After months of hearing about the increasing incidents of antisemitism in the U.S., it was astonishing to read a history of Jews in America that explained the many contributions Jews had made to the American dream. As early as the 1600s, Jews made a fundamental and valuable contribution to America’s ethos and success.
Read more The integrity gamble
Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote a fascinating book about the role of early American Jews, and how they threw off the nightmares of their lives in Europe and came to embrace their opportunities and rights as citizens, equal to any other American. She focuses on the love and respect they received, particularly from the Christian community, as full contributors to society. She also explains how Jews became Liberals, then Democrats, and how their acceptance of the progressive ideology paradoxically led them eventually to assume the roles of victims. More recently, the Jews have been branded by the Democrats as white oppressors, thus, one reason for the rise of antisemitism.
As early as the 1600s, Americans demonstrated their appreciation of their Jewish neighbors. Both Christians and Jews shared the beliefs in the covenant that God had made with the Hebrews, and that the Christians had adopted:
But the affinity early Americans felt for their Jewish neighbors went beyond that. It was rooted in the belief that the ideas that formed the very foundation of this nation—freedom, rights, and equality before the law— came from what Christians would call the Hebrew Bible.
[snip]
Jews would also be treasured for the role they played in the American Revolution, both as soldiers in the military and especially as moneylenders, blockade runners, and privateers, without whom the revolutionaries would have starved.
Ungar-Sargon provides many more examples of the contributions that Jews made to early American society. Jews discovered, to their own surprise and delight, that the criticisms they had experienced in Europe for being wealthy were rejected by other Americans, who admired their resourcefulness and success.
One of the most noteworthy and courageous Jews was a man named Asser Levy. He was continually fighting for his rights as an American. A fascinating outcome from his efforts was that instead of being hated or resented for his many lawsuits, he was admired and praised for his efforts to achieve justice:
The impact Asser Levy had on the colony was immense. It was Levy, a litigious Jew, who taught his fellow burghers not only what it meant to be a citizen, what it meant to have rights, but what it meant to hold them dear, to fight for them, to accept nothing less than the fullest respect from the authorities—for it was not the authorities who granted freedom but God.
Since Jews empathized with the downtrodden, they became a community that fought for civil rights and the black community as a whole. Jews were also key to forming the first unions, to fight for the underdog who worked in the factories and sweatshops:
It made perfect sense for Jews at the bottom of the food chain to vote for the Democrats at a time when the Democrats were the party of labor unions, of working-class dignity, and of better working conditions and higher pay. Jews didn’t just join the labor movement in the United States; they founded it.
But as Jews became more and more successful, they experienced conflict with the Democrat party, which shifted from identifying with the politics of equality to a politics “rooted in opposition to power and the elevation of victimhood.” These changes in identity made their roles in the Democrat party awkward:
Read more Josh Shapiro won’t say Dems should vote against anti-Israel Dem Socialist
Rather than admit that they had abandoned labor and gotten rich doing so, the Democrats’ highly educated base adopted a cultural posture that cast the Right as racist and themselves as enlightened so that they could continue masquerading as the good guys in a political climate in which they’d lost the working class.
As the Jews experienced tensions with their fellow Democrats, the Democrats laid the groundwork for exorcising successful American Jews. Eventually, the Jews, instead of being identified as the oppressed, were labeled oppressors; to remain in good standing with the Left, they denounced their own people. This showed up in their views on the Gaza war: the Palestinians were the oppressed; the Israelis were the oppressors.
There was also a shift in the Jewish community, when they began to once again see themselves as immigrants, thus adopting in another way the role of the oppressed. With this shift, the Jews lost sight of the many roles they had played in America’s founding and the goodwill they had experienced from the Americans around them:
Jews were treated exceptionally here because the early Americans believed they had a covenant with God to protect the rights—God-given—of every citizen. This covenant wasn’t a repudiation of nationalism; it was American nationalism.
[snip]
We were in exile as the People of the Book until we came here, and a social, spiritual, political, and legal culture developed that read in our holy book an exhortation to all men to create a new reality in which all are created equal and all created free.
Today, Jews must reflect deeply on their history in this country, the roles they played, and their ability to be full members of society, and refuse to abandon their standing, regardless of how the Left sees them:
The elites turned on the Jews because on some deeply felt level, the Jews represent the values, the civilizational impulses, and the legal and psychological basis of the entire American project—whether American Jews are aware of it or not.
Ungar-Sargon suggests that the antipathy the Left has come to experience with the Jews is embedded with the hatred they have for America. She closes with this insightful statement:
The lesson I hope my fellow Jews take from this is that we can’t successfully fight antisemitism by insisting that we are an oppressed minority in need of protection. We aren’t—not in America. The only way to fight the hate is by speaking the truth: To hate Jews is to hate America. We are an inextricable part of this nation.
Whether American Jews will step up to meet this challenge, only time will tell.
Image: Book cover.