Peter Beinart
Jewish Currents / July 29, 2026
In its quest to defend Israel, establishment Jewry has abandoned liberal democracy in the US.
At the end of 2015, soon after taking over as CEO and National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt brought the organization’s leadership to Georgia and Alabama. The journey constituted a kind of homage to the ADL’s role in the civil rights movement. In an essay about the trip, Greenblatt noted that in 1965, his predecessor, Benjamin Epstein, had summoned the ADL’s top staff to Selma, where they joined Martin Luther King Jr. in one of the country’s most famous marches for Black voting rights. Greenblatt and his team reenacted that procession, crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge as thousands had once done before. In his essay, Greenblatt pledged to honour “the inheritance bequeathed to us by Dr. King and Epstein” by pursuing “justice and fair treatment to all.”
More than a decade later, Greenblatt still leads the ADL. But when the Supreme Court this April gutted the Voting Rights Act for which King and Epstein marched, the organization said nothing. The ADL webpage about Epstein’s activities in Selma—which Greenblatt’s essay once linked to—has been taken down, along with much of the organization’s other material about civil rights.
The ADL is not the only American Jewish organization that has lost interest in whether Black Americans fully possess the right to vote. The American Jewish Committee has also turned away from its civil rights past. In 1965, the organization asked its staff to march in Selma. “Our responsibility to the Negro,” declared the AJC’s president the previous year, “is really no more or less than our responsibility to ourselves.” Yet when the Supreme Court this spring enabled Republicans to gerrymander away most Black congressional representation in the South, the AJC was silent too. (Both the ADL and AJC failed to respond to repeated requests for interviews as well as a request for comment).
These are not isolated incidents. The silence of the ADL and AJC reflects a historic transformation: an abandonment of the democratic solidarity that animated establishment American Jewish politics for roughly eighty years.
Beginning in the 1940s, American Jewry’s most influential organizations argued that expanding individual liberty and political participation for other historically discriminated against Americans would help ensure equal treatment for American Jews. These organizations hewed to this vision even after the 1967 War, when they turned much of their attention to defending Israel. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, this greater focus on Israel gave American Jewish politics a dual—and contradictory—character: support for multi-racial democracy and equal rights in the United States combined with opposition to those very principles in the Jewish state.
This ideological contradiction has now been resolved. The American Jewish establishment has largely discarded its strategy of enmeshing the struggle against antisemitism within a broader struggle for the rights of all Americans. In has done so because, in the wake of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, defending equal rights in the United States would require Jewish groups to ally with progressives who condemn Israel. And it has done so because, with Donald Trump back in the White House, defending persecuted minorities would alienate the vindictive white Christian supremacists who run the federal government.
The American Jewish establishment—which in the last century helped expand American liberal democracy—has now largely given up on it. Instead of responding to this moment of democratic peril by helping to assemble the kind of multi-racial, multi-religious alliance that defeated Jim Crow, it has chosen a different approach: Curry favour with powerful bigots in the hope that they don’t turn against Israel. This go-it-alone accommodation to authoritarian rule has deep historical roots. It is the strategy of the court Jew. In early modern Europe, that strategy constituted an understandable response to pervasive antisemitism and princely power. In 2026, however, it represents something very different: a betrayal of democratic principles that undermines not only American freedom, but Jewish safety as well.
From the beginning of the 20th century, individual Jews played an outsized role in the struggle for civil rights. In 1911, Columbia University Professor Edwin Seligman became chairman of the board of the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes, which later became the National Urban League. Two years later, one his former colleagues at Columbia, Joel Spingarn, took over as chairman of the board of the recently formed NAACP. But despite these individual efforts, American Jewry’s emerging communal establishment largely restricted its work to fighting antisemitism. When President Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal workforce in 1913, the American Jewish Committee, arguably America’s most prominent Jewish group, did not protest.
This changed after World War II. As Stuart Svonkin details in his book, Jews Against Prejudice, a new generation of American Jewish leaders emerged in the late 1930s and ’40s whose worldview was shaped not only by the Holocaust but also by the rise of fascism, which had enabled it. Europe’s lesson for the United States, they believed, was that protecting Jews required opposing racism and authoritarianism. Even if American bigotry was primarily anti-Black, rather than anti-Jewish, it still threatened the country’s liberal democratic character and would sooner or later endanger Jews as well. “If we can’t achieve full equality for all Americans,” argued Philip Hoffman, the chairman of the American Jewish Committee’s domestic affairs committee in 1964, “it goes without saying that we can’t achieve welfare and safety for the Jews.”
