The Texas Synagogue Attack and the Duality of American Jewish Life

I’ll send this week’s regular newsletter—with details about the Zoom call—tomorrow. For now, some brief thoughts on this weekend’s attack in Texas.

On Saturday, a man demanding the release of a Pakistani woman convicted on terrorism charges took the rabbi and several congregants hostage in a synagogue outside of Dallas-Fort Worth. The hostage-taker was eventually killed, apparently by law enforcement. None of the hostages were injured, thankfully. There’s a lot we still don’t know about this bizarre and frightening episode but one image flashed in my head as I followed the news.

For much of the last two years, because of COVID, our synagogue has held parts of its Shabbat morning service outside, often in Central Park. Standing there on the grass, I’ve watched passersby watching us. And I’ve wondered: Are they impressed by our religious devotion? Are they proud that in America—or at least, New York—Jews can pray outside, in full view? That public prayer felt to me like a symbol of the unusual self-confidence that many American Jews possess—our comfort in making our Jewishness public. At many other historical periods, and in many other countries, even today, such a public display would be unthinkable. I remember going to shul three years ago in a nondescript building in Amsterdam whose inhabitants wouldn’t even unlock the door until I had completed the phrase: “Shema Yisrael…”

It being New York, I also wondered whether some of the people staring at us were Jews who either felt guilty that they weren’t observing Shabbat themselves or pleased that at least someone was. And I also wondered, every time, whether any of those passersby constituted a threat. The thought often led me to check that the security guard who walked us to Central Park, and guarded our perimeter, was still there.

These disparate instincts—the instinct that America is welcoming and the instinct that America is dangerous, the instinct that the Jewish experience in America is fundamentally different from other diaspora experiences and the instinct that will ultimately prove to be the same—compete in American Jewish consciousness. (Or at least in the consciousness of those Jews who are generally regarded as white.) One might say they constitute a competition within American Jews between Americanism and Jewishness. In Joshua Cohen’s novel, The Netanyahus, the narrator, Reuben Blum, describes being whiplashed as a child in mid-twentieth century New York between the optimistic narrative he learned in public school and the pessimistic one he learned in Hebrew school. “The history in my regular schooling was all about progress, a world that brightened with the Enlightenment and steadily improved, a world that would continue to improve illimitably, so long as every country kept trying to be more like America and America kept trying to be more like itself.” By contrast, at Hebrew school, “there was no past, present, future. Rather, there was time, as round and perfect as the earth, which from the moment it had emerged from God’s spoken light had been marked by a constant repetition…of oppression, violence and death…hate would again find its vessel and we’d be kicked out of America too, kicked out or murdered.”

Incidents like the one outside Dallas-Fort Worth shift the balance, at least temporarily, toward pessimism. They lead American synagogues to invest more heavily in security, which makes them more like the bunker I encountered in Amsterdam. As Raphael Magarik has suggested, these traumatic episodes may even lead more American Jews to avoid synagogue altogether, and instead attend Shabbat and holiday services virtually—something made possible by Zoom and the fact that most American Jews do not observe Shabbat restrictions on the use of electricity. These attacks also shift the balance, at least temporarily, in how American Jews see Israel: Making them more likely to see Jewish statehood as a non-negotiable life raft than a project that violates liberal ideals.

I don’t want to exaggerate. One antisemitic episode in Texas, even on the heels of antisemitic shootings in Pittsburgh and California, does not undo the powerful assimilationist forces in American Jewish life. Many younger American Jews (better called Jewish Americans, since their Americanism is primary) have never even heard the deeply pessimistic narrative that Reuben Blum imbibed in the synagogue basements of mid-twentieth century New York. Nor do one, three, or even ten, violent antisemitic incidents erase the fact that Jews have never been America’s quintessential other in the way they were in Europe. According to polls, in fact, Jews are the most admired religious group in the United States—overrepresented in positions of power and generally venerated by politicians of all ideological stripes. There is, for instance, not a single member of Congress who opposes the existence at the State Department of an antisemitism envoy tasked with combatting Jew-hatred around the world. By contrast, when Democrats last year proposed creating a similar job to combat Islamophobia, every single House Republican voted no.

For all these reasons, when I worry about Jewish life in America—when I imagine that my children or grandchildren might one day have to emigrate from their country, as my parents and grandparents did from theirs—I don’t worry about antisemitism per se. I don’t worry that the fate of Jews in early twenty-first America will resemble the fate of Jews in early twentieth century Europe. I worry that the fate of democracy in early twenty-first century America will resemble the fate of democracy in early twentieth century Europe (or late nineteenth century America). What worries me is that while a young American Jew today might be bewildered by the pessimistic story that Reuben Blum learned about Jews, they might also be bewildered by the optimistic story he learned about America. The duality Cohen described between Jewish pessimism and American optimism relied on a confidence about the United States that is eroding every year. If American democracy survives, and if American democracy can help answer the great threats facing the country and the world—above all, climate change—American Jews will be OK, horrific events like the one in Texas notwithstanding. If American democracy falls, the United States will be a hazardous place not just for Jews but for us all.

The regular newsletter comes tomorrow.

Peter