The American Jewish Establishment Has Given Up on American Democracy

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM ET. Our guest will be Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, and the subject of a recent profile in Jewish Currents. Curt is one of most influential thinkers in defining a conservative foreign policy that is skeptical of both war and unconditional support for Israel. We’ll talk about foreign policy debates on the American right, the legacy of Pat Buchanan, one of The American Conservative’s founders, and the similarities and differences in worldview between progressives and conservatives who want to fundamentally change the relationship between the US and Israel. I’ve argued that Tucker Carlson and other prominent anti-Israel conservatives incorporate anti-Jewish attitudes and conspiracy theories into their critiques of the Jewish state. I want to ask Curt about that and hear his response. I doubt we’ll agree. But I’m sure I’ll learn something.

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Cited in Today’s Video

My essay in Jewish Currents on how influential American Jewish organizations abandoned their legacy of opposing racism and authoritarianism.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen reports on the escalating attacks on the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair.

Daniel Kaufman (my colleague at The Beinart Notebook) has his own Substack. Check out his recent post on the controversy over race in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.

On August 23, I’ll be speaking in Sydney, Australia.

Reader Response

A friend, who generally disagrees with my views on Israel-Palestine, writes in response to last week’s video about New York Jewish leaders blaming Zohran Mamdani for the stabbing of a Jewish man on Upper West Side.

“As you wrote and Mamdani has emphasized, he distinguishes between Israel as a state and Jews in NY who should not have to face any violence or antisemitism. He, and you in your essay, need to go one step further and explicitly state: ‘We recognize that for many Jews in our city, the connection and deep affiliation to the State of Israel and its people is an integral part of their Jewish identity and they proudly identify with the state of Israel. They deserve the exact same protections and support as anyone else in our great city and should not have to hide or somehow minimize their deeply held beliefs and attitudes to be free from abuse or antisemitism.’”

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

It seems quite possible that this coming Tuesday, Abdul al-Sayed will win the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan. AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups have been pouring enormous amounts of money into that primary to defeat him. And if he wins over their favorite candidate, Haley Stevens, it’s very likely that a lot of that money will move towards supporting his Republican general election candidate for Senate in Michigan, Mike Rogers.

Now, none of that will surprise anybody. Yet, if you step back, it’s really quite extraordinary. It’s extraordinary, because when a group like AIPAC decides it’s going to support a Republican candidate like Mike Rogers over a Democratic candidate like Abdul El-Sayad, what AIPAC is essentially saying is: we don’t care whether America remains a liberal democracy.

Now, that might sound like a very strong statement, but let’s just step back here, right? I think anyone who looks honestly at what Donald Trump has done, and what the vast majority of Republicans in Congress have supported him in doing, would accept that Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, and virtually everything he’s done since returning to office suggests that he would try, as much as possible, to do something similar in the midterm elections in 2026, and then likely the presidential election in 2028.

Which is to say that if the vote does not go his and his party’s way, he will try to intervene to overturn the result of the election, to overturn the result of a democratic election. That really is, in a sense, at least for a time, would be the end of American democracy. Donald Trump is not subtle about this. He advertises this in every way.

And yet, we kind of take it for granted that the most powerful American Jewish organizations, AIPAC—but not only AIPAC, a group like the Anti-Defamation League—that they prefer candidates who support Israel, like Mike Rogers, but would help Donald Trump overturn a democratic election to candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, who want to radically change American policy towards Israel, but believe that America should continue to have free elections.

AIPAC does that by pouring in money to candidates with really only one litmus test. The litmus test is: do you support unconditional U.S. support for Israel? It is not: do you support the survival of American liberal democracy? AIPAC does not care how a candidate answers that question. It only cares whether a candidate supports unconditional support for Israel.

The Anti-Defamation League doesn’t fund candidates. But if you look at the way it’s responded to Zohran Mamdani versus Donald Trump, there’s no contest. The ADL sees Zohran Mamdani as a much, much greater threat, a much greater problem. They’re much, much more outraged by Zohran Mamdani because Mamdani opposes the idea of Israel as a Jewish state. They’re much, much more upset about that than they are about Donald Trump’s efforts to turn America into an authoritarian state.

So many of us have just grown so used to this state of affairs, right, that America’s most prominent and powerful Jewish organizations essentially act politically as if democracy in the United States isn’t a concern of theirs. But it is really an extraordinary fact. I wrote a long essay for Jewish Currents last week on exactly this point that this was not always the case in American Jewish life.

There was a time for much of the 20th century, certainly in the mid-20th century, where the expansion and success of liberal democracy in the United States was the top priority of America’s most prominent Jewish organizations. Now, it is not a significant priority at all. Yes, some of these organizations may mouth, you know, kind of lip service about the idea of American democracy, but if you look at where they actually put their money and their energy, they don’t fundamentally care, right? If you look at what they do, not what they say, what they do is they are absolutely willing to pour huge amounts of money and effort into candidates and into a party, the Republican Party, which is actively working to destroy liberal democracy in the United States so long as that will preserve unconditional U.S. military support for Israel.

And the American Jewish organizations, it’s important to say, are not the only entities in this Trump era that have acted that way. The New York Times just did a long investigative piece about the law firm Paul Weiss, for instance, that also decided that it was willing to knuckle under Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. Look at what Jeff Bezos has done at the Washington Post. Lots of corporate executives have done this. University presidents have done this.

But it is striking when one thinks about the role of the American Jewish community historically as an essential, integral part of the struggle for the expansion of democracy during the Civil Rights Movement, that in this new moment of democratic peril, you have an unusually politically influential community that is not only not fighting on the side of the survival and the success of American liberal democracy, but in many ways, is fighting on the other side because it has chosen to prioritize unconditional support for Israel over the continued existence of liberal democracy in the United States.

This is something that I think we often just pass over and we take for granted, but I think when historians of the American Jewish experience look back, they will look back with astonishment, and I think probably also horror and shame that a community that once put its shoulder to the wheel and helped to expand American democracy against the forces of racism and authoritarianism is, in so many ways now, not doing that at all, and even, in many cases, working on the other side.