From this capacious view of prejudice came an often-frank repudiation of the idea that American Jewish organizations should focus narrowly on antisemitism. In a 1948 speech, the ADL’s national chairman, Meier Steinbrink, declared: “As Jewish agencies we will be concerned not so much with protecting the position of the Jews as with expanding the business of democracy so that all who live in America shall enjoy equally of the rights, obligations and opportunities which America offers.”
This commitment to equality had its limits. The AJC and to a lesser extent the ADL, which was then a subsidiary of the fraternal organization B’nai Brith, were elite institutions, disproportionately composed of wealthy, German Jews. They were far more comfortable condemning racial and religious prejudice than class oppression and tended to recoil at solutions to systemic racism that challenged American capitalism. During the Red Scare of the early 1950s, both organizations helped the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigate suspected Jewish communists. Only the American Jewish Congress, which drew more heavily from left-leaning, recently arrived, Eastern European Jews, demanded HUAC’s abolition and vigorously opposed laws that barred members of the Communist Party from teaching in public schools.
In the 1960s, this fear of leftist radicalism led some mainstream Jewish organizations to oppose the Black Power movement. The ADL didn’t only gather information on the Ku Klux Klan; it also gathered information on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Yet even as the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Reform and Conservative movements opposed revolutionary change, they supported reforms that expanded racial equality. The AJC helped fund Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s landmark 1947 study on the psychological harms of Jim Crow that the Supreme Court later cited in Brown v. Board of Education. In 1949, the American Jewish Congress employed more attorneys working on civil rights than the Justice Department or the NAACP. The Reform Movement’s Central Conference of Rabbis urged its members to join the 1964 protests in Saint Augustine, Florida, that pressured Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act. The general counsel of the American Jewish Congress helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, and the speaker who preceded Martin Luther King that afternoon was the group’s president, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a refugee from Nazi Berlin. He told the crowd that Americans must oppose racism “not for the sake of the Black community, but for the sake of the image, the idea and the aspiration of America itself.”
During this period, the American Jewish establishment considered Israel a secondary concern. With American Jews still struggling to overcome quotas at Ivy League universities and gain employment at prestigious law firms, and with the memory of more acute forms of bigotry still resonant, American Jewish organizations prioritized civil rights. That focus changed during the 1967 War when many American Jews were gripped first by panic at the thought that Israel might be overrun, and then by euphoria at its overwhelming victory. In the years that followed, this newfound pride in the Jewish state collided with growing criticism of Israel, which was now occupying millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. From this collision came a shift in Jewish communal priorities: Groups like the ADL and AJC began combatting a “new antisemitism,” which they claimed targeted not individual Jews but the Jewish state. AIPAC, an obscure organization before the 1967 War, grew in the ensuing decades into a political powerhouse by ignoring domestic concerns altogether, which helped it lobby for Israel regardless of which party held power.
Even so, most American Jewish groups retained their commitment to American liberal democracy. They now pursued a double mission: Defend Israel from external pressure and expand civil rights inside the United States.
This created a moral contradiction. Even as American Jewish leaders denounced critics who accused Israel of denying legal equality to Palestinians, they tried to extend legal equality to new groups of Americans. In the mid-1970s, when a group of dissident American Jews created Breira—an organization whose founding chairman accused Israel of governing the West Bank and Gaza Strip “without regard to international law or the rights of the indigenous Palestinians”—the president of the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis denounced Breira for wanting to leave Israel “defenseless before murderers and terrorists.” Yet that same Central Conference of American Rabbis in 1977 announced its support for laws banning discrimination against “homosexuals” as part of its insistence upon the “civil rights and civil liberties for all people, especially for those from whom these rights and liberties have been withheld.” In 2019, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which oversees Jewish community relations councils across the country, published a retrospective of its work. The report boasted that it had lobbied for both arms sales to Israel and for the Americans with Disabilities Act. This duality continued into Donald Trump’s first term. In a review of its “top moments of 2017,” the ADL lauded itself for both helping Jewish students combat “anti-Israel incidents on campus” and for denouncing Trump’s ban on immigration from six Muslim majority countries.
