The Atlantic: The Challenge for American Jews by Michael Sonnenfeldt
American Jews have achieved unprecedented safety, integration, and success in the United States, yet we carry a long historical memory in which periods of apparent security elsewhere, again and again, ended abruptly in exclusion, violence, murder, or expulsion. I grew up with a deeply personal connection to the Holocaust and with sensitivity to how the erosion of democratic institutions and the descent into fascism enabled the rise of Nazism. My father, Richard Sonnenfeldt, was a German Jewish refugee who fled to England in 1938 and then, at 23, became the chief interpreter for the American prosecution at the Nuremberg trials, and ultimately Hermann Göring’s personal interpreter.
Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that the United States is not Weimar Germany or Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement, where deadly pogroms against Jews were a regular feature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. America’s constitutional order—independent courts, federalism, a free press, and a robust civil society—provides formidable safeguards against the translation of social hostility into state persecution. Jews are not a tolerated caste here but full participants across every sector of civic life: business, academia, media, the professions, government, the arts. Jewish confidence in America’s resilience is not foolish. The challenge is to hold that warranted confidence alongside a warranted fear.
And yet, for Jews, the question of security for Israel requires its own response to that historical vulnerability, and Israel’s founding created a moral and political tension that many of us find it difficult to reconcile. In 1947, the United Nations adopted a partition plan that contemplated two states, one Jewish and one Arab. It treated that decision as a legal basis for Jewish sovereignty, even as it was rejected by the Arab world, which responded by invading the just-born Jewish state. The invasion failed.
Though the ideas of modern political Zionism long predate the Holocaust, Israel was established by the world community in response to the unimaginable atrocities and extermination perpetrated by the Nazis, who murdered one out of every three Jews on the planet. Perhaps no other people in history suffered such losses. The United Nations General Assembly affirmed the legality and necessity of a Jewish state, and its founding was supported by a majority of UN member states. Even so, the Palestinians who were displaced by the establishment of the state of Israel deserve a chance at freedom and normalcy, too.
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