https://www.commentary.org/articles/dan-senor/american-jewry-after-october-7/
For many of us, October 7 was a wake-up call of sorts, which gave birth to what some have taken to calling “October 8 Jews.” I prefer not to use that term, as it implies that they suddenly became Jews on October 8.
Nonetheless, there was a crack in Jewish consciousness on October 8, 2023. Suddenly, many Jews began to think differently about their Jewish identity, their Jewish community, and their connection to Jewish peoplehood everywhere—especially in Israel. Sociologists and Jewish leaders heralded a “surge of interest” in Jewish life.
People started wearing Jewish stars for the first time. They went to rallies. They donated hundreds of millions to emergency campaigns and sent supplies to IDF units. And the new openness to Jewish identity opened them up to indignation and shock. Over WhatsApp, people forwarded articles by the score in chat groups. I call them the “Can You Believe!?” groups, as in: “Can you BELIEVE Christiane Amanpour aired that segment?” Or “Can you BELIEVE Thomas Friedman trashed Israel again in his column?” In truth, this wasn’t as much a Jewish awakening as an outpouring of Jewish adrenaline.
And as with adrenaline, I think we can all feel the moment fading with the passage of time. It would be dangerous for us to return to the false sense of security we felt on October 6.
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Since October 7, I have heard the following two comments more than any other from American Jews.
First: Jews have played key leadership roles in so many pillars of society: finance and Hollywood, hospitals, the environment and civil rights, the arts, symphonies, museums and elite universities. How could they turn on us?
We hear this all the time. We Jews have collectively spent so much, even named wings after ourselves at these institutions. But, historically speaking, none of this has mattered in stemming the tide of anti-Semitism. No, in fact, our perceived power is deployed against us in these periods. Jews in the Diaspora have too often been, as Douglas Murray says, prominent but weak.
Murray’s observation calls to mind The Pity of It All, Amos Elon’s 2002 chronicle of German Jews from the mid-18th century until Hitler’s rise in 1933—timely today because it shatters so many of our comfortable narratives about progress, assimilation, and the supposed safety of living in an educated society. Elon shows how, over nearly two centuries, German Jews transformed themselves from marginalized peddlers and cattle dealers into the intellectual, cultural, and economic backbone of German society. They didn’t just assimilate—they excelled. A community that never was more than 1 percent of the German population produced bankers, journalists, artists, industrialists, and academics whose contributions to the flourishing of Germany are well documented.
They believed in Germany. They believed in Enlightenment values. They believed that reason and education would triumph over prejudice. They were wrong.