If you read through that 2017 report today and click the links documenting the ADL’s opposition to Trump’s Muslim ban, you’ll receive an error message. The ADL’s work against Islamophobia has been memory-holed, like the organization’s participation in the march for voting rights in Selma.
The decision to choose support for Jewish supremacy in Israel over support for legal equality in America—and thus end the dichotomy that had shaped institutional American Jewish life since 1967—can be traced to two events: Israel’s assault on Gaza and Donald Trump’s return to power.
For years before October 7, 2023, American Jewish officials had been warning about the American left’s growing embrace of anti-Zionism. But Israel’s genocide in Gaza swelled the ranks of progressives who opposed the ethnonationalism of the Jewish state. And because the American Jewish establishment equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, it depicted the post-October 7 progressive turn against Israel as a tsunami of Jew-hatred. Genuine antisemitism likely did increase after October 7. But by changing its methodology for tallying antisemitic incidents to include rallies that featured “anti-Zionist chants and slogans,” the ADL inflated the numbers. And this inflation allowed Greenblatt to claim in early 2024 that “The American Jewish community is facing a threat level that’s now unprecedented in modern history.” The head of the American Jewish Committee, which also defines anti-Zionism as antisemitic, similarly warned that after October 7, “antisemitism has reached a tipping point.”
Crucially, Greenblatt and other American Jewish leaders didn’t only describe the rise in antisemitism in apocalyptic terms. They also detached it from other forms of bigotry. After October 7, the FBI reported a surge in threats not only against American Jews, but against Arab and Muslim Americans as well, as is common when violence surges in Israel-Palestine. A Jewish student was assaulted by men yelling antisemitic slurs at the University of Pittsburgh, a six-year-old Palestinian boy was murdered near Chicago, and a Palestinian man was stabbed in Texas. Both synagogues and mosques received bomb threats.
Acknowledging that Jewish, Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Americans all faced greater danger after October 7—and that the Trump era had unleashed a surge in white nationalism that menaced many vulnerable minorities—might have reaffirmed the American Jewish community’s longstanding view that antisemitism is best fought by fighting bigotry in all its forms. Instead, Jewish leaders rejected any parallel between discrimination against American Muslims and discrimination against American Jews. “To assert that these two issues are of the same magnitude right now or of the same urgency is to minimize antisemitism,” Greenblatt declared in March 2024. “It is to silence Jews.”
Not only did American Jewish officials reject comparisons between antisemitism and other forms of bigotry, but they also accused many of the Americans fighting those other forms of bigotry of betrayal for condemning Israel. The more that Black, Latino, Muslim, LGBTQ, and feminist activists questioned Israel’s denial of legal equality to Palestinians, the more reluctant pro-Israel Jewish groups became to partner with them in the struggle for legal equality in the United States. In a November 2023 New York Times column, Bret Stephens—one of the American Jewish establishment’s favourite political commentators—declared: “On Oct. 8, Jews woke up to discover who our friends are not.” Included in the litany of betrayers were Black Lives Matter, “D.E.I. offices,” and “diversity trainers.” The lesson, according to Stephens, was that “in the long run, we’re alone.”
Greenblatt embraced the same logic. At the same March 2024 ADL summit where he denounced comparisons between antisemitism and Islamophobia, he insisted that many Jews “have felt alone, abandoned, and let down by those you believed were your colleagues and classmates, friends and allies.” Echoing Stephens, he said that this abandonment relieved American Jews of their obligation to prioritize the rights of other Americans. From now on, he announced, the ADL would follow the approach recommended by the pro-Israel group JewBelong: “Put on your own oxygen mask first.” In the months after October 7, this shift had tangible consequences. After the Council for Global Equality, a coalition that supports LGBTQ rights around the world, called for a ceasefire in Gaza and denounced “all attacks on civilian populations,” the ADL left the council, which it had helped to found.
As if to illustrate the ADL’s newfound indifference to bigotry against other vulnerable minorities, and to the survival of liberal democracy itself, two days after Greenblatt’s oxygen mask comment, he gave an award to Donald Trump’s son-in-law and close advisor, Jared Kushner. Three years earlier, after the January 6, 2021, insurrection, Greenblatt had called for Trump’s impeachment. Back then, he had accused Trump of “denigrating our democratic institutions” and unleashing “racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and so many other forms of hate” in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Now his message was radically different. In justifying his decision to honour Kushner, Greenblatt explained: “I really don’t care how you vote.” What mattered was that “in an October 8 world,” Jews must resist “partisanship” and “polarization” because “we are in this together.”
