A New Alliance Between Christians and Jews

Editorial Note: This is the third essay in a three-part series on how Protestants, Catholics, and Jews can respond to our cultural moment while learning from and depending on one another. We hope you enjoy this reflection by Yoram Hazony.

Growing up, I often heard American Jews say: it can’t happen here. They meant that the persecution that haunted our forebears in Europe and the lands of Islam could not reappear in America. But my father, who was born to Ukrainian-Jewish parents in Israel, always told me: Don’t you believe it. It can happen anywhere.

Now we know. My father was right. Anti-Jewish hatred has exploded into view across the United States with a breathtaking savagery. The line has been crossed, the spell broken. American Jewry will never be the same after this—and neither will America.

The initial facts are familiar. On October 7–8, 2023, thousands of Gazan Arabs—led by fighters of the Hamas movement, a local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood—crossed the border into Israel and conquered two dozen Jewish towns and villages. For two days, they massacred, dismembered, raped, burned alive, and kidnapped more than a thousand civilians and hundreds of soldiers, in scenes shockingly reminiscent of the Nazi Holocaust in Europe.

But instead of universal condemnation, the atrocities were met with ecstatic celebrations in many places across the United States. Neo-Marxist and radical Muslim academics organized “teach-ins” in which the hellish acts of the Hamas were painstakingly theorized and justified. Carefully choreographed street demonstrations broadcast enthusiasm for the massacre of children, women, and elderly Jews in cities across the country. And within a short time, opinion polls revealed an astounding degree of support for the massacres, which grew stronger as Israeli forces went to war against Hamas in Gaza.

Throughout, activists of the pro-Hamas Left in America emphasized that the Jews are an “oppressor class” whose intrinsic evil is so great that any act of resistance is justified, even if its results are indistinguishable from the Holocaust. The longstanding fiction that leftist anti-Israel activism is anti-Zionist, not anti-Jewish collapsed as Hamas leaders repeatedly emphasized that their aim was the extermination of all Jews. Yet the American Left refused to condemn this aspiration, instead accusing American Jews of complicity with “genocide.” Calls on the American Left for the eradication of “Zionist influence”—meaning Jewish influence—in the United States went largely unchallenged as well. 

What is happening? On the one hand, the experience of American Jews over the past year is part of a broader phenomenon: the explosion of anti-Semitism is inseparable from the George Floyd riots and the cultural revolution of June 2020, which saw almost all of America’s liberal institutions—from the New York Times to Princeton University—brought under the thumb of a strain of “woke” neo-Marxist ideology. These neo-Marxists and their Muslim supremacist allies regard all whites as an oppressor class guilty of “systemic racism.” And since most American Jews are “whites,” the effort to expel American Jewry from positions of influence is just one aspect of the effort to destroy what the revolutionaries consider to be a political order based on “white supremacy.”

But in other ways, American Jews are today facing troubles that are uniquely their own. Outside of the small minority of Orthodox Jews, American Jews have been overwhelmingly liberal since the 1920s. For nearly a century, they have provided crucial support for the Democratic Party and have been visibly active in virtually every liberal institution in the United States. This alliance between Jews and liberalism paved the way for what has been called the “Golden Age of American Jewry”—a period of perhaps sixty years (roughly from 1963 to 2023) during which the country’s Protestant elites conducted a sweeping integration of Catholics and Jews into almost every facet of social and political leadership. Under a regime that eventually took the name of “liberal democracy,” America came to be led and governed by an alliance of liberals: Protestant, Catholic, and Jew.

Over the past year, American Jews have discovered that this “Golden Age of American Jewry” has come to an end. The anti-Marxist liberalism that became the de facto public religion of the United States after the Second World War—and ushered Jews into the halls of power in large numbers for the first time—has collapsed as the ruling ideology of the country. Anti-Marxist liberalism still exists as a recognizable phenomenon at the center of the political and cultural spectrum. But it is a rapidly shrinking force, which is unlikely ever to control the Democratic Party or the cultural and educational institutions allied with it again. The alliance of neo-Marxists and Muslim supremacists now consolidating its control over most of the formerly liberal institutions in America is stridently hostile to Jews, and is busily expelling them from the same halls of power into which American Protestants introduced them two generations ago.

