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One experience being Jewish in today’s America

Editor’s note: This story pairs with “Anti-Semitism incidents resurge in the US” and “BYU students of other faiths learn tolerance through marginalization.”

I grew up as one of the only Jewish kids in a small and conservative suburb of San Antonio, Texas. At times, it was a hard and scary experience, but I am also grateful for all I went through because it helped me become a better person. However, life wasn’t the easiest.

I remember bringing matzah to elementary school during Passover and getting weird looks from all my classmates. I remember being told I killed Jesus when I was in the first grade. I remember when my sister’s classmates told her to “go back to Auschwitz” and to “get in the oven.”

I also remember the mini Shabbat services we had when I went to school at the Jewish Community Center growing up and the small group of Jewish kids I went to school with — the special bond we had.

I remember having friends over for Hanukkah and Passover dinners and getting to expose them to my culture.

Throughout elementary school, I never fully realized how my religion could be such an issue.

Even when classmates said anti-Semitic things, it never fully registered in my mind it was bad. I was just used to it.

My mom used to come to my classes around Hanukkah — which is normally around the same time as Christmas — every year and teach about Jewish history. We would light a menorah and play with dreidels and eat chocolate coins called Hanukkah gelt.

I always thought it was just something fun my mom decided to do and never realized it was to protect me and my Jewish classmates by educating our peers.

By the time I was in middle and high school, I was numb to any anti-Semitic jokes or comments. I thought it was just a normal thing everyone dealt with.

Some of my classmates denied being Jewish to escape ridicule, and I still never fully understood because I knew I was OK, and I could get away with just ignoring it.

It wasn’t until coming to BYU and being one of six Jewish students on a campus with 33,000 students that I felt like an outsider.

During new student orientation, I remember a girl seeing the Star of David I was wearing around my neck and asking me if there were a lot of Jews in America. I explained to her that there were, especially because of World War II. She said she didn’t know that much about history.

Questions about my necklace came constantly throughout my first semester at BYU. Eventually, I stopped wearing it so I could feel normal.

I was a shy, lonely 17-year-old, and I just wanted to be normal. So, I started to investigate The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I felt out of place because I felt like a bad person for not being more religious and not knowing more about my religion, so I sought that through a different religion.

I quickly realized that, while I love the members of the Church, it wasn’t for me.

Unfortunately, once you start to investigate, it’s hard to turn around and say you’re not interested.

I still get missionary calls and emails from friends asking me how I’m doing with the Church.

It’s OK.

I’ve learned so much at BYU — and especially through being a minority at BYU — and it has enabled me to help so many others.

I have also learned to be more tolerant.

Anti-Semitism is still an issue in the United States, and it’s very present at BYU. Not through people being intentionally offensive, but through a general ignorance when it comes to what is and is not OK to ask.

I’ve had friends tease me about being terrible with handling money because, stereotypically, Jewish people are supposed to be good at handling money. I have friends who have been asked if their parents are bankers. I’ve been scrutinized for wearing my Star of David during dance performances. And I’ve had friends who have been asked if they realize our religion is incomplete.

Being Jewish has always been uncomfortable, but for me, it’s especially scary after recent events.

During summer 2018, the cemetery where my grandparents are buried was vandalized with swastikas and anti-Semitic slurs.

This was the first blatantly anti-Semitic incident I had been aware of occurring for a while, and the number of instances have only increased since.

The shooting in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27 is what finally made me realize I am not safe.

A shooting could happen at any synagogue across the United States — including the synagogue I attend in Salt Lake City and any of the synagogues my family attends.

Growing up Jewish was scary. Being Jewish is scary. And it will continue to be scary.

What helps is to have people around us who support and protect us.

What Does It Feel Like To Be Jewish on Campus Right Now?

Nine jewish students, representing a wide range of perspectives, tell us how they've experienced this moment of campus protests surrounding the israel-hamas war..

A black and white composition notebook on a black background. The notebook says Jewish Voices on Campus '24 and has the flag of Israel, the flag of Palestine, and a bullhorn on the cover.

For the students witnessing the protests, participating in the protests (or counter-protests), talking about the protests with friends and in classes, feeling fearful of the protests, feeling empowered by the protests, or simply trying to study for finals while all this happens around them, this moment is not just something to study in text books or pontificate about over coffee and the newspaper. This is their lived realities.

As a publication and online community that aims to highlight and amplify a diversity of young Jewish voices, we wanted to hear directly from people who were living on college campuses during this time.

And so, last week we put out a call on our platform asking students: What does it feel like to be Jewish on campus right now?

And wow, did we get responses! We anticipated receiving a few essays, and thought we might publish a handful of them. Instead, we received nearly 100 essays, and here, we are sharing nine of those with you. These essays are all written by Jewish students attending colleges in the United States. They represent a really wide range of perspectives and experiences. And we hope you’ll read all of them. Our goal is not to speak for every single student, but rather to allow each student featured here to speak for themselves. Perhaps you’ll see something that resonates for you; perhaps you’ll see something that makes you mad. Ideally, you’ll find something that sparks a moment of self-recognition or understanding where you didn’t expect it.

Read on to hear from nine college students about what it feels like to be Jewish on campus in 2024.

“I am looking for a community, but I do not fit anywhere.” — Molly Greenwold from Newton, MA; Barnard College, Class of 2026

“I have fought for both Zionist and anti-Zionist students to feel safe.” — Irene Raich from Fayetteville, Arkansas; Yale University, Class of 2027

“Living in fear on campus has become a daily battle.” — Kalie Fishman from Farmington Hills, MI; University of Michigan School of Social Work, Class of 2024

“I was arrested on the first night of Passover at the encampment on my college campus.” — Kira Carleton from Brooklyn, NY; NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, Master’s Student, Class of 2025

“Would people treat me differently if they knew I am Israeli?” — Yasmine Abouzaglo from Dallas, TX; Columbia University, Class of 2027

“I am not a Jew with trembling knees.” — Sophie Friedberg from Los Angeles, CA; University of Wisconsin-Madison, Class of 2024

“For the first time since October 7, I don’t feel so powerless.” — Adrien Braun; Trinity College, Class of 2026

“Maybe if I weren’t grieving the massacre of my community, I would feel differently.” — Devorah Klein from Kansas City, MO; University of Kansas, Class of 2024

“Most of the time, I stay silent.” — Gabriela Marquis from Spokane, WA; Gonzaga University, Class of 2024

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Israel-Hamas War

It’s Not Easy to Be Jewish on American Campuses Today

I t’s not easy to be a Jew at an American university today. As one student tearfully explained to me, “We’re exhausted and we’re beleaguered and no one seems to understand.” University administrators have indeed mostly failed their Jewish students, staff, and faculty. Fears of imposing censorship and citing of First Amendment rights have allowed to circulate freely on campus Holocaust denial, the invocation of white privilege to dismiss antisemitism, and the rejection of the Jewish people’s inalienable right to self-determination.

How did it come to this?

There is first the obvious fact that, if Jews comprise only 2.4 percent of the United States population, Jewish students will invariably almost always be a minority on all but a few campuses. Even at universities where Jewish students comprise larger minorities, such as at Cornell, Columbia, and Tulane, they have often experienced the same opprobrium that has been seen on campuses across the country.

The relative paucity of Jewish students makes them a constituency that often receives only limited attention. At the university I teach at, Georgetown, for instance, the campus rabbi fought for years to get Kosher food in the dining hall. The consistent rebuff was that there were insufficient observant Jews on campus. Eventually, however, these entreaties succeeded and Kosher food became available. But the amount of effort and time it took underscores how challenging it can be at even the most inclusive and worldly campuses for such requests from Jewish students to be granted.

Second, like the reportedly liberal residents of the collective agricultural communities bordering Gaza, we Jewish-American academicians deluded ourselves into believing that our respect for Palestinian self-determination was mutual and that our rational arguments for a two-state solution, our opposition to Jewish settlement on the West Bank and East Jerusalem neighborhoods, and our criticism of Israel’s current extreme right government would eventually persuade our more progressive colleagues on the other side to accept and recognize Israel as a bona fide nation-state.

More revealing should have been the continued frequency of these colleagues’ denunciations of Israel and signing of protest letters decrying Israeli transgressions contrasted with the more pervasive silence over China’s treatment of the Uighurs, Turkey of the Kurds, Assad’s serial massacring of his own citizens, Hezbollah’s assassination campaign against independent Lebanese journalists and of a serving prime minister, etc. Accordingly, this historic imbalance of protests over the loss of Muslim life or repression on religious grounds when inflicted by countries other than Israel should come as no surprise, especially given the dominant anti-colonialist/anti-Western scholarly and didactic approaches so prevalent at many American universities today.

Third, how can we teach students scholarship’s guiding principles of objectivity, analysis based on empirical evidence, and logic when most of them get their news from TikTok or Instagram or YouTube and not traditional news media whether on television, radio, or print? According to a recent Reuters Institute report , this shift is the product of a demand for “more accessible, informal, and entertaining news formats, often delivered by influencers rather than journalists.” The desire therefore has become for news “that feels more relevant,”at the expense of accuracy, vetting, and objectivity. With so complex and complicated issues as war and peace with Palestine and Israel, the fact these social media sites have become the main news sources for student means that they are getting emotionally resonant and rewardingly cathartic memes and infographics that may be clever and entertaining but are glib and unenlightening.

Fourth, is the default cry of university administrators for more education and more dialogue. The belief is that talking is cathartic and can bridge or at least ameliorate disagreement and incivility over even the most divisive and polarizing issues. In reality, however, these campus forums often provide vehicles for Jewish students to feel even more marginalized, more isolated, and more victimized. As one of my students, who is not Jewish, complained to me, “There is a ‘both sides’ argument that quickly moves into a disturbingly pro-genocide narrative calling for the total annihilation of Israel.”

These “dialogues” and extra-curricular education opportunities are rarely balanced. A colleague at a small, liberal arts college wrote the other day about a planned seven-week special lecture series featuring speakers universally hostile to Israel and disdainful of the two-state solution once heralded by the landmark Oslo Accords and more recently envisioned by the Abraham Accords.

Finally, we thought that the fears and concerns of our parents and grandparents had been rendered anachronistic by “inclusivity,” the mantra of 21 st -century American universities. Today, however, like the parents of school-age children, who are afraid to send their kids to Hebrew school, the parents of Jewish undergraduates and graduates worry about the febrile atmosphere on campuses and how their children are coping. In despair, a Jewish student told me of their bitter experience of “unprecedented loneliness on campus.”

Just as the October 7 th terrorist attacks forever changed Israel, they will have a similarly profound impact on Jews at campuses throughout the country. Already some Jewish parents are steering their high school juniors and seniors away from attending or applying to more prestigious universities based on how their administrators have handled the frictions that have been continuously sharpened and the attitudes and behavior of faculty and students alike. And, many Jewish students already on campus are being encouraged by their parents, family, and friends to skip those classes where they feel that they somehow have to explain or justify Israeli policy and military operations or somehow apologize or atone for them. It is an unenviable situation that may never re-set. And, one that harkens back to a darker time when Jews felt and indeed were far less welcome at many universities throughout the U.S.

America’s universities have long been envied the world over as exemplars of the highest standards of learning and scholarship. Will they now become better known, and perhaps even emulated, for failing to adequately protect their Jewish communities? Jews know better than most how easily ostracism and intolerance spreads from us to others. And, then to books and ideas as well.

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The Reel Mudd

Films and other audiovisual materials from the mudd manuscript library.

Being Jewish at Princeton: from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s days to the Center of Jewish Life

“The Princeton of today is not the Princeton of Scott Fitzgerald. And by that I mean you can feel comfortable being Jewish, you can feel comfortable being Asian, you can feel comfortable being African American. And while this might not always have been true (…) it is definitely true today.” The speaker is Erik Ruben ’98 (1:46), one of the students featured in the promotional video below about the Center for Jewish Life, which opened in 1993. Today’s entry takes a brief look at the history of the admission of Jewish students at Princeton since the 1920s.

F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘s 1920 debut novel, This Side of Paradise , was set at Princeton and reflected the atmosphere of the eating clubs and of the university itself, which (not to Princeton’s liking) he described as “the pleasantest country club in America.” Fitzgerald wrote his book at a time when some northeastern colleges and universities, particularly in urban areas where many Eastern European Jewish immigrants had settled, perceived they had a “Jewish problem” in that if they admitted too many Jewish students, Protestant middle and upper class students would be driven away. Columbia, which had the largest Jewish enrollment at 40%, was the first to impose a quota in 1921. Princeton, however, always claimed not to use quotas. As late as 1948 Radcliffe Heermance, Princeton’s first director of admissions from 1922 to 1950, vehemently denied a claim that Princeton used a quota to keep Jewish students under 4%. “We’ve never had a quota system, we don’t have a quota system, we will never have a quota system” he told the Daily Princetonian .

Heermance limited Jewish enrollment by developing an admission policy that put an emphasis on “character,” which, however subjective, was still regarded as defensible in public. Criteria like “manhood,” “leadership” “participation in athletics” and “home environment and companions” were assessed by using interviews, letters of recommendation, and a social ranking system. A powerful disincentive to even apply was the anti-Semitic reputation of Princeton’s eating clubs, which considered most Jews “unclubbable.”

When Cliff Stein, president of Hillel, was interviewed for an article in the Nassau Weekly on May 1, 1986, shortly after Princeton’s announcement to establish the CJL, he told the paper that he still met prospective Jewish students who chose “less academically inviting colleges” than Princeton, because of Princeton’s anti-Semitic reputation. “This building will go a long way to break down that image,” he said. The above promotional film, produced three years after the opening of CJL and aimed at prospective Jewish students, should be viewed with this same history in mind.

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Read Our Research On:

Jewish Americans in 2020
2. Jewish identity and belief

1. The size of the U.S. Jewish population
3. Jewish practices and customs
4. Marriage, families and children
5. Jewish community and connectedness
6. Anti-Semitism and Jewish views on discrimination
7. U.S. Jews’ connections with and attitudes toward Israel
8. U.S. Jews’ political views
9. Race, ethnicity, heritage and immigration among U.S. Jews
10. Jewish demographics
11. Economics and well-being among U.S. Jews
12. People of Jewish background and Jewish affinity
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: Survey methodology
Appendix B: Mode experiment

Religion is not central to the lives of most U.S. Jews. Even Jews by religion are much less likely than Christian adults to consider religion to be very important in their lives (28% vs. 57%). And among Jews as a whole, far more report that they find meaning in spending time with their families or friends, engaging with arts and literature, being outdoors, and pursuing their education or careers than find meaning in their religious faith. Twice as many Jewish Americans say they derive a great deal of meaning and fulfillment from spending time with pets as say the same about their religion.

And yet, even for many Jews who are not particularly religious, Jewish identity matters: Fully three-quarters of Jewish Americans say that “being Jewish” is either very important (42%) or somewhat important (34%) to them.

U.S. Jews do not have a single, uniform answer to what being Jewish means. When asked whether being Jewish is mainly a matter of religion, ancestry, culture or some combination of those things, Jews respond in a wide variety of ways, with just one-in-ten saying it is only a matter of religion.

Many American Jews prioritize cultural components of Judaism over religious ones. Most Jewish adults say that remembering the Holocaust, leading a moral and ethical life, working for justice and equality in society, and being intellectually curious are “essential” to what it means to them to be Jewish. Far fewer say that observing Jewish law is an essential part of their Jewish identity. Indeed, more consider “having a good sense of humor” to be essential to being Jewish than consider following halakha (traditional Jewish law) essential (34% vs. 15%).

Orthodox Jews are a striking exception to many of these overall findings. They are among the most highly religious groups in U.S. society – along with White evangelicals and Black Protestants – in terms of the share who say religion is very important in their lives. A plurality of Orthodox Jews say that being Jewish is mainly about religion alone (40%), and they are the only subgroup in the survey who overwhelmingly feel that observing halakha is essential to their Jewishness (83%). Fully three-quarters of the Orthodox say they find a great deal of meaning and fulfillment in their religion, exceeded only by the share who feel that way about spending time with their families (86%). And 93% of Orthodox Jews say they believe in God as described in the Bible, compared with a quarter of Jews overall.

Identification with branches of American Judaism

More than half of U.S. Jews identify with the Reform (37%) or Conservative (17%) movements, while about one-in-ten (9%) identify with Orthodox Judaism. One-third of Jews (32%) do not identify with any particular Jewish denomination, and 4% identify with smaller branches – such as Reconstructionist or Humanist Judaism – or say they are connected with multiple streams of U.S. Judaism. Among Jews by religion, branch affiliation generally mirrors the broader pattern among Jews overall. Most Jews by religion identify with either Reform (44%) or Conservative (23%) Judaism, and fewer say they do not belong to a particular denomination (15%). Most Jews of no religion, on the other hand, do not identify with any institutional branch or stream of Judaism (79%), while the remainder largely describe themselves as Reform Jews (17%).

Among Jews who are not synagogue members, 36% identify as Reform

It is often assumed that for U.S. Jews, branch affiliation goes hand in hand with synagogue membership – e.g., they belong to a Conservative synagogue, and so they identify as Conservative, or they belong to a Reform temple, and so they identify as Reform. But this is not always the case, because the percentage of Jewish adults who identify with some branch of U.S. Judaism (67%) is considerably higher than the percentage who are synagogue members or have someone in their household who is a synagogue member (35%).

Among Jews who are neither synagogue members themselves nor live in a household where anyone else belongs to a synagogue, 47% do not identify with any institutional branch or stream of Judaism. But roughly half identify as Reform (36%), Conservative (11%), Orthodox (1%) or another Jewish denomination (4%), even though they indicate that, at present, they have no formal connection to a synagogue. This pattern is similar when looking only at respondents who are themselves not members of a synagogue, regardless of the status of others in their household. There could be multiple reasons for this, including Jewish denominational attachments retained since childhood, participation in Chabad or other synagogues that do not have a formal membership structure, and financial barriers to synagogue membership, among other possibilities. (The survey asked separate questions about branch affiliation, synagogue membership and synagogue attendance, without probing the exact connections; it did not ask people who identify as Reform Jews, for example, whether the synagogue they attend, or belong to, is a Reform synagogue.)

Younger Jews more likely than older Jews to be Orthodox or have no branch affiliation

Jewish adults ages 18 to 29 are particularly likely to identify as Orthodox (17%), compared with those who are 30 and older, of whom 7% are Orthodox. The youngest Jewish adults also are more inclined than their elders to have no branch affiliation (41%), while smaller shares are Reform (29%) or Conservative (8%).

At the other end of the age spectrum, 44% of Jews ages 65 and older identify with the Reform movement, and a quarter say they are Conservative.

Jews less inclined than U.S. adults as a whole to consider religion very important

One-in-five Jews say religion is very important to them

Nearly half of U.S. Jews say religion is either “very” (21%) or “somewhat” (26%) important in their lives, while 53% say religion is “not too” or “not at all” important to them personally.

Jews by religion are far more likely than Jews of no religion to say religion is at least somewhat important in their lives (61% vs. 8%). And Orthodox Jews are especially likely to say that religion is important: Nearly nine-in-ten (86%) say religion is very important to them, compared with a third of Conservative Jews (33%) and 14% of Reform Jews who consider religion very important in their lives.

Religion is more important to Jewish women, on average, than to Jewish men. Jewish adults ages 30 and older are more likely than those under 30 to say religion is at least somewhat important to them (49% vs. 39%). And two-thirds of married Jews who have a Jewish spouse say religion is very (35%) or somewhat (31%) important to them, while far fewer intermarried Jews say this (8% very important, 20% somewhat important).

Jews who did not obtain college degrees are more inclined to say that religion is very important in their lives. For example, about a third of U.S. Jews whose formal education stopped with high school (32%) say religion is very important, compared with 13% of those with bachelor’s degrees and 15% of those with postgraduate degrees.

Compared either with U.S. Christians or with the adult public overall, U.S. Jews are far less likely to say that religion is important in their lives. However, Orthodox Jews rank among the most religiously devout subgroups in the country by this measure; 86% say religion is very important in their lives, as do 78% of Black Protestants and 76% of White evangelical Protestants, two of the most highly religious Christian subgroups. Meanwhile, Jews of no religion are even more likely than religiously unaffiliated Americans to say religion is “not too” important or “not at all” important to them (91% vs. 82%).