This last phrase crystallized a striking inversion of the democratic solidarity that had once guided American Jewish politics. Prior generations of Jewish leaders had used the phrase “in this together” to explain why Jews should work with other Americans to oppose bigotry and expand democracy. Greenblatt was saying something very different: that all American Jews were “in this together,” whether they supported democracy or not.
The shift toward accommodating authoritarianism and bigotry grew more decisive once Trump was elected. The AJC, ADL, Jewish Federations of North America and Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations all responded to Trump’s victory with anodyne well-wishes. None described his “core beliefs” as “fundamentally at odds with our community’s deepest convictions and most cherished values”—as the ADL, AJC and the UJA-Federation’s local chapters alleged about Zohran Mamdani in a joint statement after his election as New York’s mayor. The message was clear: Zionism is a cherished American Jewish value; democracy is not. (The Conference of Presidents declined to comment for this article.)
As the Trump administration has terrorized immigrants, undermined free elections, and attempted to imprison or deport its critics, progressive Jewish groups that either take no political position on Israel, like HIAS, or oppose Israel, like Jewish Voice for Peace, have filed lawsuits and organized sit-ins. But the American Jewish establishment has generally reacted with either muted criticism or no criticism at all. The American Jewish Committee has expressed “concerns” over Trump’s decision to pardon rioters who tried to violently overturn the 2020 election; observed after Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction that “there is a difference between protected speech, even when deplorable, and statements and actions that justify deportation”; and responded to ICE’s killing of two protesters in Minneapolis by noting that the “authority to enforce U.S. immigration laws must be exercised responsibly and in a manner consistent with the Constitution and the rule of law.” Judging by its press releases, however, the AJC has neither participated in protests nor challenged government discrimination in court, as it did during the civil rights era. It has restricted itself to carefully worded expressions of unease.
The Anti-Defamation League, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and Jewish Federations of North America haven’t even gone that far. In Trump’s first term, Greenblatt called the president’s claims of widespread voter fraud “vile conspiracy theories.” But in March 2025, when Trump made those conspiracy theories the basis of an executive order requiring proof of citizenship to vote—which legal experts warned could disenfranchise millions of people—the ADL did not object. If you search the organization’s press releases for the word “immigration,” you’ll find several criticizing Trump’s policies during his first term—but none during his second.
The same goes for the Conference of Presidents, which since January 2025 has not issued a single press release criticizing the Trump administration for violating democratic principles or the rule of law. The Jewish Federations of North America has even tried to prevent other Jewish groups from challenging Trump. In the spring of 2025, when the Jewish Council of Public Affairs—one of the rare establishment pro-Israel organizations that has tried to rally opposition to Trump’s authoritarianism—circulated a letter opposing the arrest and deportation of foreign students who expressed pro-Palestinian views, the Federations tried to quash the effort.
To justify this indifference, American Jewish officials have invoked the narrative of post-October 7 betrayal. In October 2025, Greenblatt declared that “many of our self-described allies simply disappeared or deeply disappointed us when we needed them” and that, since Jews were therefore fighting antisemitism largely alone, “we have no choice but to concentrate our energies like a laser beam on our core purpose … to protect the Jewish People.” The following February, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations noted that, since “many of our erstwhile friends and allies, with whom we’d marched and supported, abandoned us” after October 7, “there needs to be a reassessment of how we prioritize engaging with allies.” That same month, the head of the Jewish Federations delivered a public address articulating the American Jewish community’s concerns on America’s 250th birthday. The speech employed the words “Israel” and “antisemitism” 17 times. It did not mention “democracy” once.
Instead of trying to recreate the multi-racial, multi-religious coalitions that in prior decades supported equal treatment for African Americans, women, immigrants, and LGBTQ Americans, the organized American Jewish community is pursuing a separate peace. This separate peace does not involve an ideological defense of Trumpism. But it doesn’t oppose Trump’s vision either. The American Jewish establishment is trying instead to ensure that the white Christian ethnostate Trump is building supports Israel.
