Thread by @petersavodnik

After the war, you couldn't be openly antisemitic. Or, at least, you had to camouflage your antisemitism. Then, around 1970, as the Boomers streamed into the labor market, the new tolerance became institutionalized. That was the beginning of the respite from history. /1

For three or four decades, the Jews inhabited this halcyon dream. It was unlike anything they had ever experienced in the diaspora. They were not simply tolerated but celebrated. The U.S. alliance w/the Jewish state seemed like a ratification of the new openness. /2

There had always been elements, on the radical right and left, that hated Jews, but they were radical, and we lived in a decidedly un-radical moment. We thought this was the new permanent state of things. We thought we would continue progressing forever. But then... /3

in the first decade of this century, there were the first glimmers of a long forgotten intolerance (or, in my case, an intolerance that I had never known, that I couldn't quite comprehend). And it came from the most unusual place: the left. /4

I recall being at a Democratic powwow in D.C. in 2003, and there was someone there from Joe Lieberman's presidential campaign, and a few of the younger people, people who were younger than I was, made a face. Lieberman, they said, was part of "the Israel lobby." /5

I had a vague notion of what they meant. I was familiar w/the literature. But it seemed kind of fringe. I didn't think about it until the early 2010's, when Democrats started attacking Israel more brazenly -- not Bashar Assad, or Hezbollah, or the mullahs. But the Jews. /6

The unspoken party line was: Israel and Israel's supporters in the U.S. (i.e., the Jews!) were the reason we had gone to war in Iraq. "At least admit the neocons are all Jewish," an Obama staffer said to me in a bar circa 2013. "Is Cheney a Jew?" I said. "Or Rumsfeld?" /7

That was when the progressive Jews started to pounce on Netanyahu like never before. They seemed to think that if they attacked him loudly enough they might prove to everyone else that they were good Jews. This is literally the oldest movie in the history of movies. /8

Over the next few years, the identitarian impulse intensified. I remember when Bernie Sanders was about to give a speech in Seattle, in 2015, and he was interrupted by some BLM activists. They were angry. He was confused. He didn't get that the paradigm had shifted. /9

Trump, of course, exacerbated things, but he was more effect than cause. He gave the radicals on the left an excuse to protest. (I've wondered whether so many progressives would have cared so much about George Floyd had Trump not been president at the time.) /10

By the fall of 2023, the institutions had long since embraced the new racialism. DEI was a thing. Antiracism was the new orthodoxy. On campus, there was an understood (if unspoken) discrimination against whites and Asians. The new hate was now baked into the everyday. /11

When Oct. 7 happened, the unspoken discrimination became more overt. That was when the anti-whiteness fused w/the anti-Zionism that stretched all the way back to the early aughts, if not earlier. It was, for Jews at least, kind of incredible to be called uber-white. /12

Over the past two years, the new antisemitism has deepened on the left -- leftists insist they only object to Zionism, not Judaism; they forget Zionism is central to Jewish identity -- and it has gripped much of the right. It is no longer fringe. It is hardly radical. /13

All of which makes The New Yorker inviting an unapologetic Jew-hater to its fiesta predictable and sad. The respite from history has been over for awhile, but many Jews have pretended otherwise. That is now impossible for all but the most delusional. /14

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