Is this the end of the golden age for American Jews?

For more than a century, US Jews have lived in safety and contributed way beyond their number. As a climate of fear takes hold, the Golden Age is under threat.

Although set in New York, the long-running police procedural Law and Order is not known as particularly Jewy nor for dipping its toes into controversial topics.

Thus, it was surprising when Season 23 kicked off with a pro-Palestine student murdering a Jewish university president. The episode did not shy away from depicting the intensity of emotions surrounding recent events, culminating with the student’s faculty advisor taking the witness stand.

“How did you feel when he told you what he’d done,” the District Attorney asked. “I felt proud,” was her cool reply.

It was with reverberations of this chilling image that I woke the following morning to encounter the headline in The Atlantic: “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.”

Author Franklin Foer describes how “Over the course of the 20th century, Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism…. [this] liberalism helped unleash a Golden Age of American Jewry, an unprecedented period of safety, prosperity, and political influence.”

Now, Foer argues “antisemitism on the Right and the Left threatens to bring to a close [this Golden Age] —and demolish the liberal order they helped establish.”