American Jews have achieved unprecedented safety, integration, and success in the United States, yet we carry a long historical memory in which periods of apparent security elsewhere, again and again, ended abruptly in exclusion, violence, murder, or expulsion. I grew up with a deeply personal connection to the Holocaust and with sensitivity to how the erosion of democratic institutions and the descent into fascism enabled the rise of Nazism. My father, Richard Sonnenfeldt, was a German Jewish refugee who fled to England in 1938 and then, at 23, became the chief interpreter for the American prosecution at the Nuremberg trials, and ultimately Hermann Göring’s personal interpreter.
Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that the United States is not Weimar Germany or Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement, where deadly pogroms against Jews were a regular feature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. America’s constitutional order—independent courts, federalism, a free press, and a robust civil society—provides formidable safeguards against the translation of social hostility into state persecution. Jews are not a tolerated caste here but full participants across every sector of civic life: business, academia, media, the professions, government, the arts. Jewish confidence in America’s resilience is not foolish. The challenge is to hold that warranted confidence alongside a warranted fear.
And yet, for Jews, the question of security for Israel requires its own response to that historical vulnerability, and Israel’s founding created a moral and political tension that many of us find it difficult to reconcile. In 1947, the United Nations adopted a partition plan that contemplated two states, one Jewish and one Arab. It treated that decision as a legal basis for Jewish sovereignty, even as it was rejected by the Arab world, which responded by invading the just-born Jewish state. The invasion failed.
Though the ideas of modern political Zionism long predate the Holocaust, Israel was established by the world community in response to the unimaginable atrocities and extermination perpetrated by the Nazis, who murdered one out of every three Jews on the planet. Perhaps no other people in history suffered such losses. The United Nations General Assembly affirmed the legality and necessity of a Jewish state, and its founding was supported by a majority of UN member states. Even so, the Palestinians who were displaced by the establishment of the state of Israel deserve a chance at freedom and normalcy, too.
Israel’s traditional response to the events of 1948—that the displacement of Palestinians was a tragic consequence of a war Arab states started, and that it was paralleled by the expulsion of roughly 850,000 Jews from Arab countries—is true, but inadequate. There are moral issues about those Palestinians who lost their home that are not solved by the fact that the Arab states fought to destroy Israel from its inception. It is particularly necessary to ask whether the relentless Jewish settlement of the West Bank—the core of any future Palestinian state—is meant to deny Palestinians what they deserve.
Many of today’s anti‑Israel activists argue that Israel does not have the right to exist as a Jewish homeland. But if the declarations and recognitions of Israel’s right to exist by the world at Israel’s founding do not constitute that right, then we have no international norms or laws that can be relied on. And yet, if one believes the world did give Israel the right to exist as a Jewish homeland, the question remains: What does justice require for the Palestinians who were displaced? I do not have solutions, and I am unsure this circle can ever be fully closed, because the world granted Israel a right to exist that the population of Arabs never agreed to. But that right was granted, and millions of Jews have immigrated to Israel, and for 80 years Jews around the world have supported Israel and its reliance on that right and recognition. To argue that the 8 million Jews of Israel have no right to exist as a polity, and must be exterminated or displaced, is, of course, genocidal in intent.
[Emma Green: Are Democrats losing the Jews?]
What I know for sure is that there will be no perfect outcome for either party. The goal is to avoid more bloodshed and displacement on the path to a reality in which both Jews and Arabs can live in peace and dignity in the two states that ought to exist between—as the saying goes—the river and the sea.
For much of modern American history, anti-Semitism followed a well‑understood pattern. It was most visibly rooted in the nationalist and authoritarian right, while the political left, broadly conceived, was a coalition of progressive activists focused on labor, civil rights, women’s rights, minority rights, environmental protection, and social justice. Jews were not only part of that coalition; we were among its most ardent institutional builders and philanthropic supporters. Jewish lawyers litigated civil‑rights cases. Jewish donors funded Black‑led organizations. Jewish students and clergy marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. Let’s not forget the memories of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, Jewish activists who were killed with James Chaney in Mississippi in the cause of civil rights during the Freedom Summer of Mississippi in 1964. For decades, most American Jews understood ourselves as allies—and often champions—of progressive causes well beyond our own communal interests.
In recent years, that moral and political alignment has frayed. Many American Jews now experience anti-Semitism not only from the nationalist right but from growing segments of the left as well. Progressive coalitions we once helped build have weakened, and in some cases Jews experience hostility or exclusion from organizations we supported for generations. This is not simply a story about disagreement over policy; it is also about the emotional shock of betrayal.
