The Situation: Thanks But No Thanks

The Situation on Wednesday apologized to the nation of France for America’s new ambassador there. 

Today I want to object to being defended against antisemitism.

Now I am a proud Jew. I recently learned that my genetic material is 100 percent Ashkenazi Jewish. Not 90 percent. Not 97 percent. Not 99 percent. One hundred freakin’ percent. I’m a purebred; my veins course with a kind of Ashkenazi Jewish blood from concentrate. It’s genetic diseases and neuroses all the way down. I’m the real deal, folks. If anyone should be excited about blowing up whole universities and revoking student visas and locking up legal permanent residents over anti-Israel activities, it should be me. 

And yet I find myself strangely ungrateful for the administration’s actions on my behalf.

No, it’s not just that the administration takes these actions in the name of combatting antisemitism while the president entertains notoriously flagrant Jew-haters like Nick Fuentes and Kanye West and while his administration on federal agencies looses DOGE monkeys who boast that they were racists before it was cool. 

It’s not just that I’m a believer in free speech and academic freedom who thinks that criticism of the Israeli government and its current policies in Gaza is not a legitimate basis for revoking a visa. 

And it’s not just that the idea of nuking Harvard or Columbia because the universities have not done a good enough job protecting Jewish students from a hostile environment is an insanely destructive idea.

All of that is true, but it’s not why Jews don’t need, and shouldn’t want, this kind of protection.

The deeper reason is that Jewish history is replete with examples of non-Jews offering Jews their protection, inviting them to live in their realms for reasons of their own convenience, and then turning on them when the situation changed. This is one of the repeated themes of about 1,500 years of European Jewish history. Some kingdom or local lord thinks having Jews around would be useful, often for economic reasons, and invites them into his domain under his protection. William the Conqueror invited Jews into England at the time of the Norman conquest. Jews also ended up in Poland as a result of specific invitation. And it all works for a while—until, that is, that Jewish community becomes more useful as a target. The infamous blood libels started in England, a few decades after the conquest. 

There is only one system that has ever truly protected Jews over time, and that is liberalism. And American liberalism is the only version that has ever done it at scale—which is to say more than ten times the scale of any other non-Jewish country. The reason? Jews don’t rely on some  liege lord’s “protection.” We rely on a system of rights and limits on government power that protect everyone. 

What Trump is proposing here is to get rid of that system—to be able to throw people out of the country because of what they say, to be able to bully universities into doing what he wants, to be able to lock people up without judicial review. He is doing this, right now, in the name of protecting Jews, never mind that he is demagogically overreacting to the actual threat against actual Jews. But an illiberal system of the type he proposes simply never works well for Jews in the long-run. Illiberalism always turns on Jews. There are no significant counter-examples. In the end, authoritarians protect Jews until they don’t.

Just look around the world at where Jewish communities are thriving. It’s all in liberal states. The once giant Russian Jewish community, which numbered more than five million in the 19th Century, is now a measly couple hundred thousand people, give or take, and this is not all Hitler’s fault. A huge number of Jews have left Russia, both for Israel and for the United States. Remember that the Soviet Union promised all kinds of equality for ethnic minorities yet managed brutally to repress Jewish life. Illiberalism of the left turns on Jews too. 

So no, I’m not interested in an offer of protection. Indeed, no offer of protection should ever make a Jew feel safe. The only thing that should make Jews feel safe is evidence of freedom: free speech, freedom of religion, and equal access to the goods associated with a liberal citizenship. Oppressing others in the name of freedom for Jews is not evidence of freedom. It’s evidence of a protection racket that will boomerang against Jews eventually—probably sooner, rather than later. Jewish life in non-Jewish societies is a fragile thing. And the erosion of liberalism is the surest sign that it’s getting more fragile. 

It is a bitter irony of the current moment that some Jews do not appreciate this because they are so fixated on defeating signs of opposition to Israel that they cheer for the erosion of the facets of our society that enable their own well-being.

But a strongman is not good for the Jews, and if he seems to be, his successor will be bad.

At the end of the Book of Genesis, the Egyptian Pharaoh invites Joseph and his family to settle in his Kingdom; Joseph is his trusted adviser, so the Hebrews are under the strongman’s protection. They are given good land. They are given riches. Campus protests cannot touch them.

By the beginning of the Book of Exodus, however, things have gone terribly wrong: “Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph. And he said unto his people, Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we: Come on, let us deal wisely with them; lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies, and fight against us, and so get them up out of the land.” The Hebrews are enslaved in response.

There will come a Pharaoh who knows not the Kushners. It may even be Trump himself, he being of a temperamental disposition and knowing not loyalty or friendship.

The lesson is not to stay in Pharaoh’s good graces and enjoy it while he screws your enemies. The lesson is that Pharaohs suck and Jews shouldn’t live in societies ruled by them. 

The Situation continues tomorrow.