Lev Radin/Sipa USA via AP Images
A good friend, some of whose French ancestors barely survived the Holocaust, is exploring exile, much as his European forebears necessarily did in the 1930s. He is considering France, Portugal, maybe Canada. He asks me if I have similar thoughts.
When Trump was president, many Americans considered moving abroad, and a few actually did. For the most part, that small exodus was not driven by increased antisemitism, but by the fear that if Trump won a second term America would no longer be a democracy. It was non-Jews as much as Jews who chose to become expatriates.
Former Congressman Jim McDermott of Washington state moved to a tiny village near Bordeaux. “I get calls from my friends now who say they are scared to do what I did but are scared to stay,” he told a Washington Post reporter in a recent profile. He advises them: “If you can afford it, buy a second home in France, or Spain, or Portugal, wherever … a second home that could become a safe house.”
Lately, however, it is increasingly Jews who worry about whether America is still a safe place. There has been a rendezvous of right-wing antisemitism, of the kind tacitly fomented by Trump (“Jews will not replace us”), with left-wing antisemitism that associates Jews with the ethnic-cleansing policies of the Netanyahu government, which most American Jews in fact oppose.
This has also blended in a weird way with DEI policies and increased consciousness of tribal identity. After Jewish quotas at universities were ended in the 1960s, Jews just became indistinguishable from other people considered white. Now, as there is more effort to increase diversity, and ethnicity becomes more explicit, Jews are exposed as “overrepresented.”
I have Israeli-born friends who are the descendants of Holocaust victims and survivors. They and many others have taken advantage of laws in Germany and Austria that offer citizenship to the descendants of German or Austrian Jews who were murdered or forced into exile, and they have encouraged their own children to get EU citizenship and passports.
Eighty years after Hitler and 76 after the founding of the Jewish state, some Israeli Jews feel safer in Germany than in Israel. (The always prescient Philip Roth, in his 1986 novel The Counterlife, invented an ideology called Diasporism, which held that Nazism was a historic mistake and that the destiny of the Jews, rather than Zionism, should be to repopulate Europe.)
There has been a rendezvous of right-wing antisemitism, of the kind tacitly fomented by Trump, with left-wing antisemitism that associates Jews with the ethnic-cleansing policies of the Netanyahu government.
But would American Jews really be safer in Europe, which has a long history of antisemitism, in contrast to the relative haven for Jews that America has been for centuries? That we are even debating this question speaks volumes. The bigger question is not whether Jews are still safe in America, but whether Jews are safe anywhere.
That is the question posed in the play Prayer for the French Republic, in which an assimilated French Jewish family has a son who becomes religious and who is beaten up by local thugs who see his kippah. The family managed to survive Hitler, but sees a serious upsurge of antisemitism even in Paris. Eventually, they decide to emigrate to Israel. The play takes place well before October 7; but even in 2022 when the play opened, audiences wondered whether French Jews—or any Jews—would really be safer in Israel.
Right after October 7, President Biden, in embracing Netanyahu and Israel, effusively declared, “Without Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world who is secure.” Since then, as Biden has come to recognize, Netanyahu’s policies have made Jews everywhere less secure.
TAKING A VERY LONG VIEW, YOU FIND THAT ANTISEMITISM sometimes subsides almost to the point of invisibility, but is always smoldering. The upsurge of antisemitism in America predates Donald Trump.
Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a cover piece for the Prospect titled “What Would Jefferson Do?” The cover illustration depicted the Washington Monument, with a horizontal piece added, turning the monument into a giant cross.
My topic was the increased efforts to turn America, original home of separation of church and state, into a Christian theocracy, combined with some reflections on the waxing and waning of tolerance. America, I suggested, was probably the best gift Protestants ever gave Jews. Would that continue?
Even then, the Christian right was love-bombing Israel on the theological grounds that Jewish return to the Holy Land is a necessary precursor to the Rapture. It was an entirely transactional affinity. More recently, the support of the far right for Israel has become a cover for antisemitism at home.
Two of the books I reviewed as part of that essay were histories of the Jews in Spain and in Germany, María Menocal’s The Ornament of the World and Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All. In Spain, Jews enjoyed two centuries of relative tolerance, under the rule of liberal Arabs no less, as fellow People of the Book.
In Germany, from the time of Moses Mendelssohn in the 1740s to the rise of Hitler in the 1920s, Jews made a rapid ascent into the professions and did their best to assimilate, even observing the Sabbath on Sunday, but did not get full citizenship until the Weimar Republic and were never as well accepted as in America.
The United States, where Jews have been relatively safe, prosperous, and thriving for going on three centuries, has already broken the two previous records. The 20th century was especially good to Jews, notably in the postwar era, when American Jews thrived in the arts, in business, in the professions, and for the most part antisemitism retreated to the country-club sort.
Some are now arguing that we were living in just another temporary bubble. Franklin Foer, in a cover piece for The Atlantic titled “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” recounts all-too-familiar episodes of far-right marauders committing mayhem in synagogues, leftists trashing Jewish-owned stores, Jewish students being harassed at universities for being presumably pro-Israel, and other events suggesting a mass upsurge in antisemitism.
“Over the course of the 20th century,” Foer writes, “Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism. They embraced this brand of liberalism because it was good for America—and good for the Jews. It was their fervent hope that liberalism would inoculate America against the world’s oldest hatred.”
But, Foer continues, that era is ending. “America’s ascendant political movements—MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other—would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish. They regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams.”
This, it seems to me, is overstated and too pessimistic. Yes, it’s possible that everything will break wrong—Biden will fail to restrain and oust Netanyahu; revulsion against the annihilation of Gaza will continue to feed antisemitism and weaken Biden; and if Trump is elected in November, almost anything could happen.
In 2004, Philip Roth wrote another eerily prescient novel, The Plot Against America. In it, Nazi sympathizer Charles A. Lindbergh defeats FDR in 1940, and begins rounding up Jews. Roth can’t figure a way out, so he creates a deus ex machina—Lindbergh is providentially killed in a plane crash, there is a special election, and history unfolds pretty much as before.
Alas, real life isn’t literature. But with a decent measure of luck and resolute policy, Trump can be defeated, and the war on Gazan civilians ended. If those two things happen, the upsurge of antisemitism is likely to subside. Even if some of it persists and Jews may not feel quite as safe in America in 2024 as in 1960, there is no place in the world where Jews are safer.
