I’m Not Having It

Predicting the death of the Jews is a kind of parlor game. Sometimes it’s a pronouncement in the secular press, even one that is sympathetic to the cause. In 1964, Look magazine famously imagined the end of Jewish life in America. Twenty years after the war in Europe, the issue wasn’t a new round of extermination, but rather a perfect storm of demographic factors. A low birth rate and assimilation were at the top of the list, but there were other reasons for Look’s gloomy prediction. Sixty-two years later, we seem to be Jewing just fine. The nature of Jewish life has changed in the shift from ethnicity to other forms of belonging, but the only thing that’s dead is Look magazine.

Israeli writers find these predictions irresistible. Israel itself remains a young country, with a perilous history of fending off its enemies. We are arguably at the pinnacle of precarity in a period that has not been propitious to the Jewish state. The slaughter of civilians in the border kibbutzim of Gaza deepened a crisis that is decades old and left a crease of trauma that may never be filled. We need to see the retaliation against Palestinians in that light, part of the overhang of the Holocaust and “never again.” Israel was supposed to stand between the Jews and slaughter. The fact that it failed will be reckoned with for a century.

But Israelis sometimes see the world differently. Even media outlets sympathetic to the so-called “Diaspora” regularly wonder (with a little bit of schadenfreude) whether it has any version of lasting power. I just did a quick test of my thesis on a couple of websites and found a rat-a-tat-tat of gloomy articles. “Can British Jews Survive Endemic Anti-Semitism?” “How Much Longer for the Jews of France?” Anyone who follows the Jewish press knows the tone and content of these thought pieces a mile away. Anti-Semitism grows worse by the hour. The goons are coming to kill us all. We’d better get out while the getting’s good.

As the saying goes, I harbor no illusions. There are goons out there who would like to kill us all. But the World Jewish Communities have shown remarkable resilience even in eras of savage anti-Semitism. There are now more Jews in France (half a million) than there have ever been in Jewish history. Jews have been thriving in Canada since the 1700’s and in America since 1654. That’s a pretty good record for a despised minority, and we are very likely to hold on to our strength. When Israeli democracy hits the four-century mark, we should sit down and compare notes again.

In the meantime, I could do with less negativism and condescension. American Jews, especially, know quite a bit about survival, and how to negotiate the complexities of our status. We will be tested again in the years ahead, but I predict that we will not need to be airlifted to safety. It’s not because people love us to bits, but let no one erect a tombstone just yet. If Israelis persist in shelilat ha-golah, the negation of every Jewish community except their own, that is an ideological strain that I do not share. Thank you very much, but I’m having none of it.

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Written without the use of artificial intelligence, this is the actual product of a struggling human mind.