The 20th century was a heyday for many North American Jewish artists. Top row, from left: Irving Berlin, Nora Ephron, Lenny Bruce, Mordecai Richler. Second row: Philip Roth, Tony Kushner, Saul Bellow, Neil Simon. Third row: Mel Brooks, Leonard Bernstein, Helen Frankenthaler and Leonard Cohen.THE NEW YORK TIMES/AP/GETTY IMAGES/REUTERS/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Noah Richler is the author of What We Talk About When We Talk About War, which was shortlisted for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.
No matter the outcome of the war in Gaza, this much is clear: The Jewish moment in North America – the Golden Age of acceptance, freedom, flourishing and cultural contribution of Jews on this continent – is done. It lasted more than a half-century, lagging behind the 90 years of good fortune under the Hapsburgs before Nazi Germany brought that era to a close but, still, if you’re a Jew, is nothing to be scoffed at. The Jewish moment was an anomaly, a consequence of the Holocaust and the European shame it brought on that was seconded, guiltily, at the UN. And though it was not made obvious until after Hamas’s massacre of Jews in Israel on Oct. 7, this exceptional period for North American Jews, one I was born into, had already started to ebb with the turn of the millennium, short days after 9/11 – which, as any savvy Jew anticipated, was all the time it would take before Israel was blamed. That was the beginning of the end of the Jewish moment here, new tides of immigration and the shortness of human memory having hastened it on.
This Golden Age for Jews could not have happened in Europe or, Israel aside, anywhere else. Sure, European and British Jews fared better after the Second World War, but outside of North America, the perception of Jews as well as their own behaviour was always going to be too hamstrung by history, by nativism, and by resentments and antisemitism not quite unseated by Europe and the UN’s postwar display of atonement and Zionist accommodation. Israel, as was true of the British colony of Sierra Leone for freed Black slaves in the 18th century, was, after all, also a way for Britain’s governing classes to be rid of Jews a significant number regarded as striving – as, in the memorable assessment by David Lloyd George, British prime minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration, of his Jewish cabinet colleague Herbert Samuel, “greedy, ambitious and grasping.”
The Wheel of Conscience, designed by Daniel Libeskind, commemorates how Canada turned away a ship of 900 Jewish refugees in 1939. Many of its passengers ended up in Nazi concentration camps.Supplied
In the United States and Canada, a fresh start could genuinely be imagined. Yes, antisemitism existed here, evinced for instance in Henry Ford’s self-published rants and in Toronto’s Christie Pits riot and in a Mackenzie King government official’s assessment of Jewish migrants fleeing Nazi Germany that “none is too many.” But whereas, in England, Jews remained beholden to a remarkably resilient class system determining their success, in North America that success was designed by Jews ascendant not only in the ranks of the monied, the professions and the politically powerful, but making their extraordinary mark in literature, art, theatre and song.
Saul Bellow, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, Leonard Cohen, Nora Ephron, Helen Frankenthaler, Maira Kalman, Tony Kushner, Philip Roth, Neil Simon, my father Mordecai Richler … culture eases the way forward for othered groups and sees, in a decent world, prejudice upended by appreciation. But I’d go further and say that in North America there was in the past century a remarkable dovetailing of Jewish cultural sensibility and the American project. Jews’ feisty dialectic, their inclination to debate, their taking nothing as a given are fundamental Jewish ways of being, ones taught by example in the rabbinical commentary of the Talmud. These tendencies neatly cohered with the rescinding of prior lives that is an essential part of the American Dream’s enactment and saw Jewish novelists, comedians and songwriters flourish in ways that were impossible in Britain and Europe, lands of established ways. That striving, so off-putting to English upper classes, is, in America, ambition to be admired.
A mural of Leonard Cohen looks out over Montreal, where the late musician and poet was raised in an Orthodox Jewish immigrant household.ERIC THOMAS/AFP/Getty Images
But later tides have washed the North American beach clean for other groups to land and make their mark. Jews, by virtue of their success, are seen as a part of the establishment now. Not allies, as Jews were to African Americans during the civil-rights era, but “white-adjacent” and fair targets for shunning. We are living, now, in a time in which our “common humanity” matters less than the particular, than the difference in our identities so often brandished to set a community apart. It may only be passing, but at least for today whatever qualities we may share falter before the imperative of fair representation so that where, earlier, Jewish authors dominated bookstore shelves, the cinema, Broadway and television, now a story by a Jew is unlikely to be chosen by, say, the CBC, over a Black, Indigenous, Asian, South Asian or Muslim one.
Which is a positive and as it should be. Jewish novels are not so novel, their stories, their idiom are familiar, and any reader, any patron of any art, craves the new and what it teaches for good reason. Through art we learn about each other and how to share the spaces, real and abstract, that we live in. Other communities’ stories are invigorating the arts and it is their turn for good reason.
But for Jews there is a negative in this receding from public view and therefore interest that is, when it comes to immigration and settlement, the ordinary historical order of things. For the integration of Jews into North American life – what the writer and critic Dara Horn, author of People Love Dead Jews, has called the diaspora’s “fantasy” of acceptance – was, in North America, realized. And this acceptance was doubly important to Jews because it constituted, in the second half of the 20th century, a mirroring of the establishment of the nation of Israel, a state for a stateless people, and the hopes it represented. The stark truth is that a loss of security in either country brings its own existential peril: No place in America or no place in Israel, each dour prospect augurs in a new iteration of the precarity Jews knew in the Middle East and Europe for two millennia.
