<em>The Atlantic</em>’s April Cover Story: Franklin Foer on How Anti-Semitism Threatens to End a Golden Era for Jewish Americans

For The Atlantic’s April cover story, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” staff writer Franklin Foer reports on how the rise of anti-Semitism on both the right and the left threatens to end an era of unprecedented safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans, one that spanned the latter part of the 20th century. Foer argues that, with the first decades of the 21st century marked by conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, the liberal order that Jewish Americans helped establish, rooted in values of tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism, is being demolished.

The rise of anti-Semitism on the political right is well documented, with Donald Trump attracting the allegiance of white supremacists and freely borrowing their tropes. Foer reports from the Bay Area on the anti-Semitism that has spread on the American left since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. He writes that the brand of anti-Zionism adopted in some corners of the contemporary left “doesn’t stop with calls for an end to the occupation of the West Bank. It espouses a blithe desire to eliminate the world’s only Jewish-majority nation, valorizes the homicidal campaign against its existence, and seeks to hold members of the Jewish diaspora to account for the sins of a country they don’t live in and for a government they didn’t elect. In so doing, this faction of the left places itself in the terrible lineage of attempts to erase Jewry—and, in turn, stirs ancient and not-so-ancient existential fears.”

Foer explores how these ascendant political movements on both sides of the political spectrum are dispensing with the ideals of tolerance and pluralism, and replacing them with intolerance and even violence. Foer writes, “Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good for Jews. And what’s bad for Jews, it can be argued, is bad for America.”

Foer’s article describes in detail the golden age that Jewish writers, filmmakers, musicians, and intellectuals helped create after World War II: “As anti-Semitism faded, American Jewish civilization exploded in a rush of creativity. For a time, the great Jewish novel—books by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Bernard Malamud, inflected with Yiddish and references to pickled herring—was the great American novel. Under the influence of Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Elaine May, Gilda Radner, Woody Allen, and many others, American comedy appropriated the Jewish joke, and the ironic sensibility contained within, as its own.” Foer writes that Jews created new genres of Americana and in turn remade America’s image of itself, with “the folk revival popularized by Bob Dylan, Art Garfunkel, and Paul Simon; the movies mythologizing the decency of the American Everyman produced by David O. Selznick, Louis B. Mayer, and Jack Warner.”

This all ended on September 11, 2001, Foer argues: “It didn’t seem that way at the time. But the terror attacks opened an era of perpetual crisis, which became fertile soil where the hatred of Jews took root.” Foer continues, “In the era of perpetual crisis, a version of this narrative kept recurring: a small elite—sometimes bankers, sometimes lobbyists—­maliciously exploiting the people. Such narratives helped propel Occupy Wall Street on the left and the Tea Party on the right. This brand of populist revolt had long been the stuff of Jewish nightmares.”

Foer writes in his conclusion, “When anti-Semitism takes hold, conspiracy theory hardens into conventional wisdom, embedding violence in thought and then in deadly action. A society that holds its Jews at arm’s length is likely to be more intent on hunting down scapegoats than addressing underlying defects. Although it is hardly an iron law of history, such societies are prone to decline … If America persists on its current course, it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them.”

“The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending” published today in The Atlantic. There will be an event to discuss the cover on March 18 at Sixth & I, in Washington, D.C., and online, with Foer joined in conversation by Yolanda Savage-Narva, the vice president of racial equity, diversity, and inclusion for the Union for Reform Judaism, and others, in a dialogue led by Sixth & I's Senior Rabbi, Aaron Potek. Tickets are available via Sixth & I here.

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