Canaries in the Liberal Coal Mine

Liberalism and Endangered Minorities

It’s impossible for me to publish a post this week that doesn’t take as its subject the back-to-back violent attacks on American Jews, first in Washington, DC and then in Boulder, Colorado. In addition to a couple of tv interviews on the attacks, I’ve had a couple of days during the Jewish holiday of Shavuot earlier this week to do some quiet thinking about what terrorist attacks on Jews can tell us about the health of the American liberal democratic community.

The short answer, as I’m sure you’re not surprised to read, is that it doesn’t tell us anything good. While this might sound self-involved, stick with me: for many centuries, you could tell a lot about the health of a society by looking at its treatment of Jews because antisemitism isn’t some sort of isolated political problem. When Jews are subjected to scapegoating or violence it always signals a more general erosion of civic norms. As antisemitic sentiment becomes part of the mainstream political conversation, it opens the door to broader assaults on dissent, civil liberties, and democratic institutions. Cossacks rampaging through the shtetl or anti-Zionists targeting people at a museum tend to go hand in hand with rising authoritarianism, conspiracy theorizing, and a more widespread rejection of pluralism.

This isn’t so much about placing Jews at the center of everything as it is about recognizing a consistent pattern. Where Jews are under threat, so too is liberalism itself. Where Jewish life is able to flourish openly in political communities where Jews represent a tiny minority—through religious freedom, political participation, cultural expression, and social acceptance—it’s a clear indicator of liberalism’s health.

None of this is new, of course. A colleague and I published Antisemitism on the Rise in 2021, and we noted then that antisemitic rhetoric and targeted violence against Jews had exploded over the course of the previous half a decade. From chants of “Jews will not replace us” at the Charlottesville hate rally to the synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh and Poway to last week’s fire bombing of a march calling for the return of Israeli hostages, Jews in America have found themselves in a position of insecurity unknown for several generations. With each incident, there are calls for increased security measures and more funding to support it. But, truth be told, the Jewish community doesn’t need more armed guards at synagogues, community centers, and schools; we need people to stop wanting to harm Jews.

When I say “we” here, I mean the Jewish community of course. But I also mean all of us in America. Protecting the Jewish community means standing up for the rights of minorities, but it’s also a test of the entire political system’s capacity to uphold the ideal of liberal pluralism and resist the seduction of authoritarianism. This connection between protecting Jewish communities and a society’s commitment to pluralism isn’t just a theoretical claim. We can see it over and over again in historical examples from the Dreyfus Affair in late 19th Century France to the Kishinev Pogrom in the waning days of Russia’s Czarist regime to the Shoah. Each time, the damage isn’t exclusive to the country’s Jewish community but extends outward to the broader society. In our own political moment, it’s instructive to look at the way in which antisemitic rhetoric was coupled with the rise of authoritarian politics in Hungary (especially because of the rapturous approval of the Hungarian model by a vocal faction of American conservatism). Under Viktor Orbán, the government has repeatedly used coded (and also sometimes not-so-coded) antisemitic rhetoric, most obviously to target Jewish philanthropist George Soros. While it’s always framed in terms of opposing “globalism” in defense of Hungarian national interests, these attacks mobilize suspicion against Jews as symbols of “rootless cosmopolitanism.” The result is a clear shift toward authoritarian populism, accompanied by attacks on judicial independence, the press, and academic freedom.

If we really dig down into what’s going on, I think we can all be really clear that antisemitism doesn’t teach us anything whatsoever about Jews, but it teaches us a lot about antisemites. As such, hostility toward Jews is the mask for a broader intolerance for nuance, dissent, and diversity. Whether the culture that tolerates antisemitism says it out loud or just lets it fester in the shadows, what it makes clear is an opposition to the core tenets of political liberalism. When political leaders or movements treat Jews as suspicious or nefarious or dangerous, they’re always using Jews as target practice for the features of liberal society that protect the members of every minority group: freedom of speech, assembly, and religion, the rule of law, and institutional checks on power.

This is why antisemitism, whether it’s coded language or terroristic violence, isn’t the fringe concern of the Jews. When a reporter asks me, “How does the Jewish community feel about the recent attack?,” my answer is always going to be about security at the synagogue, sure, but it’s also always going to be about our society. Jews are a society’s canaries in the proverbial coal mine: if we aren’t listening to what the Jewish community is saying about antisemitism or if we’re willing to downplay the seriousness of the rhetoric and even the violence we’re seeing today, we’re not taking the steps we need to take to protect American liberal democracy.