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A fortress won’t save American Jews
Jews have found themselves at the center of politics over the past few years — not a place we want to be, at least not like this.
Anton Jäger, a historian at Oxford University, has argued that since the Covid-19 pandemic spurred more government intervention into the lives of ordinary citizens, many Western countries have become “engulfed in a kind of permanent Dreyfus Affair.”
His point was that a contemporary obsession with politics has consumed society in the same way that the conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus on manufactured treason charges sucked up the oxygen in France at the end of the 19th century.
Jäger doesn’t mention the fact that Dreyfus was Jewish. But just as his Jewishness animated the scandal in the Third French Republic, Jews — real and imagined — have also found themselves at the center of today’s toxic political climate.
As many Americans became unmoored from reality during the pandemic, they alternately blamed Jews for creating the virus and described themselves as being victimized like Jews during the Holocaust for refusing to get vaccinated or comply with other public health guidance.
Jews have also found themselves at the center of debates over immigration, with suggestions on the right that George Soros is fueling mass migration intended to displace white Americans even as some on the left think of Jews as too white to be included in the minority coalitions fighting white supremacy.
Joe Biden made countering antisemitism a keystone of his presidency, while simultaneously providing Israel with a blank check after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack that allowed the country to wreak absolute devastation on Gaza — a military assault drove many Americans toward strident forms of anti-Zionism that teeter into antisemitism.
Donald Trump accelerated the logic of Biden’s fight against campus antisemitism — which held that the intense discomfort some Jewish college students felt over speech targeting Israel was a violation of their civil rights — to decimate elite universities that had long been targets of the conservative movement.
Meanwhile, right-wing media stars like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have won massive audiences while inveighing against Jews who they claim are supposedly controlling American politics, and even establishment institutions like the Heritage Foundation have struggled to keep what were once fringe antisemitic views from coming into the mainstream.
The overt kind of antisemitism peddled by the right is far less severe on the left — but the emergence of strident opposition to Israel as perhaps the core litmus test for inclusion in progressive spaces has hit many Jews hard in politics. At workplaces, schools and in social settings, people often fail to make space for any sense of Jewish attachment to Israel even when those Jews share deep outrage over the country’s actions or structure of government. AIPAC has ascended into the pantheon of liberal enemies alongside longstanding and much vaguer villains like “corporations” and “billionaires.”
Israel’s actions, and its apparent impunity to international concerns about its often abhorrent conduct, are an obvious and real explanation for this. But it doesn’t explain everything. Whatever one thinks about Zionism, the almost messianic notion that Palestinian liberation would unlock everything from world peace to Medicare for All is both unserious and, at its worst, part of an ignominious tradition of assigning Jews outsized control over the world.
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This can make it feel like there is little room for persuasion in the fight against antisemitism. If someone believes that Israelis engineered Covid-19 in a lab to kill gentiles, what can you really say to sway them — and is it even worth it, if they’re just going to move on to a new conspiracy about George Soros or the Rothchilds? And if someone believes that all the allegations against Graham Platner were a plot by Israel and its supporters to sink his candidacy, it’s hard to believe they’re coming from a place of genuine concern about Palestinians.
It’s a feeling of hopelessness that has ironically animated both the argument that we should stop trying to counter antisemitism, promoted by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens in his State of World Jewry speech earlier this year at the 92nd St. Y, and the Jewish establishment’s turn toward embracing the use of force against perceived enemies of the Jews.
This force is literal in the case of Israel’s campaign in Gaza and more figurative — though sometimes still involving arrests and police violence — when it comes to cracking down on campus protests at home.
Both Stephens and the Anti-Defamation League, which he took target at in his remarks for supposedly spinning its wheels in a hopeless attempt to defeat antisemitism, seem to have adopted a belief that Jews are better off going it alone.
Stephens argued that we should shift the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been invested in countering antisemitism into day schools and other institutions that can cultivate a sense of Jewish belonging and peoplehood.
The ADL, along with much of the Jewish establishment and dozens of new Jewish defense organizations created over the past decade, have abandoned past efforts to combat antisemitism through coalitions with other minority groups in favor of a rhetorical and legal assault on those they contend criticize Israel in unacceptable ways. Their methods — including promoting rigid definitions of antisemitism that include anti-Zionism, sponsoring lawsuits against colleges and universities, and cheering on the Trump administration’s move to deport student activists — seem to accept that they aren’t going to win hearts and minds but can perhaps still bludgeon their enemies into submission.