In certain ways, this strategy echoes one employed by German Jewish leaders in the 17th and 18th centuries, during the era of the “court Jew.” Court Jews helped princes raise money and, in return, were permitted to amass wealth and advocate for their co-religionists. Sometimes, they succeeded in winning greater tolerance for the Jews in their region. But even then, notes the historian David Sorkin, “toleration did not imply rights.” It certainly did not include the right to criticize the local ruler. What court Jews secured were “privileges” granted “to groups or individuals on the basis of political and economic expediency.”
Most of today’s American Jewish leaders don’t conduct business deals with Trump. But under a president whose governing style has been dubbed “neo-royalism,” they are reverting to this older model of public obedience and private influence-peddling. They are not the only political actors who are trying to appease, flatter, and even bribe Trump rather than publicly challenging his assault on democratic norms, of course; many corporate titans, heads of large law firms, and university presidents are pursuing the same strategy. What makes Jewish leaders distinct is that they are doing so in pursuit of what they deem communal self-interest. That’s why they resemble the court Jews of old.
The ADL is a telling example. After honouring Kushner in 2024, it responded to Trump’s election by hiring a lobbying firm close to the administration. It also went to extraordinary lengths to avoid publicly antagonizing Trump and his allies. When Elon Musk twice extended his arm in what appeared to be a Nazi salute at a Trump inaugural rally, the ADL overlooked his extensive record of racist and antisemitic comments and defended the move as “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.”
When this bid to ingratiate itself with the Trump administration proved insufficient, the ADL grew even more submissive. After last September’s assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Trump allies attacked the ADL for including in its “Glossary of Extremism and Hate” a 2023 entry that accused Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, of promoting “the idea that Christians should dominate the government and other areas of life in the US.” This accusation, Musk tweeted on September 28, proved that “The ADL hates Christians.” Rather than defend its decades-long opposition to white Christian nationalism, or rebut Musk’s preposterous charge, the ADL deleted not only the entry on Turning Point but the entire glossary. Then, in October, when FBI director Kash Patel accused the ADL of “functioning like a terrorist organization” because it has historically criticized the far-right, the ADL again declined to publicly defend itself. It even asked other American Jewish groups not to speak out on its behalf. It instead deleted much of the language on its website concerning civil rights.
If the ADL offers one example of the court Jew strategy, Bari Weiss offers another. Weiss is a media figure, not a Jewish official. But she is among the political commentators most aligned with pro-Israel Jewish groups. The closest thing the American Jewish establishment has to an official lecture is the annual State of World Jewry address at New York’s 92nd Street Y. Weiss delivered it after October 7.
Like the ADL, Weiss once considered Trump a threat to freedom. When he was elected in 2016, she cried at her desk. But when Trump returned to office in 2025, she announced that she no longer suffered from “Trump derangement syndrome.” In March of that year, her publication, The Free Press, penned an editorial praising Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—whose virtual elimination of the United States Agency for International Development will likely cause millions of deaths across the globe—for having “done the seemingly impossible: They have found the waste, the fraud, and the abuse. And they are promising to get rid of it.”
Then, last October, David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance and son of the pro-Israel billionaire Larry Ellison, appointed Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, at least in part, reportedly, because of her pro-Israel views. In the months since, the younger Ellison has courted Trump’s approval for his efforts to buy Warner Brothers by, among other things, cutting Jared Kushner in on the deal. For her part, Weiss and her team have curried favour with Trump by trying to spike or water down CBS News stories that document his administration’s abuse of immigrants and killing of US citizens in what three former CBS correspondents call blatant political interference.
Still, even as this deferential, transactional response to Trump evokes the court Jews of centuries past, there is a crucial difference. Early modern German Jewish leaders tried, with varying degrees of success, to defend the Jewish communities in which they lived. The court Jews of our time are mostly consumed with defending Israel. When Greenblatt says that the ADL will now focus primarily on protecting Jews, he does not mean protecting them from the white Christian nationalism of Elon Musk and Turning Point USA. He means protecting them from anti-Zionism, even though almost half of young American Jews now support a binational state. Ellison and Weiss are turning CBS, and soon perhaps CNN, which Ellison may acquire as part of the Warner Brothers deal, into pro-Israel propaganda shops while doing fawning interviews with Charlie Kirk’s widow. Miriam Adelson—another Trump-era court Jew, who has offered to give the president $250 million to run for a third term and suggested adding a “Book of Trump” to the Bible—also uses her access chiefly to ensure that he supports Israel. Trump himself has publicly joked that Adelson cares more about Israel than the United States.
