How Liberalism Uses Jews, and Why It Shouldn’t Do That

“If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one,” Senator Joe Biden said in 1986. Biden’s passionate commitment to, and identification with, Israel has been a cornerstone of his career. Nor is he alone. Numerous US leaders, Republican and Democrat, Jewish and non-Jewish, have made Zionism a key part of their political identities. Unwavering and uncritical support for Israel, no matter who their prime minister, no matter what their policy, remains one of the few bipartisan planks in US politics. 

There are numerous reasons why the US political class is so wedded to Zionism, even amidst a mass civilian slaughter of Palestinians which numerous human rights orgs and experts consider a genocide. Israel is a key security ally in the region. It also has a good deal of domestic support from Jews and (critically) from much more numerous non-Jews, especially evangelical Christians. Pro-Israel groups have been effective at primarying and removing pro-Palestinian Democrats; politicians notice when being on the wrong side of an issue could lose them an election. 

Still, these factors don’t seem adequate to explain the passion with which Biden and others speak about Zionism. Biden, again, frames Israel as not just a security ally, but as a moral imperative. “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist,” Biden insisted in an interview last July, “and a Zionist is about whether or not Israel is a safe haven for Jews because of their history of how they’ve been persecuted.” 

It’s certainly true that Jewish people have been persecuted in hideous ways for a very long time. But so have Roma. So, closer to home, have Native Americans. But Biden hasn’t called for the establishment of a Roma homeland, and he certainly doesn’t talk about tribal sovereignty the way he discusses Israel. Why are Jewish suffering and Jewish identity, in particular, presented as central to America’s ethical vision of itself?

I think the answer is that Jewish rights and Jewish equality have long been central to European liberalism’s sense of its own virtue and identity. In much of the European liberal tradition which Biden and the US have inherited, Jews are the iconic oppressed other, whose rights guarantee the egalitarianism and justice of the liberal democratic project. 

Jewish people in European and US politics have often functioned as a kind of abstracted symbol of liberalism. This is both ironic and unfortunate, because treating one group of people as an abstracted symbol of virtue ultimately undermines the liberal project. It also often endangers the group in question.

Icons of liberalism

The link between liberalism and Jewish rights was inaugurated at a key point in the history of liberalism—the French Revolution. The Revolutionary governments were violently anticlerical, and opposed to the influence of the Catholic church in government. Since the Revolutionaries were opposed to a confessional state, they rejected the idea that Jewish people should be barred from civil society because of their religion. Jews were emancipated and granted full legal rights, first in France, then in the territories France annexed during the Napoleanic wars. 

Anticlericalism didn’t just create a path for Jewish emancipation. It also linked Jewish identity to the core values of the Enlightenment and of the Revolution. Jewish enlightenment figures like Moses Mendelssohn embraced and extended anticlerical critiques before the revolution, becoming partners in the liberal project. After the Revolution, Jews could express anticlericalism as a way of demonstrating their loyalty to Revolutionary ideals.  

Napoleon was eventually defeated, but Jewish rights remained central to European liberal ideas and goals. In his massive history of the 1848 revolutions, Christopher Clark notes that “no other minority was as widely associated with the idea of religious freedom, and none had campaigned so effectively for it.” In Vienna and Berlin, rabbis and Christian clergy held joint services for revolutionary martyrs; many of the revolutionary governments granted equal rights to Jews (often reversed when the old guard succeeded in taking back power.)

Even more than the revolutions, though, it was the Dreyfus Affair which solidified modern European political divisions and positioned Jews at the center of them. 

The antisemitic conspiracy to brand Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus as a spy polarized French politics in the 1890s. On one side, per Maurice Samuels’ recent Dreyfus biography, “The Dreyfusards shared a liberal, pluralistic vision of the nation, in which the rights of the individual were paramount, and Jews and other minorities would enjoy full equality.” On the other side, “The anti-Dreyfusards…embraced a deterministic model of French identity defined by race and religion, which excluded Jews—even those Jews, like Dreyfus, whose families had lived in France for centuries.” 

In a controversy which roiled France for a decade, and which was covered breathlessly around the world, two distinct visions of national identity took form, built around competing visions of the place of Jews within the nation. The Dreyfus Affair firmly ensconced Jewish rights as a core liberal value, pushing formerly moderate antisemites, like Emile Zola, to fight enthusiastically against the hatred of Jewish people. 

World War II, Jews, and the US

The conflict between proto-fascism and liberalism which took shape during the Dreyfus Affair exploded into global genocide and war during World War II. And as in the Dreyfus Affair, the fascist attack on Jewish people was often framed (by Jews and non-Jews) as part and parcel of the fascist assault on liberalism. Or as Jewish leader Rabbi Stephen Wise put it in 1943, "Jews have become the victims of the Fascist terrorism because they are the unbowed protagonists of freedom, faith, democracy" (quoted in Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life.)

Wise was attempting to build support for American entry into the war by connecting the defense of Jewish victims to American values; to fight against the Nazis was to fight for US liberalism, just as to fight for Dreyfus had been to fight for French liberalism. Following the war, when the full extent of the Holocaust became visible, this link between Jewish identity and American self-image became even more powerful.

Some critics of American support for Israel suggest that the US is motivated by guilt over its failure to do more to stop the Holocaust. Guilt rarely motivates nation-states, though—and I don’t think the US generally sees its fight against Hitler as a failure. On the contrary, the US devoted enormous resources and a not insignificant amount of blood to defeat a regime which is widely (and correctly) perceived as horrifically evil. Americans generally don’t feel guilty about that. They feel proud.

The pride is evident in the popular, critically acclaimed genre of Hollywood gentile savior films, which typically use the Holocaust as an occasion to trumpet the moral, liberal virtues of non-Jews with whom Americans are encouraged to identify. Schindler’s List (1993) is the iconic example here, but there are innumerable others: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008), The Zookeeper’s Wife (2011), and One Life (2023) to name just three. A recent, massively successful variation is Oppenheimer (2023), which celebrates the (mostly) Jewish scientists who developed the atomic bomb as quintessential embodiments of American virtue, can-do spirit and righteous force.

Not great for the Jews, not great for liberalism

The conflation of Jewish identity and liberalism has arguably had some positive effects. Maurice Samuels argues that the eventual liberal victory in the Dreyfus Affair helped to solidify Jewish rights and helped ensure that fascism did not find a strong foothold in France until the country was conquered by the Nazis. The bipartisan view of Jewish people as part and parcel of American identity has not eliminated antisemitism, but it has been a powerful tool against antisemitic discrimination in employment, housing, and public life over the last 70 years.

There have also been real downsides though. Christopher Clark notes that during the 1848 revolutions, the fact that Jewish rights were seen as intertwined with revolutionary ideology created the grounds for significant backlash, including violent pogroms and attacks against Jewish communities. 

More recently, the fact that many non-Jews feel like they have a strong stake in defining and creating Jewish identity as part of national liberal politics has created an ugly dynamic. Because they see Jewish people not primarily as people, but as icons of national self, many non Jewish (and Jewish) politicians and public figures feel empowered to define who is Jewish and who is not. In Germany, anti-Zionist Jews have been increasingly branded antisemites, and have often been deplatformed—all in the name of protecting Jewish people. Similarly, in the US, the ADL has labeled Jewish anti-Zionist organizations as “hate groups.” Jews who speak against the current Israel assault on Gaza (like me) are inevitably told that they are “Hamas” and not really Jews. (And yes, I’ve had a non-Jewish congressman tell me I’m a terrorist.)

Treating individuals as symbols rather than as people is a form of prejudice and stereotyping, and can lead to discrimination, violence, and erasure. That’s bad for the people targeted. And it’s also antithetical to the liberal project of tolerance, equality, and freedom.

The clash between liberalism and the creation of an iconic identity of virtue is perhaps clearest in Herrenvolk politics. For the Nazis, for the anti-Dreyfusards, for MAGA, for the Israeli right, the national polity is defined by an imagined white cishet Christian male (or in Israel by an imagined Jew). One particular group has rights and stands in for the nation. People with other identities—Jewish, Black, immigrant, LGBT, Palestinians—are viewed as a threat to that nation simply by virtue of existing. The goal of the state then becomes policing, ejecting, and even exterminating those whose identities are deviant or unpatriotic.

The use of a symbolic Jewish identity by liberal states isn’t precisely the same, but there are parallels. Jewish people are abstracted from their particular conditions, and become ontological victims, to be trotted out as exemplars of national virtue. Jewish people who object to their scripted roles or identities will be accused of ingratitude, or told that they are not really Jews, or silenced. When your identity is seen as an endorsement of the state, then you better endorse the state…or else.

A better liberalism

So what’s the solution? One common left argument is that identity politics should be abandoned; we can avoid the pitfalls caused by state investment in, or cooptation of, particular identities by simply refusing to acknowledge, or organize around, identities.

The problem here is that Black people, LGBT people, women, Palestinians, and, yes, Jewish people too are in fact targeted on the basis of their identities, and ignoring that leaves them more vulnerable, not less. You can’t contest the oppression of Black people by just ignoring racism; “All Lives Matter” is not an adequate response to the disproportionate way in which police target, beat, imprison, and murder Black people. When the forces of the state insist that Black lives, in particular, don’t matter, you need to respond by asserting that those lives, specifically, have worth. 

The state needs to recognize that marginalized identities are valid identities, and that marginalized people have equal rights and equal dignity. Part of recognizing that, though, is refusing to frame the vision of the state around particular identities, marginalized or otherwise. Jewish people are not symbols of liberalism, or of American virtue. We’re just people, with a range of views and a great capacity for good and for evil, just like anyone else. Recognizing us as such is the only way forward for liberalism, for Jews, for Palestinians, for justice, and for peace.

Featured image is The Degradation of Alfred Dreyfus, by Henri Meyer