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But I don’t think Jews have the luxury of throwing up our hands in the face of rising antisemitism and deciding to either completely retreat, as Stephens has proposed, or strategically retreat while launching some rear-guard actions meant to keep the antisemites at bay for as long as possible.
First, there just aren’t enough of us. Jews may collectively have more wealth and resources at our disposal than any other community in the history of the Jewish diaspora, but there are still only a few million of us in the United States. Any fortress we try to build here would be cramped and vulnerable to being overrun by the 98% of the country that is not Jewish.
The community’s strength and power has come from our engagement in the political process and the fact that elected officials and civic leaders across the political spectrum take us seriously as citizens and constituents.
Smaller Jewish communities around the world, including those in Europe, have tried the fortress approach — often faced with little other choice as their numbers have shrunk and hostility has skyrocketed well beyond American levels — with dismal results. Following their lead voluntarily would be a tragic mistake.
Second, many Jews would be left outside the walls of any fortress. That’s because Stephens and his allies in the establishment seem determined to protect Jews not only from neo-Nazis, but also from anti-Zionists, who they often describe as posing the same threat as white supremacists. Where, then, would the roughly 50% of young Jews (and smaller shares of older groups) who oppose Israel’s existence as a Jewish state — preferring a binational one — find protection from those who wish them ill based on their identity?
An insular community that conditioned American Jewish identity on political support for Israel would also serve to legitimize antisemitic arguments that diaspora Jews should be held responsible for the country’s actions.
But the third, and most hopeful, reason to stay in the fight is it’s not a futile one. Antisemitism in the U.S. has receded dramatically since the 1960s, when university quotas and “gentiles only” disclaimers in employment ads were still common. The phenomenon of intermarriage, sometimes held up as an existential threat in its own right, is also a testament to the widespread acceptance of Jews in American society, and Jews remain welcome in the highest echelons of government, corporate and cultural life in this country.
That was not always true — but it became true in part as more Americans got to know Jews, and as Jews forged intentional alliances with other minorities to cultivate a more accepting climate in the country.
Antisemitism never disappeared, and I’m not suggesting that Jews can make it disappear any more than other minorities can make racism disappear or women can make sexism disappear. Prejudices ebb and flow according to factors beyond any of our control.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in five years on this beat it’s that we need Jews in the fight. The most effective path to fighting antisemitism is having Jews with credibility who are genuine participants in movements across the political spectrum and have allies who will listen to them when they raise concerns.
This isn’t a panacea. There’s no magic bullet to stop antisemitism and no singular approach that will work. Many people, and many communities, are hurting in this country right now. My appeal is simply that we accept that hurting alongside them — and working with them to lessen the pain — is our best shot at preserving Jewish safety.
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This Toronto street corner has been a site of anti-Zionist activism for months. Police just opened a hate crime investigation.
The Toronto Police Service hate crimes unit is investigating teacher Abbas Hamze for remarks about “Zionists.” Canadian Jewish groups, including the Jewish Federations of Canada’s advocacy arm and B’nai Brith Canada, have called his speech, which went viral online, “blatant antisemitism.”
Hamze’s remarks invoked antisemitic tropes, accusing “Zionists” of performing “black magic” as well as raping and killing children. He spoke at the intersection of Bathurst and Sheppard, in the heavily Jewish Toronto neighborhood of Bathurst Manor – Clanton Park.
According to his LinkedIn, Hamze works as an instructor at several Canadian colleges in the area, including the University of Niagara Falls and Georgian College. He does not specify what he teaches.
Hamze could not be reached for comment. The University of Niagara Falls and Georgian College did not respond to requests to comment, and the Toronto Police declined a request for comment.
UNF issued a statement addressing Hamze’s remarks, distancing the university from the instructor’s statements and stating that they have “zero tolerance for discrimination, hate, harassment, or any conduct that threatens the dignity and well-being of others.” They announced that they are “launching an internal investigation” into the matter.
In his speech, Hamze claimed that “British colonizers have planted this cancerous, false Zionist state of Israel … right in the heart of Islam.”
Later — wearing a keffiyeh and reading from his phone into a megaphone emblazoned with the Lebanese flag — the instructor repeated numerous antisemitic conspiracy theories, including the debunked idea that Jews have caused or deserved centuries of persecution.
“The Zionists have never had a country of their own because of their mischief,” Hamze said. “They are the most kicked-out people in the world who are making black magic and horrible things.”
