Full Speed Ahead

Last summer, long before the election and inauguration of Trump 2.0, I wrote a piece in The New Yorker, arguing that American Jews were returning to a form of politics they had perfected in Europe but abandoned in the United States. Surveying what happened on college campuses during the last year of Biden’s presidency, I warned that we were reverting to a kind of politics from the Middle Ages and early modern era that betrayed the democratic traditions of Jewish politics in the United States: Instead of organizing or joining democratic movements to fight racism, defend immigration, and build social democracy, Jewish leaders and donors supplicate sovereigns or would-be sovereigns who are antisemitic, or aligned with antisemitism, yet promise special protection for the Jews at home or in Israel. The […]