At a meeting among Jewish leaders twenty years ago, the billionaire and longtime president of the World Jewish Congress, Edgar Bronfman reportedly expressed a common fear among the Jewish elite that young Jews — becoming too comfortably assimilated — needed to be goaded into reconnecting with their Jewish identity by whatever means necessary:

“The point is, we have a crisis and I don’t care how we go about getting young people involved in their Jewishness,” Bronfman stated at a STAR [Synagogue Tranformation and Reform] meeting in Chicago….

….Going through my 20-year-old notes, I am struck at how often Jewish lay and religious leaders voiced a fear that an end to anti-Semitism would further erode the tenuous connection young people had to Judaism. Ironically, the rise in Jewish activism in response to anti-Semitism could be an opportunity to find a place for them.

In 2019, while our institutions are hashing out the same arguments, American Jews are faced with an altogether different existential crisis: the rise of American anti-Semitism. Now is the perfect time to truly reckon with what it means to be a Jew and who gets counted as a member of the tribe because people who never thought about their Judaism before are now constantly reminded of it by anti-Semites.

Poster Comment:

With leaders like theirs there will be no end to Antisemitism. I have always thought of Judaism as a criminal conspiracy.