He went on to say that Jewish corruption is “crystal clear in Epstein Island where they have the Jewish leaders from all around the world.” He accused “Zionists” of having “raped, and killed, and ate children at the same time.”
Finally, he unfoundedly blamed the actions of President Donald Trump on “Zionists” who “blackmail” and “control” people.
“That’s why you can see now a guy like Trump who caused this genocide in Gaza kidnaps the presidents of Venezuala, kills the supreme leader of Iran Imam Ali Khamenei, may God sanctify his soul,” he said. “This is because of them, the terrorist Zionists.”
It appears that people became aware of Hamze’s remarks after Casey Babb, an Israel and International Relations scholar, posted a video of him on X.
In a joint statement, Canadian Jewish groups described Hamze’s claims as “antisemitic blood libels that have been used for centuries to justify hatred and violence against Jews.”
The statement says that the intersection where Hamze spoke, Bathurst and Sheppard, has long been a site of “antisemitic harassment, intimidation and provocation, too often under the guise of anti-Zionism,” and called on Toronto’s police department to investigate the incident.
“Allowing this behaviour to go unchecked is to normalize antisemitism as an everyday feature of life in this city,” it stated.
The city’s police have opened an investigation. However, online, some said that Hamze had been speaking at the street corner for months without police intervention.
In Canada, public incitement of hatred is considered a criminal offense. The Canadian criminal code says that “communicating statements in any public place” that “incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace” is a breach of law, resulting in up to two years in prison.
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West Elm’s Russ & Daughters merch did something their in-house line could never
Figuring out one’s Judaica vibe can be a challenging endeavor for those of us who don’t have tastes in line with the colorful stained glass or embossed silver aesthetics that tend to dominate the category. Newer designers have introduced some minimalist options, but that’s also not really for me.
But for those of us with a tendency toward the whimsical or kitsch, furniture retailer West Elm is coming to the rescue with two new collections, geared toward the High Holidays and Hanukkah.
There’s a Russ & Daughters collaboration of blue-and-white ceramics, featuring serving platters with handpainted designs such as a fish or latkes, trinket trays with pickles and more fish, simple Delft-colored dinnerware and napkins with little cutlery printed in the corners.
And, separately, in an apparent attempt to capitalize on the Jewish market, West Elm also released a set of their own plates, bowls and tea towels printed with colorful “deli favorites” — pickles, brisket, hamentaschen, black-and-white cookies, and the like.
The concepts are pretty similar; both lean into the idea of decorating plates with food objects that may or may not be the food you actually put on them.
I do admittedly already have a large blue-and-white platter with a fish painted on it that I find charmingly eclectic, and just as suitable for serving foods that are not of the oceanic persuasion as it is for foods that are indeed from the briny deep. So I’m not inherently opposed to the concept. But I don’t feel as good about the in-house West Elm Jewish designs, like a bowl with a sort of mushy depiction of matzo balls at the bottom. Imagine eating anything else out of that. Honestly, imagine eating matzo ball soup out of it. It seems disorienting.
Everyone’s tastes vary, and if you want to eat a salad off of a plate with a colorful brisket sandwich painted on it, be my guest. But I think the Russ & Daughters offering is the better of the options. For the most part, the collection stays on the artful side of kitsch largely thanks to the simplicity of the designs and the color scheme. And, more importantly, the internal logic seems actually Jewish. The pieces are useful — perhaps with the exception of the latke platter — for multiple Jewish occasions. The matchbox with a challah on it may feel a bit random at first glance but it does conjure an image of lighting candles on Shabbat, and there are matching candle holders. The art kind of evokes Marc Chagall.
The West Elm deli hits sets on the other hand — which are separate from their collab with the iconic Lower East Side deli — feel as though they’re screaming their Jewishness. The tea towel mixes together hamentaschen and sufganiyot (or possibly a bagel, it’s hard to tell) on the same piece of cloth, despite the fact that these desserts correspond to different holidays. The drawings are cute, but the overall effect is frantic, like someone dumped every Jewish food they could name onto the same page and sent it off to the printers. It’s giving Target Rosh Hashanah decorations — the sort that have a menorah alongside the apples and honey.
