Antisemitism, often just under the surface for certain groups in America, is now out in the open. Some Jews are wondering if America is still a safe option for living and bringing up a family.
Throughout America’s illustrious history, antisemitism has generally been a minor problem for Jews. Some colleges, country clubs, and private organizations either did not accept Jews or kept their numbers in check. At times, Jews have been harassed or antisemitic graffiti or fliers have been posted. But open antisemitism and antisemitic violence has been relatively rare in the US, where Jews have enjoyed their greatest freedom of religious and personal expression anywhere on Earth. The number of Jews killed because they were Jewish is small, certainly in comparison to lands where Jews experienced state-organized pogroms. That was the past. Today, Jews are being attacked, harassed, or threatened for the simple fact that they are Jews. Antisemites are emboldened and have no fear of legal ramifications for their actions as arrests or college expulsions are rare. Just as whites are now fair game in the eyes of the authorities, so too are American Jews.
Just in the past week, Hamas supporters caused the president of the United States to arrive twenty minutes late to his State of the Union speech. They shut down access to Cleveland’s international airport and they made Hollywood stars walk to the Oscars. Their demands for a ceasefire seem innocuous until they insist that Israel cease to exist and that Jews go through another murderous intifada. Authorities let the Jew haters march, disrupt traffic and spew genocidal hate. Police and DAs don’t care if people miss their flights or cannot get home. In England, the police are terrified of the protesters and tend to arrest those with Israeli flags or the few who express support for Jews or the Jewish state. One policewoman told an anti-Hamas protester in his own house to shut up, as he had no right to call the genocidal marchers racist. That’s policing? That is cowardice.
In looking at the explosion of antisemitism that occurred immediately after the October 7th pogrom, one sees that the attacks on Israel and Jews started well before Israel began its response to the massacre. The pent-up hatred of Jews that was revealed on college campuses and in major cities throughout the West was so intense that the very first comments from Jew haters was to blame Israel for the rape, beheading, burning, torture, and kidnapping of its own citizens. Then came the demands for genocide: “From the river to the sea…” and “Intifada revolution” can only mean that the Jews should die and where Israel is today should be a state of Palestine that has never existed before. Where did this intense Jew hatred come from and what does it mean for America’s Jewish population?
The source of the Jew hatred is a combination of leftwing “intersectionality” wherein the Jews are deemed oppressors and thus always evil, even when harmed, and traditional Muslim Jew hatred from the increasing number of Muslim students and immigrants who make no effort to assimilate into the more tolerant American culture. Before October 7th, these groups worked mostly independently and sufficed themselves with attacks on Israel at BLM marches or through the annual “bring the biggest Jew-hater we can find to campus” lectures. Since October, these groups have gone into the street to demand that Israel and its Jews be destroyed, and along the way they have had no problem threatening or physically attacking local Jews, like the man killed in Los Angeles. Their relationship is so deranged that one sees “Trans for Palestine” groups, though one knows that such people in Gaza would be thrown off of the tallest building that may still be standing. The emboldened protesters have also shown their utter disdain for the US, UK, and other Western countries which, unlike Hamas, allow them to express their views without fear of death or torture. As orthodox Jews wearing religious clothing or head coverings are the most visible forms of Jew (what does a Reform Jew look like?), along with those holding Israeli flags or clothing, these are the ones most likely to be accosted, threatened, spat upon, pushed around, beaten or cursed during the aggressive marches. The Jewish students who have bravely spoken before Congress have expressed their shock at once being like everyone else and now finding themselves despised and threatened. Students at Harvard, MIT and Columbia have sued their respective schools for not protecting them from antisemitic malice and threats of physical harm.
So what do American Jews do when threatened. Pray. Come together. Organize self-protection. Fight back. But some also look at Israel as an option. Moving to Israel from the US is technically easy: there are plenty of flights as well as freight cargo companies to move belongings, and there are organizations to help with the move. That’s the easy part. The more challenging aspect is that life in Israel is not the same as life in the US. Over the past two hundred plus years, lovely Jewish communities have sprung up from coast to coast, with synagogues, schools, kosher butchers, restaurants, and stores with kosher food or modest clothing. Leaving such outstanding surroundings for the challenges of life in Israel is not easy, and traditionally, immigration to Israel from North America has lagged behind “aliyah” from the former Soviet Union where people see moving to Israel as a step up in quality of life.
One has to understand that while moving from California and New York to Florida and Texas involves adjustments in terms of weather, lifestyle, customs, shopping and leisure options, moving from the US to Israel as a family is to enter another world. I came here alone in 1992 after becoming more religiously observant in grad school. I stand in awe of families who pack up and leave the comfort of beautiful Jewish communities in the US and move here. Below are some of the differences that a family moving here can expect:
*Going from a house with a front and back yard to an apartment on a fourth floor with no elevator. Nondescript apartments in Jerusalem run $1 million or more.
*Income is much lower here than in the US; doctors make a fraction of what their American counterparts make, for example. Many moving here try to keep up their US gigs remotely which means that their work day starts at 4 pm or they split their time while leaving family here.
*Going from two cars to maybe one or just public transportation (very few here have private parking spaces).
*Putting kids into schools where everything is taught in a non-native language.
*Everything except falafel is more expensive: clothes twice as much, electronics 50% more.
*There is no Sunday for resting, shopping, going to the beach or painting the guest room. It is a five-and-a-half day work week and if one keeps the Sabbath, he has almost no free time to deal with repairs or take the family to the beach without taking a vacation day from work.
*Everyone has the same vacations based around Jewish holidays, so if you want to go to the Dead Sea, expect the normal one hour drive from Jerusalem to take three hours.
Yet, with even these and many other challenges, families are moving to Israel. While this is no new phenomenon, I believe that many families look around and wonder what kind of future they will have in the US, where Jews can be harassed freely in major cities. As Jews need basic institutions like a synagogue, access to kosher food, schools and other Jews, they tend to live in cities or larger urban areas. Going off to live in Lake Tahoe may sound appealing, but from my own personal experience there, there is not much Jewish infrastructure. So when someone sees cities going down the drain with crime, illegal aliens taking over schools and hotels, and now open antisemitism against religious Jews (about the only ones they can easily identify), he might stop to think about what kind of future he and his family will have. And when you throw in glowing Jew hatred at Harvard, Columbia and other top universities, he might just conclude that the small apartment in Jerusalem beats the big house and built-out basement in Chicago, as his kids will at least go to a school where they don’t demand that his family drop dead. A friend confided that his son wants to sell his house in a very nice Jewish community in New Jersey in order to move to Israel, but he does not know if there will be a market for his house.
Jews have been an active and positive contributor to the American story from before the founding of the United States. I do not believe that Jews will ever completely leave the US, but it is a shame that rising and unchecked antisemitism combined with the general growth of crime and an anti-religious official culture make all of the challenges of moving to Israel look small in comparison. I will always root for the US, as it has given me so much. I hope that a change in government will bring back a more positive environment in the US for its Jewish citizens.