American Democracy and Israeli Sovereignty Promised Jewish Safety.: That Promise Is Broken

Two developments raise this very question, whether a historic pattern of Jewish politics is at an impasse: the Trump administration's exploitation of antisemitism, and the Netanyahu government's systematic destruction of Gaza. America was to be the diaspora home that transcended the historical cycle of settlement, flourishing, decline and ultimately persecution and exile. America would be the eternal haven. Democracy, however flawed, represented the realization of irreversible progress and exile's end.

Israel's sovereignty returned Jews to history through the restoration of state power after two millennia. Jews would transcend the historical cycle, with the Holocaust as its horrific culmination, by fielding a robust army that would enable self-defense and the invincible realization of "never again."

The idea of American Jewish exceptionalism dated to George Washington's promise, in his letter to Newport's Jews, of "no sanction to bigotry." Yet it was after 1945 that intellectual and organizational leaders turned this into a full-fledged ideology, claiming that unlike in Europe, Jews in the U.S. did not experience an emancipation process. Rather, they boasted, Jews effortlessly gained citizenship alongside other white men.

In the middle of the twentieth century, the civil rights era reinforced that alluring claim when Jews alongside other white ethnics such as Italians and Irish, gained full access to employment, housing and educational institutions by joining a broad coalition: African Americans, labor unions, main line churches. The civil rights era similarly abolished the overtly racist national quota immigration system. This was America's exceptionalism.

The idea of Israel's exceptionalism, on the other hand, was at the core of Zionism. That ideology posited that Jews were a nation and thus entitled to national self-determination in the form of an autonomous region or sovereign state to regenerate Jews from the diaspora's deformations. They would transcend a limited economic niche – associated with usury, peddling or commerce – by erecting a society in which Jews would undertake all occupations, including soldiering and exercising a majority's political power.

These two exceptionalisms dominated the postwar era. They infused Jews in the two demographic centers with pride in the present and confidence for the future. Moreover, they reinforced each other.

American Jewry's postwar "Marshall Plan" focused on rebuilding Europe's devastated Jewish communities, as well as developing settlement in Mandatory Palestine and then in Israel. American Jewry poured hundreds of millions into this undertaking through philanthropy and investment such as Israel Bonds.

Lobbying for Israel gave Jewish organizations and their leaders unprecedented license to intercede in the formation of American foreign policy. The "labors for Israel," in Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg's felicitous phrase, became the sine qua non for Jewish leaders, supplanting religious knowledge, practice and belief.

Zionism and Israel have been dependent upon an imperial power from the start: the Ottomans, Britain, the USSR (albeit briefly), France and then the United States.

And organized American Jewry, in turn, cooperated with Israel in maintaining and strengthening this Israel-U.S. alliance, including censoring dovish two-state views that were commonplace in Israel itself. However much Israeli officials continued to denigrate diaspora Jewry, upholding the classic Zionist doctrine of the diaspora's negation, they became dependent upon their partners.

What now?

American democracy is under threat from a far right that places Jews at the center of their animosity. The toxic combination of the Trump administration's cultivation of white Christian nationalism and antisemitism at home, while supporting Israel's depredations abroad, puts American Jews in the crosshairs.

After immigrants and political opponents, we American Jews are potentially vulnerable targets. The administration's "shakedown" policies could as easily be applied to an array of heavily endowed Jewish institutions as they already have been applied to universities. By accepting Trump's purport to realize American-Jewish exceptionalism on campuses, Jewish leaders have allowed themselves to be implicated in the destruction of civil liberties.

Israel has outgrown its role as the regenerator of diaspora Jewry to become the Palestinians' oppressor by actively engaging in the atrocities, ethnic cleansing and indeed genocide. The illusion of a two-state solution offering a more equitable future has evaporated. Over a century ago the historian Simon Dubnow asserted that Jewish nationalism could never be chauvinist and oppressive because it was a higher nationalism of the spirit. Is that victim of Nazism, murdered in the Riga ghetto in 1941, turning in his grave?

What replaces the post-Holocaust pattern of the two exceptionalisms?

Jewish history teaches that it takes generations to recover from a profound crisis and respond creatively to it, both intellectually and spiritually. World Jewry is still grappling with the Holocaust, a challenge the two exceptionalisms' demise will only magnify.

American Jewish leaders must begin to imagine a future based on a categorically different vision of American Jewish history as well as relationship to Israel. The verities of the postwar dream have not just failed: They have crashed and are now burning before our eyes.

If American Jews wish not to be partners in creating an authoritarian United States and a pariah autocratic Israel, then they must reckon with the passing of old solutions.

David Sorkin