In a bold cover story in The Atlantic, journalist Franklin Foer declared "The Golden Age of American Jewry is Ending." On the Haaretz Podcast, he tells host Allison Kaplan Sommer how and why he reached the sobering conclusion that "an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans" is over.
Allegiance to the Palestinian cause on the progressive left, he says, is understandable – even after the atrocities of October 7 – as is opposition to the war in Gaza and calls for a cease-fire.
But "in that window after the horrific attacks of October 7 and before the Israeli war truly began, you had all of these people who had no sympathy for what had happened to Jews and immediately started blaming Israel for what had happened. And in that window there was just this sense of abandonment and disappointment that felt like a harbinger of something much worse that was to come."
According to Foer, people like him had a "sort of blind spot" when it came to antisemitism on the left before October 7.
Foer says he was particularly stunned after traveling to California to report on the "epidemic of bullying" of Jewish schoolchildren in Berkeley. The stories he heard were "horrifying," exemplifying a "kind of simplistic moralism, the dividing of the world into good and evil, where Jews are placed on the side of evil."
He sees what is happening as "a return to a more normal form of Jewish history where it's possible to live everyday Jewish life, but it is punctuated by episodes of antisemitism that cause a sense of insecurity and fear. I think that that that could be something closer to the new status quo."
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