That sense of alienation and dislocation intensified after the October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel. Jews around the world identified instinctively with the victims of mass murder, rape, and kidnapping. Yet in the immediate aftermath, many found themselves not merely criticized but implicitly blamed. Jewish students were harassed on campuses; Jewish institutions required heightened security; even expressions of grief were sometimes met with suspicion. The shock was not only the scale of anti-Semitism but its moral inversion: Jews felt ourselves cast as perpetrators even while mourning Jewish victims of barbaric violence. As but one example of many, more than 30 student organizations at Harvard signed a statement after October 7 that held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” At once, we became both victim and defendant.
The Anti‑Defamation League reported 8,873 anti-Semitic incidents in 2023, a 140 percent increase from the prior year and then the highest number on record since the ADL began tracking such incidents in 1979. In 2024 the number of incidents rose again, but at a slower pace. The dramatic increase took place primarily in the period following October 7, but the larger point is that what felt, for many years, like a marginal social pathology has returned as a visible feature of public life. Even when anti-Semitism appears as “mere rhetoric,” Jews have learned to take that rhetoric seriously, because it is often the early stage of a darker sequence.
For many American Jews, another source of estrangement has unfolded in parallel: a growing distance from Israel’s current government. American Jews who largely inhabit the center and the left—politically, culturally, and morally—feel disillusioned and betrayed by an Israeli leadership that appears intent on blocking the creation of a Palestinian state and seems committed instead to permanent domination. This estrangement is further complicated by the widening regional confrontation with Iran. I profoundly disagree with the direction of Israel’s government but still believe that Iran must be prevented from acquiring a nuclear weapon. And although I may feel alienated from Israeli leadership, I do not feel alienated from Israelis themselves. I am deeply sympathetic to civilians whose daily life is being turned upside down by rockets, sirens, bereavement, and sustained mobilization. Solidarity with people living under existential threat is not the same as endorsement of the policies of those who govern them, even if that distinction has become difficult to articulate.
My discomfort is exacerbated by an inability to reconcile my steadfast belief in the need for Israel to survive and thrive with a lack of clarity about what solutions could ever evolve to produce a durable peace with the Palestinians. I reject both the illusion that Israel can secure itself through permanent domination and the dark fantasy that dismantling Israel would produce justice or peace.
[Yair Rosenberg: The Anti-Semitic revolution on the American Right]
These contradictions place many American Jews in an untenable position. Many of us believe deeply in Israel’s right to exist, and many of us believe the United States should help Israel defend itself against existential threats, because as America’s only democratic ally in the Middle East, Israel’s survival is in the United States’ interest. At the same time, we cannot ignore the profound moral questions raised by the conduct of the war in Gaza, or dismiss the concerns of those who fear that American arms are being used in ways that violate humanitarian law. Understanding the impulse to condition military support is not the same as abandoning Israel; it can be an expression of anguish about what Israel, under its current leadership, is becoming.
I have long been invested in Israel’s security and its pursuit of peace. In the 1990s, at Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s request (and in coordination with Prime Ministers Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak after Rabin’s assassination), I led dozens of missions to the Middle East as a leader of the Israel Policy Forum, meeting with most of the region’s leaders, and specifically with Yasser Arafat on seven occasions. That experience left me firmly committed both to Israel’s right to exist free of concerns about security and terrorism and to the moral and strategic necessity of a just peace. It also left me with humility about how hard peace is to achieve, and how easily events can make reasonable positions seem naive.
Many American Jews, some reluctantly, others more enthusiastically, have gravitated toward the political right, often drawn less by domestic policy than by what now appears to be clear and forceful Republican support for Israel, and by a perception that Republicans have been more aggressive in confronting anti-Semitism on college campuses that have lost their way.
I am unlikely to become a Republican, given how sharply many core Republican policies diverge from my values and from those of the large majority of American Jews. Some Jews lean Republican to minimize taxes as part of a belief in conservative economics and smaller government, while others are attracted to the Republican Party’s right-to-life, marriage, or immigration policies. But what is most clear is that a higher percentage of Republican Jews support Israel when compared with Democratic Jews. In recent years, Republican rhetoric and actions toward Israel, particularly in confronting Iran, have often been more unequivocal than those of Democrats. Too often, Democrats have minimized anti-Semitic excesses on campuses and within parts of the progressive ecosystem out of fear of splintering a coalition that includes activists whose politics have become intertwined with Palestinian solidarity.