Most Jews say being Jewish is at least somewhat important to them

The fact that many Jews say religion is relatively unimportant in their lives does not necessarily mean their Jewish identity is not meaningful to them. In fact, three-quarters of U.S. Jews say that “being Jewish” is either very important (42%) or somewhat important (34%) in their lives, while only 23% say it is not too or not at all important to them.

Jews by religion are far more likely than Jews of no religion to say that being Jewish is very important to them (55% vs. 7%); 55% of Jews of no religion say being Jewish is of little importance to them.

Nearly all Orthodox Jews in the survey (95%) describe being Jewish as very important in their lives. A majority of Conservative Jews also say being Jewish is very important (69%). Fewer Reform Jews (40%) and Jews of no denomination (17%) say the same.

Married Jews are more likely than those who are not married to say that being Jewish is central to their lives (48% vs. 33%). Being Jewish tends to be particularly important for Jews who have a Jewish spouse (64% say it is very important).

To U.S. Jews, being Jewish is not just about religion

There is no one way that American Jews think about being Jewish, as the survey makes clear. When asked whether being Jewish is mainly a matter of religion, ancestry or culture, some Jewish respondents pick each of those things, and many choose some combination of them. In fact, among the most common answers – expressed by about one-in-five U.S. Jews (19%) – is that being Jewish is about religion, ancestry and culture.

Similar shares say being Jewish is mainly a matter of just culture (22%) or just ancestry (21%). About half as many (11%) say being Jewish is mainly about religion alone. The remainder give other responses, such as that being Jewish is about both ancestry and culture (10%).

All told, about half mention ancestry among their responses (52%). A similar share point to culture either alone or in combination with other answers (55%). But fewer mention religion (36%), suggesting that most U.S. Jews do not see being Jewish as primarily about religion.

Even among Jews by religion, just 44% mention religion as a primary facet of Jewish identity, although Orthodox Jews stand out in this regard: 40% say being Jewish is about only religion, and an additional three-in-ten Orthodox adults say it is about some combination of religion, ancestry, and culture, or all three of these.

The vast majority of Jews of no religion say that for them, being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry (41%), culture (25%) or both (15%).

U.S. Jews more likely to say being Jewish is about culture or ancestry than about religion; to many, Jewish identity is about more than one thing

The survey asked Jews whether each of 10 attributes and activities is essential, important but not essential, or not important to what being Jewish means to them. The answers show that to U.S. Jews, being Jewish is about many things. Fully three-quarters (76%) say remembering the Holocaust is an essential part of what being Jewish means to them, and nearly as many (72%) say leading an ethical and moral life is essential. Majorities of U.S. Jews say working for justice and equality in society (59%) and being intellectually curious (56%) are essential to being Jewish.

Half of U.S. Jews say continuing family traditions is an essential part of their Jewish identity (51%), and 45% say caring about Israel is essential. One-third or fewer mention having a sense of humor (34%), being part of a Jewish community (33%), eating traditional Jewish foods (20%) or observing Jewish law (15%) as essential aspects of their Jewish identity.

The survey also asked respondents to describe in their own words anything else that is essential to what being Jewish means to them; see topline for results.

Nine of these items (along with the final, open-ended question) were included in the 2013 survey, while the item about continuing family traditions is new. In terms of relative importance, respondents ranked the items similarly in each of the two surveys. For instance, remembering the Holocaust, leading an ethical and moral life, and working for justice and equality were the top three responses in both 2013 and 2020. 21

While Jews by religion are more likely than Jews of no religion to consider each of the 10 attributes or activities in the 2020 survey essential to being Jewish, both groups generally rank the items in a similar order. Majorities of both Jews by religion and Jews of no religion cite remembering the Holocaust as essential, and both groups rank observing Jewish law and eating traditional foods toward the bottom of the list.

Despite these similarities, there are large gaps between the two groups on a few aspects of Jewish identity. For example, Jews by religion are far more likely than Jews of no religion to say that continuing family traditions is essential to what it means to them to be Jewish (61% vs. 24%). And Jews by religion are nearly twice as likely as Jews of no religion to say that caring about Israel is essential (52% vs. 27%).

Those with a Jewish spouse differ significantly from those without one on the importance of continuing family traditions. Among Jews with a Jewish spouse, seven-in-ten say continuing family traditions is essential to what it means to them to be Jewish, while far fewer Jews married to spouses who are not Jewish (37%) say the same.

Older Jews are more likely than younger generations to see certain things as essential to being Jewish. Compared with Jewish adults under the age of 30, larger shares of those 65 and older rank remembering the Holocaust, caring about Israel, being intellectually curious and having a good sense of humor as essential parts of their Jewish identity. However, younger Jews more likely than the eldest cohort to say that observing Jewish law is essential to being Jewish (19% vs. 12%).

What’s essential to being Jewish also tends to vary according to the respondent’s branch or stream of Judaism. Orthodox Jews are more likely than the non-Orthodox to say that following Jewish law and being part of a Jewish community are essential to what it means to them to be Jewish. Non-Orthodox Jews are more likely than the Orthodox to say that remembering the Holocaust, being intellectually curious and having a good sense of humor are essential.

Most Orthodox Jews say following Jewish law is essential to being Jewish

Three-quarters of Jews believe in higher power of some kind, but just one-quarter believe in God as described in the Bible

Overwhelming majority of Orthodox believe in God of the Bible; most Conservative and Reform do not

Three-quarters of U.S. Jews say they believe in God or some spiritual force in the universe, including 26% who say they believe in “God as described in the Bible” and about twice as many (50%) who believe in some other spiritual force. Belief in God is much more widespread among Jews by religion than among Jews of no religion. But even among Jews by religion, 14% say they do not believe in any higher power or spiritual force. Meanwhile, 44% of Jews of no religion say they do not believe in any higher power.

Nine-in-ten Orthodox Jews (93%) say they believe in the God of the Bible, compared with 37% of Conservative Jews, 18% of Reform Jews and 12% of Jews with no denomination.

U.S. Christians are far more likely than U.S. Jews to say they believe in God as described in the Bible, and far less likely to say they believe in some other higher power – or no higher power at all.

American Jews derive a great deal of meaning from spending time with family and friends

The survey also included a set of questions asking respondents to rate how much meaning and fulfillment they draw from each of seven possible sources: spending time with family; spending time with friends; their religious faith; being outdoors and experiencing nature; spending time with pets or animals; their job, career or education; and arts and literature, such as music, painting and reading.

Three-quarters of U.S. Jews say they derive a great deal of meaning from spending time with their family (74%), and six-in-ten find a great deal of fulfillment in spending time with friends (61%). Arts and literature (55%), spending time outdoors (51%), spending time with pets (43%) and jobs (38%) also are common sources of meaning and fulfillment. Among Jews, religious faith is by far the least common source of meaning of all the options presented by the survey; just one-in-five U.S. Jews say they get a great deal of meaning and fulfillment from their religion.

Jews by religion are somewhat more likely than Jews of no religion to say they draw a great deal of meaning from their families and from their faith, although even among Jews by religion, only a quarter say their religious faith carries a great deal of meaning.

There are also differences in where Jews find meaning based on their denominational affiliation. Nearly nine-in-ten Orthodox Jews say they find spending time with family very meaningful (86%), compared with three-quarters of Conservative and Reform Jews. And three-quarters of the Orthodox find a great deal of meaning in their religious faith, versus 32% of Conservative and just 13% of Reform Jews. Conversely, non-Orthodox Jews are far more likely than the Orthodox to find meaning in arts and literature as well as pets or animals.

Jewish Americans are less likely than U.S. adults as a whole to find a great deal of meaning in their religious faith (20% vs. 40%).

One-in-five U.S. Jews say their religious faith is highly meaningful, fulfilling

Due to differences in how the surveys were conducted, the exact percentages of Jews who cite several of these items as essential to their Jewish identity are not directly comparable to the 2013 survey. See Appendix B for details. ↩

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A brief history of antisemitism in U.S. higher education

What one wave of it a century ago created

The first Jew to be hired as an instructor at a U.S. college was Judah Monis. He had earned a Master of Arts degree from Harvard College in 1720 — the only Jew to receive a college degree in America before 1800 — and then was given a job two years later by Harvard to teach Hebrew, but on one condition: that he convert to Christianity . He did so a month before starting the job, but his conversion was seen as suspect by Jews and Christians; he was never embraced by his Harvard colleagues despite marrying a Christian; and his students reportedly disliked him throughout his nearly 40 years there.

And ever since then, Jews on U.S. college campuses have faced discrimination of varying degrees — both institutional and social — depending on the era, with one surprising result of a major antisemitic explosion in higher education a century ago.

Today, a sharp and sudden wave of antisemitism has erupted at numerous schools across the country — including at some of the most elite — in reaction to the Israel-Hamas war , putting administrators on the defensive for failing to protect Jewish students and reviving concerns among Jews that they aren’t welcome.

Colleges braced for antisemitism and violence. It’s happening.

In the first 16 days after Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7 and killed at least 1,200 people — leading to an Israeli military retaliation in Gaza that has already killed more than 10,000 people, according to the World Health Organization — there was a r eported spike of nearly 400 percent in the number of cases of assault, vandalism and harassment against Jews in the United States. Some of the most visible took place on college campuses. Anti-Muslim hate crimes spiked too, including the fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy in Illinois.

Administrators at a number of colleges, including Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, are now pledging to do more to make Jewish students feel protected after initial criticism that they had failed to even as campuses are being roiled by protests. Last week, the U.S. Education Department issued a letter reminding U.S. schools and colleges of their legal obligation to fight “an alarming rise” of antisemitism and Islamophobia with “renewed urgency.”

U.S. institutions under fire for their support — or silence — on Israel

What administrators are being pressed to do today is far different from what their predecessors did at the at the turn of the 20th century when Jewish students were enrolling in elite colleges in increasing numbers and faced antisemitic sentiment on campus. Instead of protecting Jewish students, administrators moved to solve what they called “the Jewish problem” — unofficially defined as too many Jews on campus — by implementing measures to restrict Jewish enrollment. In an example of unexpected consequences, what they did created what we now recognize as the modern admissions process.

Virtually every major part of the selective college application process — the freshman class cap, the interview, an emphasis on outside interests and character, the desire for geographical diversity, the legacy preference — were put into use in an effort to cut down on the Jewish student population. Columbia University in New York City, followed by Harvard, Yale and Princeton universities, found novel ways to cut back on, and then keep down, Jewish enrollment that stemmed from a historic wave of Jewish immigration beginning in the late 19th century, historians say. Hundreds more schools over the decades restricted Jewish enrollment, too, with quotas and other measures, some of which remained in force until the 1960s, historians say.

“These universities that had basically been finishing schools for Protestant boys who had come from elite boarding schools all of a sudden became engines of social mobility for aspiring dreamers from Jewish immigrant families,” said Mark E. Oppenheimer, vice president of Open Learning at American Jewish University and host of a podcast called Gate Crashers about the history of Jews in the Ivy League. “The character of the campus began to change. Jewish boys were going to school not to participate in a cappella singing and fraternity pranks and intramural sports but to study hard and get a leg up, and this changed the culture in ways that were threatening to the gentry who had considered these schools their own playgrounds.”

To be sure, Jews were not the only students discriminated against; there was, for example, anti-Catholic sentiment amid strong Catholic immigration. Still, historians say, Jews were the primary target because the Catholic Church encouraged its members t o enroll in Catholic colleges. “Meanwhile, leaders at many elite schools in the Northeast thought that Catholics — being Christian and mostly Irish — were more assimilable than Jews. … Thus, Ivy League schools did not feel as inundated by Catholic applicants, and those Catholics who did apply to these schools did not encounter the same limitations as Jewish applicants,” according to a 2011 academic paper on the origins of legacy admissions.

“Of all the immigrant groups streaming into the United States, none aroused greater antipathy than the Jews of Eastern Europe,” Jerome Karabel, a University of California at Berkeley sociologist, wrote in his 2006 book, “ The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton . Not only were they seen by nativists as socialist proselytizers, but Jews were also seen by some Americans as being members of a genetically inferior race. In some elite social circles, Jews were tagged as crude and unacceptable.

Efforts to restrict Jewish enrollment began in New York City, where the largest population of Jewish immigrants in the United States resided, historians say. By 1920, Jews made up some 30 percent of the city’s population, and the student bodies of local colleges, including the City College of New York, were mostly Jewish. At the elite Columbia University, Jewish enrollment had swelled to 40 percent by 1920, according to a paper by Oliver P. Pollak, who taught at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and co-founded the Nebraska Jewish Historical Society.

The beginning of a college song at the time explains why Columbia was the first elite school to try to restrict Jewish enrollment, according to Karabel:

Oh, Harvard’s run by millionaires

And Yale is run by booze,

Cornell is run by farmers’ sons,

Columbia’s run by Jews.

Jewish students were largely poor and lived at home, with many of them working jobs at night to pay their tuition, so Columbia started requiring students to live in dormitories on campus. Columbia also began limiting scholarships to applicants outside New York. Columbia and then Harvard began recruiting from states without large numbers of — or with no — Jews in a diversity move that is seen today as having value. Economic conditions also fed into a desire for more geographic representation, but “its roots were anti-Semitic,” Oppenheimer said. “They sent admissions officers to Montana and Washington state and Michigan, where they could find boys of Protestant stock.” Columbia also began interviewing students face-to-face, Oppenheimer said, so that university representatives could detect accents or other telling signs that a Jew was applying if the name wasn’t a clear giveaway.

Pamela Nadell, director of American University’s Jewish Studies Program who is writing a book on the history of antisemitism in the United States, said Columbia began to see Protestant students start going to other schools because they did not like the changing culture at Columbia. “These were the future business and government leaders who were children of White Anglo-Saxon elite who came out of the prep schools that had been feeders to the Ivy League schools, and they started deserting Columbia,” she said. Within two years, Columbia cut its Jewish student population nearly in half.

Harvard University’s president at the time was Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who became what historians Deborah L. Coe and James D. Davidson called “the most significant proponent of restricting Jewish admissions.” He saw what was happening at Columbia and feared that the Jewish population — which hit 19 percent in 1919 and 21.5 percent by 1922 — would keep growing at Harvard and the school could sustain a similar reaction from traditional Protestant students.

“By the 1910s, Harvard enrolled 85 percent of the sons of the Boston upper class, whereas just 52 and 6 percent of their counterparts in Philadelphia and New York matriculated at [the University of Pennsylvania] and Columbia,” Karabel wrote in “The Chosen.”

“Harvard, moreover, enjoyed a close relationship with the upper class of New York City, which in recent decades had come to dwarf Boston in economic importance; in the 1910s, nearly a third of the sons of New York’s elite enrolled at Harvard. To Lowell, Harvard’s rising Jewish enrollment posed a threat to these crucial relationships, making it imperative to bring the 'Jewish invasion’ under control,” he wrote.

At the time Jewish enrollment was rising, academic performance was the only criteria for college admission. At the turn of the 20th century, applicants began taking the first standardized admissions test, which was meant to bring some order to rather messy applications processes. While the exam was not meant to keep out Jews, its first incarnation was designed around the curriculum at the tony boarding schools filled with White Protestant students, who learned Greek, Latin and other classic subjects not taught in the urban public schools immigrants attended. Here’s a sample question from the 1901 College Board admissions test:

1. Write the rules for the following constructions and illustrate each by a Latin sentence:

(a) Two uses of the dative.

(b) The cases used to indicate the relations of place.

(d) The hortatory (or jussive) subjunctive.

(e) The supine in um.

Jews were not expected to do well on the test, Oppenheimer said, but it turned out that they did, and Jewish enrollment began rising at elite colleges.

So restrictions began. Dartmouth, Williams and Amherst colleges as well as Princeton University moved to cap the size of their classes — with what were effectively quotas — as did Harvard, while Dartmouth, Yale and other schools introduced legacy admissions to favor Protestant boys whose fathers had attended, Oppenheimer said.

Schools also began to require applicants to write essays to declare their extracurricular interests, as well as letters of reference from prominent people. Sociologist Stephen Steinberg wrote in a study of Jewish quotas in higher education that the most common method for restricting Jewish students was the introduction of character and psychological exams.

“Before the 1920s only criteria of scholastic performance were used in the admissions process; now admissions boards began to scrutinize the ‘outside’ interests of students,” Steinberg wrote. “In addition, school principals were asked to rank students on such characteristics as ‘fair play,’ ‘public spirit,’ ‘interest in fellows,’ and ‘leadership.’ These traits were exactly the opposite of those generally ascribed to Jews. According to the prevailing image, Jews did not use ‘fair play’ but employed unfair methods to get ahead. ‘Public spirit’ and ‘interest in fellows’ were Christian virtues; Jews were outsiders who cared only for themselves. ‘Leadership’ was seen as a prerogative of non-Jews; Jews exhibiting this quality would be regarded as ‘pushy.’ School principals, who were invariably Protestant and middle class, could be expected to reflect these stereotypes in evaluating their Jewish students.”

Hundreds of schools around the country followed, imposing what was effectively Jewish quotas. In the 1950s, Stanford University did so, but didn’t acknowledge it until October 2022 , when officials there publicly apologized for what then-President Marc Tessier-Lavigne called “appalling anti-Semitic behavior.” One way they did it was by cutting acceptances from a few Los Angeles high schools that had large Jewish populations. Beverly Hills High School was one of them. Stanford Jewish studies professor Ari Y. Kelman said in an interview that the university not only restricted Jews but then denied it for decades. “For many people that was almost as harmful as the initial action,” he said. “We don’t really know how many years the restrictions were in place.”

Stanford apologizes for limiting admissions of Jewish students in 1950s

By the 1970s, however, Jewish quotas were seen as a thing of the past and Jewish enrollment in U.S. higher education rose. In 1967, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Ivy League colleges — the very ones that had started Jewish quotas — were enrolling Jews in larger numbers than ever (though counting students by religion is never an exact science). Columbia University’s Jewish population was back up to 40 percent, where it had been when restrictions started earlier in the century.

Though percentages of Jews began to drop on college campuses when schools began to broaden their student diversity, Jewish students in the last part of the 20th century were largely comfortable on campus, with overt antisemitism displayed by administrators largely a thing of the past.

That doesn’t mean, however, that antisemitism had disappeared on U.S. college campuses.

Even when institutionalized antisemitism was seen to be a thing of the past in the United States, there were still problems for some Jews on some campuses. In the last 20 years of the 20th century, Holocaust deniers pressed public campaigns — including visits to colleges and universities and advertisements in student-run college newspapers — to spread their ideas. In 1997, the Anti-Defamation League, an international Jewish advocacy group, said in a report :

Jewish students and faculty are found in great numbers at elite universities which once resisted their presence. A majority of Ivy League universities and many others now have or have had Jewish presidents. There are few if any positions in American higher education that are not open to Jewish talent. Therefore, it is paradoxical that the American college and university campus recently emerged as one of the major sites for the expression and dissemination of antisemitism. At hundreds of institutions of higher learning, the concepts of academic freedom and student activism (which have been part of the Jewish success story on campus) have been invoked to shield hatred. No longer the ivory towers they were once considered, colleges and universities are proving all too porous to the prejudices emerging in our society. In recent years, campuses have become a new proving ground for the tactics of all manner of extremists, forcing some colleges and universities onto the frontline in the fight against extremism and anti-Semitism.

In 2001, a campaign to use economic leverage against Israel emerged from the U.N. World Conference Against Racism in South Africa, and what became known as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement began putting pressure on higher education institutions to disinvest from Israel and boycott Israeli academics. Supporters said it was an effort to help Palestinians, including the right of return to homes and properties they owned before the establishment of Israel in 1948. Many Israelis saw it is an effort to destroy Israel. On U.S. college campuses, student governments at dozens of schools held votes to support BDS. Most failed, and the movement seemed to lose momentum in recent years.

