconsin border. My grandfather’s father had founded Am Echod, a conservative shul, and a Jewish cemetery there. My grandparents and great-grandparents understood democracy by its fruits long before I had the language for it. It was democracy that let my grandparents raise four children, several of whom are still practicing Jews today. My grandmother never once told anyone how she voted. I remember my sister and me asking her outright, and she never gave in. The ballot was hers. Democracy protected that privacy as surely as it had protected my great-grandfather’s freedom to build a shul and a cemetery, where the legacy of those Waukegan Jews is now buried, too.
That kind of quiet, the freedom to hold a belief without having to defend it, litigate it, or perform it for anyone, feels almost impossible today. The internal fighting inside the Jewish community, and among people who care about democracy more broadly, has stopped being productive. I’ve lost track of what “left,” “center-left,” and “center” are even supposed to mean anymore. We use those labels less to describe people than to shove them aside. That is not the America I want to leave my children.
I believe in pluralism. Most of us still do, even when it doesn’t feel that way. But when push comes to shove, we spend our energy litigating definitions, overanalyzing social media posts, and taking single lines from faith leaders taken out of context. All of this gets us nowhere and distracts us from the fight to preserve our democracy. When did we decide this was how we’d treat each other? There is a real generational divide on these questions, yes. But underneath it, every generation still wants the same thing, to actually reap the benefits of democracy, not just argue about its theory. We need red lines; there are things none of us should tolerate. But I hope that in this new year, we can build more room around where those lines sit and more patience for the disagreement that happens inside them.
To me, being an American Jew is an identity and a commitment to ritual, to belief, to story, and to an understanding of what it means to be “othered.” It carries a responsibility to be a voice for people who don’t have one. Jewish communities cannot keep excluding people over their politics on Israel or US elections, politics that have themselves become weaponized, wielded to divide us rather than to protect what we actually share. That isn’t a path forward. It’s just more roots, when what we need is to remember the fruit.
As we enter 5787, I want to try approaching our conversations from that same place.