How did this come to be? Well, through simple demographics for a start, the 20th-century waves of Jewish immigration vastly superseded by the arrival into this continent of peoples whose own traumatic histories either do not intersect with the Jewish ones or contradict them. This demographic shift is one that politicians, many caught off guard, have been compelled to recognize – we are democracies, after all – and especially after its furious acceleration by the entry into social and political arenas of younger generations for whom terms such as “the Holocaust” and “genocide” have markedly different meanings.
No longer is the Holocaust a literal burning – instead, a confluence of horrid circumstances that may even be inadvertent is enough. No longer is genocide the realization of the meticulously planned and organized murderous intent of a specific, targeted people. It can be cultural, or, as we are seeing today in Gaza, a crushing, deleteriously ham-fisted and ultimately self-defeating military campaign that is the result of a profound and inalienable existential fear in a grievously injured population whose motives there is no will to understand, let alone permit. In this age in which “lived experience” is ultimately what validates a truth, the manner in which Jews remember both the Holocaust and the Nazi attempt at genocide is not shared. Jewish references are historical and effectively redundant. They are not this generation’s, and useful only as weapons to be turned back against Israel and the Jewish “Zionist” by activists and also governments benefiting from the distraction – Colombia, Nicaragua, Russia, South Africa, Turkey. (I used to think that, yes, to be anti-Zionist or anti-Israel did not necessarily mean a person was antisemitic but now, what with Jews basically regarded as colonists “from the river to the sea” – well, I’m not so sure.)
Ultra-Orthodox protesters hold anti-Zionist placards in Jerusalem on May 14, when Israel celebrated, and Palestinians mourned, the 76th anniversary of Israel's creation.RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP via Getty Images
What the Netanyahu government’s calamitous execution of the war in Gaza has provided – beyond catastrophe, beyond a second Nakba – is permission, the old tropes evolving so adeptly that they are unrecognizable and we cast them instead as news. The blood libel of the Middle Ages makes Israelis in Gaza the deliberate, premeditated mass murderers not just of children and babies but, in the wake of the bombing of a fertility clinic, Jews willfully slaughtering their enemies even before they are born. And, too, the undying bogey of an international Jewish conspiracy and the money it controls quietly animates the revivified Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and students’ demands that universities divest from arms manufacturers or funds apparently aiding Israel even when they have no proof such investments exist.
It’s an odd thing, antisemitism, a scourge I have yet to comprehend. I have read my fair share of studies, histories, polemics, and am aware of the usual explanations: Jews, the murderers of Christ. Jews, the “chosen people,” pissing off those who apparently weren’t. (“You don’t find Jews in jail, do you?” said the outstanding antisemite of my youth.) Jews, unable to own property, working as moneylenders and tax collectors and therefore easily reviled. Jews, the invidious cabal of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Crusades exporting antisemitism to the Levant and so on – but none of these quite convince me. None seem to adequately explain the strange venality of antisemitism, the sheer relish of folk blaming, hating, punishing and killing Jews that Jean-Paul Sartre called a “passion.” (“Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews! Mom, your son is a hero!” bragged one of the Hamas terrorists after the Oct. 7 attacks.) Antisemitism is a habit millennia old and constantly, brilliantly shape-shifting: It’s the fault of the Jews, they’re communists, no, wait, they’re capitalists. Jews control the media, Jews control the world. See where that has got us.
The Richler family – father Mordecai, mother Florence and children Emma, Daniel and Noah – vacation on Long Island in 1961. The photo was likely taken by the novelist William Weintraub, a fellow Montrealer.Supplied
I am what is sometimes called a “cultural,” “ethnic” or “godless” Jew. I was brought up in upper-middle-class Montreal, securely, and with love. And yet Holocaust nightmares have woken me, exhausted and terrified, since I was a boy: bulldozers pushing bodies into a trench; drowning with others in excrement; defending myself and others against a demon wielding a knife, me with a down-stuffed pillow for a shield. Burning houses, burning planes; me leading the terrified out.
Such heroics have never been required of me, and yet I dream them still despite the antisemitism I have known having been of an innocuous Canadian kind. Not close. Not threatening. Until Oct. 7, that is, when I felt something quite new come over me, a sort of COVID of the mind that left me nauseous and wary and my body tense, guarded and braced for the physical. It was a retreat, I think, a cautious retreat into the Jewish carapace of days gone by.
Nor is it mine alone. Tellingly, this past April, my wife and I stayed over in Saint John to attend a musical evening with the Jewish-American television and theatre star Mandy Patinkin. On our way to the Imperial Theatre, we passed, every 40 feet or so, the slogans “FREE PALESTINE” and “END ZIONISM PROJECT” stencilled on the pavement. That afternoon, there’d been a group of protesters in keffiyehs and, leading their call and response as they made their way down King Street, a young white man shouting repeatedly into his megaphone, “End the illegal Zionist state!”
I had no reason to feel anxious – Saint John is not an activist hub and no one had thought to picket the theatre – except that we are living in a time in which no performance, one by a Jew especially, can proceed without some sort of acknowledgment of the horrors in Israel and Palestine and I wondered what form it would take. What Mr. Patinkin, who sits on the board of the advocacy group Peace Now, did was to let, remarkable in their abundance, the Jewish-American Broadway composers whose works he’d selected make their own case for the Jewish humanist tradition and their place in North America. He sang, from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific:
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late Before you are six or seven or eight To hate all the people your relatives hate You’ve got to be carefully taught
And he ended the evening with that masterpiece of yearning for a safe place, Harold Arlen’s Over the Rainbow. Mr. Patinkin’s brilliant twist was that he sang Yip Harburg’s lyrics in Yiddish. Heartbreaking, it was. Perhaps because it felt like someone else’s retreat into the carapace, Jews reduced to dreaming again.
No, the Jews’ North American day has not ended yet, but dusk is here and the balmy light is dimming.