For American Jews, the past decade has been something between a wake-up call and a nightmare: the 2017 march in Charlottesville, where tiki torch–bearing marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us.” The 2019 massacre at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. The hostages in Coleyville, Texas. Not to mention the very troubling responses, often callous and indifferent, to the loss of Jewish life in the attack of October 7, 2023. American Jews are horrified by this new reality, which has jump-started a conversation about how to quash the resurgence of antisemitism.
But it is short-sighted to expect that antisemitism can be completely eradicated. To expect that it could be legislated or even educated into submission is to perpetuate a fantasy about the world we live in. Indulging in this fantasy about the nature and persistence of hate can end up hurting the people it hopes to protect—and gives license to terrible policy, besides. Indeed, pursuing a zero-tolerance policy for antisemitism expects too much of a country like the U.S., where intolerance has become something of a political virtue.
Instead of taking an approach to antisemitism that tries to silence it entirely, the question Jews ought to be asking themselves is: how much antisemitism is to be expected of a country like the United States? Given the track record of this country, we might take a clue here from Upton Sinclair’s investigation into meat packing plants in turn-of-the-century Chicago: there are always going to be rat parts in the sausage. Like rat parts, antisemitism is undesirable, but also—by necessity—acceptable, at some level. The question is, how much is reasonable to expect? The answer must be “something greater than zero.”
How much antisemitism is to be expected of a country like the United States?
Jews used to be cannier when it came to antisemitism. Not legislatively or litigiously, but personally. American Jews flourished in this country at a time when dislike of Jews was even more prominent than today. Bigotry is always painful to endure. But it need not determine one’s prospects, or one’s expectations for flourishing. Our grandparents expected occasional respites from antisemitism, and they expected that things would be better here than in Eastern Europe. But they did not expect utopia. Expecting bigotry might even have been part of the recipe for Americanization.
In the introduction to a 1966 book reporting on some thirty years of surveys about American attitudes toward Jews, the sociologist Marshall Sklare observed that “anti-Semitism is no longer a particularly overt phenomenon.” He called it “intellectually embarrassing” to think about antisemitism too much, calling it a “vestige … of a ghetto mentality.” Sklare was reflecting on what he and the book’s authors called the “sharp decline in prejudice against Jews.” On what grounds did Sklare base his claims? He pointed to a 1962 survey that showed that between 17 and 25 percent of Americans thought that Jews had too much power; between 28 and 38 percent of Americans would consider voting for an antisemitic candidate; 27 percent thought Jews were “unscrupulous”; and 30 percent thought Jews had an admirable facility in business or finance (although respondents may have meant this as a compliment).
These findings gave Sklare cause for modest celebration. Comparing these numbers to those generated by surveys dating back to the years of the Great Depression, Sklare and Charles Stember, the book’s author, found them to be trending sharply downward. From the perspective of the late 1960s, Sklare’s reporting was good news indeed.
Sklare cheered, but not because he and Stember thought antisemitism had been licked. Antisemitic sentiment persisted, just in much lower amounts than had been previously recorded. They never imagined, and did not suggest, a zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism. Decline was enough. They were satisfied to see the trend moving in the right direction.
Some may conclude Sklare had been lulled into a post-war complacency, born of big suburban synagogues and vast front lawns. Or that anything short of outright Nazism was a positive step. But if Sklare could claim that antisemitism was at an ebb tide when only (only!) one quarter of Americans believed Jews had “objectionable qualities,” then Jews today can certainly handle college students holding offensive signs and giving voice to ideas that many only partially understand. Similarly, they should expect to be caught up in the conspiracy theories and apocalyptic fantasies of white nationalists and Christian supersessionists. American Jews would be wise to learn from Sklare’s modest expectations.
Our grandparents expected occasional respites from antisemitism, and they expected that things would be better here than in Eastern Europe. But they did not expect utopia.
