Since the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks and the start of Israel’s war in Gaza, the annual “State of World Jewry” address at 92Y—the New York City cultural center that used to be known, before its zippy rebranding, as the 92nd Street Y—has exclusively featured neoconservative commentators: Bari Weiss in 2024, Dan Senor in 2025, and Bret Stephens this year. The Upper East Side space is not the most representative Jewish institution in the country, but it is arguably a reliable weathervane of civically inclined liberal Jewish community leaders. More than two years after Oct. 7, the hawkish sensibility that suddenly pervaded American Jewish discourse has not abated.
The headlines following Stephens’s address on Feb. 2 focused on his criticism of the Jewish community’s overinvestment in anti-antisemitism initiatives, and his subsequent suggestion to “dismantle” the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). But Stephens’s attention-grabbing provocation concealed a message both more prosaic and troubling for its implications in how American Jews should approach the present political moment. “We need to take this as an opportunity to stop caring,” Stephens said, referring to sundry social anxieties American Jews have felt in recent years. “The goal of Jewish life is not to ingratiate ourselves with others so that they might dislike us somewhat less.”
Proceeding from this uncharitable caricature of Jewish liberalism, Stephens laid out a program for action that even he acknowledged was more of the same but at greater scale: a massive expansion of day schools, a more robust Jewish press, and the seeding of a “Jewish sovereign wealth fund,” an idea floated by the senior counselor to the CEO of Palantir in the Sapir journal, which Stephens edits.
Put another way: more investment in Jewish-only spaces, or spaces meant primarily for Jews. Stephens wants the American Jewish community to step back from efforts to improve their country, including trying to make it less antisemitic. In his telling, such wider civic engagement is a waste of resources; American Jews are in a position to focus on themselves and they should do so.
Stephens is not the first person to suggest that American Jews should invest in a collective Jewish departure from spaces in which they are apparently no longer welcomed, an assertion taken as an unproblematic fact by the audience. Indeed, his criticism of Jewish leadership strikes me as outdated. Who actually thinks the major institutions of American Jewish life still lean too heavily towards assimilation? Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the ADL, who was in the audience, did not seem to take much offense at the casual suggestion that his job be eliminated. He correctly perceives Stephens as being aligned with the general thrust of organized American Jewish life today.
Stephens wants us to put the assimilationist impulse in reverse.
The non-clash between Stephens and Greenblatt points to a peculiar impoverishment of the American Jewish public sphere. At a time when major foundations of American liberal democracy are under existential strain, a community that played a critical role in securing that political order is apparently meant to be satisfied by a debate between remarkably similar visions of retrenchment and parochial inwardness.
But American Jews have never been liberals, democrats, and integrationists just because they judge liberal policies, and the national political environment they promote, to be right, or correct—it’s also that they’ve judged liberalism to be in their best interests. The good feelings and solidarity sometimes developed between Jews and other Americans in the struggle to achieve and protect the full promise of citizenship are nice, but they are incidental byproducts of a necessary partnership. The point is to ensure equality before the law and a free, pluralistic society in which no group holds inherent privileges or is subject to belittlement. That’s nothing less than a precondition for Jewish thriving.
If progressive young Jews could once protest the American Jewish establishment for its hypocrisy in espousing liberalism at home and lockstep nationalism in Israel, this is no longer the case. The American Jewish establishment today is liberal neither at home nor abroad. The 92Y and ADL are not alone in embracing a narrowed political imaginary. Liberalism, in fact, has become something of an orphan in American Jewish politics. Despite the fact that liberalism remains the outlook of a majority of American Jews, it finds few champions among American Jewish thought leaders. This is a reversal of an older dynamic in which prominent Jewish leaders were more eager proponents of liberalism than the communities they purported to represent. Today, American Jewish liberals must navigate this perilous moment without guidance from the top.
Compared to their responses to the first Trump administration, the response of institutional liberal American Jewry to the attacks on foundational liberal democratic ideals over the last year has been pitiful, even though these attacks have been much more extensive and damaging this time around. Barely a day passes without an administration action that would have once provoked apoplectic liberal outrage. From the lawless wrecking ball directed at federal agencies and workers last year; to the heavy-handed occupations of American cities to target immigrants and brutalize protesters; to the mafioso shakedowns of nonprofit and educational institutions; to the routine and open racism and Islamophobia of administration officials and elected representatives of the Republican Party; to the regular threats of political prosecutions; to the anti-pluralistic nods to Christian and white nationalism; to the targeting of birthright citizenship for elimination, we are faced with a radical right-wing government.
Yet for too many Jewish leaders, it is now business as usual. After Trump was first elected in 2016, Jonathan Greenblatt pledged to register as a Muslim if such a list was compiled. From 2017-2021, the ADL repeatedly spoke out in defense of immigrants, refugees, and Black Americans. No such heroics are on display today. When President Trump called Somali Americans “garbage,” the ADL was silent. When Elon Musk appeared to project a Sieg Heil after Trump’s 2025 inauguration, the ADL counseled caution in defending a figure with longstanding affinities with white supremacists and neo-Nazis. When the administration’s offenses against decency are occasionally referenced by the ADL, they are invariably “balanced” by references to supposed liberal excesses, such as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz referring to Anne Frank in describing the terrors to which immigrant and refugee children are being subjected by heavily armed grown men.
“The goal of Jewish life is not to ingratiate ourselves with others so that they might dislike us somewhat less.”
The American Jewish Committee (AJC) has scarcely been better, bending over backwards so that their position does not offend the administration. Reading the statement released by the AJC in the aftermath of the federal government summarily killing two U.S. citizens, one might conclude a mere “tragedy” had taken place. They seemed blithely unaware that the government was slandering its victims as “domestic terrorists” and lying to the public about what transpired. As far as I can tell, none of the dozens of local Jewish federations in the United States has issued a principled statement against the second Trump administration’s escalating attacks on democracy, the rule of law, immigrants, and our Muslim neighbors.