Criticism of the Israeli government’s policies is not necessarily antisemitic, but on some campuses support for BDS left many Jewish students feeling isolated and even targeted for harassment. In 2005, a U.S. Civil Rights Commission report said:

American college campuses are generally considered welcoming places for Jewish students. Life on campus is often enhanced through a number of opportunities for Jewish students. Despite this positive environment, many experts agree that antisemitism persists on college campuses and is often cloaked as criticism of Israel.

Jewish students began increasingly reporting incidents on campus where they felt deliberately targeted. A report on antisemitism in the United States by the American Jewish Congress released early this year found that more than a third of current or recent Jewish college students reported feeling uncomfortable or unsafe at a campus event because they are Jewish. Some say that it is what is referred to as “social antisemitism” driven by other students rather than institutional antisemitism, although many feel they have been unprotected by their administrators for too long.

Survey finds ‘classical fascist’ antisemitic views widespread in U.S.

Harvard President Claudine Gay recently admitted as much regarding school leadership and its silence on antisemitism, saying, “For years, this university has done too little to confront its continuing presence,” she said. “No longer.”

(Correction: Fixing decade to century in this sentence: Columbia University’s Jewish population was back up to 40 percent, where it had been when restrictions started earlier in the century.)

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“You’re My First Jew:” University Student and Professor Experiences of Judaism in a Small Indiana City

Emma cieslik.

Department of Anthropology, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306 USA

Robert Phillips

There has been a Jewish presence in Muncie, Indiana since before the city was incorporated in 1865. Most people, however, do not even know that the city has a synagogue or where it is located. This study contextualizes this small Jewish community within small-town America. For this study, we interviewed 12 Jewish individuals, including college students and faculty members at Ball State University, about their Jewish religion, identity, and experiences with antisemitism in this East-Central Indiana community. The interviews were transcribed and hand-coded for elements of Jewish life and identity, including the frequency of terms related to Jewish holidays, Christian dominance, and antisemitic interactions. These transcripts were also used to create a word corpus that was analyzed using a text analysis tool that calculates the frequency of dominant terms and their context. From this analysis, we determined that many Jewish college students and professors in Muncie experience Christian hegemony, not only because of public religious celebrations, feelings of difference, and Christian evangelization on campus and in public spaces, but also because many of the people interviewed revealed experiences of being someone’s “first Jew,” or the first Jewish person they have met.

Introduction

Jews have lived in Muncie before the city was incorporated in 1865. Muncie is a small-to-medium-sized city with an estimated population of about 68,500, situated in East-Central Indiana. It is best known for its role as “Middletown” in sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd’s 1929 and 1937 studies of small-town America. Despite the long history of Judaism in Muncie starting with German and Central European Jews settling in rural areas in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, the Lynds found Muncie “a city of whose total population of Negros and foreign-born form only an infinitesimal part” and did not mention Jewish individuals in their first book. While the Lynds failed to comment on a group critical to Muncie’s economic growth in the early twentieth century, more recently, researchers like Daniel Rottenburg have worked to fill this void through archival and oral history research (Rottenburg 1997 ).

In the early years, the Jewish population in Muncie worked hard to establish their religious community, fighting antisemitic backlash from political leaders and a dominant Ku Klux Klan. Despite these difficulties, the first Jewish services were held in members’ homes before shifting to the Delaware Masonic Lodge No. 46 in 1891 and later to the Hebrew Temple from 1891 to 1896. The congregation then formed Temple Beth El in 1912, and in 1922 moved into what is Muncie’s current and only synagogue. Temple Beth El is affiliated with the Reform Movement, and Jewish individuals wanting to attend Conservative or Orthodox services drive to synagogues in Indianapolis, which is approximately 50 miles away. Due to its consistently small number of members, Temple Beth El has relied on student rabbis from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio to lead services. Currently, Temple Beth El maintains an active sisterhood and regularly collaborates with the Hillel at Ball State.

As noted above, the Jewish community of Muncie has always been small, with between 25 and 35 member families, beginning with the arrival of Jewish settlers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jewish settlers faced similar difficulties to larger immigrant communities, including keeping their culture and religion alive between generations and resisting assimilation. Small town communities were unique in that they were more economically monolithic, consisting mostly of middle-class Jews working as merchants or entrepreneurs in business and junk collecting (Weissbach 2008 ). Despite, or perhaps because of, this success, in the early twentieth century they faced religious and race-based hatred from the Ku Klux Klan and from the broader culture in the form of exclusionary housing covenants and job discrimination.

Few anthropological studies have focused on Jews in small communities in the Midwest, and currently none exist for small towns in Indiana. Most scholarship related to Muncie’s Jewish population has focused on recording the stories, customs, and ways of life of Jews in Muncie, a type of salvage ethnography. Writing centered on Muncie’s Jewish community includes the Middletown Jewish Oral History Project I and II (1978–1979 and 2003–2004). This study hopes to fill this gap in scholarship by investigating the following questions.

How do Jewish students and professors experience their Jewish identity in a city with limited Jewish resources, including religious, cultural, and social resources?
How does being Jewish in small-town Indiana affect Jewish identity in light of increasing incidences of antisemitism?

To answer these questions, the authors focused on the experiences of students and professors attending or affiliated with Ball State University in Muncie. This is due to the fact that most of the current Jewish population in Muncie reside where they do because of attendance or employment at the University. Research has focused on collective identity among Jewish college students in the USA from the 1960s onward (Jospe 1964 ; Ruttenberg et al. 1996 ), but most research centers on universities in larger cities. Compared with Ball State, universities in larger Indiana cities offer more religious and cultural resources to Jewish college students, including, for example, through Hillel chapters. Ball State does have a Hillel chapter, but unlike regional Butler University and Indiana University’s Hillel chapters, Ball State does not have a rabbi or full-time Jewish educator on campus. Purdue University and Indiana University offer weekly Shabbat services and kosher meals. Ball State’s Hillel coordinates one to three Shabbat dinners at Temple Beth El per semester, and Temple Beth El hosts Shabbat services every other week, to which the Hillel students are invited.

Literature Review: Jewish identity, Assimilation, Christian Privilege

This study sits at the intersection of previous work that examines Jewish identity, assimilation, and Christian hegemony. Many different factors affect Jewish identity in small cities, including the smaller size of Jewish communities, limited religious resources, and assimilation of Jewish residents into the broader mainstream community. Judaism is more than simply a faith tradition in that it extends well beyond religious practice and identity. For many Jews, their religious identity includes connections to Israel, notions of racial belonging, and shared diet, and these factors that affect identity often vary from location to location. This is especially true of a small city like Muncie. As such, this paper works to understand local knowledge primarily using the participant’s point of view (the emic perspective) collected through ethnographic interviews to study how living in Muncie affects the identification of Jewish residents.

Jewish identity is strongly linked to place. Jewish identity within the USA is not homogeneous but is affected by sociodemographic features of individual Jewish communities, according to a comprehensive study of 22 American Jewish communities conducted between 2000 and 2010 (Hartman et al. 2017 ). Unfortunately, Indiana was not included in this study. The sense of group belonging (family, synagogue, and community) is embedded in Jewish ritual (Chiswick and Chiswick 2000 ), and Jewish identity therefore involves institutional affiliation and Jewish group socialization and cohesion (Rebhun 2004 ). These “microcontexts,” including friends, family, and schoolmates, greatly impact religiosity, shaping how important religion is in adolescents’ and adults’ lives (Regnerus et al. 2004 ).

Heilman ( 2003 ) encourages the right amount of pull between Jewish communities and their traditions and events that differ from tradition and events popularized in larger American society, as absorbing influences from the wider society stimulates individuals to oppose, insulate, mask, and reinterpret events (Goldberg 1990 ). One example where this tension slackens is Chrismukkah, involving the union of Jewish and Christian tradition (Mehta 2018 ). Common in intermarried households, Chrismukkah demonstrates that, while decisions often revolve around belief, practical considerations dominate. One sense of belonging relates to intermarriage (Handlarski 2020 ) and how public discussion of interfaith decisions revolve around belief, but everyday issues will tackle questions of practice (Mehta 2018 ). We also focus on Judaism’s clash with wider Christian iconography, particularly the public display of Christian holidays with Christmas trees, Easter eggs (and crosses), and Christian music in public schools and universities, where the authors were conducting the study.

Like the blending of tradition in interfaith families, one aspect of blending in small-town life is assimilation. As assimilation is a contested idea in many minority communities, the authors focus on the transformational aspects of the process, following the examples of Rogers Brubaker (Brubaker 2003 ). Isolation from mainstream white and Christian culture leads some Jews to deny their Jewish identity to “blend in” (Altman et al. 2010 ). At Ball State, Jews may try to “blend in” to remain safe from antisemitism on campus and to have better employment or involvement opportunities, especially as many student organizations on campus are Christian-affiliated at Ball State. Some interviewees mentioned doing this by adopting a new non-Jewish appearance (such as not wearing a kippah in public), behavior, or diet to avoid discrimination, especially in Jewish communities that are not visible, like that in Muncie (Amyot and Sigelman 1996 ). Assimilation or “blending in” may work to improve social circumstances by protecting Jews from antisemitism (Alba and Nee 2009 ). Assimilation can form two different types, where (1) nonpracticing Jews who identify as Jews no longer consider religion important in their lives or (2) where nonpracticing Jews stop thinking of themselves as Jewish, often common in smaller Jewish populations (Alper and Olson 2013 ). Nonpracticing Jews may identify as Jewish based on culture, ethnicity, or ancestry instead of religious identity or religious practice. Therefore, while King and Weiner ( 2007 ) note that antisemitism is usually tied to communities with large numbers of Jews, and Muncie’s Jewish population was not the main target of the KKK owing to its small size, the Jewish community was still impacted by religious and race-based hatred contributing to discrimination and a hegemony of Christianity in public spaces.

A demographic study conducted by Sheskin ( 2017 ) of the Indianapolis Jewish community in 2017 is one of two studies focused on Indiana. An anthropological study was conducted by Levine ( 1986 ), who investigated assimilation and integration among Jewish adults in Indianapolis. The Indianapolis Jewish population, consisting of 17,900 people with 50% of Jewish households living in the Indianapolis area for 20 years or more, is considerably larger than the Muncie Jewish population, which has remained in the triple digits since its inception, but it offers the only comparison available as it is the first study of any Jewish community in Indiana ever archived at the Berman Jewish Databank (Sheskin 2017 ). A few months before the Pew Research Center released their 2013 national study of the US Jewish population, Sheskin ( 2013 ) argued that researchers’ best resource is to make use of these local Jewish community studies. One community study in the early twentieth century focused on the Jewish community in Indianapolis (Auerbach 1933 ). Even when there is no recent national study, local population studies do increase our understanding of the American Jewish population (Saxe and Tighe 2013 ) and may even be useful in ways that national studies cannot.

While people may be integrated into either the Jewish or American community, the more they assimilate into the American community, the weaker the Jewish community becomes (Levine 1986 ). Many Jews do not identify themselves publicly, but rather feel alienated from mainstream culture, and some have even internalized antisemitism (Schlosser 2006 ). Often, Jews do not feel welcomed into communities, and the lack of acceptance manifests as comments, “You’re not like all the other Jews” or “I would never have guessed that you’re Jewish” (Hecht and Faulkner 2000 ), very similar to questions about the fixity of race and ethnicity explored through full-bodied ethnographies of Jewish communities (Markowitz 2006 ). Markowitz’s analysis focused on Jewishness as performativity between embodied actors. This study of Jewishness in Muncie involved individuals who all self-identified as white, but these moments are also experienced by Jews of color in the USA and beyond.

Notably, Jewish-identified people reported perceiving more discrimination than their assimilated counterparts (Friedlander et al. 2010 ). Although many studies show that non-Jews are more accepting towards Jews than other groups (Kressel 2016 ; Putnam and Campbell 2012 ), 42% of Jews say that there is a lot of discrimination against Jews in the USA and 81% perceive antisemitism as problematic in the USA (Pew 2013 ). While no data exist for Muncie, 14% of respondents in a 2017 Indianapolis study indicated that they had personally experienced antisemitism in the past year, and of those 14%, about one-third said they had perceived a good deal or moderate amount of antisemitism in Indianapolis. (Sheskin 2017 ).

Many American Jews experience feelings of marginalization, alienation, microaggressions, bias, and discrimination (Schlosser 2006 ). Therefore, the history of Jewish diaspora shows selective accommodation with the cultural, political, and everyday life of new “host societies,” in this case, through incidents of antisemitism in small-town America (Clifford 1994 ). While Diner ( 2004 ) discovered that reports of antisemitism are fewer among first- and second-generation Americans, studies focused on college populations show antisemitism reports are correlated with Jewish engagement (Kosmin and Keysar 2015 ; Saxe et al. 2009 ). Past studies have shown that group identification and membership is correlated with experiences of antisemitism (Tajfel and Turner 1986 ; Turner 1991 ). Other factors tied to antisemitic experiences include lower age, less education, American nativity, and attachment to Israel (Rebhun 2014 ). Among Jewish individuals identifying as Orthodox, religiously or ethnically Jewish belonging to a Jewish organization, or religiously or ethnically Jewish and not belonging to an organization, all perceived the presence of antisemitism (DellaPergola et al. 2009 ).

Past research connects religious oppression and antisemitic acts together, as Blumenfeld ( 2006 ) argues that oppression of non-Christians produces Christian privilege in the USA, and conversely, Christian privilege continually reinforces oppression of non-Christian people and faith communities. This incorporates the third area of literature, the hegemony of Christianity. Building on Young’s ( 1990 ) five categories involved in oppression and privilege, including powerlessness, exploitation, marginalization, cultural imperialism, and violence, Blumenfeld ( 2006 ) argues that oppression also involves systemic constraints imposed upon groups that do not necessarily implicate violence, such as elements of tokenism and microaggressions. Past research has highlighted the promotion of Christianity in public schooling systems (Blumenfeld 2006 ). Clark and colleagues ( 2002 ) build on critical work studying manifested white privilege in the USA (McIntosh 1988 ) to identify Christian privilege regardless of how that identity is expressed. While protestants often hold most of this privilege (Blumenfeld 2006 ), it is the opposition of sameness and difference that parallels Protestant ship and other minority religious traditions that perpetuate the idea that Protestantism is the norm and that is acceptable for Christian expressions to persist in secular schools and other settings (Schlosser 2003 ), as highlighted in public spaces in Muncie and on Ball State’s campus.

Lastly, this study employs the notion of bricolage, an idea first introduced by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his book The Savage Mind (1962) referring to how, in mythology, people combine available content to create something new. Riis and Woodhead ( 2010 ) further this theory to refer to the development of an individual religious framework, which Illman ( 2017 ) notes is driven by the consumerization of religious constructions where religious individuals can select different religious ideas to create their own worldview. Specific to our study, Altglas ( 2014 ) contradicts the focus on individual, independent constructions, explaining how economic, social, and political factors in the environment affect this available content, returning to Lévi-Strauss’s original idea. The availability of Jewish religious resources, the absence of public Jewish imagery, and the dominance of Christian evangelization therefore strongly impact the environment in which Jewish identity is constructed, which is the focus of how Jewish individuals in Muncie construct their identity.

Methods: Coding and Corpus Analysis

For this study, the authors interviewed 12 Jewish individuals living in Muncie, Indiana. Of these, six were college students and five were professors or staff in different colleges at Ball State University. Undergraduate and graduate students were interviewed. The twelfth interview was with a local Jewish religious leader in Muncie who worked closely with university students. We began by reaching out to individuals from Muncie’s only synagogue Temple Beth El as well as Ball State’s Hillel chapter, a strategy often employed in ethnographies on Jewish identity construction (Feldman 2004 ). The interviews ranged between 30 and 60 min, which were recorded and transcribed. They covered Jewish family relationships, Jewish identity in the context of Muncie, incidents of physical or emotional threats, Jewish jokes and harassment, and modern political leadership. All the interviews were hand-coded, and a code book was constructed that included 34 unique codes falling into five main categories: Jewish identity, antisemitism, dominance of Christianity, the Jewish community in Muncie, and the greater Jewish community (see “Appendix” A).

A primary method of analysis employed in this study is corpus linguistics, in which any number of “everyday” texts are compiled into an electronic, machine-readable format (the corpus) and analyzed to expose previously unseen patterns related to grammatical or lexical features of the corpus. This is usually accomplished by comparing the corpus under investigation (the focus corpus) with a corpus of text that is representative of a given language (the reference corpus), allowing for a comparison of the patterns between corpora. Underlying this methodology is Renouf and Sinclair’s notion ( 1991 ) that individual words do not carry meaning in themselves, but rather through their analysis as part of a larger sequence of words. In this study, we use Sketch Engine (Anthony 2013 ; Kilgarriff 2004 , 2014 ), a widely available software package. Another feature of the method is that it involves a quantitative analysis of the data followed by qualitative interpretation. This is significant in that knowledge of a particular culture or issue is necessary for the researcher to properly unravel and interpret the patterns that emerge. For this study, this corpus linguistics is especially relevant in that it focuses the attention on the “real world” speech patterns of Jewish individuals from various segments of society from which attitudes and patterns can be extrapolated.

Analyzing this word corpus through corpus linguistics allowed the authors to conduct concordance and word sketch analysis related to the content of the interviews, including the frequency and connection between certain terms. This analysis yielded pie diagrams for specific terms, including “Jewish,” “identity,” Christian,” and joke,” which show the connection of these terms to others in the interview and the frequency of associated terms. The charts are discussed in the results section below. Corpus analysis offers a quantitative method of analyzing qualitative data, in this case the interviews conducted with 12 Jewish individuals.

While the interviews encompassed a wide range of experiences, certain themes became prominent throughout, including (a) the small size of the Jewish community, (b) the prominence of secular Judaism, (c) the dominance of Christianity, (d) cautiousness in sharing Jewish identity, and (e) Jewish stereotypes and meeting their “first Jew.” To protect the confidentiality of all interviewees, the names and identifying information for all interviewees were removed.

Small Jewish Community

While 72% of adults in Indiana are Christian, only 2% of adults in Indiana identify with another faith and 26% are unaffiliated. One percent of all religious adults in Indiana are Jewish (Pew Research Center 2014 ).

This Jewish community in Muncie has existed at Temple Beth El for over a century, and members have always dealt with the reality of being a small community. The people interviewed consistently emphasized that they live in a city with little Jewish representation and with a Jewish community that is shrinking or disappearing. Joshua spoke to this:

I feel that we are disappearing here, and I just wish that we were more than just those 20–25 families.

Although the Jewish community in Muncie is small, Temple Beth El works not only to hold religious services but to avoid feelings of separation. Those who were interviewed frequently associated the words “community,” “population,” and “people” with the word “Jewish,” as indicated by analysis of the word corpus (Fig. 1 ). For some who attend Temple Beth El, their desire to uphold Jewish religious practices comes from within and not from the synagogue or from the city. Diana spoke to this idea:

Keeping the High Holidays, or keeping any holidays, is up to me, not my community, or to my city.

In many ways, Diana’s sense of personal responsibility for celebrating the High Holidays may stem from a lack of Jewish religious resources in Muncie. However, in many respects, Judaism can be considered a “religion of the home,” and therefore, attendance at a synagogue is not mandatory. The city of Muncie has no kosher butchers or restaurants; although, most grocery stores in Muncie contain commercial food items that are kosher. Several people interviewed, however, do drive to Indianapolis or Chicago to purchase kosher meat or order food online for upcoming holidays. Daniel spoke to how it is harder to be observantly Jewish in Muncie:

Being a Jewish minority in a place like Muncie, Indiana or like Cincinnati, Ohio, it’s much harder to be observant; whereas, in Israel, everything is there for you, so you can decide if you are observing or not observing, but the community surrounds you and makes it easier.

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Word sketch analysis for the word “Jewish,” utilizing the word corpus of 12 interviews analyzed with Sketch Engine. The frequency of other words associated with Judaism in the interviews is indicated by the size of each bubble and separated based on type of word. The words “identity,” “people,” and “person” are closely associated with “Jewish,” noting how Judaism is a significant part of the identities of those interviewed

Cincinnati has a much larger Jewish community, including Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform synagogues and a rabbinical school, and more Jewish resources, but in Muncie, there is no Jewish religious infrastructure outside of Temple Beth El, and for some this has led many to worry that they may not find support systems, and as Sam explains, this can lead him to think that his religious identity is being overshadowed or “minimized.”

