It would be easy to dismiss Franklin Foer’s recent piece in the Atlantic – “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending” – as simply another salvo in the long litany liberal Zionist hand-wringing about what really has come to a final end: the “Golden Age” of Zionist consensus, roughly the 1970s to perhaps the early 2000s. Yet every now and again, an essay commits such political and historical violations that ignoring it is impossible: it demands, in a sense, to be put on trial.  

Foer begins his essay with vivid portraits of Jewish students alarmed at the rise of massive pro-Palestine protests since October 7th, with dramatic calls by Jewish parents for Jews to leave public school systems, hide Jewish markers such as Stars of David and kippot, and wonder who, among the good people of America, are still our friends. While Foer is correct to talk of a rise antisemitism and threats to even the most basic democratic protections in the recent years, one might caution a prominent Jewish writer that the moral crisis facing this generation of American Jews is not criticism of Israel but the crimes committed in his name: Israel’s invasion of Gaza has become a “meat-grinder” for Palestinian civilians in none other than Thomas Friedman’s evocative phrase, and a “genocide” in the case the South Africa brought before the ICJ. If there is a crisis for American Jewry, it is less in the verbal rhetoric of Students for Justice in Palestine than the sclerotic power wielded by Jewish institutions such as the ADL and Jewish Federation supporting, very materially, Israel’s violence and America’s appetite for endless war.  

Yet Foer does more than merely opine for a lost consensus over Israel; he argues that Jewish life, as we have known it in the U.S., is coming to an end. He wraps his despair over the rise of popular rejection of Israel in a heavy gauze of nostalgia for what Yuri Slezkine referred to as the “Jewish Century,” the 100 year ascendency of Jewish success and cultural visibility in the U.S. From high rates of educational attainment, to cultural and political innovation, from Jewish socialist politics of the early Forward and garment workers’ unions to more radical interventions of Jewish communists, feminists and freedom riders, Slezkine argues that Jewish comfort in the world of cosmopolitan modernity culminated in the prominence of a certain kind of pugnacious Ashkenazi Jewish writer and intellectual, iconically located in figures such as Lenny Bruce, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Richard Hofstadter and others.  In Foer’s assessment, this is all coming to a bitter end: with MAGA hats to the right of us, and Palestine solidarity activists to the left, what is a nice Jewish liberal to do?

To make his point, Foer and the editors of The Atlantic emblazoned their cover with a faux mid-century Yiddishkeit playbill.  Cast in Hebrew script and under photos of well-known American Jews such as Roth, Bob Dylan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Leonard Nimoy, there are Yiddish phrases from Sholem Aleichem about antisemitism, “shver tsu zayn a Yid” (“it is hard to be a Jew”), and a reference to the radical playwright S. Ansky’s “The Dybbuk,” “tsi iz arayn a dibek in di gilden-fon-universitetn?” (“has a dybbuk possessed the golden-flag schools”)?  It is clear that Foer and the Atlantic editors are trying to construct a genealogy of American Jewish life which begins with Jewish socialism and mellows like room-temperature Manischewitz as it glides down the gullet of the 20th century, ending improbably with both Barbara Streisand and Thomas Friedman celebrating the sight of Israelis in tanks and jet fighters. Yet for all paeans to the meteoric rise of Jewish Americans like a surface-to-air missile into the middle class in Grace Paley’s phrasing, the very figures Foer invokes should suggest that all is not kosher in his bat mitzvah for the mid-century Jewish coming of age.

The first and most obvious flaw in Foer’s construction of a vital Jewish center is to point out that few of the intellectuals and artists Foer evokes would agree with him. Philp Roth, mentioned prominently in the first section of Foer’s essay and placed at eye-catching center-left of the cover, devoted his entire career to satirizing the likes of Foer. Roth’s most famous take-down of Zionism, his 1986 novel The Counterlife, is a send-up of Foer’s entire premise: For Roth, Israel is a psychic compensation, a kind of fantasy wish-fulfillment for a life lived anxiously if all too well in the U.S. The narrator’s brother, afraid of his waning virility after mid-life heart-failure, moves to an ultra-orthodox settlement in the West Bank, takes a Hebrew name, and takes to wearing a gun. I-made-Aliyah-because-America-stole-my-erection is rendered far more seriously in Operation Shylock, in which it is clear the narrator views Palestinians as the ironic and tragic inheritors of Jewish history, displaced and marginalized in a late capitalist racial ghetto.  

Both novels are, of course, stories of doubling, uncertainty, narrative fragmentation, and identity displacement, interrupting in an epistemic way the imagined reality of a blood-and-soil homeland. Roth seems to argue that rather than a Jewish homeland, there is nothing more alien to American Jewish identity than to pretend one belongs somewhere. American Jews, Roth seems to say, need Israel only because they refuse the many-layered irony and mobility of Jewish American life. Roth would argue that Foer’s mobilization of an unbroken line of Jewish history that materializes in the iron-clad security of the Merkava tank undoes the very thing that makes American Jewish life worth writing about. In Roth’s construction, it is Foer who marks the end of the “Jewish Century,” not keffiyeh-wearing Jewish activists.