The legacy liberal American Jewish organizations have been absent or worse over the last year. Even the Reform movement—the most outspoken of all the major groups—has steadily withdrawn from its liberal commitments. Anxiety over declining Zionism among Reform Jewish youth and the rise of leftist politicians like Zohran Mamdani have taken the place of prophetic calls for social justice. But what may be most telling is that even critics of American Jewish liberalism on the left no longer expect better from such Jewish leaders. They have moved on and are organizing amongst themselves. Who can blame them?
But in the absence of a forceful American Jewish liberal dissent, directed at the center of our community, the moral fiber of institutions with sizable endowments of real and social capital is now mainly the concern of the center-right and the right.
How did we get here? Despite their fixation on growing antisemitism, Jewish institutions and leaders betray an incredible faith in state action to protect them. Any threat to an American Jew’s place in society is today usually portrayed as originating from civil society, particularly college campuses, social justice organizations of various kinds, and the media. The state is not only treated as a benign actor by comparison but sometimes as an ally in disciplining institutions, like universities, that supposedly fail to adequately protect Jews. Thus, the Trump administration’s opposition to birthright citizenship, explicit hostility to a religious minority (Muslim Americans), routine demonization of nonwhite immigrants, and boorish attacks on civil society are not properly registered by American Jewish leaders as a threat to them.
This fallen faith in civil society and inflated faith in state power suffused American Jewish liberalism after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. If this may have been an understandable overcorrection when the Biden administration was in office, it is a positively harmful conception of political life under an administration with authoritarian ambitions. The administration gleefully weaponizes charges of antisemitism to target its opponents, while gutting civil rights protections for disfavored minorities. Having placed their trust in the state and seemingly not yet abandoned it, Jewish leaders choose quiescence.
I do not mean to romanticize a past era of American Jewish liberalism, which produced its own reaction with the birth of neoconservatism. Neoconservatives believed that the United States had rectified its wrongs by 1965 or so, and that further liberal efforts, especially affirmative action and public programs for the urban poor, were unwarranted and harmful. Though neoconservatives never convinced the majority of American Jews to vote for the Republican Party, they spoke to a growing skepticism in the community about liberalism. Liberal Jewish leaders in mainstream organizations like the ADL, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (today, the Union for Reform Judaism), the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress saw it as their mission to push back against these trends and keep American Jews from abandoning liberalism altogether. Even when the ADL, AJC, and American Jewish Congress opposed affirmative action quotas in the 1970s, they did so in liberal terms. Unlike the neoconservatives, they supported affirmative action provided it did not involve explicit quotas.
But the American Jewish community is now falling short even of the standards set by previous popular backlashes to liberalism. Whatever else can be said about Jewish neoconservatism, it did not come with any trusting naiveté about the state. The argument was that Jewish liberals had gotten liberalism wrong in their support for the Great Society. While much of the third generation of neoconservatives has now organized around outlets such as The Bulwark to sound the alarm over the Trump Administration’s fascistic tendencies, American Jewish leaders, at least publicly, regard the Trump federal government as normative. If we are so fortunate to have future historians who will document the movements and activists that prevented the United States from descending into full-on authoritarianism, the American Jewish community will certainly not hold the honored place it does in the annals of the twentieth century.
The American Jewish establishment today is liberal neither at home nor abroad.
From the liberal perspective, the most tragic development for American Jews since Oct. 7 must be the ad nauseam denigration of cross-communal political alliances. Almost immediately after Oct. 7, many liberal, pro-Israel Jews sensed a “betrayal” from former allies—either because they expressly supported the Palestinian national movement that day or were reluctant to display sympathy for Israeli civilians killed and taken hostage by Hamas. This was real, and it was painful. Knowing his audience, Stephens spoke directly to these still-lingering wounds: “This fact seems to shock Jews, perhaps never more so than after October the 7th, when we witnessed just how little compassion there was for Jewish anguish, most of all from the very people to whom we had given so much.”
But to view historic liberal Jewish support for social justice movements as charity toward the less fortunate (“the very people to whom we had given so much”) is to thoroughly misunderstand the political logic of American Jewish liberalism. It is a misconception Jewish neoconservatives have constantly repeated, at least since 1973, when Milton Himmelfarb made his famous remark about American Jews having the incomes of Episcopalians and the voting records of Puerto Ricans. Now that the old economic paradox of Jewish liberalism has been made obsolete, with other high-education and high-income groups increasingly at home in the Democratic Party, hostility to Israel on the left today serves as the primary hobbyhorse for those looking to highlight what Irving Kristol termed “the political stupidity of the Jews.”
Rising to the defense of demonized minorities under a ferocious attack by the most openly reactionary federal administration in at least a century should be a matter of self-interest for American Jews. The basic civil and political rights of all American citizens are not safe today. Regression is always possible and is the reality for Muslim Americans and minorities targeted with maximum sadism and hatred by the Trump administration. It requires no deep dive into the ideology of the Christian nationalist right to understand the potential devastating threat to American Jews.
If any “lesson” can be derived from modern Jewish history, it is this radical contingency of legal equality and belonging. As David Sorkin writes in his monumental Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (2019), “Equality and the exercise of citizenship were and are, always and everywhere, fragile, subject to substantial infringement if not outright abrogation. The process of emancipation continues into the twenty-first century. Jews everywhere live in the era of Emancipation.”
American Jewish liberals are desperately needed, both for Jewish flourishing and for the country. The first step in reviving this tradition may be in recognizing that we do not have the luxury to choose between the two.
