For a moment, as the black smoke billowed from where the Twin Towers stood, all Americans were New Yorkers – and, in a sense, Israelis, too. Middle Eastern-style terror had reached these shores, two oceans suddenly a pitiful shield. In a flash, New Yorkers knew in a visceral, concrete way what it was like to live in Israel – to be sitting in a Tel Aviv café, a sweet Mediterranean breeze caressing your face, or riding a bus in Jerusalem, or celebrating a wedding in Netanya – when a suicide bomber struck.
The banner headline in this paper seemed to sum up the 9/11 attacks for some Jewish readers: “America: The New Israel.” The sub-headline, looking back over these five years, seemed like a yearning for the moment that had turned all Americans into Israelis to last: It asked, “As fear and vulnerability grip the United States, will empathy with Jerusalem increase?”
But even in that fleeting moment, with international sympathy for the United States at an all-time high, there were others with a different view.
Within minutes of World Trade Center’s collapse on Sept. 11, 2001, conspiracy theories raced across the world in an Internet-fueled frenzy – pointing to supposed Jewish and Israeli villains; they persist today. Within days, police guards and surveillance cameras appeared at synagogues and Jewish community centers. Suddenly, in a country where Jews had felt more secure and at home than, perhaps, any time or place in Jewish history, security was more than an abstract worry for community leaders.
The nearly 3,000 dead at the Twin Towers and the Pentagon that day were just the beginning of the consequences for America, and for American Jews. Both emerged with a new feeling of vulnerability and a new set of challenges stemming from the cascading crises triggered by the falling towers.
“We have to remember, this wasn’t just a single event,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, noting that 9/11 was the trigger event for a still unfolding series of world-changing events. “The impact is cumulative; it’s still playing out.”
The fallout, Foxman said, included new fears of both physical attacks targeting Jews and Jewish institutions, and of a social backlash as Americans come to terms with the loss of their traditional feeling of invulnerability.
Fears of a backlash were multiplied by the biggest and most controversial consequence of the 9/11 attacks: the Iraq war, a conflict that even some members of Congress have blamed on the Jews, saying that Jewish neo-conservatives in the Bush administration pushed the United States into the war.
“Nine-eleven created an anxiety for many of us,” Foxman said. “We have to wonder: what if something else really bad happens to America? There are forces out there. The box is open.”
Even before the smoke cleared at Ground Zero, American Jews felt more vulnerable in two ways: in the physical security of their institutions and in concerns about their place in American life.
Jewish institutions, community leaders felt, could become prime targets in a new campaign of terror on U.S. soil – as they have been targeted in Europe and the Middle East. That produced an upsurge in expensive security enhancements at synagogues, day schools, Jewish community centers and other facilities. It also produced a controversial and partially successful effort to win government assistance for vulnerable nonprofits.
Fears that Jewish institutions would be targeted by al Qaeda and similar groups have not been realized, but this summer’s shooting spree at a Seattle Jewish federation office, where one woman was killed and five were injured, produced a new surge of anxiety –and a new wave of security spending.
“While there is still a difference between the experience of entering a synagogue in Europe and a synagogue in this country, that difference is narrowing, especially in New York,” said Brandeis University historian Jonathan Sarna.
The other kind of vulnerability comes from anxiety over the Jewish place in American society. “Jews know that they have some neighbors who wonder whether all the troubles we’re having are due to Israel, and to Jewish pressure,” Sarna said. “And they’re thinking, as is being talked about in Europe, that maybe if Israel didn’t exist, none of this would be happening.”
According to an Anti-Defamation League poll, 75 percent of Americans believe that U.S. support for Israel has made America more vulnerable to terrorist attack – although most of those agreed that the United States should not change its Middle-East policy.
The continuing conflict between Israel and her neighbors, and this summer’s war in southern Lebanon in particular, have added to concerns that Americans will eventually be swayed by those who say U.S. support for the Jewish state is a prime reason America has been targeted.
“In the wake of Sept. 11, it has become more legitimate in some circles to raise questions about Israel, its activities and its supporters – questions that would have been taboo back in 1967,” Sarna said.
The linkage includes the most frontal assault ever on the legitimacy of the Israel lobby, led by University of Chicago scholar John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor of international relations, who argued in a widely disseminated and discussed paper that U.S. support for Israel, enforced by a ruthless pro-Israel lobby, was undercutting the nation’s foreign policy interests.
“The sense of Israel as illegitimate has been greatly heightened by Sept. 11 and its aftermath,” Sarna said.
And it’s not just the radical left. The 9/11 attacks and the U.S. response energized a radical anti-war movement on the right that links Israel and the Iraq conflict, with spokesmen like former GOP presidential contender Pat Buchanan and venues like the Web site Antiwar.com, where the far left and far right come together in their opposition to U.S. policy and their willingness to blame Israel and its supporters.
And while visceral Jew-baiting has not gained much traction in this country, it has become more visible and more venomous in the Islamic world, a trend personified by Iran’s belligerent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has questioned the reality of the Holocaust and called for Israel’s liquidation.
But recently, Jewish leaders, concerned about the effort to lay the Iraq War at their feet, criticized President Bush for citing the perceived threat of Iran to Israel as one of his prime reasons for confronting Iran.
The 9/11 attacks also proved something less than a unifying force – in America and in the Jewish community. “The ensuing issues, starting with Iraq, have created deep cleavages in the nation, and in the Jewish community as well,” said David Harris, director of the American Jewish Committee. “There may be a shared perception of a new level of threat in our community, but there is tremendous disagreement on what do it about it.”
“Jews, like the nation, are deeply divided on Iraq, on how to deal with Iran,” Harris said. “There is a heightened awareness of the threats, but less consensus about what to do about them. That reflects the partisan divides in the U.S., which are deep and possibly unbridgeable.”
Sarna, the Brandeis University historian, said the recent war in Lebanon helped bring the Jewish community together – momentarily. “There was the hope that there would be more unity when Israel was under attack. But it became clear very quickly that that was a pipe dream,” he said.
Not all the social and political consequences of that terrible day were negative. Numerous Jewish leaders argue that the unprovoked attack against a civilian target changed the way Americans view Israel.
“It created a much deeper understanding of the problems Israel faces,” said Dan Mariaschin, executive vice president of B’nai B’rith International. “We saw the results recently when the public understood Israel’s position in dealing with Hezbollah.”
That new identification with the Jewish state has made some Jews more comfortable with their pro-Israel activism – something that in the past set them apart from their neighbors, said Queens College professor Samuel Heilman. “In the past, support for Israel has always included the hint of dual loyalty,” he said. “Since 9/11, you can say that doesn’t apply any more.”
Heilman argues that the impact of 9/11 on Jews is barely distinguishable from its impact on the nation as a whole, a mark of the Jewish community “coming of age,” he said.
But it is the sense of vulnerability, both personal and communal, that is perhaps the most lasting, and hard to shake, legacy of the 9/11 attacks. As if to underscore this, the National Council of Young Israel has just launched a self-defense program for its nationwide network of Orthodox synagogues. Coming almost five years to the day after Sept. 11, the program is titled, ominously, “KeepSafe: Self-Defense and Prevention Strategies for You and Your Family.”
