The Blogs: Run, Hannah, Run!

What’s spooked America’s Jews?

At the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards, Jewish comedian and actress Hannah Einbinder blurted out, “Go Birds, f—k ICE and free Palestine.” From a defensive crouch, she explained that she felt obliged “as a Jewish person” to distance herself from “Jews from the State of Israel,” whose religion and culture “is really separate.” As goes Hannah, so goes America? Is this a new schism that compromises the solidarity needed to bring the 10/7 hostages home? An understanding of the history of Jews in America is needed to interpret what Hannah said and the tenuous dynamic it reveals between the two major Jewish global constituencies: those who speak Hebrew and are shaped by history and survival; and, those who speak English and cleave to liberal ideals and the hope of belonging.

Nearly 6 million Jews live in America in 2025, compared with about 8 million in Israel (and a total worldwide Jewish population of about 16 million). The lived experience of American Jews is different from Israeli jews. While Jews have always lived in the Land of Israel, the bulk of Israeli Jews descend from Europeans who survived the Shoah and had to fight for their place in Israel against the British and then massed Arab armies bent on their extermination, or were forced to flee Arab countries following the 1948 War of Independence. In 1921, as the situation for Jews in Europe deteriorated, millions of Jews looked to flee West, but America and the West closed their doors and they had nowhere to go. For the remnant who the survived the Shoah, the Nazis had won in their genocide and defeat of the Third Reich was a time for mourning, not celebration. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, two-thirds of the 250,000 survivors remaining in Europe immigrated to Israel.[1] They were immediately followed by hundreds of thousands of Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews who were forced to flee the Arab world (now constituting the largest Jewish ethnic group in Israel). For all of them, Zionism was an urgent mission to save Jews and Israel would be constructed to shelter and protect them from foes like Hamas who seek to destroy the Jewish people.

For American Jews, the experience has been altogether different. Typically, they did not grow up in families traumatized by the Holocaust–shamed by the trauma of their degradation and the humiliation of having to be saved, and grieving the loss of murdered parents and siblings. American Jewish culture was largely shaped by “German” Jewish immigrants who came between 1820 and 1880, following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, when the Congress of Vienna triggered the erosion of Jewish emancipation in many parts of Europe, and modernization wiped out their businesses. American liberal democracy promised them a home and safety.

As observed by President Reagan in his last speech, America’s magical power is that it is the one place where an immigrant can be accepted as an American regardless of origin. Aligning themselves to American liberalism, these Jewish immigrants created a version of German Reform Judaism that transformed the social atmosphere of the synagogue into that of a Protestant church and the role of rabbis into quasi-Christian pastors. Early Reform Jews disassociated from the ancient sorrow (Psalm 137), “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion” (meaning Jerusalem). In America, they removed references to Jerusalem from their liturgy, and today many liberal American Jews downplay the traditional prayer for a return to Jerusalem (Le-shanah ha-ba-a b’Yerushalayim) and forgo the opportunity to express solidarity with the entire Jewish community (Klal Yisrael), past, present and future. (Rabbi Alexander Kohut, a founder of the Conservative Judaism movement, objected to the effort to make Judaism a private matter and celebration of universal culture, calling it out as “suicide; and suicide is not reform.”)

Both German-American Jewry and the Reform movement initially opposed Zionism, notwithstanding their need to absorb about 2.5 million desperately poor, Ukrainian Jewish peasants fleeing pogroms. They saw the project for a national Jewish homeland as a challenge to their integration into American society and a potential source of “dual loyalty” accusations. For example, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) resolved that, “[Zion] is a holy memory, but it is not our hope of the future. America is our Zion.”[2] The Hebrew Union College (the American Reform movement’s rabbinical seminary) echoed this, declaring:

Each land, whereof Jews are loyal citizens, is the national home for those Jews. Palestine is not our national home, since we are not now and never expect to be citizens of that land.[3]

Instead, they embraced liberalism to assure their and others’ place in America. They cultivated proud American identities by wielding moral responsibility (the principle of Tikkun Olam) and political agency to fight for civil rights for all Americans.