It has been challenging because I’m looking for support, and I don’t always know if I am going to find it, and as a religious community, I just think that my beliefs are being minimized.

This experience of feeling “minimized” ties closely to prominent Christian displays and evangelization, discussed below. Others who were interviewed, often professors moving to Muncie in middle-to-late adulthood, see this void of Jewish representation and the fact that they live in a small Jewish community to necessitate involvement in the community. George notes:

Maybe if there is a big population, I wouldn’t care but here they kind of need everyone, so, I have some obligation.

The idea of obligation paralleled a sense of community; Steven noted that community events help to decrease feelings of isolation:

It’s important to have those few, at least, come together at some point, so we’re not isolated and so we don’t lose our way .

The people interviewed consistently note how Muncie has a small and shrinking Jewish community, but among those who are Jewish, there is a feeling of obligation to become more involved in the Jewish religious community because there are fewer people in Muncie to take on those roles. Feelings of isolation and fears for openly identifying as Jewish likely stem from Christian religious dominance in Muncie, especially evangelism efforts targeted at students on Ball State University’s campus. Also, most Jewish individuals enter the community as a student or faculty member at Ball State, so students may not be expected to stay in the community for more than 4 years, which may impact their involvement with the community.

Prominence of Secular Judaism

Jewish identity extends beyond religious practice, which is different from other dominant religious practices in the USA, including Christianity. Recent studies have shown a rise in Jewish secularism among college students (Kosmin 2018 ) largely impacted by upbringing and intermarriage (Keysar 2018 ); this fact was mirrored in our interviews. Word sketch analysis indicates that those interviewed closely associate identity with the term “Jewish,” but they do so in a way that can allude to an “ethnic,” “cultural,” or “national” identity separate from religious identity (Figs. 1 and and 2). 2 ). Several people interviewed, specifically students, note how their Jewish identity is not tied to religious practices or dietary observances. The term “non-observant” is often used interchangeably with “secular,” but those interviewed did not indicate loss of Jewish identity when not attending services but rather self-identification based on ancestry, ethnicity, and social community. Isabella explained her own identity:

That’s kind of what’s cool about Judaism is that you can never practice a single custom, never keep kosher or anything like that associated with being Jewish, but you can still be considered just as Jewish as anyone else.

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Word sketch analysis for the word “identity,” utilizing the word corpus of 12 interviews analyzed with Sketch Engine. “Jewish” is closely related to “identity,” but terms like “ethnic,” “cultural” and national” allude to a Jewish identity that extends beyond religious tradition related to growing secularism among Jewish young people

The people interviewed who identify as Jewish “by birth,” also referred to themselves as “secular.” Smith and Zhang found that, among a Jewish community in a city in the southern USA, ancestry plays an increasing role in Jewish identity, as most consider it inherited or inherited as well as chosen and constructed (Smith and Zhang 2018 ). The 2013 Pew study also found that almost 25% of Jewish adults in the USA identify as Jewish by some other factor besides religion (Pew Research Center 2013 ). They may or may not attend Temple Beth El, and even if they do, they may be doing so for social reasons rather than religious ones. Lucy spoke to why many people attend Temple Beth El,

Probably the majority of the Jewish community in Muncie is involved with the temple on a social setting rather than a religious setting.

As mentioned above by Steven, events that bring together the Jewish community work to fight feelings of isolation, so social events are a critical piece in developing a support system. The young people interviewed who did not identify as religiously mainly came from households with one Jewish parent and one non-Jewish (often Christian-identified) parent and were from the Midwest. The Jewish parent was often the mother. While studies have shown that there is decreased religiosity among Jews raised in the Midwest by interfaith parents (Smith and Young 2018 ), recent studies of college students and intermarried couples show that children born of intermarriage often experience faith like children with two Jewish parents when they are incorporated into Jewish communities (Saxe et al. 2009 ; McGinity 2012 ; Thompson 2013 ). Those interviewed do attend Temple Beth El for social reasons and closely associate Judaism with family social events. Shawn explained:

A lot of the value that I find in Judaism and all that kind of stuff really is more of a familial get-together and stuff like that.

While “secular” identity was mainly confined to the younger people who were interviewed, several other people characterized themselves as “ethnically” Jewish. For Dominick, how he identified as Jewish depended on his surroundings:

In Israel, I saw myself as secular. I do think of myself as secular, but I would say maybe ethnically Jewish more than observant.

For one interviewee, Israel played a key role in the identity construction process. He previously identified as secular or nonreligious while in Israel, but when outside of a Jewish state, his Jewish identity was closely tied to his ethnic identity, and he became involved in the Temple community. This experience reflects only one person and merits future research. The Word Sketch analysis confirms the varied types of Jewish identities, noted with the use of the words “ethnic,” “national,” and “cultural” alongside the word “religious” discussing identity (Fig. 2 ). This is likely a result of growing secularism among Jewish young people from intermarried parents and ethnic and cultural identities tied to national ties and identities, including to Israel.

Predominance of Christianity

Religious, as well as cultural and ethnic identity as mentioned above, can be manifested publicly and privately, and this theme focused on how Jewish identity was represented in Muncie. When asked about Jewish representation in Muncie, many of the people interviewed noted how Christian symbols and iconography dominated public spaces, including decorations for Christmas and Easter. Word Sketch analysis revealed that those interviewed used the words “be” and “very” as well as “holiday” closely associated with “Christian,” showing how predominance of Christian symbols often mirrors evangelization efforts by Christian organizations on campus (Fig. 3 ). On Ball State University’s campus, the prominence of Christmas trees, songs, and events overshadows what little, if any, Jewish decorations exist. Visibility and recognizing a visual culture are central to identity formation (Zemel 2015 ). One Ball State student, Veronica, spoke to the lack of Hanukkah decorations:

If you are going through Ball State and it’s the time of year, like December, count how many Hanukkah decorations that you see. This is my sixth year on campus, and it has not gotten better. It’s all Christmas lights, wreaths and trees and presents, and they’re playing holiday music on the speakers in the buses. No menorah. Not a single menorah.

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Word sketch analysis for the word “Christian,” utilizing the word corpus of 12 interviews analyzed with Sketch Engine. The words “be” and “very” appeared frequently when the people interviewed were asked about Christianity. Other terms include “holiday,” alluding to the dominance of Christian holidays, and “family,” referring to Jewish young people from interfaith homes that celebrate Christian holidays

Other Ball State students who were interviewed recalled how Muncie community members passed out New Testament Bibles at the main thoroughfare of campus. This area also played host to other Ball State Christian student organizations, including Cru and Awaken, largely focused on evangelization. Larry, another student, explained:

I think there is definitely a lack of representation, and I guess you can see that with the dominance of Cru, so when you have the bigger organizations that have the dominance, then with the smaller organizations [like Hillel], it’s harder for them to be known and get more involved.

Ball State does have a Hillel chapter, but membership is consistently small, with five to ten students attending most meetings. In fall 2019, the organization partnered with an older member of Temple Beth El to organize Hebrew lessons for students, but attendance at these events remained in the single digits until they were discontinued due to coronavirus. Although Hillel provides a space for social gatherings, Jewish college students still receive fliers for Christian organizations and churches in their dorm mail.

Beyond Ball State students, elementary and middle schools in Muncie are largely Christian-oriented. For Jewish professors working to raise their children Jewish in Muncie, they are working against a school year with Christian holidays “built into the school breaks” and schools celebrating Christian holidays in the classroom. Susan, a Ball State professor explained:

It’s a hard role because I have to constantly remind my kids that Christmas is a great holiday. It’s wonderful, but it’s not our holiday.

Mark, another parent, noted how his daughter was the only Jewish student he knew of in her school, making it difficult to seek out other parents for guidance. Lucas explained how, in Muncie, “Judaism is almost a non-entity here,” as if it does not exist. Some people the authors spoke to at Ball State and in Muncie did not know that it had a synagogue. A former student rabbi explained her initial reactions when arriving at Temple Beth El:

Even if you look at the synagogue building, the first time that I came here, I drove right past it because I couldn’t see that this was a synagogue. It wasn’t really clear from the outside, which is very common in synagogues in many places in the world where they try to blend in and not stick out too much and not show they are Jewish externally so much. I think just because of the numbers. It is such a small community. It’s not a public presence as much in Muncie.

This rabbi’s note about Temple Beth El parallels another theme in the interviews, a cautiousness to share Jewish identity, linked partly to increasing antisemitism in the USA.

Cautiousness in Sharing Jewish Identity

While Muncie’s Jewish community is small, its community members still perceive the risks of antisemitism and bigotry witnessed in larger Jewish communities. Several people interviewed mentioned that they felt physically unsafe when attending Temple Beth El, even though a police officer is on-duty during all services as well as other events held at the temple. Rachel commented that “my personal safety is at risk,” whereas Diana remarked that her risk is always on her mind when attending temple services:

Yes, every time that I go to the synagogue it crosses my mind.

When asked if this risk would compel them to give up their Jewish identity, the majority of those interviewed said no but noted that they are less likely to talk about their Jewish identity in public, wear symbols of Judaism (including a kippah or Magen David jewelry), and are generally “more cautious” because of modern examples of antisemitism-motivated violence. This fear is therefore affecting their physical embodiment of their identity and mirrors an absence of Jewish cultural and religious symbols in public spaces in the Muncie community.

The authors conducted these interviews between September and December 2019, one year after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting at the Tree of Life/Or L’Simcha Congregation, but this tragic event still affected the people interviewed. Stacey explained her fear:

After they had that shooting last year at the temple, I was calling my mom asking if I should wear my Jewish star necklace anymore.

Another man, Roger, noted how he has taken off his kippah or put his hood up to hide that he is wearing it to stay safe. Parents interviewed explained how fear associated with this recent antisemitic attack, along with other occurring in Hasidic communities in New York City in December 2019, makes it difficult to instill feelings of pride in their children:

We try to teach our kids to be proud of who they are, while at the same time, we try to teach them a modicum of not necessarily going and flaunting it because we’re concerned that drawing attention to you, in that way, could have adverse effects.

Even several of the young college students describe growing up with family members that explicitly said to “never advertise your religion” or to limit expression of Jewish identity to stay safe. In a city where the small Jewish community bands together for social and religious events to work against feelings of isolation, the Jewish community also feels cautious to express this identity openly, especially when the city has explicitly Christian events and symbols.

Jewish Stereotypes and the “First Jew”

Just as few people living in Muncie, Indiana know that their city has a Reform synagogue, many people in Muncie, Indiana have never met a Jewish person. Several people interviewed explained how, when people find out that they are Jewish or when they share their Jewish identity, that person admits that they have never met anyone who is Jewish, that this person is their “first Jew.” Sarah explained her own experience:

I guess a lot of people who come here to Ball State, maybe they’re from a smaller town in Indiana or maybe they’re from Muncie, but they don’t know a lot of Jewish people. It’s very, very common to me, when people find that I am Jewish, they have never met a Jewish person before.

While Sarah explained that she sees her Jewish identity “as a diamond in the rough for more people to know about it,” she also discusses how being this person’s “First Jew” can be tiring, always being placed in a minority that the often-Christian majority have not encountered and do not understand. Henry remarked how people often assume that he is Christian:

Whenever I say that I am Jewish, it’s always the funniest thing because people are always so surprised that I am not Christian.

For those in Muncie that do not know what Judaism is, this can lead to confusion, harmful statements, and inappropriate jokes. One woman interviewed noted that her boyfriend’s family did not know what Judaism was, and while they affirmed that it was okay that she was Jewish, they still thought that she believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ. This confusion and misunderstanding can lead to antisemitism, here exemplified by the prominence of Jewish jokes.

This lack of experience speaking with Jewish people has led to misunderstandings about what Judaism is and has perpetuated stereotypes about Jews manifested as Jewish jokes and, more insidiously, Holocaust jokes. Several people interviewed note that many people they encounter in Muncie do not know how to speak with or interact with a Jewish person, leading them to tell Jewish jokes, thinking it will not bother this person or not even realizing that this person is Jewish. Stacey explained how “harmless” jokes can turn dark:

I find that often time when people do get really cruel is when they are just having fun because then they try to turn it into, “I was just joking around. I’m not being serious.” But they are.

Several other people interviewed, mostly young people remark how they feel they “had to laugh it off” or turn the other way when people used phrases like “Jew it down,” to refer to getting the price reduced. Word Sketch analysis of the interviews indicate that, when discussing “Jewish” identity, most interviewers used the term “Jewish” in close association with “joke,” “stereotypical,” and “Holocaust” (Fig. 4 ). While some are hopeful that awareness about the derogatory phrase will help it to stop being used, others worry that an explanation is not enough for people to stop using these phrases. Walter explained hearing people’s use of “Jew it down”:

He had not a clue that I was Jewish. That was his term for it, and talking to the guy, I don’t think any amount of explanation as to how that is not acceptable would have made him understand.

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Word sketch analysis for the word “joke,” utilizing the word corpus of 12 interviews analyzed with Sketch Engine. The term “Jewish” is closely related to jokes, along with “Holocaust,” “antisemitism,” “stereotypical,” and “racist,” referring to Holocaust jokes and Jewish stereotyping. The prominence of the verbs “tell” and “make” refer to how the people interviewed have heard people tell these jokes, referring to the action, as opposed to receiving the jokes, with the lesser use of the word “hear.” The association between “joke” and “be” also shows how Jewish people may believe others view Jewish identity as a joke

The use of this phrase and other terms are harmful to the Jewish community and survive on stereotypes related to physical appearance and greed. When people are no longer able to accept the reality of these phrases, terms, or jokes as unacceptable, jokes about genocide, about the Holocaust, are seen as acceptable and “not serious,” even though all of these terms, phrases, and jokes allude to underlying antisemitism and, worse, socially permitted antisemitism. One person interviewed noted how they felt threatened because “there has been a rise in overt antisemitism.”

While the authors were conducting the interviews, a group put up posters across Ball State’s campus on the day before Rosh Hashanah (29 and 30 September 2019) warning that a Neo-Nazi group would be coming to campus. While the posters encouraged students to oppose the group, the Ball State students that the authors interviewed after the incident argued that it seemed more like a group declaration (Fig. 5 ). When one young Ball State student showed a picture of the posters to the University Police Department, she had to explain the threat to Temple Beth El members like herself because the flyers promoted the group coming to campus right during the High Holidays. This experience highlighted ignorance about the existence of a Jewish community in Muncie and an understanding of Judaism and when important Jewish holidays occur, critical to protecting all members of the community.

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Flyer promoting Neo-Nazi group coming to Ball State. These flyers were posted throughout campus in late September 2019, advising that a Neo-Nazi group called Patriot Front, would soon be coming to Ball State campus. It took several days for the posters to be taken down by the police. Most of them were torn down immediately by Ball State students. Patriot Front is a white nationalist hate group that separated from Vanguard America after the deadly Charlottesville rally in August 2017. Many of their rallies featured swastikas and other Nazi-era imagery and chanting, “Jews will not replace us” (Southern Poverty Law Center 2020 )

The authors encountered a small but strong Jewish community in Muncie, Indiana committed to holding social and religious events despite the lack of resources. The interviews highlighted how Jewish identity varies based on life stage and environmental context (Cohen 1998 ; Alba 2006 ; Roehlhepartan et al. 2011 ), how the experiences of Jewish people in Muncie depend on their upbringing (single or interfaith household), surroundings (living in a Jewish nation versus the USA), and their past experiences with antisemitism. This research therefore supports how Jewish identity can vary based on secular and ethnic identity, regardless of the religious observance of the person interviewed (Friedman et al. 2005 , Samson et al. 2018 ). The majority of those interviewed indicated that they identified more with secular Judaism and so looked to Temple Beth El as a locus of ethnic and cultural community. The small size of the community necessitates that many take up leadership and membership roles for this religious and social resource to be available to Jewish members of the community.

While Ball State draws a wider variety of students from across the USA and the world, more religiously oriented Ball State students may choose universities with an established campus rabbi, large Hillel organization, and kosher resources, which Ball State does not offer. In the case of these students, access to Jewish resources may not predominate in their college decision or may revolve around maintaining a strong Jewish community or family in their hometown because there exists great variability among secular Jewish young people (Buckser 2011 ; Keysar 2010 ). Whether the authors encountered more secular Jews because the Jewish religious resources were not part of their college decision or because they came from the Midwest, where interfaith upbringings are common, would be an interesting topic for a future study of secular Judaism in small cities and college towns in the Midwest.

Many people interviewed commented about not wearing Jewish clothing to protect themselves, and this trend parallels social stigma related to presenting Jewish in the corporate and academic world (Chiswick and Chiswick 2000 ). On a college campus where students encounter Christian evangelization and open warnings about Neo-Nazi groups (Fig. 5 ), the students who were interviewed avoid “presenting” their Jewish identity for fear that it could endanger their personal safety. According to the Anti-Defamation League, a significant number of incidents occurred at K-12 schools and on college campuses in 2018 (“Antisemitism in the US” 2020 ). Beyond this campus, Ball State students struggle to integrate into a Jewish community because there are no public Jewish symbols to attach to in Muncie. They often face dominant Christian symbols and evangelization. Despite these obstacles, including little visibility in the Muncie community and few resources, the Jewish community in Muncie, Temple Beth El, still stands, still practices, and still comes together to fight isolation.

For one Ball State student, representing Hanukkah in Muncie is her way to incorporate her Jewish identity into her everyday visual landscape despite the presence of Christian symbols and the acceptability of the Christian evangelization in school spaces. Abramitzsky and colleagues ( 2010 ) found that American Jews are more likely to celebrate Hanukkah if they live in areas with low Jewish market shares, working to counteract the influence of other religions (Abramistzky et al. 2010 , Cohen-Zada and Elder 2018 ). Hanukkah is a minor holiday compared with the High Holidays in the fall, but many people closely associated Hanukkah as the Jewish equivalent of Christmas providing an easily explainable, yet incorrect, representation of Judaism to a largely Christian-dominated community in the American Midwest.

Bricolage, Lévi-Strauss’ idea of putting existing ideas and things to new purposes, a type of cultural DIY if you will, seems an apt framing for this study in that individual religious constructions are the product of the environment in which religious traditions, services, and resources are available. Each person interviewed showcased how their religious identity is a pastiche of different traditions, including electronic menorahs, kosher food road trips, and Hillel meetings.

The Jewish population in Muncie, Indiana has remained a small but integral part of the economic and cultural landscape of Muncie for over a century, and today, during a time of increasingly overt antisemitism, the Jewish population at Ball State and Muncie has centered itself around the Temple Beth El community for social and religious events that counteract feelings of isolation and separation in a city dominated by Christian symbols. As there are few Jewish Ball State students and professors, it can lead to misunderstandings about what Judaism is. While the experience of being someone’s “First Jew” can be rewarding in breaking down these stereotypes, it can be difficult and upsetting for Jewish individuals who may encounter Jewish jokes and stereotypes along the way.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the three anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their edits and comments and to the editors and staff at Contemporary Jewry for seeing this project through.

Biographies

is a graduate of Ball State University with a B.A. in public history and biology, with minors in anthropology and Spanish. She is the recipient of two undergraduate research fellowships. She researches historical and anthropological effects of religion and has conducted archival and ethnographic research on Jewish identity and experiences of antisemitism in East-Central Indiana. More recently, Cieslik has conducted ethnographic research related to religious identity and clothing among practicing Catholic women across the USA, focused in Muncie, Indiana.

is an associate professor of anthropology at Ball State. He lectures on ethnographic methods and the anthropology of religion. His early fieldwork was in South India, but most of his empirical research was conducted in Singapore, focusing on how interactions on the Internet affect national and sexual subjectivity. More recently, Phillips has been conducting research in Brooklyn, NY and Jerusalem, Israel, focusing on religious subjectivity among Orthodox Jewish men. He is the author of Virtual Activism: Sexuality, the Internet, and a Social Movement in Singapore , published by the University of Toronto Press in 2020.

