Tevi Troy: A New Wave of American Populism Could be Good for the Jews
“Christoph Waltz played a Nazi obsessed with finding Jews,” Steve Martin said at the Academy Awards this year, referring to the Austrian actor’s Oscar-winning turn in Inglourious Basterds. Martin then gestured ostentatiously to the theater filled with Hollywood’s glitterati and added, “The mother lode.” Martin’s joke brought down the house, largely because of the (accurate) view that Jews play what some would call a leading role in Hollywood. Jews do well in other sectors of the economy as well, most notably finance, politics, and academia. Yet despite tremendous Jewish success in the United States, Jews often seem a little tentative about their place in a country they have done so much to shape. Rather than dominating the hall as they did on Oscar night, the attitude seems to resemble that of actress Sally Field, who said, incredulously and famously, “You like me, right now, you like me” after being awarded a best actress Oscar for Places in the Heart....
This steady and strong support for Israel provides little comfort for Jews, though, who are often nervous about their safety and security, even in a friendly home such as the United States. This nervousness stems from legitimate and understandable historical reasons. For centuries, Jews have been restricted, harassed, exiled, or murdered by unfriendly governments. Only 80 years ago, German Jews considered Germany to be the world’s most welcoming country for the Jews, in which Jews attained high-level positions in business, culture, and the universities. At the time, Jews found refuge in these elite institutions, recognizing that the populists of the street were far more dangerous than the elite, who ran society’s major institutions. A banker or a professor could exhibit the polite anti-Semitism of the cocktail lounge and refuse a loan or a job application, but an anti-Semitic street populist could incite a pogrom that might wipe out a community. Indeed, it was Hitler’s thuggish brownshirts who facilitated his rise to power in the nation that had formerly served as a relative safe haven.
Another reason that Jews feared populists more than the elite in Europe was the tendency of Jews to be useful to society’s leaders. Yale surgery professor and Tablet Magazine contributing editor Sherwin B. Nuland tells the tale of Francis I, who, suffering from syphilis and a scalp abscess while captive in Madrid in 1525, asked for his Jewish doctor to tend to him. Upon the doctor’s arrival, Francis learned that his “Jewish” doctor was born Jewish but had, in fact, converted to Christianity. Francis then insisted he be brought a real Jewish doctor. Despite his misery, Francis was willing to wait for a real Jewish doctor to come all the way from Constantinople.
Other examples abound of Jewish usefulness to the ruling classes, including Maimonides serving as court physician in Egypt and Lord Rothschild financing 19th-century regimes and armies. Yet the usefulness of these individuals at the highest levels did not help, and in some cases harmed, reception of their people among the lower classes. In fact, Jewish service as lenders, money collectors, and middle men between rulers and ruled made them a lightning rod for lower-class resentments against their insulated rulers.
In the United States, too, populism has had negative historical connotations for the Jews—from Ulysses S. Grant’s 1862 expulsion of Jews from Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee and the lynching of Leo Frank in 1915 to the anti-Semitic rantings of Father Charles E. Coughlin and Ku Klux Klan marches in the 1930s. Jews had reason to fear populist sentiment behind all these threats and often looked to nationally elected leaders to protect them. Abraham Lincoln, for example, famously countermanded Grant’s Order Number 11, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt distanced himself from Coughlin after Coughlin’s initial support for his 1932 election.
Yet anti-Semitism has not been ingrained in the American psyche as it has been in many European nations. Our founders were philo-Semites, many of whom knew Hebrew and adorned their children with biblical names. George Washington’s famous letter to the Newport synagogue, in which he wrote that “happily the Government of the United States … gives to bigotry no sanction,” demonstrated that religious tolerance and freedom were principles of the American founding. Indeed, many of the early settlers—not just Jews but Puritans, Catholics, and Huguenots—came to this country to get away from religious intolerance in Europe and saw in America a place where they could worship as they saw fit. With the specter of religious intolerance chasing them from Europe, many early settlers, even if not explicitly philo-Semitic, were at least predisposed to the notion that religious intolerance did not have a place in the New World....
To the extent Israel does face strong criticism in the United States, it comes largely from elitist institutions, most notably universities. The recent experience of the mass heckling of Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California at Irvine was only one prominent example of the challenges Israel, and its student supporters, face on campuses. Over the last six years, a new spring ritual called Israel Apartheid Week has encouraged anti-Israel activities on college campuses, and pro-Israel Jewish students find themselves increasingly under fire when trying to defend the Jewish state.
Beyond student activism, many of the leading anti-Israel critics in the United States are from among the intellectual elite. George Gilder, in The Israel Test, makes the humorous observation that “Jews, amazingly, excel so readily in all intellectual fields that they outperform all rivals even in the arena of anti-Semitism,” and the American examples he cites—Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Naomi Klein—are, if not out-and-out anti-Semites, at the very least elitist critics of Israel and its policies. But the truth is that there are many prominent non-Jewish critics of Israel on college campuses, including Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, from Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, who wrote The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy; Columbia University’s Rashid Khalidi; and former Weatherman and University of Illinois Professor Bill Ayers, who signed a petition calling for divestment, a boycott, and sanctions on Israel.
The United States, therefore, is in a historically unusual situation where Jews and Israel are quite popular among the populace but are less well-liked by the political and academic elite. A 2007 article in Canada’s Financial Post called college campuses “Anti-Semitism’s last North American refuge.”...