Richler: Is the Jewish moment in North America over?

Interesting long read:

….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 Well, through simple demographics for a start, the 20th-century waves of Jewish immigration vastly superseded by the arrival into this continent of peoples whose own traumatic histories either do not intersect with the Jewish ones or contradict them.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.)…

Source: Is the Jewish moment in North America over?