https://www.city-journal.org/article/embrace-pluralism-over-racialism
Jews feel less safe in America than they did a generation ago, and for good reason. As my colleagues have documented, we are living through a disturbing surge in anti-Semitic violence. The reason, I suspect, is a change in the ideological climate, one that represents a grave threat to the American experiment.
Other nations, throughout their histories, have scorned the Jewish people. But it was George Washington who asked that “the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” Since then, America has welcomed the Jewish people. In return, it has reaped enormous rewards, as the extraordinary achievements of Jewish scientists, doctors, lawyers, artists, businesspeople, and statesmen have helped make America the most dynamic, productive, and creative nation in the world.
America’s relationship with Jews is special but not entirely unique. The U.S. welcomed them for the same reason it welcomed my immigrant parents and countless others: a sense of confidence that America’s founding values were so compelling that we need not fear difference. If newcomers embraced the nation’s commitment to hard work and self-reliance, the presence of thriving communities of different religious and ethnic stripes would enrich the American experiment, not endanger it. This balance between an expectation of assimilation to shared norms of personal responsibility and active citizenship, on the one hand, and warm tolerance for the preservation of inherited traditions, on the other—call it meritocratic pluralism—has worked exceedingly well for countless minority ethnic groups, American Jews included.
Today, a new form of adversarial identity politics threatens to throw this balance askew. This “racialism”—a belief that race-consciousness and group-based conflict are and will forever remain central to American public life—scorns meritocratic pluralism, offering in its place a noxious brand of leveling-down egalitarianism. If racial groups are always at odds and assimilation is impossible or undesirable, a given group’s prosperity is no longer worthy of celebration and emulation. Wealth instead becomes a zero-sum pie to divvy up. Groups like the Jews—who turn the blessings of liberty into economic and intellectual achievement through hard work and sacrifice—are regarded with envy.
