Ruth R. Wisse
Mosaic Magazine, Aug. 8, 2022
I did not think anything in American Jewish life could surprise me—until an Upper East Side neighbor said to me recently that his daughter, who had moved to Israel a dozen years ago, “was the first to see the handwriting on the wall.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I know that you’re an optimist about America,” he responded. “But at a certain point, Jews have been driven from every place where they’ve settled.”
I was stunned. “You don’t mean she thought Jews were so endangered that it was time to leave America as they’ve been leaving France and Russia?”
Smiling at my visible distress, my neighbor said he was surprised: did I really not know what was going on?
A few weeks later, unable to get this conversation out of my mind, I shared it with a professional adviser, another Jew in our neighborhood, who was similarly amused by my reaction. “Did you see the man who just left my office?” he asked. “One of the top lawyers in his field. That’s just what he was telling me he’d been hearing from some of his clients.”
Had I really fallen so far behind on a subject I’ve been tracking for decades? Everything about the upsurge of anti-Jewish politics in the United States troubles me: the role of universities, media, and cultural elites in abetting anti-Zionism, the successor and incorporator of anti-Semitism; the organization of grievance brigades against the allegedly privileged Jews; the ease with which the Arab and Islamist war against the Jewish people has found a home on the left; the electability of known anti-Semites to government; the lone shooters who choose Jews for their targets; the underreported street attacks on visible Jews; and the timidity and stupidity of some American Jewish spokesmen in response to all this aggression.
It wasn’t the escalation of anti-Jewish activity that surprised me, but the idea that it’s therefore time for Jews to give up on America altogether.
Let me try to make this as clear as I can. Aliyah, the voluntary move of Jews to Israel, is an honorable Jewish imperative. The Jews’ return to their homeland—“to build and be rebuilt by it”—is one of the most hopeful developments in the history of civilization. No attempts to sully Israel’s reputation can lessen the magnitude of that achievement. …