The Woke Threat to America— and to American Jews

by Samuel J. Abrams and Jack Wertheimer, COMMENTARY

A new set of assumptions about how American society should reform itself has emerged from the cloistered academy in recent years and now has captured the imagination of many in the news media, the entertainment industry, and, even more remarkably, corporate leadership. Often described as progressive (in contrast to liberal), or more vaguely as “woke,” some of these ideas have found supporters among Jewish influentials—and beyond.

Item: Writing in Jewish Currents, a left-wing journal, Raphael Margarik proposes a radical uprooting of Jewish philanthropy—it should be “scrapped, spent down, and liquidated,” he declares.

“This shift,” he goes on to explain, “would involve downsizing: fewer private day schools, summer camps, and trips to Israel, all of which are subsidized by endowments; fewer fellowships for Jewish leaders, fewer conferences and summits, less innovation.” What will replace institutions preparing young Jews and future leaders to assume their roles in Jewish communal life is a question left unanswered, as is the consequence of depriving creative innovators of the money they will need to launch new initiatives. Tearing down existing institutions, a favored goal of the woke, would appear to be the end goal.

Item: In the interest of protecting women from what are perceived as misogynistic motives for studying Jewish demographic patterns, a cohort of Jewish academics seeks to silence discussion about low fertility rates and high intermarriage rates in the American Jewish community, trends reconfirmed recently by the 2021 Pew report. The Women’s Caucus of the Association for Jewish Studies issued an unusual, if not unprecedented, statement this past March branding discussion of those issues as “re-hashing old ideas about Jewish continuity in an effort to capture philanthropic funding.” Entirely sidestepping whether these trends exist, let alone what they portend for the American Jewish future, these scholars seek to discredit any discussion of these topics through cyberbullying and canceling of academics who do not share their views. Like many in progressive bastions, these academics often pay lip service to the idea of free speech and open discourse but demonstrably no longer value free speech, debate, and disagreement, or perhaps only endorse speech that supports their perspectives.

Item: The rabbi of a Conservative synagogue saw fit to distribute copies of Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility to all congregants. One of the new texts in the growing catalogue of books portraying all whites as homogenous and riddled with racism, White Fragility paints a portrait of whites as supremacists who dominate other races through, among other things, a sham system of meritocracy, the very system that enabled the descendants of poor Jewish immigrants to become one of the most successful American minorities within a few generations. In this vein, Michael Sandel, a highly popular lecturer at Harvard whose classes attract hundreds of students, has written a book-length attack on “the tyranny of merit,” this despite the fact that his own Jewish family members benefitted richly from meritocratic values.

Item: Jewish students at American campuses (and increasingly in high school and even lower school) are indoctrinated with lessons about the range of victims who have suffered oppression, principally people of color, of a non-“cisgender” sexual orientation, and women. One might have imagined that there are Jews who fall into each of these categories. But one would be wrong to make such an assumption. Increasingly, Jews are defined as being on the wrong side: They are castigated as privileged, white, and part of the oppressor class, never the victims—even as the incidence of anti-Semitism has exploded in America, including on campuses and in class discussions. Tragically, many American Jews naively internalize this hostile critique and blind themselves to the scarcely veiled anti-Semitism motivating it.

The list of such items can be expanded easily, but the question remains as to why more Americans—especially Jews—do not engage in the battle against these dangerous ideas. One reason for acquiescence by Jews is that contemporary American culture sorts people based on their ideological positions. Political sorting, which is often confused with polarization, is a fairly new phenomenon but nevertheless occurs when ideological and attitudinal positions no longer vary but are expected to align to particular liberal or conservative attitudes. The result today is that Democrats are more uniformly left-leaning and Republicans are more uniformly right-leaning than they were decades ago. Both the left and the right promote packages of ideas and attitudes that must be adopted wholesale if one is not to fall into disfavor. Today, dissent and divergence become almost impossible if one is to avoid adverse social consequence and possibly real professional ramifications as well.

To complicate matters further, the package of progressive ideas continues to grow like wildflowers and the language morphs regularly. Every week seems to bring new nonnegotiable demands; and what was treated as benign yesterday may suddenly cause outrage and ostracism tomorrow. Still, by this point in what we may describe optimistically as late-stage progressive ideology, the broad contours of progressive thinking about domestic issues* are clearly set. Among the articles of faith are calls for the substitution of “equity” in place of equality as the guiding principle of government and corporate policies: Contrary to the famous exhortation of Martin Luther King Jr., it is precisely the color of one’s skin, we are told by the woke, that should serve as the basis for advancement in society, rather than the content of one’s character. But this is merely the first step in proposals to promote radical social change by imposing various forms of so-called justice initiatives—environmental, racial, sexual, and social.

Also in the crosshairs of some progressives are a range of institutions, including the nuclear family, the structure enabling philanthropy, and, of course, the police and justice systems. Contempt for religion, tradition, and history is part of this package of ideas too, as has been evident in the disdain for people of faith and their rights to religious liberty, efforts to erase from history great American leaders, including Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, and the insistence on rewriting the history of the United States through lenses that falsify the past. All of this nihilism is in the service of eliminating the social control supposedly exercised by a white establishment, elites who allegedly represent no one and still resist relinquishing their unearned privileged status.

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WHETHER ANY of this is good for America is a topic that fortunately has engaged a good many thoughtful commentators. But there also is an additional question to ask: Is it true that the tribunes of progressive ideology reflect the thinking of the American public on these matters? Extensive public-opinion research demonstrates that many of the views present in progressive ideology are neither popular nor appreciated by the majority of Americans. Centrists regularly defeat progressives at the ballot box, and the latter are not as dominant as they may appear to be in social media and in the mass-media spheres. Let’s look at three central and particularly egregious planks of the progressive program.

CONTINUE