I point out Roth only because, as perhaps the most famous of the post-war generation of Jewish liberal writers, his very centrality to the tradition Foer wishes to evoke should force him to take an even greater pause considering the figures missing from his nostalgia-trap of Jewish life. As Foer frames it, Jewish liberalism helped usher in a “golden age” not only for Jews, but for America itself:  “Jewish dreams became American dreams,” as he summarizes it. And yet one has to ask, for which Jews? Not the hundreds of thousands of Jewish American communists and socialists, many of whom were hounded out of American life by the Red Scare and even deported; not for Lenny Bruce who bitterly remarked in his memoir, “goddamn Israel and its bond drives…what influence did they exert to save the lives of the Rosenbergs?” And certainly not for the Rosenbergs themselves. Even the most iconic Jewish celebrity radicals of the 1960s – the supposed heyday of American Jewish comfortability in the U.S. – Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Judy Gumbo, Chuck McDew – openly compared the United States to Nazi Germany for its massacres of Vietnamese people. And even more saliently, they were openly hostile to Israel. As Jerry Rubin famously quipped in his memoir, “If Moses were alive today, he’d be an Arab guerrilla.”     

I should point out, though, that Foer’s vision of American Jewish life is standard among professional Jewish historians. From Jonathan Sarna to Marc Dollinger to Cheryl Greenberg to Deborah Lipstadt, Jewish liberalism is not only the Panglossian best of all possible worlds for Jewish life in America, it has been liberalism for Jews all the way down. Sarna, Dollinger, and many others briskly make the argument that after Auschwitz, or perhaps Levittown, Jews are all good Americans now. Their histories of American Jewish life never mention the Red Scare, the Johnson-Reed Act, or the rabbis trying in vain to meet with Roosevelt at the peak of the Holocaust. This split-level suburban Eddie Cantor-and-Al Jolson view of Jewish American life would be shameful enough were it not colliding in real time with vast and profound cleavages in American Jewish life. Even as Foer evokes the golden age of Jewish life, Jewish life, from the corner office to the street, seems to have its own irreconcilable opinions about the directions of American Jewry, from the ADL defending  the pro-Israel Elon Musk’s antisemitism to tens of thousands of Jewish Voice for Peace activists taking to the streets to demand an end to Israeli apartheid and genocide: neither of these streams is particularly liberal. Within Jewish life and not just from without, liberalism is coming up against its own contradictions.

As phony as Foer’s evocation of Yiddish history may be, I think it can be instructive as a means to distinguish between “nostalgia” and “memory” when it comes to articulating a Jewish past in the United States. As many American Jews are casting about for historical metaphors as Zionism’s colonial and violent nature can no longer be concealed, Foer reaches back into a myth of American Jewish life as to say, it is not we who have a problem, it is all of America. Nostalgia as a mode, to cite the literary critic Frederic Jameson, is one outside of history, rendering historical time as flat, seamless, inside the immediacy of the present. Foer’s evocation of Yiddish is precisely this form of saccharine nostalgic haze: an incoherent mashup of Jewish leftists, anti-Zionists, cosmopolitanists and then also, nationalists, racists, and colonialists, as if these have any more common than exemplary Russians Tsar Nicholas the Second and Vladimir Lenin. 

“Memory” on the other hand, as Walter Benjamin frames it, can be a disruptive force, entering political discourse in a moment of crisis to suggest the re-emergence of lost futures. As many Jewish activists and scholars are now unearthing histories of Jewish anarchists, socialists, communists, anti-Zionists, they do so not to preserve a Jewish status-quo, but rather to chart new paths through a fragmenting present. Indeed, every generation of Jewish radicals invents its own past to break with what Benjamin refers to as the “social conformism of progress,” what Foer would describe as the seamless march to the future of (Jewish) America. Whether Molly Crabapple’s histories of Bundist anti-Zionism socialism, the Chutzpah Collective’s evocation of radical partisans and garment workers, Amelia Glazer’s recovery of radical Yiddish poetry, Alan Wald’s literary biographies of Jewish communists such as Abraham Polonsky and Mike Gold, Judtih Butler and Daniel Boyarin’s reclamation of “diaspora,” such histories are spectres in Marx’s phrasing, to haunt the present and present by way of the past, a different path forward.

Whether such radical projects can take hold in 21st century America is up for debate. Foer is right in one regard: a certain era of Jewish American history is over, or at least, is concluding, that is not separate but rather a part of a certain crisis writ large of American liberalism. And indeed, this is perhaps what Foer actually mourns: that his affiliation with American liberalism and an apartheid state are now shown, in full view, for both its contradictions and its continuities.  As much as liberalism has been a strong current of American Jewish life, its hegemony was always in dialogue with other strains of both radicalism and reaction, and it has only been by the violent power of states that the former was earlier suppressed and the latter is on the warpath. The liberalism that Foer evokes has, in its earlier moments of crisis, aligned with an imperial state even over the interests of other Jews, whether covering over Roosevelt and Truman’s barring of Holocaust refugees or siding with the American Jewish Committee in its support for the Rosenbergs’ execution. The vital center was never vital, and its hegemony could only be secured by the silencing and erasure of the radical left, and the absorption of the radical right.  Whatever the future of American Jewry may be, I will take the activists marching for Palestine over Foer’s over-the-counter-culture schmaltz.

Benjamin Balthaser is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University at South Bend. He is the author of Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (University of Michigan Press, 2015) and Dedication (Partisan Press, 2011), a collection of poetry based on the lives of Jewish labor activists.