Appendix A: Codebook: codes and subcodes

Jewish identity

Family religious observance

One Jewish parent

Two Jewish parents

Proximity to immediate family

Keeping kosher

Wearing a kippah

2. Antisemitism

Ku Klux Klan

Differentness or otherness

Jewish or Holocaust-related jokes

Classroom setting

“First Jew”

Hiding Jewish identity

Not socially accepted

Hateful looks and comments

President Trump

3. Dominance of Christianity

Push of Christianity

Dominance of Christian

Student organizations

Christian Church

Christmas or Easter

Jesus Christ

4. Muncie Jewish community

Little Jewish representation

Small or shrinking community

Ball State Hillel

Lack of resources

Lack of support

Lack of understanding

Jewish holidays

Temple Beth El

Give up Jewish identity

Refuse to give up Jewish identity

5. Worldwide Jewish community

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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photo-illustration with 18 photos of Jewish celebrities including Bob Dylan, Henry Winkler, Barbra Streisand, + more plus lines of text in red and blue

The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending

Anti-Semitism on the right and the left threatens to bring to a close an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans—and demolish the liberal order they helped establish.

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Updated at 1:35 p.m. ET on March 13, 2024. This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here .

Stacey Zolt Hara was in her office in downtown San Francisco when a text from her 16-year-old daughter arrived: “I’m scared,” she wrote. Her classmates at Berkeley High School were preparing to leave their desks and file into the halls, part of a planned “walkout” to protest Israel. Like many Jewish students, she didn’t want to participate. It was October 18, 11 days after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel.

Zolt Hara told her daughter to wait in her classroom. She was trying to project calm. A public-relations executive, Zolt Hara had moved her family from Chicago to Berkeley six years earlier, hoping to find a community that shared her progressive values. Her family had developed a deep sense of belonging there.

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But a moral fervor was sweeping over Berkeley High that morning. Around 10:30, the walkout began. Jewish parents traded panicked reports from their children. Zolt Hara heard that kids were chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a slogan that suggests the elimination of Israel. Rumors spread about other, less coy phrases shouted in the hallways, carrying intimations of violence. Jewish students were said to be in tears. Parents were texting one another ideas about where in the school their children could hide. Zolt Hara placed a call to the dean of students. By her own admission, she was hysterical. She says the dean hung up on her.

By the early afternoon the walkout was over, but Zolt Hara and other Jewish parents worried that it was a prelude to something worse. They joined Google Groups and WhatsApp chains so they could share information. Zolt Hara organized a petition, pleading with the school district to take anti-Semitism more seriously. It quickly received more than 1,300 signatures.

Most worrying was what parents kept hearing about teachers, both in Berkeley and in the surrounding school districts. They seemed to be using their classrooms to mold students into advocates for a maximalist vision of Palestine. A group of activists within the Oakland Education Association, that city’s teachers’ union, sponsored a “teach-in.” A video trumpeting the event urged: “Apply your labor power to show solidarity with the Palestinian people.” An estimated 70 teachers set aside their normal curriculum to fix students’ attention on Gaza.

Even classes with no discernible connection to international affairs joined the teach-in. Its centerpiece was a webinar titled “ From Gaza to Oakland: How Does the Issue Connect to Us? ,” in which local activists implored the kids to join them on the streets. They told the students—in a predominantly Black and Latino school district—that the Israeli military works hand in glove with American police forces, sharing tips and tactics. “Repression there ends up cycling back to repression here,” an activist named Anton explained. Elementary-school teachers, whose students were too young for the webinar, were given a list of books to use in their classes. One of them, Handala’s Return , described how a “group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.”

The same zeal was gripping schools in Berkeley. Zolt Hara learned from another parent about an ethnic-studies class in which the teacher had described the slaughter of some Israelis on October 7 as the result of friendly fire. She saw a disturbing image that another teacher had presented in an art class, of a fist breaking through a Star of David. (Officials at Berkeley High School did not respond to requests for comment.) In her son’s middle school, there were signs on classroom walls that read Teach Palestine .

Zolt Hara didn’t need to imagine how kids might respond to these lessons. She heard about incidents at her children’s schools. One kid walked up to a Jewish student playing what he called a “Nazi salute song” on his phone. Another said something in German and then added, “I don’t like your people.” A Manichaean view of the conflict even filtered down to the lowest grades in Berkeley. According to one parent complaint to the principal of Washington Elementary School, a second grader suggested that students divide into Israeli and Palestinian “teams,” and another announced that Palestinians couldn’t be friends with Jews.

On November 17, the middle school that Zolt Hara’s son attends staged its own walkout. Zolt Hara was relieved that her son was traveling for a family event that day. But she heard about video of the protest, recorded on a parent’s phone. I tracked down the footage and watched it myself. “Are you Jewish?” one mop-haired tween asks another, seemingly unaware of any adult presence. “No way,” the second kid replies. “I fucking hate them.” Another blurts, “Kill Israel.” A student laughingly attempts to start a chant of “KKK.”

photo of graffiti reading "Annihilate ISRAEL! stolen land"

On a damp morning this winter, I joined about 40 kids assembled in a classroom at a public high school in the East Bay for a meeting of the Jewish Student Union. I promised that I wouldn’t identify their school in the hopes that they might speak freely, without fear of retribution from teachers or peers. The first boy to raise his hand proudly announced that he supported a cease-fire. But as the conversation progressed, students began to recall how painful their school’s walkout had felt. Their classmates had left them alone with teachers, who they suspected would think less of them for having stayed put. At every stop in their education in this progressive community, they had learned about a world divided between oppressors and the oppressed—and now they felt that they were being accused of being the bad guys, despite having nothing to do with events on the other side of the world, and despite the fact that Hamas had initiated the current war by invading Israeli communities and murdering an estimated 1,200 people .

At the end of the session a student in a kippah, puffer jacket, and T-shirt pulled me aside. He said he wanted to speak privately, because he didn’t want to risk crying in front of his peers. After October 7, he said, his school life, as a visibly identifiable Jew, had become unbearable. Walking down the halls, kids would shout “Free Palestine” at him. They would make the sound of explosions, as if he were personally responsible for the bombardment of Gaza. They would tell him to pick up pennies. As he was walking into the gym to use one of its courts, a kid told him, “There goes the Jew, taking everyone’s land.” I asked if he’d ever told any of this to an administrator. “Nothing would change,” he said. Based on how other local authorities had responded to anti-Semitism, I didn’t doubt him.

Like many American Jews , I once considered anti-Semitism a threat largely emanating from the right. It was Donald Trump who attracted the allegiance of white supremacists and freely borrowed their tropes. A closing ad of his 2016 presidential campaign flashed images of prominent Jews—Lloyd Blankfein, Janet Yellen, and George Soros—as it decried global special interests bleeding the people dry.

Trump’s victory inspired anti-Semitic hate groups, long consigned to the shadows, to strut with impunity. Less than two weeks after Trump’s election, the white nationalist Richard Spencer came to Washington, D.C. , and proclaimed, “Hail Trump! Hail our people!” as supporters responded with Nazi salutes. In August 2017, angry men carried tiki torches through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting , “Jews will not replace us.” In 2018, the consequences of violent anti-Semitic rhetoric became tangible: At the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 11 people were fatally shot . The following year, on the last day of Passover, at a synagogue in a San Diego suburb, a gunman killed one and wounded three others, including a rabbi .

After each incident, my anxiety about the safety of my own family and synagogue would spike, but I consoled myself with the thought that once Trump disappeared from the scene, the explosion of Jew hatred would recede. America would revert to its essential self: the most comfortable homeland in the Jewish diaspora.

From the May 2023 issue: Is Holocaust education making anti-Semitism worse?

That reassuring thought required downplaying the anti-Semitism that had begun to appear on the left well before October 7—on college campuses, among progressive activists, even on the fringes of the Democratic Party. It required minimizing Representative Ilhan Omar’s insinuation about Jewish control of politics —“It’s all about the Benjamins baby”—as an ignorant gaffe. And it meant dismissing intense outbreaks of anti-Zionist harassment by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, which coincided with tensions in the Middle East, as a passing storm.

Part of the reason I failed to appreciate the extent of the anti-Semitism on the left is that I assumed its criticisms of the Israeli government were, at bottom, a harsher version of my own. I opposed the proliferation of settlements in the West Bank, the callousness that military occupation required, and the religious zealotry that had begun to infuse the country’s right wing, including its current ruling coalition.

photo of people hugging in street with uniformed police behind

Such criticisms were not those of a dissident— the majority of American Jews share them . The Palestinian leadership has a long record of abject obstructionism, historical denialism, and violent irredentism, but American Jews heap blame on recalcitrant right-wing Israeli governments, too. Polling by the Pew Research Center in 2020 found that only one in three American Jews said they felt that the Israeli government was “sincere” in its pursuit of peace. But whatever criticism American Jews leveled against Israel, the anger was born of love. Eight in 10 described Israel as either “essential” or “important” to their Jewish identity. And they still held out hope for peace. In that same poll, 63 percent of American Jews said they considered a two-state solution plausible. Jews were, in fact, more likely than the overall U.S. population to believe in the possibility of peaceful coexistence with an independent Palestine.

Among the brutal epiphanies of October 7 was this: A disconcertingly large number of Israel’s critics on the left did not share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own. After Hamas’s rampage of rape, kidnapping, and murder, a history professor at Cornell named Russell Rickford said Palestinians were understandably “exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence.” He added, “I was exhilarated.” A student at the same university was arrested and charged with posting online threats about slitting the throats of Jewish males and strafing the kosher dining hall with gunfire. In Philadelphia, a mob descended on a falafel restaurant, chanting about the Israeli American co-owner’s complicity in genocide. Over the three-month period following the Hamas attacks, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 56 episodes of physical violence targeting Jews and 1,347 incidents of harassment. That 13-week span contained more anti-Semitic incidents than the entirety of 2021—at the time the worst year since the ADL had begun keeping count, in 1979.

I don’t want to dismiss the anger that the left feels about the terrible human cost of the Israeli counterinvasion of Gaza, or denounce criticism of Israel as inherently anti-Semitic—especially because I share some of those criticisms. Nor do I believe that anti-Zionist is a term that should be considered axiomatically interchangeable with anti-Semite . The elimination of Israel, in my opinion, would be a profound catastrophe for the Jewish people. But I have read idealistic critics of Israel, such as the late historian Tony Judt , who imagined that it could be replaced by a binational state, where Jews and Palestinians live side by side under one democratic government. That strikes me as naive in the extreme—especially after the Hamas pogrom of October 7—and very likely the end of Jewish existence in the Levant. But not everything that is terrible for the Jews is anti-Semitic.

Anti-Semitism is a mental habit, deeply embedded in Christian and Muslim thinking, stretching back at least as far as the accusation that the Jews murdered the son of God. It’s a tendency to fixate on Jews, to place them at the center of the narrative, overstating their role in society and describing them as the root cause of any unwanted phenomena—a centrality that seems strange, given that Jews constitute about 0.2 percent of the global population. Though it shape-shifts over time, anti-Semitism returns to the same essential complaint: that Jews are cunning, bloodthirsty, and mad for power. Anti-Zionism often takes a similar form: the dehumanization, the unilateral casting of blame, and the fetishizing of Jewish villainy.

Liberal Jews once celebrated Israel as the lone democracy in a distinctly undemocratic region. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition of theocrats and messianists seems bent on shredding the basis for that claim . But many governments in the world share these undesirable traits. Still, no one calls for the eradication of Hungary or El Salvador or India. No one defaces Chinese restaurants in San Francisco because Beijing imprisons Uyghurs in concentration camps and occupies Tibet.

The anti-Zionism that has flourished on the left in recent years doesn’t stop with calls for an end to the occupation of the West Bank. It espouses a blithe desire to eliminate the world’s only Jewish-majority nation, valorizes the homicidal campaign against its existence, and seeks to hold members of the Jewish diaspora to account for the sins of a country they don’t live in and for a government they didn’t elect. In so doing, this faction of the left places itself in the terrible lineage of attempts to erase Jewry—and, in turn, stirs ancient and not-so-ancient existential fears.

Nowhere is this more fully on display than in the Bay Area. After October 7, protesters flooded city-council meetings, demanding cease-fire resolutions and rejecting any attempt to include clauses condemning Hamas for the rape and murder of Jews. One viral video compiled enraged citizen comments at an Oakland city-council meeting. These citizens weren’t just showing solidarity for the people of Gaza, but angrily amplifying wild conspiracy theories. One woman declared, in the style of a 9/11 truther, that “Israel murdered their own people on October 7.” Another, in the manner of a Holocaust denier, described the events of that day as a “fabricated narrative.”

For months, the Berkeley city council resisted the pressure to pass a cease-fire resolution; the mayor regarded foreign policy as far beyond its jurisdiction . But the pressure grew so intense that the council could hardly conduct any other business. Protesters disrupted official meetings, forcing the mayor to keep adjourning deliberations to another room where the public was not allowed. Police offered to escort council members to their cars after meetings. The mayor’s unwillingness to condemn Israel was anomalous, even in his own city. On December 4, the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board voted to endorse a cease-fire .

Impassioned support for the Palestinian cause metastasized into the hatred of Jews. Anti-Semitism has become part of the landscape. In 2021, a community space in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, owned by a progressive gay Jewish activist, was defaced with messages including Zionist pigz. After October 7, the windows of Smitten Ice Cream, owned by a Jewish woman, were smashed and spray-painted with the words Out the Mission .

photo of two people looking at debris from Oakland menorah on grass and sidewalk

During Hanukkah, a menorah sponsored by Chabad Oakland and perched on the shore of Lake Merritt, in the center of the city, was torn apart by its branches and hurled into the water , replaced by graffiti reading your org is dying, we’re gonna find you, you’re on fucking alert . Oakland Public Works quickly painted over the message and other anti-Semitic graffiti. But when I walked the trail around the lake several weeks after Hanukkah, I found a weathered metal box, built to display a work of public art. On its side was a laminated message titled “The World We Wish to See.” What followed was a lyrical vision of liberation that imagined a future in which “all beings are treated with dignity.” But whatever display had once existed in the box had been removed. What was left were the etched words Zionist KILLER .

In the hatred that I witnessed in the Bay Area, and that has been evident on college campuses and in progressive activist circles nationwide, I’ve come to see left-wing anti-Semitism as characterized by many of the same violent delusions as the right-wing strain. This is not an accident of history. Though right- and left-wing anti-Semitism may have emerged in different ways, for different reasons, both are essentially attacks on an ideal that once dominated American politics, an ideal that American Jews championed and, in an important sense, co-authored. Over the course of the 20th century, Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism. They embraced this brand of liberalism because it was good for America—and good for the Jews. It was their fervent hope that liberalism would inoculate America against the world’s oldest hatred.

For several generations, it worked. Liberalism helped unleash a Golden Age of American Jewry, an unprecedented period of safety, prosperity, and political influence. Jews, who had once been excluded from the American establishment, became full-fledged members of it. And remarkably, they achieved power by and large without having to abandon their identity. In faculty lounges and television writers’ rooms, in small magazines and big publishing houses, they infused the wider culture with that identity. Their anxieties became American anxieties. Their dreams became American dreams.

But that era is drawing to a close. America’s ascendant political movements—MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other—would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish. They regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams. The Golden Age of American Jewry has given way to a golden age of conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, all tendencies inimical to the democratic temperament. Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good for Jews. And what’s bad for Jews, it can be argued, is bad for America.

I grew up at the apex of the Golden Age. The nation’s sartorial aesthetic was the invention of Ralph Lifshitz, an alumnus of the Manhattan Talmudical Academy before he became the denim-clad Ralph Lauren. The national authority on sex was a diminutive bubbe, Dr. Ruth. Schoolkids in Indiana read Anne Frank’s diary. The Holocaust memoirist Elie Wiesel appeared on the nightly news as an arbiter of public morality. The most-watched television show was Seinfeld . Even Gentiles knew the words to Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song,” which earned a place in the canon of festive music annually played on FM radio. Jews accounted for roughly 2 percent of the nation’s population at the time , but I’d estimate that my undergraduate class at Columbia University was one-third Jewish; soon, a third of the justices on the Supreme Court would be Jewish as well. In 2000, Joe Lieberman, a Shabbat-observant Jew with a wife named Hadassah, fell 537 votes short of becoming vice president. None of these occurrences sparked a backlash worthy of note.

photo of Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander walking and talking on set with cameras

By the mid-’90s, experts had declared the end of anti-Semitism. It persisted, of course, in the dark corners of American political culture—in the wacky cosmology of the Nation of Islam and in the malevolent rantings of David Duke, the ubiquitous ex-Klansman—but that proved the point. The only Jew haters to be found were hopelessly fringe; anti-Semitism disappeared from polite conversation. Leonard Dinnerstein, a historian who devoted his life’s work to studying anti-Semitism, concluded his magnum opus , published in 1994, with the admission that his scholarly obsession was becoming a relic: “It has declined in potency and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.”

That last sentence was an expression of triumphalism, rendered in the spirit of the times. Like the end of history, the end of anti-Semitism was a post–Cold War reverie, a naive declaration of a golden age without end. American Jews now worried that they might become too accepted. The great anxiety of the fin de siècle was intermarriage.

The threat of assimilation had frightened the Orthodox Jews who came to the United States during the great wave of immigration in the last decades of the 19th century. Fathers who had fled the Pale of Settlement feared that their sons would trade ancestral traditions for the allure of American culture. (A quite popular, very American musical is energized by these anxieties.) One of those sons, however, made it his intellectual project to find a way for Jews to enjoy the bounties of American society without having to fully abandon their Jewishness.

Born in Silesia in 1882, the eldest of eight, Horace Kallen had a preordained calling: to become a rabbi like his father. But a Boston truant officer forced him, against his parents’ wishes, to attend a secular grammar school. This set him on the path to Harvard, where he paid his way by reading meters for the Dorchester Gaslight Company. Kallen never felt at ease with patrician classmates like Franklin D. Roosevelt, though the philosopher William James embraced him as a protégé.

Kallen’s breakthrough came in the course of an argument with another Jew. In 1908, the British-born playwright Israel Zangwill had a hit called The Melting-Pot , a melodrama about a pogrom survivor who sets out to marry a Christian woman in the hopes that he will no longer be haunted by his identity. This vision of assimilation was a warmed-over version of the devil’s bargain that Western Europeans had offered Jews ever since Napoleon: In exchange for the rights of citizenship, Jews would have to give up their distinctive identity.

Yair Rosenberg: How to be anti-Semitic and get away with it

Kallen didn’t want to surrender his identity. He wasn’t religious, but he had read Spinoza and devoured the works of the early Zionist thinkers. At Harvard, he co-founded the Menorah Society, a Jewish affinity group. His rebuttal to Zangwill took the form of unabashed patriotism. In essays that were intellectual bombshells at the time, Kallen extolled the mongrel nature of American society, the phenomenon known as hyphenation. Harvard’s Brahmin elite believed that newcomers must assimilate in full, commit to what they called “100 percent Americanism.” But to Kallen, the hyphen was the essence of democracy. He described America as a “symphony of civilization,” an intermingling of cultures that resulted in a society far more dynamic than most of the countries back in the Old World. The genius of America was that it didn’t coerce any minority group into abandoning its marks of difference.

That argument was idealistic, though also self-interested. Kallen’s polemics implicitly targeted the Protestant monopoly controlling academia, politics, and every other corner of the establishment, which reverted to desperate measures to block the ascent of Jews , imposing quotas at universities and restrictive housing covenants in well-to-do neighborhoods. His ideas were emblematic of an emerging strain of Jewish political philosophy, a set of arguments that would define American Jewry for generations.

