(ANALYSIS) The April issue of the ever-interesting Atlantic magazine features an 11,400-word blockbuster by staff writer Franklin Foer, a prominent Jewish journalist who was formerly editor of The New Republic. The provocative headline of his state-of-the-union assessment proclaims that “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending.”

Big — if true. 

According to Foer’s piece, “an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity” for America’s Jews has now ended, an historical turning point that becomes obvious to all in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 surprise attack from Gaza upon Israel.

Foer typifies liberal Jews who’ve long been optimistic about America and about Jewish life in America, but now alarmed as never before by antisemitism. Formerly seen as a minor irritant from right-wing crackpots, he now considers this a far more dangerous pathology, newly empowered by a rising left-wing component. 

There’s been extensive news coverage of Jews besieged at elite universities. An Anti-Defamation League survey depicted an “urgent need to protect Jewish students on campus.” In the 13 weeks after Hamas attacked, ADL tabulated 1,403 antisemitic incidents in the U.S., more than in all of 2021, until then the worst year on record. Also see ADL on the spread of noxious antisemitic tropes. 

Foer underscores a phenomenon that is less publicized and, if anything, even more unnerving: The climate of fear also afflicting youths in high schools, even middle schools. He focuses on recent incidents in the symbolic liberal citadel of Berkeley, Calif. Here, too, Jewish students face slurs and threats of implied violence, with faculty members sometimes acting as cheerleaders for hostilities. 

He himself experienced notable anxiety “about the safety of my own family and synagogue” upon the advent of Donald Trump, which “inspired antisemitic hate groups.” No fan of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu regime and the Orthodox religious parties in its coalition, Foer asserts that disagreement with Israeli policy, which he and a U.S. Jewish majority often share, has evolved into straight-up antisemitism on the political left.

Anti-Zionism becomes the “blithe desire to eliminate the world’s only Jewish state” and thus disappearance of Jews, while excoriating U.S. Jews who defend the existence of that nation. As the familiar protest slogan goes, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” meaning the disappearance of Israel and of Jews.

Foer depicts a now-fading “golden age” lasting several generations when Jews were no longer “excluded from the American establishment” and became “full-fledged members” of it, without needing to abandon their identity. Gone were elite universities’ admission quotas, restrictive covenants in housing or country club barriers. Jews excelled in science, medicine, finance, education, entertainment and much else, making notable contributions to the nation far beyond their numbers. 

“But that era is drawing to a close,” he writes, as both he MAGA movement and “the illiberal left” dismiss the democratic consensus that embraced “tolerance, fairness, meritocracy and cosmopolitanism.” Problems on the Left worsened after Sept. 11, 2001, he writes, when Jews were prominent among “neoconservatives” thought to manipulate foreign policy in Israel’s favor, followed by suspicions about Jews in business such as George Soros with the 2008 crash. 

Among intellectuals, the Left’s newfound “intersectionality” viewed things like objective journalism or color-blindness in the law as “a guise for white supremacy” and Israel as a tool of western colonialism. Then the “Boycott Divestment Sanctions” cause depicted Israel as “an international pariah” to be shunned in every way possible. “American culture became permissive regarding what could be said about Jews. Antisemitism crept back into the realm of the acceptable.” 

To comprehend the drama of such pessimism, think back to a much-mulled 1997 book, “The Vanishing American Jew” by Harvard Law School professor and controversialist Alan Dershowitz. His theme was not Jews suffering from  antisemitic pressures, but the exact opposite: Acceptance and success so sweeping that “American Jewish life is in danger of disappearing”  through “skyrocketing” assimilation and intermarriage, plus low birth rates. Central to this scenario was the book’s announcement that “institutional antisemitism is on its last legs,” exiled at the margins of society, and with no significant impact on Jews’ everyday life. 

Both Dershowitz and Foer mostly sidestepped one aspect the Jewish situation. In a word, Judaism. 

Yet data in the Pew Research Center’s exhaustive survey report “Jewish Americans in 2020” clearly demonstrates the unsurprising reality that religious involvement correlates with the vitality of the non-religious activities in the U.S. Jewish community. 

How is the religion of Judaism faring? Per Pew, 19% of the 5.8 million adults now have “no religion.” Only 21% of Jews say religion is “very important” to them (compared with 41% of Americans over-all). Jews by 26% express belief in the God “described in the Bible” (56% for Americans over-all) while 12% attend worship weekly and 35% belong to a synagogue. Like other studies, Pew documents the vast erosion of Judaism among children of mixed marriages, which  have now reached a 61% rate.

An important and remarkably blunt analysis of the Pew findings came from Jack Wertheimer, professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. 

He accused American Jewish leaders of putting a false positive spin on Pew’s “devastating news” about an “urgent” situation. Apart from Orthodox Judaism, he said, U.S. synagogues are “hemorrhaging members, aging, merging and closing.” In just seven years since a prior Pew survey, Jewish observances continued to decline across the board. Added to Pew’s nationwide view are similar surveys conducted in key metropolitan areas. 

His summation: Nearly half no longer engage in any non-religious cultural activities, which means “large swaths of American Jews are on their way out of Jewish life.”

Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.