Today, however, intersectionality “purity tests” have ostracized Jews and muted their voices with a spiral of silence that is resolutely antithetical to the fundamental American promises of individualism, free expression, and civil rights. Read as favorably as possible, Hanah’s exclamation of “free Palestine” may well be a howl of individual moral frustration. But does it signal a growing awareness that the liberal path to American acceptance of Jews has been shattered? Hannah evidently thinks so as she traverses her dilemma by tossing overboard her people Israel.

The belief of American Jews that liberalism is their redemption is, at heart, their answer to the Jewish Question: how can “Jewish differences” be accommodated in a modern society that hews to secular universalism? In “enlightened” Europe, the precondition for emancipation of the Jews was to cease seeing themselves as a nation. Christian von Dohm, a Prussian advocate for Jewish emancipation, described this choice in darkly prophetic terms in his 1781 text titled, The Civic Improvement of Jews:

It would be better if the Jews, along with their prejudices, did not exist – but since they do exist, do we really still have a choice from among the following: to wipe them off the face of the earth; … or to let them remain in perpetuity the same unwholesome members of society they have been thus far; or to make them better citizens of the world.[4]

History has tragically demonstrated that making Jewish survival contingent on what others think is a path that ends in flame and ash. Those who made it out alive–predominantly Israeli Jews–see Hannah’s moralizing as value signaling to fit into an American post-liberal culture that no longer tolerates and resolutely seeks to “cancel” Jews. The lesson they learned is not to ask permission to live. The main thing is to get a grip and have no fear because G-d is watching over you.[5]

From the beginning of time, the Children of Israel have been bound together by maintenance of their covenantal relationship with G-d. As described by the pagan prophet Balaam (Numbers 23:9):

This is a people who dwell alone,
Not reckoning themselves one of the nations.

Jews distinguish themselves from the non-denominational universalism of others and allow for the theological space of others. But, says Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks,[6] “the religion of Israel is not the religion of all humanity; it is something unique to the Jews.” According to Rabbi Sacks, Jewish particularity exists to teach the meaning of difference. G-d, Sacks says, commanded one people, the Jews, “to be different in order to teach humanity the dignity of difference.” What Hannah Einbinder represents to many Jews is an effort to assuage her upset by fleeing that difference. Without it, what is left of her Jewish identity? This begs the questions both of whether her revealed embarrassment signals a divide that profoundly threatens Israel, and also whether secular Jews can survive much longer outside Israel?

Endnotes:

Notably, the Displaced Persons (DPs) camps in Europe finally emptied out in May 1948. The US Congress did not update immigration quotas until June, when the DPs had already left.
Quoted in, Y. Dadoun, Zionism in the Hebrew Union College Monthly, 1896–1949, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (Ordination Dissertation May 2020), p.4, http://library.huc.edu/pdf/theses/Dadoun_Yael-CN-Rab-2020_rdf.pdf
Quoted in, K. Greenfeld, Anti-Zionism Among Jews, Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-zionism-among-jews#:~:text=We%20declare%20that%20no%20one,be%20citizens%20of%20that%20land.
Quoted in R. Fine & P. Spencer, Struggles within Enlightenment: Jewish emancipation and the Jewish question, in Antisemitism and the left (Feb. 28, 2018), https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781526104960/9781526104960.00006.xml
“Know, too! a person must cross a very, very narrow bridge. The main rule is: Do not be frightened at all!” Likutey Moharan Part II 48:7, https://www.sefaria.org/Likutei_Moharan%2C_Part_II.48.2.6?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
See, J. Sacks, Universalizing Particularity (Eds. H. Tirosh-Samuelson & A. Hughes), Koninkijke Brill NV (2014), quoted in, Jonathan Sacks: Universalizing Particularity, IDEAS, https://www.jewishideas.org/article/jonathan-sacks-universalizing-particularity