The sons and daughters of immigrants may have dabbled in socialism, but in the 1930s and ’40s, liberalism became the house politics of the Jewish people. Walter Lippmann, a descendant of German Jews, first used the term liberal in the American context, to describe a new center-left vision of the state that was neither socialist nor laissez-faire. Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, conceptualized a new, expansive vision of civil liberties. Lillian Wald and Henry Moskowitz co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in the belief that all minorities deserved the same protections. Jews became enthusiastic supporters of the New Deal, which staved off radical movements on the left and the right that tended to hunt for Jewish scapegoats. As a Yiddish joke went, Jewish theology consisted of die velt (“this world”), yene velt (“the world to come”), and Roosevelt.

The historian Marc Dollinger titled his 2000 narrative of Jewish liberalism Quest for Inclusion . Jews set out to achieve that goal procedurally—opposing prayer in public school, knocking down discriminatory housing laws, establishing new fair-employment rules. But it was also a project of mythmaking and dream-casting. Widely read mid-century intellectuals such as Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and Max Lerner wrote books reimagining America as the home of a benevolent centrism—tolerant, cosmopolitan, unique in the history of nations.

Reality began to resemble the myth: In the years following World War II—and especially as the world began to comprehend the extent of the Nazi genocide—a liberal consensus took hold, and anti-Semitism receded. After Auschwitz, even three-martini Jewish jokes at the country club felt tinged by the horrors. In 1937, the American edition of Roget’s Thesaurus had listed cunning , rich , extortioner , and heretic as synonyms for Jew . At that time, nearly half of Americans said Jews were less honest in business than others. By 1964, only 28 percent agreed with that assessment . It became cliché to refer to America as a “Judeo-Christian nation.” Quotas at universities fell to the side.

As anti-Semitism faded, American Jewish civilization exploded in a rush of creativity. For a time, the great Jewish novel—books by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Bernard Malamud, inflected with Yiddish and references to pickled herring—was the great American novel. Under the influence of Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Elaine May, Gilda Radner, Woody Allen, and many others, American comedy appropriated the Jewish joke, and the ironic sensibility contained within, as its own.

During the Golden Age, Jews created new genres of Americana, and in turn remade America’s image of itself, through the idealized vision of the heartland found in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! ; the folk revival popularized by Bob Dylan, Art Garfunkel, and Paul Simon; the movies mythologizing the decency of the American Everyman produced by David O. Selznick, Louis B. Mayer, and Jack Warner. (To say that “the Jews” run Hollywood is conspiratorial; to say that Jews founded it is factual.) Only in America could Jews—Irving Berlin, George Wyle, Sammy Cahn—write the Christmas songbook.

It wasn’t just mass culture. The New York Intellectuals, a group with a name as euphemistic as it sounds, acquired a priestly authority in the realm of aesthetics and political ideas, and included the likes of Alfred Kazin, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, and Susan Sontag. Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg ushered second-wave feminism into the world. Jews became the prophetic face of American science (J. Robert Oppenheimer) and the salvific one of American medicine (Jonas Salk). The intellectual rewards of Jewish liberation could be measured in medals: Approximately 15 percent of all Nobel Prize winners are American Jews.

In the Golden Age, Jews in America embraced Israel. Enjoying their political and cultural ascendance, they looked to the new Jewish state not as a necessary refuge—they were more than comfortable on the Upper West Side and in Squirrel Hill and Brentwood—but as a powerful rebuttal to the old stereotypes about Jewish weakness, especially after the Israeli military’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. As The New York Times ’ Thomas Friedman has put it , American Jews “said to themselves, ‘My God, look who we are! We have power! We do not fit the Shylock image, we are ace pilots; we are not the cowering timid Jews who get sand kicked in their faces, we are tank commanders.’ ”

A now-obscure cultural event captures, for me, this newfound sense of self and self-confidence. In 1978, ABC aired The Stars Salute Israel at 30 , a kitschy prime-time variety show filmed in front of a full house at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in Los Angeles, the same venue that hosted the Oscars. Like the Oscars, it featured an A-list slate: Barry Manilow in a white suit, surrounded by backup singers in sequins; Henry Winkler, the Fonz himself, playing a rough-hewn Israeli in a sketch; and, of course, Sammy Davis Jr. Near the conclusion, Barbra Streisand emerged in a white gown to talk via remote hookup with Golda Meir as a camera filmed the former prime minister in a book-filled room in Israel—the two most celebrated Jewish women of the century kibitzing on American TV.

photo of Barbra Streisand in white gown on stage singing into microphone with orchestra in background

In the early decades of Hollywood, Jewish stars had hidden behind stage names—Emanuel Goldenberg performed as Edward G. Robinson; Issur Danielovitch transformed himself into Kirk Douglas. Streisand had also changed her name, dropping the a from Barbara, but that was an instance of a diva’s bravado, not a sop to the goyim. What made her stardom so emblematic of the Golden Age was that she never allowed herself to be bullied into suppressing her Jewish identity. Her crowning achievement was Yentl , an adaptation of an Isaac Bashevis Singer short story. For the grand finale of the ABC telecast , Streisand sang “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, for 18.7 million viewers. “The good feelings and the love will always remain,” she told them.

The Jewish vacation from history ended on September 11, 2001. It didn’t seem that way at the time. But the terror attacks opened an era of perpetual crisis, which became fertile soil where the hatred of Jews took root. Though Osama bin Laden claimed credit for the plot, that didn’t stop some people from trying to shift the blame. One theory explained in exquisitely absurd detail how Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, had toppled the Twin Towers.

But there was also a more sophisticated version of this conspiracy theory, one that had a patina of academic respectability. On the left, it became commonplace to fulminate against the neoconservatives, warmongering intellectuals said to be whispering in the ear of the American establishment, urging the invasion of Iraq and war against Iran.

This wasn’t fully untethered from reality: The neocons were a group of largely Jewish think-tank denizens and policy operatives, some of whom held top posts in President George W. Bush’s administration. But the angry talk about neocons also trafficked in dangerous old tropes. It inflated their role in world events and ascribed the worst motives to them. Men like Paul Wolfowitz, the second-highest-ranking official in Bush’s Pentagon, and William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard , were portrayed by critics on the left as bamboozlers undermining the national interest in service of their stealth loyalty to Israel. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for one, took exception to the idea that Jews were pulling the strings of the United States government. “I suppose the implication of that is that the president and the vice president and myself and Colin Powell just fell off a turnip truck to take these jobs,” he said.

In 2007, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, spelled out what others implied in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy , a book published by a venerable house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, that soon arrived on the New York Times best-seller list. This was the opposite of the schmaltzy Streisand tribute—the Jewish state as not a friend but a villain surreptitiously manipulating American power to further its own ends.

One year later, Lehman Brothers, a bank founded in 1850 by the son of a Jewish cattle merchant from Bavaria, collapsed. That news was followed by the revelation that Bernie Madoff had masterminded the largest-known Ponzi scheme in history. Although politicians, on the whole, refrained from casting Jews as the primary culprits of the 2008 financial crisis—which was, in fact, systemic—a sizable portion of the public harbored this thought. Stanford University professors conducted a survey that found that nearly a quarter of the country blamed Jews for crashing the global economy. Another 38.4 percent ascribed at least some fault to “the Jews.”

In the era of perpetual crisis, a version of this narrative kept recurring: a small elite—sometimes bankers, sometimes lobbyists—maliciously exploiting the people. Such narratives helped propel Occupy Wall Street on the left and the Tea Party on the right. This brand of populist revolt had long been the stuff of Jewish nightmares. A fear of the mob suffused masterworks of the Golden Age—Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality , Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism , Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life . Haunted by the Holocaust and inherited memories of pogroms, these writers warned how a society might fall prey to a demagogue who tapped into prejudice.

After 2008, a version of their prophecy came to pass. The right settled on a Jewish billionaire as their villain of choice: George Soros. An idea took hold, and not just on extremist blogs. The mainstream of the Republican Party seeded the image of Soros as the “shadow puppet master,” in the words of the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. In elevating the figure of Soros and invoking him so frequently, Fox News and Republican politicians were also, intentionally or not, drawing on the deeply implanted imagery of the Jewish financier bankrolling the destruction of Christian civilization.

In 2018, Fox News began carrying images of migrant caravans headed from Central America toward Texas, a tide of humanity it described as an “invasion.” Though they had no evidence to bolster the charge, Republican politicians insinuated that the caravans were paid for by Soros. Representative Matt Gaetz tweeted a video of two men handing out cash to a line of Honduran migrants, accompanied by the question “Soros?” When President Trump was asked about Soros’s role in funding a caravan, a week after a pipe bomb was found in Soros’s mailbox, and days after the Tree of Life shooting, he told reporters, “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Soros was a central character in a new master narrative, much of it adapted from European sources. The spine of the story was borrowed from a French author named Renaud Camus, a socialist turned far-right reactionary who wrote a 2011 book called The Great Replacement , warning that elites intended to diminish the white Christian presence in Europe by flooding the continent with migrants. The Jews weren’t a central feature of Camus’ theory. But when elements of the American right embraced it, they inserted Soros and his fellow Jews as the masterminds of the elite plot. This became the basis for the chant “Jews will not replace us.”

Jews were the antagonists of the conspiracy theory because they occupied a special place in the bizarre racial hierarchy of American ethno-nationalism. Eric Ward, an activist who is among the most rigorous students of white supremacy, has put it this way: “At the bedrock of the movement is an explicit claim that Jews are a race of their own, and that their ostensible position as White folks in the U.S. represents the greatest trick the devil ever played.” That is, Jews were able to pass as white people, but they were really stealth agents working for the other side of the race war, using immigration to subvert white Christian hegemony.

This notion planted itself in the mind of Robert Bowers, a loner who lived in a suburb of Pittsburgh. He became obsessed with the work of HIAS , originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. It was formed in 1902 with the intention of easing the arrival of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms. The group’s evolution was emblematic of the trajectory of Jewish liberalism. As American Jews settled into a comfortable existence in their new land, HIAS’s mission expanded. It has field offices in more than 20 countries, including a branch on a Greek island to tend to Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan migrants. On October 19, 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was participating in a National Refugee Shabbat, which was the brainchild of HIAS.

The event stoked Bowers’s rage. “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” he wrote on Gab, the Christian-nationalist social-media site. Just before he entered the synagogue’s sanctuary, armed with three semiautomatic pistols and an AR‑15 rifle, he posted, “Open you Eyes! It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!!”

archival photo of room full of people sitting at tables paying attention to man lecturing and pointing to American flag

A faith in immigration—the idea of America as a sanctuary for the refugee, the belief that subsequent groups of arrivals would experience the same up-from-the-shtetl trajectory—was a core tenet of Jewish liberalism. A Jewish poet had written the lines about huddled masses inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. If America was a nation of immigrants, that made Jews quintessential Americans. But now this ideal was the basis for Jews’ vilification. At the Tree of Life synagogue, it was used to justify their slaughter.

In the old Jewish theory of American politics, the best defense against the anti-Semitism of the right was a united left: minorities and liberal activists locking arms. When I was young, rabbis and elders reverently told us about the earnest young Jews in chunky glasses who had jumped aboard the Freedom Rides; about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his unmissable kippah, marching right next to Martin Luther King Jr.; and about the martyrdom of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two Jews who had been murdered alongside James Chaney, a Black Mississippian, for their work registering Black Americans to vote. A coalition of the tolerant pressed the country to live up to its ideals.

Later, I would learn that those memories were a bit gauzy. In the late 1960s, former comrades began to quietly, then brusquely, discard this spirit of common cause. Younger activists in the civil-rights movement took a hard turn toward Black Power and dismissed the old liberal theory of change as a melioristic ruse. Anti-war protesters embraced the decolonization struggles of the developing world. After Israel captured the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967, many came to view the Jewish state as a vile oppressor. (This was well before right-wing Israeli governments saturated the occupied territories with Jewish settlers.) Even as Israel’s shocking victory in the Six-Day War, 22 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, filled American Jews with pride and confidence, a meaningful portion of America’s left turned on Israel.

The turmoil of the late ’60s presaged the rupture that has occurred over the past decade or so. A new ideology has taken hold on the left, with a reordered hierarchy of concerns and an even greater skepticism of the old liberal ideals.

This rupture was propelled by the menace of Donald Trump. His election jolted his opponents to take emergency measures. The left began describing itself as the Resistance, which implied a more confrontational style than that of Nancy Pelosi floor speeches or Center for American Progress white papers.

Even before Trump took office, the Resistance announced a mass protest set to defiantly descend on the capital, what organizers called the Women’s March on Washington. In an early planning meeting, at a New York restaurant, an activist named Vanessa Wruble explained that her Judaism was the motivating force in her political engagement. But Wruble’s autobiographical statement of intent earned her a rebuke. According to Wruble, two members of the inner circle planning the march told her that Jews needed to confront their own history of exploiting Black and brown people. Tablet magazine later reported that Wruble was told that Jews needed to repent for their leading role in the slave trade—a fallacious charge long circulated by the Nation of Islam. (The two organizers denied making the reported statements.) That moment of tension never really subsided, either for Wruble or for the left.

When the march’s organizers published their “unity principles,” they emphasized the importance of intersectionality, a theory first introduced by the law professor Kimberlé W. Crenshaw . It would be insufficient, she argued, for courts to focus their efforts on one narrow target of discrimination when it takes so many forms—racism, sexism, homophobia—that tend to reinforce one another. Her analysis, incisive in the context of the law, was never intended to guide social movements. Transposed by activists to the gritty work of coalition-building, it became the basis for a new orthodoxy—one that was largely indifferent to Jews, and at times outwardly hostile.

When the Women’s March listed the various injustices it hoped to conquer on its way to a better world, anti-Semitism was absent. It was a curious omission, given the central role that Jews played in the conspiracies promoted by the MAGA right, and a telling one. Soon after the march, organizers pushed Wruble out of leadership. She later said that anti-Semitism was the reason for her ouster. (The organizers denied this charge.)

The intersectional left self-consciously rebelled against the liberalism that had animated so much of institutional Judaism, which fought to install civil liberties and civil rights enforced by a disinterested state that would protect every minority equally. This new iteration of the left considered the idea of neutrality—whether objectivity in journalism or color blindness in the courts—as a guise for white supremacy. Tolerance, the old keyword of cultural pluralism, was a form of complicity. What the world actually needed was intolerance, a more active confrontation with hatred. In the historian Ibram X. Kendi’s formulation, an individual could choose to be anti-racist or racist , an activist or a collaborator. Or as Linda Sarsour, an activist of Palestinian descent and a co-chair of the Women’s March, put it, “We are not here to be bystanders.” To be a member of this new left in good moral standing, it was necessary to challenge oppression in all its incarnations. And Israel was now definitively an oppressor.

photo of MLK in suit and tie holding up picture of three slain civil rights activists

The American left hadn’t always imposed such a litmus test. During the years of the Oslo peace process, groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine had no problem attending events with liberal Zionists. Back then, the debate was over the borders of Israel, not over the fact of its existence. But that peace process collapsed during the last days of the Clinton administration, and whatever good faith had existed in that brief era of summits and handshakes dissipated. Hamas unleashed a wave of suicide bombings in the Second Intifada. And in the aftermath of those deadly attacks, successive right-wing Israeli governments presided over repressive policies in the West Bank and an inhumane blockade of Gaza.

Palestinian activists and their allies began the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, pushing universities to divest from Israel. The new goal was no longer coexistence between Arabs and Jews. It was to turn Israel into an international pariah, to stop working with all Israeli institutions—not just the military, but also symphonies, theater groups, and universities. In that spirit, it became fashionable for critics of Israel to identify as “anti-Zionist.”

Within the Jewish establishment, there’s a tendency to impute anti-Semitism to anyone who describes themselves that way. That has always struck me as intellectually imprecise and, occasionally, as a rhetorical gambit to close down debate. But there’s a reason so many Jews bristle at the thought of anti-Zionism finding a home on the American left: Zionist can start to sound like a synonym for Jew . Zionists stand accused of the same crimes that anti-Semites have attached to Jews since the birth of Christianity; Jews are portrayed as omnipotent, bloodthirsty baby-killers. Knowing the historical echoes, it’s hard not to worry that the anger might fixate on the Jewish target closest at hand—which, indeed, it has.

In 2014, dorms at NYU where religiously observant Jews lived received mock eviction notices—“We reserve the right to destroy all remaining belongings,” read the flyer slipped under doors—as if intimidating college kids with unknown politics somehow represented a justifiable reprisal for Israeli-government action in the West Bank. The same notices appeared at Emory University, in Atlanta, in 2019. At the University of Vermont and SUNY New Paltz, groups that helped sexual-assault survivors were accused of purging pro-Israel students from their ranks. “If you don’t support Palestinian liberation you don’t support survivors,” the Vermont group exclaimed. Years before October 7, students at Tufts University, outside Boston, and the University of Southern California moved to impeach elected Jews in student government over their support for Israel’s existence. This wasn’t normal politics. It was evidence of bigotry.

Among the primary targets of the activists were the Hillel centers present on most college campuses. These centers occasionally coordinate trips to Israel and, on some campuses, sponsor student groups supportive of Israel. Those facts led pro-Palestinian activists to describe Hillel as an arm of the “Israeli war machine.” At SUNY Stony Brook, activists sought to expel Hillel from campus, arguing, “If there were Nazis, white nationalists, and KKK members on campus, would their identity have to be accepted and respected?” At Rice University, in Texas, an LGBTQ group severed ties with Hillel because it allegedly made students feel unsafe. What made this incident darkly comic is that Hillel couldn’t be more progressive on issues of sexual freedom. What made it so worrying is that Hillel’s practical purpose is not to defend Israel, but to provide Shabbat dinners and a space for ritual and prayer. To condemn Hillel is to condemn Jewish religious life on campus.

Gal Beckerman: The left abandoned me

As exclusion of Jews became a more regular occurrence, the leadership of the left, and of universities for that matter, had little to say about the problem. To give the most generous explanation: Jews simply didn’t fit the analytic framework of the new left.

At its core, the intersectional left wanted to smash power structures. In the American context, it would be hard to place Jews among the ranks of the oppressed; in the Israeli context, they can be cast as the oppressor. Nazi Germany definitively excluded Jews from a category we now call “whiteness.” Today, Jews are treated in sectors of the left as the epitome of whiteness. But any analysis that focuses so relentlessly on the role of privilege, as the left’s does, will be dangerously blind to anti-Semitism, because anti-Semitism itself entails an accusation of privilege. It’s a theory that regards the Jew as an all-powerful figure in society, a position acquired by underhanded means. In the annals of Jewish history, accusations of privilege are the basis for hate, the kindling for pogroms. But universities too often ignored this lesson from the past. Instead, they acted, as the British comedian David Baddiel put it in the title of his prescient book about progressive anti-Semitism, as if “ Jews don’t count .”

In the death spiral of liberalism, extremism on the right begets extremism on the left, which begets further extremism on the right. To protest the censoriousness of the new progressives, right-wing edgelords and trolls attempted to seize the mantle of liberty.

The most powerful of the edgelords was Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter ostensibly to save discourse from the woke mob. To make good on his noble aims, he reversed bans that the platform’s previous regime had imposed on the most vile anti-Semites, including the white nationalist Patrick Howley, the comic Sam Hyde, and the Daily Stormer’s founder, Andrew Anglin. By restoring them to the site, Musk was, in essence, conceding that their words shouldn’t have been considered taboo in the first place. He legitimized their claims of victimhood, the sense that they had been excluded only because they’d offended the wrong people.

In fact, Musk hinted that he shared this conspiratorial view of censorship. In May 2023, he retweeted an aphorism that he attributed to Voltaire: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” Those words were actually uttered by a neo-Nazi named Kevin Alfred Strom, not the French philosopher. It shouldn’t have been hard to imagine that the words had dubious origins, because they captured a view of the world in which shadowy forces furtively censor their enemies.

Nor was it hard to imagine that those shadowy forces might include the Anti-Defamation League, which relentlessly called attention to the proliferation of Jew hatred on Twitter under Musk’s ownership. Musk threatened to sue the group, accusing it of trying to “kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.” The Jews, he all but spelled out, were those who couldn’t be criticized—which, by the logic of the Strom quote, made them society’s secret masters.