There is one force in American public life that has a reasonable chance of checking the revolutionaries’ advance and keeping life livable for traditionalist American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. This is the nationalist Right, which since 2016—the year of Brexit and Donald Trump’s “America First” movement—has increasingly come to dominate the Republican Party. To be sure, there are plenty of anti-Semites on the nationalist Right. No one knows this better than I do. But much of the nationalist Right harbors a degree of sympathy or even open admiration for Israel and for Jews. This has become increasingly evident as the international Left and its Muslim supremacist allies have prosecuted their war to destroy Israel and Jewry over the past year. In both America and Europe, those willing to take political risks to publicly side with the Jewish State and with beleaguered diaspora Jewish communities have been concentrated overwhelmingly on the political Right.

There are many reasons for this. But the most obvious one is that Jews face the same enemies as the conservative Protestants and Catholics who make up most of the nationalist Right. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews all face persecution and ultimately extinction in America should the neo-Marxist and Muslim supremacist revolution prevail.

Jews are a tiny minority in the United States. I don’t believe American Christians are under any obligation to consult with Jews before taking steps to strengthen the public standing of Christianity in what is still, in many places, a Christian country. But from a political perspective, it is obvious that none of these three American tribes—Protestant, Catholic, Jew—is strong enough to win the war to restore public order and public decency by itself. An alliance of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, however, may be sufficient to save the day, especially in conservative states (“red states”) where there is still a clear Christian majority.

Forging a conservative and nationalist alliance of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews will not be easy. For historical reasons, Jews can be hesitant about alliance with Christians. On the Christian side, the long association of so many Jews with liberalism raises questions about how much common ground American Jews and Christians really have to build upon. However, under the present conditions of upheaval and revolution, such a conservative and nationalist alliance is necessary. Defeat is the only other choice we have. 

What would be the terms of such an alliance? It will not be based on a common liberalism, as the collaboration among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews was in the 1950s and 1960s. That liberalism has run its course and has brought us to the current catastrophe. Instead, a renewed collaboration among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews must be based on a pact to establish a conservative society and a conservative life in those parts of the United States where this is still feasible. The aim would be to strengthen traditionalist Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism—all three of them—against common enemies that wish to destroy us.

Such an alliance would seek, for example, to overturn the US Supreme Court decisions that banned Bible instruction and prayer from government schools, and, consequently, from public life. And it would establish new conservative schools and universities that place God and Scripture at the center of their students’ education and are unashamed to raise young men and women who know and consider precious their place in the history of the English-speaking nations—and of Western civilization more generally.

I believe there is room for conservative Muslims and Hindus in such an alliance. But this openness to friendship and collaboration across cultural boundaries should not be mistaken for substantive neutrality in matters of religion and morals. There is no reason that Satanism, for example, must be accorded the status of an honored religion in a conservative state governed primarily by Christians; or that a Satanist should, for that matter, be permitted to immigrate from a foreign land and be granted citizenship. However, the actual arrangements and accommodations among the various partners in such a pact to establish a conservative society would have to be negotiated in accordance with conditions in each state.     

Americans are a Christian nation—or at least, they were a Christian nation until not long ago. Reviving a public Christianity in those parts of the country that are not yet entirely lost is the only plausible alternative to America’s continued decay into a brutal neo-Marxist tyranny. Jews who wish to avoid this calamity should seek an alliance with nationalist and conservative Protestants and Catholics. This will not be an easy road to travel. But it is the best road available, and one that may yet bring a blessing to all who share in it.  

Image by Billy McDonald and licensed via Adobe Stock.