Having grown up (as I did) in a world in which antisemitism did not shape our lives, American Jews, encountering it in the past couple years, literally did not know what to do. This was unfamiliar terrain. As a result, the most prominent response was to demand and expect that it be silenced or legislated away, as if it were possible to return to the relative quietude of Sklare’s day. But those efforts caught too much in their dragnets. By calling nearly everything antisemitic and demanding absolute zero, people and organizations cast their net too broadly, crippling their ability to identify it and, consequently, their capacity to fight it.
Critiques of Israel, wild conspiracy theories, rants about the Rothschilds, teachers scheduling exams on Jewish holidays, baristas wearing “Free Palestine” buttons: treating them all with equal horror perpetuates the false belief that they all require the same sweeping response and that they all signal the same thing. Surely some expressions are more dangerous than others, but if they are all treated the same, it becomes harder to distinguish the real dangers from the inescapable ones.
To hold a zero-tolerance position with respect to antisemitism is to damn American Jews with gauzy expectations about other Americans and low expectations about the collective ability of American Jews to thrive in a country unable to overcome group-based hatred. If Jews are as resilient and Jewish culture is as rich as most Jews believe, then it surely has the resources to deal with persistent antisemitism. History suggests as much.
Baseless hatred and bigotry shape the reality that all Americans must deal with, no matter their ethnicity. Focusing on those who dislike us is, for the most part, fruitless; it’s hard to change people’s minds. While we should always be open to dialogue, we can’t expect to reform our would-be haters. But we can—and if there is to be a future for Jews in America, we must—learn to live with them. And they must learn to live with us.
The fantasy that antisemitism can be driven down to zero has allowed American politicians to use antisemitism as an excuse to pummel American higher education, punish students, and bully faculty. That antisemitism is, often, merely an excuse for draconian actions has been obvious to everyone who was paying attention, and I applaud recent comments by leaders of a handful of leading American Jewish organizations who have opposed the use of antisemitism in this manner, arguing that it harms many of the social and political structures that have benefitted American Jews for so long.
But the impulse to identify everything awful as intolerable is to replace one kind of totalitarianism with another.
Ironically, those who call antisemitism “the oldest hatred” are also the ones most likely to assert that antisemitism can be quashed completely. But if antisemitism is an age-old hatred and a feature of modern life, then how can anyone believe that it can be eliminated now? It takes some chutzpah to even ask such a question.
And chutzpah can only go so far. Chutzpah should embolden people to call out antisemitism when they see it. Chutzpah should fuel demands that institutions hold their members to established standards of conduct and that they be punished when those standards are violated. Chutzpah should embolden communities to fight white supremacy and call out dog whistles. Chutzpah should drive efforts for dialogue, for engagement, for bridge-building, and for protest.
But American Jews can’t let their chutzpah get in the way of their sense of what is possible. Antisemitism is a problem in contemporary America, on both the political right and the political left, and group-based hatred seems to be an intractable quality of American culture and politics. Wherever possible, it should be identified, addressed, and opposed, and its proponents should be held responsible for their views. But to expect that there is a world in which antisemitism does not exist is not, in fact, chutzpah. It is delusion.
The impulse to identify everything awful as intolerable is to replace one kind of totalitarianism with another.
This is not a case for resignation or acceptance. It is precisely because antisemitism is real, awful, and persistent that we must be realistic about the limits of fighting it. Imagining that it can be completely stamped out is not useful either for diminishing antisemitism or for raising a generation of Jews capable of thriving in a hateful world. Cocooning youngsters in Jewish communities will not help them. Raising expectations that every objectionable utterance can be countered by a claim of “antisemitism” will benefit no one. Calling every criticism of Israel antisemitic stretches the meaning of the term beyond comprehension and undermines otherwise credulous claims. Buying into the false logic of “microaggressions” will serve Jews as poorly as it serves other minority groups.
Why expect that antisemitism can be silenced or solved? Why imagine that banning certain words or images is going to make American Jews safer or more secure? Such efforts might make campuses quieter, but all that quiet comes with a high cost. Remember, things were quiet before Charlottesville, too. We live in a hateful world, and American Jews would do well to get used to it.
We Jews might be chosen, but we’re not special.