Musk wasn’t alone in this argument. In 2022, Dave Chappelle used the opening monologue of Saturday Night Live to muse about the cancellation of the hip-hop artist Ye (formerly Kanye West), who had lost a deal with Adidas after he promised, among other things, to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” Chappelle exuded empathy for Ye. “I don’t want a sneaker deal, because the minute I say something that makes those people mad, they’re going to take my sneakers away … I hope they don’t take anything away from me,” he said, adding with a smile and a conspiratorial whisper: “Whoever they are.” There was no mystery about his use of pronouns: “I’ve been to Hollywood … It’s a lot of Jews. Like, a lot.” He went on, “You could maybe adopt the delusion that the Jews run show business.”

photo of Dave Chapelle with microphone opening SNL with band in background

Chappelle practices shock comedy as a form of shock therapy: The authoritarian impositions of the left justify offensive comments, which are a form of defiance. He has taken a genuine problem—anti-liberalism on the left—and used it as a pretext for smuggling anti-Semitism into acceptable discourse.

That Chappelle and Musk see fit to indulge anti-Semitism in order to protect freedom of speech contains a dark irony. In the 20th century, starting with Louis Brandeis’s dissents on the Supreme Court, Jews stood at the vanguard of the movement to protect “subversive advocacy,” even when it came at their own expense. This could be understood as a defense of the Talmudic tradition of disagreement, what Rabbi David Wolpe calls the “Jewish sacrament” of debate. The movement culminated in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977, when the ACLU deployed the lawyer David Goldberger to sue to allow neo-Nazis to march through the Chicago suburb, which was filled with Holocaust survivors. The Jewish community was hardly unanimous on the Skokie question—unanimity would have been inconsistent with the tradition—but the ACLU position reflected a commitment to free speech officially espoused by major Jewish communal institutions in the postwar years.

In the Jewish vision of free speech, open interpretation and endless debate mark the path to knowledge; the proliferation of discourse is the antidote to bad ideas. But in the reality of social media, free speech also consists of Jew hatred that masquerades as comic entertainment, a way to capture the attention of young men eager to rebel against the strictures of what they decry as wokeness.

When I asked Oren Segal, who runs the ADL’s Center on Extremism, to point me to a state-of-the-art anti-Semitic hate group, he cited the Goyim Defense League. The spitefully silly name reflects its methods, which include pranks and stunts broadcast on its website, Goyim TV. Its leader sometimes dresses as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, calling himself the “Honest Rabbi.” In one demented piece of guerrilla theater, he apologizes on behalf of the Jewish people for fabricating stories about the Holocaust. The group has attempted to popularize the slogan “Kanye is right about the Jews,” hanging a banner proclaiming it on a freeway overpass in Los Angeles and projecting it on the side of a football stadium in Jacksonville, Florida, as 75,000 fans filed out. GDL hecklers have stood in front of Florida synagogues and Holocaust museums, shouting, “Leave our country. Go back to Israel” and “Heil Hitler.”

In a short span, as the edgelords successfully pushed the limits, American culture became permissive regarding what could be said about Jews. Anti-Semitism crept back into the realm of the acceptable.

For a brief moment , it felt as if the October 7 attacks might reverse the tide, because it should have been impossible not to recoil at the footage of Hamas’s pogrom. Israel had yet to launch its counterattack, so there was no war to condemn. Still, even in this moment of moral clarity, the campus left couldn’t muster compassion. At Harvard, more than 30 student groups signed a letter on October 7, holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Days later, the incoming head of NYU’s new Center for Indigenous Studies described the attacks as “affirming.” This sympathy for Hamas, when its crimes were freshest, was a glimpse of what was about to come.

On the afternoon of October 11, Rebecca Massel, a reporter at the Columbia Daily Spectator , received a tip. She was told that a woman, her face wrapped in a bandanna, had assaulted an Israeli student in front of Butler Library in a dispute over flyers depicting hostages held by Hamas. The woman’s alleged weapon was a broomstick. Her battle cry was said to be “Fuck all of you prick crackers.” After striking him with the broomstick, the man said, she attempted to punch him in the face. By the end of the fracas, she had bruised one of his hands and sprained a finger on the other.

Massel began to report out the story . She spoke with the victim, who told her, “Now, we have to handle the situation that campus is not a safe place for us anymore.” She spoke with the NYPD, which confirmed that it had arrested the woman, who was charged with hate crimes and has pleaded not guilty. Massel and her editors curbed their impulse to quickly score a scoop, double-checking every sentence. They didn’t publish the story until 3 a.m. on October 12.

Later that morning, Massel, a sophomore studying political science, was sitting in her Contemporary Civilization seminar when her phone lit up. It was her editor, calling her back. She had texted him to get his sense of the response her article had elicited, so she stepped out of class to hear what he had to say. She had already caught a glimpse of posts on social media, harping on her Jewishness and accusing her of having a “religious agenda.” She’d worried that these weren’t stray attacks. The editor told her the paper had been inundated. The messages it had received about the article were vitriolic, but he didn’t give her any specifics. Before returning to class, she checked her own email. A message read, “I hope you fucking get what you deserve … you racist freak.”

Read: The juvenile viciousness of campus anti-Semitism

For as long as she could remember, Massel had wanted to be a journalist. She’d founded the newspaper at her elementary school. During high school, she’d read She Said , Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book about investigating Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults. The New York Times reporters insisted that they were journalists, not feminist journalists. Massel vowed to take the same approach. The accusations of bias, therefore, didn’t just feel anti-Semitic. They felt like an attack on the integrity that she hoped would define her work.

But anger was an emotion for another day. At that moment, she was overwhelmed by fear. She thought about what the Israeli student had told her the day before. A dean had apparently advised him to leave campus because the university couldn’t guarantee his safety. Now Massel felt unsure of her own physical well-being. She decided that she would stay with her parents until she could get a better sense of the fury directed at her.

In her unnerved state, Massel threw herself into her journalism. She decided to interview Jewish students, from all corners of the university, to gauge their mood. After the office of public safety assured her that she could return to campus, she parked herself in the second-floor lounge of Columbia’s Hillel center. When she overheard a student mention an incident, she would approach them and ask to talk.

Over the course of two weeks, Massel spoke with 54 students . What she amassed was a tally of fear. Thirteen told her that they had felt harassed or attacked, either virtually or in person. (One passerby had barked “Fuck the Jews” at a small group of students.) Thirty-four reported that they felt targeted or unsafe on campus. (At one precarious moment, the Hillel center went into lockdown, out of concern that protesters might descend on the building.) Twelve said that they had suppressed markers of their Jewish identity, wearing a baseball cap over a yarmulke or tucking a Star of David necklace into a sweatshirt. She learned that a group of students had created a group-chat system to arrange escorts, so that no Jew would have to walk across campus alone if they felt unsafe.

Perhaps even more ominously, Massel uncovered incidents in which teachers expressed hostility toward Jewish students. One Israeli student told Massel that a professor had once said to him, “It’s such a shame that your people survived just in order to perpetuate another genocide.” When I made my own calls to students and faculty, I heard similar stories, especially instances of teaching assistants seizing their bully pulpit to sermonize. One TA wrote to their students, “We are watching genocide unfold in real time, after a systematic 75+ years of oppression of the Palestinian people … It feels ridiculous to hold section today, but I’ll see you all on Zoom in a bit.” One student left class in the middle of a professor’s broadside against Israel in a required course in the Middle East–studies department. Afterward, he sent an email to the professor explaining his departure, to which the professor wrote back, saying they could discuss it in class later. When the student returned, the professor read his email aloud to the whole class, and invited everyone to discuss the exchange. It felt like an act of deliberate humiliation.

When I talked with Jewish students at Columbia, I was struck by how they, too, tended to speak in the language of the intersectional left. They described their “lived experience” and trauma: the pain they felt on October 7 as they learned of the attacks; the fear that consumed them when they heard protesters call for the annihilation of Israel. They sincerely expected their university to respond with unabashed empathy, because that’s how it had responded in the past to other terrible events. Instead, Columbia greeted their pain with the soon-to-be-infamous concept of “context,” including a panel discussion that explained the attacks as the product of a long struggle. This historicizing felt as if it not only discounted Jewish students’ suffering but also regarded it as a moral failing. (In early November, in response to criticism, Columbia announced that it would create a task force on anti-Semitism.)

photo from back of student in kippah and backpack facing protest and people in street

There are many reasons for the unusual intensity of events at Columbia, which is located in a city that is a traditional bastion of the American left; its campus is where the late Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said achieved legendary status. But Columbia is also a graphic example of the collapse of the liberalism that had insulated American Jews: It is a microcosm of a society that has lost its capacity to express disagreements without resorting to animus.

The events on campus that followed October 7 were a sad coda to the Golden Age. When I was a student at Columbia, in the ’90s, the Ivy League was a primary plot point in a triumphalist tale. During the first half of the 20th century, Columbia had deployed extraordinary institutional energy to limit the presence of Jews. The modern college-application process was invented by Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler to more effectively weed out Jews. In the late ’20s, the university created an ersatz version of itself in Brooklyn, Seth Low Junior College, so that it could educate otherwise qualified Jewish applicants there, rather than having them mingle with the Gentiles in Morningside Heights. But once Columbia lifted its quotas after World War II, the Jewish presence swelled. By 1967, the student body was 40 percent Jewish. The institution that arguably had fought hardest to exclude them became a welcoming home.

But in the 21st century, the Jewish presence in the Ivy League has steadily receded . In the 2000s, Yale was 20 percent Jewish. The proportion is now about half that. The University of Pennsylvania went from being a third Jewish to about 16 percent. The reasons for that plummet aren’t nefarious. There has been a deliberate institutional drive to reengineer the elite, to provide opportunities to first-generation college students and students of color. Some Jews have chafed at this reengineering. But the concept of meritocracy that Jews celebrated was far from a pure reward for test scores and grades. Jewish alumni came to benefit from the same dynastic system of preference that their Protestant predecessors had taken advantage of. Their children applied from prestigious high schools, which maintained a cozy relationship with university admissions offices. It was a system that desperately required reforming in the name of fairness.

The problem exposed in the limp university response to campus anti-Semitism after October 7—distilled to then–Harvard President Claudine Gay’s phrase, “It depends on the context”—is that Jewish students aren’t just a diminished presence but a diminished priority. Whereas Jews thought of themselves as a vulnerable minority—perhaps not the most vulnerable, but certainly worthy of official concern—their academic communities apparently considered them too privileged to merit that status. This wasn’t just scary. It carried the sting of rejection.

There’s a number that haunts me. In 2022, the Tufts political scientist Eitan Hersh conducted a comprehensive study of Jewish life on American college campuses, which surveyed both Jews and Gentiles. Hersh found that on campuses with a relatively high proportion of Jewish students, nearly one in five non-Jewish students said they “wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.” They were saying, in essence, that they couldn’t be friends with the majority of Jews.

Each spring , during the Passover seder, Jews recite this phrase from the Haggadah: “In every generation, our enemies rise up to destroy us.” To participate in the most universally observed of all Jewish rituals, a celebration of liberation and survival, is to be reminded of the grim cycle of Jewish history, in which golden ages are moments of dramatic irony, the naive complacency just before the onset of doom. Some of these moments are within living memory.

In 1933, the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith published a 1,060-page book meticulously enumerating the achievements of the community. It was quite a list. Weimar Germany is remembered as a period of instability, a time of beer-hall-putschists, louche cabarets, and rampant assassinations. But Weimar was also the pinnacle of Jewish power, a golden age in its own right, especially if one considers the whole of German culture, which sprawled across borders on the map. During the first decades of the 20th century, Jewish contributors to German music included Gustav Mahler, Kurt Weill, and Arnold Schoenberg; to German literature, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, and Walter Benjamin; to science, Albert Einstein. Jews presided over the Frankfurt School of social criticism and populated the Bauhaus school of art and architecture. The Central Union’s compendium could be read as the immodest self-congratulation of a people who represented 0.8 percent of the total population—or as a desperate, futile plea for Germany to return the love that Jews felt for the country.

Americans maintain a favorable opinion of Jews . The community remains prosperous and politically powerful. But the memory of how quickly the best of times can turn dark has infused the Jewish reactions to events of the past decade. “When lights start flashing red, the Jewish impulse is to flee,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, told me.

Back in 2016, many liberals blustered about leaving the country if Donald Trump was elected president; after he won, many Jews actually hatched contingency plans. My mother tried, in vain, to get a passport from Poland, the country of her birth. An immigration lawyer I know in Cleveland told me that he had obtained a German passport, and suggested that I call the German embassy in Washington to learn how many other American Jews had done the same.

The German government, for understandable reasons, doesn’t count Jews. But the embassy sent me a tally of passport applications submitted under laws that apply to victims of Nazi persecution and their descendants. In 2017, after Trump’s election, the number of applications nearly doubled from the year before, to 1,685, and then kept growing. In 2022, it was 2,500. These aren’t large numbers in absolute terms; still, it’s extraordinary that so many American Jews, whose applications required documenting that their families once fled Germany, now consider the country a safer haven than the United States.

I also saw signs of flight in Oakland, where at least 30 Jewish families have been approved to transfer their children to neighboring school districts —and I heard similar stories in the surrounding area. Initial data collected by an organization representing Jewish day schools, which have long struggled for enrollment, show a spike in the number of admission inquiries from families contemplating pulling their kids from public school.

After 1967, the previous moment of profound political abandonment, the American Jewish community began to entertain thoughts of its own radical reinvention. A coterie of disillusioned intellectuals, clustered around a handful of small-circulation journals and think tanks, turned sharply rightward, creating the neoconservative movement. Among activists, the energy that had once been directed toward Freedom Rides was plowed into the cause of Soviet Jewry, which became a defining political obsession of many synagogues in the 1970s and ’80s. Meanwhile, Jewish hippies turned inward, creating new spiritual movements centered on prayer and ritual.

Although not all of these movements proved equally fruitful, this history, in a way, is cause for optimism, an example of how conflict might provide the path to religious renewal and a fresh sense of solidarity. It’s also a reminder that the Golden Age was not an uninterrupted rise.

The case for pessimism, however, is more convincing. The forces arrayed against Jews, on the right and the left, are far more powerful than they were 50 years ago. The surge of anti-Semitism is a symptom of the decay of democratic habits, a leading indicator of rising authoritarianism. When anti-Semitism takes hold, conspiracy theory hardens into conventional wisdom, embedding violence in thought and then in deadly action. A society that holds its Jews at arm’s length is likely to be more intent on hunting down scapegoats than addressing underlying defects. Although it is hardly an iron law of history, such societies are prone to decline. England entered a long dark age after expelling its Jews in 1290. Czarist Russia limped toward revolution after the pogroms of the 1880s. If America persists on its current course, it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them.

*Lead image source: Top row from left to right : Michael Ochs Archives / Getty; Universal History Archive / Getty. Middle row from left to right : Robert Mitra / WWD / Penske Media / Getty; Ulf Andersen / Getty; Jean-Régis Roustan / Roger Viollet / Getty; CBS Photo Archive / Getty; Daily Herald / Mirrorpix / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; David Lefranc / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Frederick M. Brown / Getty; CBS Photo Archive / Getty; Theo Wargo / Getty; Max B. Miller / Archive Photos / Getty. Bottom row from left to right : ABC Photo Archives / Getty; Bachrach / Getty; Getty; Bernard Gotfryd / Getty.

This article appears in the April 2024 print edition with the headline “The End of the Golden Age.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

How do Jewish students experience antisemitism on US campuses – study

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A BDS demonstration outside the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. (photo credit: Philafrenzy/WIKIPEDIA)

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The new antisemitism

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Tell me a bit about yourself and what your Jewish identity means to you?
Have you experienced any anti-Semitic or anti-Israel encounters on campus within classes or among peers? If so, please provide examples.
What have your experiences been communicating your needs as a Jewish-identifying student to campus personnel, professors, or peers? Please provide examples.
Do you feel campuses and university personnel could improve on addressing antisemitic and anti-Israel concerns on campus, and if so, how?
Anything else you’d like to say or add?

Experiences of disclosing, externalizing, or embodying Jewish identity

Experiences of antisemitism, experiencing exclusion within education, the author's personal conclusion.

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Unpacking the truth of antisemitism on college campuses

Odette Yousef

Colleges have become a flashpoint in discussions about rising antisemitism. But some on those campuses say the alarm from politicians and groups distorts reality and their motives should be examined.

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Georges Lieber Essay Contest

On this page, eligibility, awards and prizes, essay contest winners 2023, fifth annual georges lieber essay contest on resistance.

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Georges Lieber, at the age of 16, prided himself on being part of the French resistance. Perhaps because of that involvement, he and his family were identified and taken by the Nazis, and on July 3, 1944, Georges was deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. To make a blessing of Georges Lieber’s memory, please articulate an issue on or of resistance that you have encountered and analyze what it has taught you about resistance and yourself. Note that the most engaging essays often reflect deeply on a particularly meaningful experience or episode in one’s life. That approach could focus on resistance pertaining to:

A personal issue
A family matter
An academic inquiry
A dilemma in literature or film
A recent article or editorial in a major newspaper
A current conflict in American life
An international crisis

Email your essay, with “Georges Lieber” as the subject, to the Jewish Studies Committee at Gettysburg College: [email protected]

In 3,000 words, you are encouraged to raise questions, single out issues, and identify dilemmas involving resistance. Essays may be written in the formal or informal tone, but most importantly, an individual voice should be evident. The essay should be developed from your point of view and may be biographical, historical, literary, philosophical, psychological, sociological or theological. It must be the original, unpublished work of one student. Only one essay per student per year may be submitted. It must have a title, and must be written in English. Essay should be titled, typed in 12-point font easily readable font (such as Times New Roman), double-spaced with 1” margins and numbered pages. Submissions will be judged anonymously, by the Gettysburg College Jewish Studies Committee. (We have heavily relied on the language from the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics essay contest.)

Registered high school students—first-year through senior—during the spring 2024 semester.

8:00 p.m. EST, April 17, 2024

First Place

Maria Darrup “Resisting the Monster of the Mind”

Second Place

Sage Matthews “Resistance the Double-Sided Coin”

Third Place

Diya Jha “Rising Through Resistance with Resilience and Optimism”

Honorable Mentions

Adalee Guinn “Resistance as a Teenager”
Kennedy Robinson “PRIDE: The Resistance”
Unity Bridges “My Skin”
Mushka Landa “The Lamplighter Effect”
Helen Zhang “The Rise of Conservative Media and What it Teaches Us about Modern Activism”

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This is when you will certainly find WowEssays' free samples directory extremely helpful as it includes numerous expertly written works on most various Jewish People College Essays topics. Ideally, you should be able to find a piece that meets your criteria and use it as a template to compose your own College Essay. Alternatively, our skilled essay writers can deliver you an original Jewish People College Essay model written from scratch according to your individual instructions.

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Numerous historians have indicated that the Holocaust is without parallel in history as a crime against humanity. Based partly on the history over the last 2,500 years of anti-Semitism, and partly on reference sources researched in the process of preparing this essay, the writer agrees with the view taken by historians and others that the Holocaust was indeed unique when compared with other incidences of genocide or mass killing of a population.

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A Palestinian converted to Judaism. An Israeli soldier saw him as a threat and opened fire

David Ben-Avraham at a supermarket in the Israeli town of Beit Shamesh in 2021, where he briefly worked.

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At first, it seemed like the kind of shooting that has become all too common in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. A Palestinian aroused suspicions and an Israeli soldier killed him.

But then the deceased was identified as David Ben-Avraham, a Palestinian who had made the almost unheard-of decision to convert from Islam to Judaism years earlier.

His unusual journey had taken him across some of the deepest fault lines in the Middle East and led to some unlikely friendships. Most Palestinians saw him as an eccentric outcast, while many Israelis treated him as an unwelcome convert to a religion that doesn’t proselytize.

But in his final moments, he was once again viewed as a Palestinian who was in the wrong place, at a time of widespread anger and suspicion.

A DIVIDED CITY

He was born Sameh Zeitoun in Hebron, home to some 200,000 Palestinians as well as hundreds of Jewish settlers who live in enclaves guarded by Israeli troops. Tensions have run high for decades, often spilling over into violence.

Rights groups have long accused Hebron’s settlers of harassing Palestinian residents, and Palestinians have committed a number of stabbing and shooting attacks against Israelis over the years.

A Palestinian woman sits in front of her makeshift tent with her grandchildren after been displaced by the Israeli air and ground offensive on the Gaza Strip at a camp in Deir al Balah, Monday, May 13, 2024. Palestinians on Wednesday, May 15, 2024, will mark the 76th year of their mass expulsion from what is now Israel. It's an event that is at the core of their national struggle, but in many ways pales in comparison to the calamity now unfolding in Gaza. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

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At its most extreme, the bitter neighbors live just a few meters apart. In some narrow alleys of Hebron’s Old City, metal netting protects Palestinian shoppers from objects thrown by settlers living on the upper floors.

Zeitoun first made contact with Jewish settlers over a decade ago, asking for help converting to Judaism, according to Noam Arnon, a Jewish settler in Hebron who went on to befriend him.

He said Zeitoun was inspired by family stories about his grandfather protecting Jews when riots erupted in 1929, when the Holy Land was under British colonial rule. Palestinians killed dozens of Jewish residents in the city.

“He went further, not only to live as a good neighbor but to join the Jewish community,” Arnon recounted.

A RARE CONVERSION

Conversion to other faiths is deeply frowned upon in Islam. In much of the Muslim world, those who do so are cast out of their communities, sometimes violently. Judaism, unlike Islam and Christianity, has no tradition of proselytization.

Such a conversion is even more fraught in Israel and the Palestinian territories, where religion and nationality usually overlap in a decades-old conflict. Judaism is the faith of most of the soldiers who patrol the territory and the settlers whom Palestinians see as hostile colonizers.

Israel's National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (C-L) shakes hands with a volunteer of the new civilian guard unit while handing out M5 automatic assault rifles, during the unit's inauguration ceremony in the southern city of Ashkelon on October 27, 2023. (Photo by Menahem KAHANA / AFP) (Photo by MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP via Getty Images)

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Arnon said most of the settlers from Hebron’s tight-knit community refused to accept Ben-Avraham. Only Arnon and a few others interacted with him, helping with his conversion application papers.

Religious conversions are rare but legal in areas administered by the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority. Most are undertaken by Palestinian Christians converting to Islam for marriage.

In Israel, converting to Judaism requires an application to the government-run Conversion Authority. Ben-Avraham submitted two requests in 2018 but did not meet the requirements, according to a government official who was not authorized to speak with media and spoke on condition of anonymity.

With that pathway closed, Ben-Avraham turned to Israel’s insular ultra-Orthodox community and eventually made his conversion official in 2020, according to documents published online.

Los Angeles, CA - April 30: Barricades surround the encampment for the pro-Palestine group as they stand guard and keep watch of their encampment from the pro-Israel group at UCLA on Tuesday, April 30, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. (Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)

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In the year before his conversion, Ben-Avraham was detained by the Palestinian Authority’s intelligence unit in Hebron, according to Arnon and a local Palestinian activist, Issa Amro.

The reason for his arrest was never publicly disclosed, but they believe his conversion and open connections with Israelis attracted unwanted attention.

Palestinians can face arrest or even death if they’re seen as collaborating with Israeli authorities. But few would have suspected Ben-Avraham of being an informant because his story was widely known.

Ben-Avraham told the Israeli news site Times of Israel that he was held for two months in solitary confinement and beaten before being released. Around that time, a video emerged showing him holding what appears to be a Quran and pledging his Muslim faith.

Arnon and Amro said his statement was likely made under duress during detention. The PA’s prosecution office said it had no information about his case.

BURIN, OCCUPIED WEST BANK -- MARCH 5, 2024: Salam Najjar bids farewell to her son Amro Najjar, 10, during a funeral in Burin, Occupied West Bank , Tuesday, March 5, 2024. According to his father, Mohammad Najjar, Israeli forces opened fire on their vehicle after they encountered the Israeli military incursion into the Palestinian village and one of the bullets hit Amro directly in the head, killing him. Since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7th and IsraelOs full-scale military offensive in the Gaza Strip, 106 Palestinian children have been killed in the occupied West Bank according to the Defense for Children International Palestine (DCIP). (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

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After his release, Ben-Avraham moved in with Haim Parag, a Jewish friend who lived in Jerusalem. He returned to Hebron infrequently because of safety concerns and continued his Jewish studies. Parag said the pair regularly prayed together at a nearby synagogue.

“He was like a son to me,” he said.

Parag also said he met Ben-Avraham’s wife and some of his children, and that several close family members maintained a relationship with him even after his conversion.

The Zeitoun family declined to speak with the Associated Press, fearing reprisal. In the end, Ben-Avraham left little public record of what drove his personal convictions.

A DEADLY SHOOTING

Ben-Avraham was waiting outside a West Bank settlement for an Israeli bus to take him to Parag’s apartment March 19 when he got into an argument in Hebrew with an Israeli soldier.

Across the West Bank, Jewish settlers live apart from Palestinians in guarded settlements where they’re subject to different laws. Palestinians are generally barred from entering settlements unless they have work permits.

“Are you Jewish?” the soldier shouts in a video that circulated online and appears to have been shot by his body camera.

“Of course,” Ben-Avraham answers.

“What’s your name?” the soldier says.

“David,” he replies.

“David?” the soldier says.

“Ben-Avraham, stupid.”

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The soldier then orders Ben-Avraham to step away from his bag on the ground and raise his hands in the air, before saying sarcastically, “Jewish.”

A second video, apparently taken from a nearby security camera, appears to show two soldiers shooting Ben-Avraham from a close distance as he keels over backward onto the sidewalk.

The army said a small knife was found in Ben Avraham’s bag after the shooting. Parag said he gave him the knife for self-defense.

The Israeli army said it’s investigating the shooting, but rights groups say soldiers are rarely held accountable in such situations.

Israeli forces have been on high alert as the West Bank has seen a surge of violence linked to the war in Gaza. Nearly 500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the war’s start, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Many have been shot dead in armed clashes during military raids, others for throwing stones at troops, and some who were posing no apparent threat.

Palestinians have also carried out several stabbing and other attacks against Israelis.

Arnon said the shooting was a tragic misunderstanding. Parag, Ben-Avraham’s friend in Jerusalem, accused the soldiers of racial profiling, saying they saw Ben-Avraham for his background and not his unexpected beliefs.

A FUNERAL Even in death, Ben-Avraham’s identity was contested.

Parag and another Israeli friend asked an Israeli court for the body to bury him at a Jewish cemetery, filing a petition against members of the Zeitoun family who wanted a Muslim funeral. Bezalel Hochman, a lawyer representing the two Israelis, said the Tel Aviv family court ruled in their favor.

After his death caused a public outcry, the Interior Ministry granted him Israeli residency, saying it wanted “to fulfill the will and desire of the deceased to be part of the nation of Israel.”

Ben-Avraham was buried in April in a Jewish cemetery on the foothills of Mount Gerizim, near the Palestinian city of Nablus, Parag said. The hilltop is sacred for Samaritans — a small, ancient religious minority that straddles the Palestinian-Israeli divide, just like Ben-Avraham.

No one from the Zeitoun family attended the funeral, said Parag, who’s designing his friend’s gravestone.

He said it will read: “David Ben-Avraham Zeitoun Parag. The Holy Jew.”

Jeffery writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Tia Goldenberg in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

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THOUSAND OAKS, CA - NOVEMBER 7, 2023 - Elena Columbo, from Hamakom Synagogue, pauses from creating a Star of David in chalk at a growing memorial fro Paul Kessler at the corner of S. Westlake Blvd. and E. Thousand Oaks Blvd. in Thousand Oaks on November 7, 2023. Paul Kessler, a 69-year-old Jewish man, died a day after an altercation during dueling Israel-Hamas war protests Sunday. The Ventura County Medical Examiner's Office said an autopsy determined Kessler died as a result of a blunt force head injury and that the case is being investigated as a homicide. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

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In a first, Jewish Biden administration staffer resigns over war in Gaza

WASHINGTON ( JTA ) — At first glance, the chalkboard sign looked like any of the others standing in front of Washington D.C.’s many restaurants and cafes.

But instead of advertising espresso or sandwiches, this one — across the street from a federal government building — displayed only one thing: the number of Palestinians killed in Israel’s war with Hamas, along with the words “Remember the people of Gaza.”

When it was taken down earlier this month after being vandalized, that number had passed 34,000 — a statistic quoted often in pro-Palestinian advocacy. But what made the blackboard different from the campus protests and others across the country was that the people keeping it current worked for the Biden administration, which has largely supported Israel and armed it as it has fought Hamas in Gaza.

Nearly all of the federal employees behind such efforts have kept their identities hidden — including the relatively few Jews in the movement. But a landmark moment in internal Jewish dissent came on Wednesday, when Lily Greenberg Call, special assistant to the chief of staff at the Department of Interior, announced that she was resigning in protest of President Joe Biden’s Israel policy — the first Jewish staffer among the several who have publicly resigned since Oct. 7.

“I can no longer in good conscience represent this administration amidst President Biden’s disastrous, continued support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” Greenberg Call, 26, wrote in her resignation letter, which she submitted to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and shared on social media.

Greenberg Call, 27, attended Jewish day school and was a leader of a pro-Israel group in college, at the University of California, Berkeley, that was affiliated with AIPAC, the Washington lobby. She has previously written publicly about her move to the left on Israel, saying in a 2022 Teen Vogue essay that she had begun to question the idea of unconditional support for Israel after getting to know Arabs and Palestinians, including through her work on political campaigns.

In her resignation letter, Greenberg Call said her family had come to the United States after escaping persecution in Europe and that she was concerned about rising antisemitism around the world now. But she said she did not believe the war aided in Jewish security.

“Israel’s ongoing offensive against Palestinians does not keep Jewish people safe — in Israel nor in the United States,” she wrote. “What I have learned from my Jewish tradition is that every life is precious. That we are obligated to stand up for those facing violence and oppression, and to question authority in the face of injustice.”

Lily Greenberg Call, as a teen leader in 2015: “Advocacy is not just a Band-Aid to cover and temporarily fix problems in society.” (Courtesy of the Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego)

While Greenberg Call is the first Jewish Biden administration staffer to resign publicly over the war, others in her movement say she isn’t alone in her sentiments. In memos, in internal staff meetings, and in occasional bursts of public protest, a cadre of mid-level D.C. bureaucrats is dissenting from the Biden administration’s backing for Israel in the war. They describe crushing disappointment in an administration that they feel is committed to defending innocents from carnage elsewhere — most notably in Ukraine — but not, they say, in Gaza.

“There is nothing more American than the right to free speech and free assembly,” said a May 3 statement from Biden-Harris Administration Staffers for Ceasefire, an ad hoc group formed soon after the war broke out.

The staffers say they have moved the needle a bit on policy — citing the increased flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza as an example — though they wish they’d had more impact. But their critics in the administration say their influence is negligible.

Those making the actual decisions say the dissent is background noise and that factors stemming from the crisis — and not the protests — are behind shifts in policy.

“These are people who are not involved in the policy discussions,” said a federal official who has a seat at the policy making table, “who are not in the room to hear senior-level policymakers make the case for both humanitarian assistance and describe what our expectations are when it comes to avoiding civilian harm and preventing violations of laws.”

The clandestine pro-Palestinian organizing began shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 invasion of Israel, which killed approximately 1,200 people and launched the war. As Israel began counterstrikes, heads of various departments convened meetings to air concerns about Biden administration policy. Soon, S, a Jewish staffer who is part of the activist movement, was spearheading one of a number of letters to top Biden administration officials that called for a ceasefire.

An Oct. 20 letter from Jewish and Muslim congressional staff calling for a ceasefire represented an early public action. A letter sent to Biden in November ultimately garnered a thousand signatures, and a White House vigil took place in December . Discussion of others has not abated.

“Word of mouth and WhatsApp are pretty active,” S said.

Another convening point has been the Instagram account Dear White Staffers. Established in 2020 by an anonymous congressional staffer to post examples of how colleagues of color face discrimination, the account turned after Oct. 7 to decrying Biden’s war policies. The account has posted anonymous comments from administration staffers alongside news articles and calls to action such as alerts about D.C.-area pro-Palestinian protests. On Wednesday, it directed followers to Greenberg Call’s resignation letter.

P, a staffer for a congressional Democrat, joined one of the Jewish-led vigils in the Capitol that led to arrests . Contacts he forged through helping to set up the first union for congressional staffers helped lead to the letter from Hill staffers a few weeks later.

“We have continued to show up and speak at large rallies and marches,” he said.

S and P asked to be identified only by first initials in order to avoid professional repercussions. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has verified their identities and their staff positions. Jewish groups that have organized ceasefire protests, including the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, confirmed that they are among the groups’ active participants within the government.

IfNotNow distributed Greenberg Call’s resignation letter on Wednesday.

The Jewish activists who spoke to JTA believe they are among the few Jewish voices in the movement because of the pressures pro-Palestinian Jews feel from their communities at home. Others in the executive branch support Biden’s position.

“I definitely feel like I’m one of the only Jewish voices in the group chats,” said S.

The dissenters point to Biden’s increased pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow in humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, and measures to hold accountable alleged Israeli perpetrators of abuses, as evidence they made a difference.

But Julie Fishman Rayman, the American Jewish Committee managing director, said the dissenters have had more of an impact on the media than on actual policy in the government or in Congress.

She noted that one of their key demands — a unilateral Israeli ceasefire — has not found support in the executive branch, or in Congress, where the majority of lawmakers calling for a ceasefire have insisted that it must be mutual and include a release of hostages.

“There are people who from the get-go were starting these calls for a one-sided ceasefire,” she said. “If they were reading the fine print here, they would see that argument has not gained any currency.”

A congressional staffer told JTA that the flood of calls from constituents opposing the war had been more influential than the internal dissenters. “They are way less impactful than a bunch of angry constituents who are calling day in and day out and are better organized,” the staffer said.

Asked for comment, a State Department official referred JTA to remarks recently by spokesman Vedant Patel, when he was asked about the resignation of Hala Rharrit, the spokeswoman for Arab media. Rharrit quit over Gaza policy, saying State Department staff were afraid to speak out in dissent. (At least one other staffer has publicly resigned from the department, while a Palestinian American staffer at the Department of Education resigned publicly in January.)

Secretary of State Antony Blinken “reads every single one of those dissent channel cables and dissenting viewpoints from across the administration,” Patel said. “We continue to welcome them and we think that it helps lead to stronger, more robust policy making.”

Whether or not the internal protests are making a difference, pro-Palestinian activists say they are meaningful.

“Congressional and administration staffers have joined Palestinian solidarity marches, written dissent cables, signed open letters of disapproval, and in some cases publicly resigned,” Beth Miller, the political director of JVP Action, the political advocacy affiliate of Jewish Voice for Peace, told JTA. “Such public expressions of protest from people who are usually unwilling to do so should be a dire warning to the Biden administration to change course.”

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Guest Essay

What Is Happening on College Campuses Is Not Free Speech

A photo illustration of an imposing university building looming over a student waving an Israeli flag.

By Gabriel Diamond , Talia Dror and Jillian Lederman

Mr. Diamond is a senior at Yale University. Ms. Dror is a junior at Cornell University. Ms. Lederman is a senior at Brown University.

Since the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, campus life in the United States has imploded into a daily trial of intimidation and insult for Jewish students. A hostile environment that began with statements from pro-Palestinian student organizations justifying terrorism has now rapidly spiraled into death threats and physical attacks, leaving Jewish students alarmed and vulnerable.

On an online discussion forum last weekend, Jewish students at Cornell were called “excrement on the face of the earth,” threatened with rape and beheading and bombarded with demands like “eliminate Jewish living from Cornell campus.” (A 21-year-old junior at Cornell has been charged with posting violent threats.) This horror must end.

Free speech, open debate and heterodox views lie at the core of academic life. They are fundamental to educating future leaders to think and act morally. The reality on some college campuses today is the opposite: open intimidation of Jewish students. Mob harassment must not be confused with free speech.

Universities need to get back to first principles and understand that they have the rules on hand to end intimidation of Jewish students. We need to hold professors and students to a higher standard.

The targeting of Jewish students didn’t stop at Cornell: Jewish students at Cooper Union huddled in the library to escape an angry crowd pounding on the doors; a protester at a rally near New York University carried a sign calling for the world to be kept “clean” of Jews; messages like “glory to our martyrs” were projected onto a George Washington University building.

This most recent wave of hate began with prejudiced comments obscured by seemingly righteous language. After the Oct. 7 attacks, more than 30 student groups at Harvard signed on to a statement that read, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” There was no mention of Hamas. The university issued such a tepid response , it almost felt like an invitation.

Days later, at a pro-Palestinian rally, the Cornell associate professor Russell Rickford said he was “exhilarated” by Hamas’s terrorist attacks. (He later apologized and was granted a leave of absence.) In an article, a Columbia professor, Joseph Massad, seemed to relish the “awesome” scenes of “Palestinian resistance fighters” storming into Israel. Most recently, over 100 Columbia and Barnard professors signed a letter defending students who blamed Israel for Hamas’s attacks. To the best of our knowledge, none of these professors have received meaningful discipline, much less dismissal. Another green light.

Over these last few weeks, dozens of anti-Israel protests have been hosted on or near college campuses. Many of these demonstrations had threatening features: Masked students have chanted slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which many view as a call for the destruction of Israel. Others have shouted, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.” The word “intifada” has a gruesome history: During the Aqsa intifada of the early 2000s, hundreds of Israeli civilians were killed in attacks .

On at least one occasion, these student protests have even interrupted candlelight vigils for the victims of Oct. 7. And they haven’t been condemned by the leadership at enough universities. In recent days, some universities, including Cornell, have released statements denouncing antisemitism on campus. Harvard also announced the creation of an advisory group to combat antisemitism.

The terms “Zionist” and “colonizer” have evolved into epithets used against Jewish students like us. These labels have been spit at some of us and our friends in dining halls, dorm common rooms, outside classes and at parties.

Failure by any university to affirm that taunts and intimidation have no place on campus legitimizes more violent behaviors. We are seeing it play out before our eyes.

At Columbia, an Israeli student was physically assaulted on campus. Near Tulane, a Jewish student’s head was bashed with the pole of a Palestinian flag after he attempted to stop protesters from burning an Israeli flag. And students at Cornell live in fear that their peers will actualize antisemitic threats.

All students have sacred rights to hold events, teach-ins and protests. And university faculty members must present arguments that make students uncomfortable. University campuses are unique hubs of intellectual discovery and debate, designed to teach students how to act within a free society. But free inquiry is not possible in an environment of intimidation. Harassment and intimidation fly in the face of the purpose of a university.

The codes of ethics of universities across the country condemn intimidation and hold students and faculty to standards of dignity and respect for others. Campuses are at a crossroads: The leadership can either enforce these ethics codes or these places of learning will succumb to mob rule by their most radical voices, risking the continuation of actual violence.

Simply affirming that taunts and intimidation have no place on campus isn’t enough. Professors violating these rules should be disciplined or dismissed. Student groups that incite or justify violence should not be given university funds to conduct activity on campus.

Furthermore, in line with anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies, established university initiatives that protect minority groups must also include Jews. Universities should adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism as a mechanism for properly identifying and eliminating anti-Jewish hate.

No students should be subject to discrimination, let alone outright threats and hostility, on the basis of their identity. This standard must be applied to Jewish students, too.

Finally, it is vital that individual campus community members — students, professors, alumni, staff members and parents — act against intimidation and incivility. Stand with your Jewish friends at peaceful assemblies. Call on universities via letters and petitions to restore civility on campus.

Although one may think antisemitism has an impact only on Jews, history shows it poisons society at large. Universities have a moral responsibility to counter hateful violence in all its forms. When they fail to do so, they fail us all.

Gabriel Diamond is a senior at Yale University studying political science. Talia Dror is a junior at Cornell University studying industrial and labor relations and business. Jillian Lederman is a senior at Brown University studying political science and economics.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram .

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