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The Vacation from Jewish History Is Over for Americans
(JNS) Jonathan S. Tobin - American Jewry, a population that achieved almost complete acceptance in virtually every sector of society and business, is now starting to be treated with disdain, suspicion and hostility in the same way their great-grandparents and every generation of Jews for 2,000 years had taken as the normal state of affairs. Most Americans still reject the demonization of Jews and Israel, even as they are deluged with such messages by biased media that have normalized blood libels about "genocide" in Gaza. Add to that their social-media feeds, which are flooded with conspiracy theories about Jews being responsible for all the ills of the world. The progressives and Marxists who make up a bizarre red-green alliance with Islamists, along with their apologists, have captured the institutions of American education as well as the arts and pop culture. They falsely brand Jews - the most persecuted minority in history - as "white oppressors." Activists have used the war being waged against the Jewish state in the past three years not merely to stigmatize, shun and intimidate Jews, but also to begin to erase them from sectors of society like higher education, publishing and other cultural pursuits where they had flourished. It is one thing for European nations to turn on the Jews; almost all countries on that continent have at various times in their histories expelled or persecuted Jewish people. But the U.S. has always been a place where Jews have almost never experienced official discrimination or persecution, and where they were, from the very inception of the republic, equal partners. That is as good a reason as any to fight via defiance in the streets and public discourse, as well as legal and political action, to preserve this country as a safe place for Jews and non-Jews alike from the dangerous lunacy. Yet there is no avoiding the fact that Jewish life in the U.S. is undergoing a transition that is leaving behind the post-Holocaust honeymoon in which Jews were popular and universally accepted. The armed security guards and other methods by which they are turning their synagogues, schools and community centers into fortresses - in marked distinction from the way other ethnic and religious groups live - are just the most visible evidence of this.