Many young Democrats have explicitly called for suspending weapons sales to Israel, motivated by a genuine belief that Israeli military actions have crossed moral and legal lines. I understand this impulse. The scale of Palestinian-civilian suffering is unbearable, and the restraint expected of a democratic state at war must be higher, not lower. Israel’s extraordinary technological, military, and economic success has altered perceptions. Today, Israel is often understood to be the aggressor rather than a besieged democracy fighting for survival. And yet, historical memory complicates that moral clarity. For most of its nearly 80 years, Israel was not a regional superpower but a vulnerable state surrounded by enemies openly committed to its destruction. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s leadership are no less dedicated to Israel’s destruction today than they were during the decades when Israel’s survival, not dominance, defined its strategic posture. That history shaped a belief, deeply ingrained in my generation, that Israel required some flexibility and understanding from its allies as it defended itself against existential threats.
Younger Jews, especially those in the secular, liberal-leaning Jewish mainstream, feel less attachment to Israel than American Jews of my generation do. This is not simply because many care less about Jewish identity, but because they have grown up in what has been, historically, the safest, freest, and most tolerant period Jews have ever experienced in the Diaspora. In America, the past 80 years have been the most favorable environment for Jewish flourishing in two millennia. Younger Jews have not felt flagrant anti-Semitism directly, so they often feel more secure in America and less reliant on Israel as an existential safeguard than members of my generation do. When confronted with images of devastation in Gaza and with an Israeli government they view as right‑wing and extremist, they feel less solidarity with a state they do not recognize and whose leadership they reject.
That distance is understandable, but it is also shaped by distance from the Holocaust and from periods when Jewish safety in liberal societies proved tragically fragile. Anti-Semitism has reappeared, in varying forms, in almost every diasporic society where Jews have flourished over the past two millennia, including societies that once seemed secure, enlightened, and permanent. My disagreement with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies is vehement. But my belief in Israel’s central importance to the survival and dignity of the Jewish people remains unshaken. I hope for and work toward a future Israel led by more balanced, moral, and pluralistic leaders. But I have concerns about a Jewish future without Israel’s continued existence and strength.
[Michael A. Cohen: How Netanyahu hurt America’s Jews]
Anti-Semitism is rising sharply in the United States at the same time that traditional alliances with progressive organizations are weakening, political identities are being reshuffled, and emotional ties to Israel are strained by policies that clash with deeply held democratic and ethical commitments. The simultaneity of these pressures—political, moral, and psychological—is what makes the present moment feel so destabilizing.
Holding multiple truths does not require treating them as morally equivalent. Jewish history teaches with devastating clarity that democratic institutions are not merely another value, but the condition that makes a minority’s safety possible. We can debate policy, argue strategy, and tolerate contradiction. We cannot accept the erosion of pluralistic democracy as the price of order, security, or ideological victory. That lesson, more than ideology, anchors where I ultimately stand. Democracy is not merely one cause among many. It is the condition that makes all other fights possible, the one condition on which American Jews (and other minorities, too) depend most to ensure our continuance as full citizens with rights protected by our Constitution.
If that hierarchy is true, it carries obligations. It means investing in the unglamorous work of democratic maintenance: strengthening the rule of law, supporting free and fair elections, protecting independent courts, defending a free press, and reinforcing a civic culture capable of disagreement without dehumanization. It means continuing to build institutions that expand opportunity through education, economic mobility, and inclusion, because societies that allow despair to fester are easier to polarize and harder to govern democratically. Above all, it requires insisting that fighting anti-Semitism means not retreating into sectarian isolation, but rather engaging pluralistic coalitions more honestly: calling out anti-Semitism on the left and the right without ideological exception, and refusing to excuse it for the sake of tactical convenience.
We cannot trade constitutional norms for partisan advantage, or confuse forceful rhetoric with moral seriousness. Jewish history does not require us to choose strongmen over institutions; in fact, it warns us what happens when we do.
America remains the only large country in history where Jews have become fully equal citizens under a constitutional order strong enough, so far, to withstand waves of hatred and scapegoating. If that order weakens, Jews will not be the only victims, but we have more reason than most to understand what follows when minorities lose the protection of the law.
Preserving and strengthening democratic institutions also means fighting for a pluralistic, democratic Israel: an Israel not dominated by a right‑wing religious government that has alienated many, if not most, American Jews; an Israel capable of moral self‑correction; and an Israel that continues to pursue the possibility, however remote, of a just and enduring peace with the Palestinians. That may be too much to ask of any generation. But Jewish history suggests that the price of asking for less is higher still.
The post The American Question appeared first on The Atlantic.
