“In every generation, someone rises up to eradicate us,” goes the popular Jewish motto. In the 20th Century, the effort was directed to European Jews, and in the 21st Century, to Israeli Jews.
While the attempt to eradicate Judaism is naturally funneled through the largest and most relevant aspect of the Jewish population of the time, in both the 1940s and 2020s, there was another large and powerful Jewish population: American Jews.
In both cases, an election year elevated the ability of American Jews to influence the administration, and in both cases, some blame American Jews for not doing enough.
As the 1944 elections approached, it was clear that Jews were being murdered in Europe. President Roosevelt refused to intercept the destruction mechanism of Judaism and did not bomb the rail tracks leading to the extermination camps. Still, he received an astonishing 90% of the American Jewish vote.
Historian Alex Grobman recounts that in 1943, Jewish Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who was close to President Roosevelt, was told by Polish resistance leader Jan Karski the extent of the murder and was urged to do something to save European Jews. Frankfurter did not: “Either Frankfurter found the thought of Jews being killed in this fashion inconceivable, or he knew that if he acknowledged the systematic destruction, he would have to act publicly in their defense.”
A two-headed existential threat
Eighty years later, Judaism is once again under an existential threat, sustaining a dual assault - a physical attack coming from Iran and its proxies and an ideological attack coming from the West.
While Iran and its proxies have the capability to kill many Jews and indeed have done so over the last year, they do not have the capability to destroy Judaism. The West does. As I show in my new book, The Assault on Judaism, the 21st-century path to destroy Judaism is not through war but through war crime indictments, alongside sanctions, demoralization, and delegitimization. Those mechanisms have been activated in 2024, and we are now far along the path of a Western attempt to negate the idea of the Jewish state and, through it, the concept of Judaism.
Once again, the United States failed to intercept the destruction mechanism of Judaism. It refused to sanction the ICC, which in turn led to the expansion of its effort, alongside new actions in the International Court of Justice and a growing list of European countries who pledge to collaborate.
Nobody needs to tell American Jewish leaders that the ICC is preparing the groundwork for the rest of Israeli Jews - it says so openly.
And yet, American Jews seem to be silent when it comes to urging America to defend Judaism from the existential threat of the 21st Century. Instead, with an 80-year delay, there is a focus on defending Judaism from the last Century’s threat: antisemitism. The second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, even led a committee to combat antisemitism – putting together a comprehensive strategy to counter the threat of yesterday while ignoring the contemporary threat to Jews and Judaism.
Worldwide incidents of traditional antisemitism are up, American Jews explain, and they are no longer occurring in obscure places: the marchers holding torches yelling ”Jews will not replace us” happened on US soil, and the mobs disrupting disrupted public Yom Kippur services last year occurred in Israel.
Harris makes a strong statement on fighting antisemitism, Jewish Democrats say, while Trump associates himself with antisemites.
Jews do not vote based on Israel, even in existential times. So, with all respect to Iran and the ICC, there are more pressing issues: abortions, rising traditional antisemitism incidents, and the environment.
Moreover, Democratic Jews are satisfied with the Biden-Harris administration providing weapons to Israel, intercepting the Iran missile attacks, sharing intelligence, and having Israel’s back. At the same time, they look the other way at the executive order that gave Treasury and State Departments a broad “license to sanction” Israeli Jews, as well as at the weaponry the administration withheld from Israel, the pressure it puts, and the restrictions it placed on the Jewish state’s ability to win the war.
Times of London columnist Melanie Phillips sees this phenomenon in a greater context. Speaking last week at the launch event for The Assault on Judaism, she said that there is an American worldview known as “The Obama Doctrine” that calls for a tie between various actors in the Middle East - Suni and Shia, Israel and Iran: “My impression is that current American administration will not allow Israel to be destroyed on its watch… but they want Israel to continue to swing in the wind. They do not want Israel to win because winning is inconvenient to their worldview, which must prevail.”
Trump, who argues Israel will not survive if Harris wins, says that Jews who vote for Harris should have their heads checked.”
Yet, voting for Trump is not the only way Jews can get America to support Israeli Jews, just like voting for Dewey against Roosevelt in 1944 was not the only way Jews could have gotten America to support European Jews.
American Jews are estimated to account for about half of Democratic party funding. Seventy percent of them voted for Biden in 2020, and they are concentrated in swing states, such as Pennsylvania.
Are American Jews using their leverage to urge the administration to defend the escalating assault on Judaism and the Jewish state?
Israeli Jews today, as European Jews back then, certainly do not think so.
In fact, some American Jews infuriated Israeli Jews on the Left and Right alike by urging Israel to respond to the October 7 and Iranian attacks by “ending the occupation” and establishing a Palestinian State. This would be akin to the 90% of American Jews who voted for Roosevelt in 1944, urging European Jews to end the Jewish occupation of Europe, that they were broadly accused of engaging in: taking jobs away from “indigenous Europeans,” competing with Europeans businesses, and Judaizing European culture.
“In every generation, someone rises to eradicate us,” - but many American Jews apparently do not vote based on such an existential threat - not in 1944 and not in 2024.
Gol Kalev is the author of the new book The Assault on Judaism: The Existential Threat Is Coming from the West. He is chair of the Judaism 3.0 Think Tank and author of Judaism 3.0: Judaism’s Transformation to Zionism.