A few years ago, Crate and Barrel had Jewish lifestyle influencer Rebecca Lowin curate a Hanukkah display, but it was done using items the store already carried in white, blue and silver; only the menorah was specifically Jewish. Now, a similar home decor store is creating entire lines catering specifically to Jewish holidays and culture. That’s a sign of an increased mainstream embrace of Jewish culture, and that’s a good thing — it wasn’t so long ago that it wasn’t possible to find much public recognition of the existence of the High Holidays, and every attempt featured a hanukkiah with the wrong number of branches or a loaf of challah for Passover. Today, if Jews want twee merchandise — and no judgment — there’s plenty. There are even Hanukkah gnomes, if your taste runs to that.
But there’s still a dearth of decor that feels elegant and thoughtful, instead of try-hard. Decor that feels actually rooted in Jewishness, instead of like a Jewish gloss on something that’s really for another holiday. The Russ and Daughters collaboration is rooted in actual Jewish history. Even if you don’t like a fish motif as much as me, that’s a step in the right direction.
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Sephardic and Mizrahi groups accuse New York Magazine of erasing Middle Eastern Jews. The editor-in-chief agreed to a meeting.
As editors of New York Magazine dug in their heels this week, defending the magazine’s viral “Habibi City” package published earlier this month, 14 Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish organizations delivered an open letter on Monday night, accusing the magazine of erasing Middle Eastern Jews from its coverage.
On Tuesday, Editor-in-chief David Haskell invited them to meet in September, saying he wants the magazine’s coverage to reflect the multitude of perspectives in the region.
In addition to asking for a meeting, co-signers of the letter, convened by JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa), asked the magazine to acknowledge what they call the package’s exclusionary framing and provide more representative coverage of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews going forward.
The dispute centers on the magazine’s August issue about the city’s burgeoning Southwest Asian and North African cultural scene known as SWANA. The package explores restaurants, cafes, cultural collectives and dance parties, tracing much of their growth to the war in Gaza that followed theHamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Out of that resistance,” the magazine writes, “a cultural ecosystem started to bloom.”
This week, the magazine published a statement standing by its use of the term genocide to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza, adding that “accusations of antisemitic intent were in fact obfuscating an overwhelming scholarly consensus, and that its use would be allowed in our pages.”
The open letter did not address the use of that term. Instead, it addressed the article’s framing.
The package describes membership in SWANA community in political terms.
“To be in SWANA community,” one article says, means “embracing a set of shared beliefs: that Palestinians deserve human rights. That what happened in Gaza in the aftermath of October 7 constitutes a genocide. That social justice and social welfare override capitalist concerns.”
The same article describes the place of Israelis within SWANA culture as “complicated,” in part because of the term’s “political framework.”
It also says SWANA New Yorkers “face xenophobia, Islamophobia and Zionism” in the city — language that drew particular ire from the coalition and online critics.
According to the letter, New York Magazine’s framing turns SWANA from a geographic and cultural identity into an ideological one, excluding many of New York’s Jews from the Middle East and North Africa unless they reject Israel — the country where many of their families found refuge after fleeing persecution and discrimination elsewhere in the region.
“A Mizrahi Jew whose grandparents were born in the region, expelled from their country of origin, and who carries the region in her language, liturgy, and kitchen belongs only upon disavowal of the movement through which her family survived,” the letter reads.
As the letter puts it, for a great majority of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews to be represented “as we actually are” means representing them as Zionists.
The letter also faults the package for invoking Oct. 7 repeatedly without acknowledging the atrocities committed that day and erasing the region’s non-Muslim populations.
“When we read ‘Habibi City,’ we immediately saw that this wasn’t something one organization should answer alone,” Sarah Levin, JIMENA’s executive director told the Forward. “The feature made claims about who belongs in contemporary Middle Eastern and North African and ‘SWANA’ communities in NYC, so the response needed to come from the breadth of the communities being written out.”
After she read the package, she began contacting other Sephardic and Mizrahi organizations about writing an open letter. Within four days, all 14 organizations had signed on.
“Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, North African and Sephardic communal organizations almost never act in concert, and they’ve united around one argument,” Levin said.
Signatories include the American Sephardi Federation, the Iranian American Jewish Federation of New York and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.
Levin said the groups had little difficulty reaching consensus. “When the argument is, ‘We exist, and we will not be defined out of our own region,’ there isn’t much for our communities to debate.”
What concerned Levin most, she said, was the size of New York Magazine‘s audience and cultural reach. The Pulitzer Prize-winning bi-weekly magazine boasts reaching 1.8 million readers each week.
“When a magazine that shapes American culture tells millions of readers that belonging to the Middle East requires renouncing Zionism, that is not a small thing,” Levin said. “That is why we responded the way we did.”
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