The willingness of today’s establishment Jewish groups to aid and abet a racist aspiring dictator as long as he arms Israel and suppresses criticism of it in the US isn’t only immoral. It’s also profoundly foolish because it ignores the core insight that animated American Jewish politics after World War II: Bigotries travel together. A host of studies show that animosity toward American Jews correlates with hostility to Muslims and far-right attitudes in general. The shooter who attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 turned his fury on Jews only after he had been convinced by the pro-Trump media that they were helping Central American immigrants to invade the United States. The ADL itself released a study in 2023 showing that Americans who supported violently restoring Trump to power were far more likely than other Americans to hold antisemitic views. In the era of Donald Trump, as in the era of George Wallace, white supremacists who threaten American democracy also threaten Jews.
Nearly every day brings new evidence that the firewall between antisemitism and other forms of bigotry is a mirage. In November of last year, as the ADL was scrubbing its website to eliminate evidence that it had ever cared about the rights of Black Americans, Nick Fuentes—the most prominent young neo-Nazi in the United States—publicly mocked the idea that white nationalism would not come for the Jews. The Republican Party, he noted, “tolerated all this offensive stuff against every other group” but “the deal is that you could never criticize the Jews.” That artificial limitation, Fuentes declared, is “fucked up.”
Fuentes loathes not only Jews, but Israel as well. Elon Musk, by contrast, still champions the Jewish state. But regardless of their views of Zionism, it is increasingly clear that the white Christian nationalists who want to subordinate other American minorities do not make an exception for Jews. Last October, Politico published excerpts of a group chat conducted among young Republican leaders across the country. They included expressions of support not only for slavery and rape, but also for Adolf Hitler. Tucker Carlson, arguably the right’s most prominent media figure, is embracing the trend. In Trump’s first term, he largely trained his ire on Black and brown immigrants. Now he’s expanded the narrative to include Jews. After a friendly interview with Fuentes last fall, this spring he hosted another young far-right influencer, Tyler Oliveira. As Carlson egged him on, Oliveira explained that he had gravitated from making videos about “parasitic” Somalis in Minnesota to focusing on “parasitic” ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York. This Jewish freeloading, Carlson explained, stemmed from a “legalistic worldview” that contrasts with the “higher law having to do with your ethics: Honor, shame, decency” promoted by the “New Testament.”
The German court Jews had little choice but to cling to princes for protection. But American Jewish leaders do have a choice. They could do what their predecessors did in the mid-20th century. They could use their considerable resources to fight fascism. By refusing to do so, they are making themselves ever more dependent on the protection of fickle tyrants like Trump. They are betting that Miriam Adelson’s money, Bari Weiss and David Ellison’s censorship, and the ADL’s submissiveness will convince Trump and his Republican successors to limit themselves to racism, Islamophobia, transphobia, and misogyny and not stray into antisemitism, even as it grows among the party’s base. That’s deeply unwise.
Imagine a counterfactual in which Jewish billionaires purchased news networks so they could defend the rule of the law rather than defend Israel, and in which Jewish-led lobbying groups like AIPAC supported politicians who oppose authoritarianism in the United States rather than those who defend Israel’s authoritarian rule over Palestinians. Imagine if the ADL, the AJC, the Conference of Presidents, and the Jewish Federations confronted Trump the way they confront Mamdani. Imagine if the leaders of the organized American Jewish community acted as if they care whether America remains a free country.
Maybe such efforts would meaningfully increase the chances that American democracy survives Donald Trump. Maybe they would not. But, either way, no future American Jewish leader will pay homage to the ethical “inheritance bequeathed to us” by Jonathan Greenblatt, as Greenblatt once did about Benjamin Epstein. When future generations look back at how the institutional Jewish community reacted in this moment of democratic peril, they will find little worthy of emulation. Mostly, they will be filled with shame.
In recent years, I’ve watched as mainstream Jewish institutions and media have chosen ethnonationalism over liberal democracy and mass slaughter over the pursuit of a just peace. Jewish Currents offers something different. It’s a magazine built on intellectual curiosity and respect for the dignity of all people.
Peter Beinart is the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents
