The State of American Jewish Anxiety

Regarding Frank Foer's Atlantic story.

Photo by David Holifield on Unsplash

Let’s start this newsletter about American Jewish anxiety with a personal anecdote and a useful piece of data correction.

The personal anecdote has to do with my Wikipedia entry. I’m narcissistic enough to acknowledge that very once in a while I procrastinate from doing work and check it out just to see if someone has edited it. And this week I caught two changes. One of them was pretty humorous: an erroneous claim that I was a podcaster for The Nation rather than Space The Nation. One of them was less humorous: stating that I was born “to a Jewish family in Syracuse, New York.” I have made no secret of being Jewish and I’ve been assured by others that this is not an uncommon phrasing in Wikipedia entries. Still, to me it seems like an odd way to phrase it. It did not feel great.

The useful piece of data correction comes from the Pew Research Center about the flaws in online “opt-in” sampling for polls, in which people are recruited via banner ads to respond to a survey rather than being randomly sampled. According to Pew’s Andrew Mercer, Courtney Kennedy, and Scott Keeter, opt-in sampling can cause unreliable findings in sub-samples of polls due to bogus respondents trying to fill in the surveys as quickly as possible to win prizes. Pew found these kinds of bogus respondents were particularly concentrated among those claiming to be younger people and/or Hispanics. They warn that, “bogus respondents can cause opt-in surveys to overestimate rare attitudes and behaviors.”

Why does this matter? Mercer, Kennedy, and Keeter conclude that it undercuts one particularly disturbing finding that made the pundit rounds from a few months ago:

We took particular notice of a recent online opt-in survey that had a startling finding about Holocaust denial among young Americans. The survey, fielded in December 2023, reported that 20% of U.S. adults under 30 agree with the statement, “The Holocaust is a myth.” This alarming finding received widespread attention from the news media and on social networks.

From a survey science perspective, the finding deserved a closer look. It raised both of the red flags in the research literature about bogus respondents: It focused on a rare attitude (Holocaust denial), and it involved a subgroup frequently “infiltrated” by bogus respondents (young adults)….

We attempted to replicate the opt-in poll’s findings in our own survey, fielded in mid-January 2024 on Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel.

Unlike the December opt-in survey, our survey panel is recruited by mail – rather than online – using probability-based sampling. And in fact, our findings were quite different.

Rather than 20%, we found that 3% of adults under 30 agree with the statement “The Holocaust is a myth.” (This percentage is the same for every other age group as well.) Had this been the original result, it is unlikely that it would have generated the same kind of media attention on one of the most sensitive possible topics.

As a social scientist, I am keenly aware that my personal anecdote pales in significance besides that Pew finding. Therefore, on balance, I feel better about the degree of anti-Semitism in the United States than I did a week ago. Is that Wikipedia thing still in the back of my mind? Sure, a little, but discovering that nowhere close to 20% of young Americans believe that the Holocaust is a myth is quite the relief.

Between personal vibes and reliable data, give me the data is all I’m saying.

This leads us to Franklin Foer’s Atlantic essay with the cheery title, “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.” Here’s the gist of it:

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….

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.

Foer marshals some interesting arguments and evidence to support his claims, including recounting some truly abysmal behavior by a whole host of actors at Columbia University. Shifts in leftist thought have made it far easier for social justice activists to let their anti-Zionism effortlessly morph into anti-Semitism. I have encountered some of this behavior in recent months as well; it’s a real phenomenon and a disturbing one.

It is to Foer’s credit, therefore, that he also includes a link to a September 2022 Pew poll that severely truncates the power of his thesis:

As an American Jew, those result look pretty, pretty good to me! Jews are viewed more favorably than every other religious group in that poll. That is not a sign of growing anti-Semitism, like, at all. This particular pillar of consensus looks pretty robust!

How can this be reconciled with Foer’s argument? It’s the difference between mass public attitudes and elite behavior. His essay is not about broader trends in American attitudes about Jewry, not really. It’s about elite attitudes and elite discourse. He writes at one point, “Columbia is… 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.” There is no universe where Columbia University is representative of any larger socioeconomic trend except elite attitudes.

When it comes to elite discourse in universities or the politics of lefty localities in the Bay Area, Foer makes some trenchant points. Clearly, there is an element of anti-Semitism emanating from the left as well as the right. As a paid-up member of elite society, I can sense those vibes as well as Foer. But this phenomenon remains relatively small.¹ Furthermore, the rather public highlighting and pushback of this kind of lefty anti-Semitism will hopefully trigger some self-reflection from those who believe they are only anti-Zionist.²

The larger points in Foer’s essay have less to do with growing anti-Semitism and more to do with structural changes in American culture in recent decades. The end of the “Golden Age of American Jewry” is only relative. With greater opportunities for various groups that faced more severe restrictions in the past, it is unsurprising that American culture or American letters has become less Jewish and more diverse. Or, to put it another way, the rise of Abbott Elementary or The Bear hardly means that Curb Your Enthusiasm is neglected.

Foer quotes Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League, saying, “When lights start flashing red, the Jewish impulse is to flee.” I get why some might be feeling that vibe. But the data suggests that these concerns have been grossly exaggerated.

Oh, and as a proud American Jew, let’s be clear about one thing: I’m not going anywhere.

1. One tell here: we’re all talking about a longform piece in The Atlantic. Foer didn’t exactly publish this in an obscure intellectual outlet.

2. I am also pretty confident that far-right anti-Semitism and far-left anti-Semitism will encounter difficulties making common cause on much of anything.