american materialism essay

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American Materialism

• Category Sociology
• Subcategory American Society
• Topic American Values

Materialism in America isn’t something new, rather it’s something that has been a part of American society for some time now. Materialism is defined as valuing material possessions and physical comfort over spiritual values. In today’s society, we have hundreds if not thousands of examples of people obsessing over material things. Most Americans believe that buying will bring fulfillment, happiness, a higher social standing, and connections with others. In short, the more you have the better you are as a person. This is the current status of American society full of consumers wanting to buy more and more even when they have no money to spend.

Technology is always improving, getting better but also getting more and more expensive. Apple and Samsung are American companies that focus on the selling, design, and development of electronics. Both of these companies are considered industry giants, making a variety of products such as phones, computers, and smartwatches. Apple, which is known for its iconic iPhone, released its new iPhone 11 starting at a piece of 1,200 dollars in the United States. Samsung also releases its new Galaxy note plus phone with a starting price of 1,000 dollars. These price ranges are the highest the general smartphone market has ever seen. Yet these companies have no trouble selling their products to thousands of Americans. Jefferson Graham says the iPhone set a new sales record in 2017, surpassing their previous year by 211 million phones. Jefferson also states that while iPhones are the most popular in 2017 looking at the list of most sold tech items of 2017, it is easy to see the dominance these brands have. With the Galaxy smartphone being second and the Apple watch coming in fourth. Buying the latest phone, computer or smartwatch can sometimes make people fill fulfill or make them believe they have a higher status until, of course, a new model comes out. This shows materialism in American society.

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Americans also spend thousands of dollars on housing. One might argue that its because Americans want comfort, and they want a sense of relief. This, however, is starting to change because Americans are spending more and more on housing expenses. The typical expenses for the America home could be narrowed to rent, bills, and insurance. This has started to alter with expensive furniture and appliances becoming a must-have in a household. Items such as high-speed internet, the biggest and best plasma screen TVs, touch screen refrigerators to name a few adding to the expenses that Americans have for their homes. American society will make you feel as if you’ve failed if you don’t have a big house with all the must-have items, making people force themselves into buying and buying. Hoping this will give then a sense of fulfillment that won’t last long because just buying doesn’t give that long sense of fulfillment.

The fashion industry keeps growing with people spending wild sums of money on clothing. Once again, this illustrates the materialism in American society. Brands like Nike, Adidas, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci are some of the examples of American companies that make millions of dollars every year from the sale of clothing items. Having clothing from a well-known brand gives people a sense of privilege and belonging to a higher economic class because of the money spent on your clothing. Clothing is one of the best examples to show the materialism of American society. Clothing has only one use which is to be worn and nothing else, yet clothing companies have no issue charging hundreds of dollars for common clothing items like shirts, shoes or jeans. Joel L. Young talks about dealing with depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem, emotions that make people become materialistic and even compulsive spenders. American materialism has reached an all-time high as people are willing to pay the same amount of money for a Louis Vuitton shirt as they are for their rent or mortgage.

American society is materialistic, many value physical and material items above obtaining education and having intrinsic values. There is a lack of search for items that hold intrinsic value. As Ryan T. Howell declares Americans have a misconception that people who are materialistic or being materialistic will obtain happiness, a higher social standing, or better well being however this is false. Change is possible but only if as a society we stop judging people based on their economic income and items of possession. If we focus on achievements that don’t revolve around money and possessions.  

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Consumer Behavior

What causes materialism in america, individuals who live in affluent areas may be more likely to spend compulsively..

Posted March 23, 2014 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

The belief that material possessions improve individuals’ personal and social well-being permeates America. However, contrary to this belief, multiple studies show that materialists, compared to non-materialists, have lower social and personal well-being. Compulsive and impulsive spending, increased debt, decreased savings, depression , social anxiety , decreased subjective well-being, less psychological satisfaction, and other undesirable outcomes have all been linked with materialistic values and purchasing behaviors.

In light of these findings, many studies have tried to determine what causes such strong materialistic desires in America. In a recent paper, my colleagues and I examined the "geography of materialism ." We found a connection between one's neighborhood, socioeconomic status, and materialism.

Consistent with past research that has demonstrated negative influences of neighborhood characteristics on individual attitudes and behaviors, our results suggest that various local economic indicators of wealth (e.g., more financial development, higher median per-capita income) affect individuals’ materialistic values, impulsive buying tendency, and savings behavior.

These signals of wealth conveyed by the local economy appeared to impact self-evaluations in a manner similar to when one is exposed to idealized advertising images. That is, individuals who were young, poor, and lived around wealth were most vulnerable to engaging in social comparison with idealized, wealthier individuals, and using their scant resources to accumulate possessions to, presumably, convey wealth they did not have.

The reason for the link may have to do with "relative deprivation," or the feeling that people are less well-off than those around them. In this case, living in a strong local economy may change an individual’s comparison standards and encourage individuals to socially compare with respect to their material belongings, style, and consumption patterns. We suggest that people who live in more affluent areas are vulnerable to this implicit social comparison — if you see other people spending a lot of money, you feed a need to live up to that standard. Because of this, you end up buying a lot of material items, typically on impulse, even though they don't actually make you happier.

Think about it: If someone is bombarded with images or reminders of wealth, such an abundance of investment banks nearby or neighbors driving luxury cars, they are likely to feel a need to spend money they may not have to project an image of wealth they don't actually possess.

So, what is the next step? We want to explore whether there are ways to counter a neighborhood's effect on an individual's materialistic values. This could be done simply by making more people aware of the correlation or through interventions developed to make people feel more grateful for their status.

Beyond The Purchase is a website dedicated to understanding the psychology behind spending decisions and the relationship between money and happiness . We study how factors like your values and personality interact with spending decisions to affect your happiness . At Beyond The Purchase you can take quizzes that help you understand what motivates your spending decisions, and you’ll get personalized feedback and tips. For example:

• How do you score on the five fundamental dimensions of personality? Take our Big Five personality test and find out.
• How do you feel about your past, present, and future? Take the Time Attitudes Survey and learn about your relationship with time.
• How happy are your Facebook updates? We can analyze your last 25 Facebook status updates and determine how happy you have been.
• How happy is your subconscious ? Take our Happiness IAT and find out.

Finally, I am pretty excited about our gratitude intervention and some of the benefits you can experience if you take part. If you go to BeyondThePurchase.Org you can find our two-week gratitude intervention . Every night after you complete our brief gratitude journal, we will tell you how grateful you felt that day—we also have a graphic displaying how grateful you have felt each day of the intervention so you can see how grateful you are.

With these insights, you can better understand the ways in which your financial decisions affect your happiness. To read more about the connection between money and happiness, go to the Beyond the Purchase blog .

"Living in Wealthy Neighborhoods Increases Material Desires and Maladaptive Consumption" by Jia Wei Zhang, Ryan Howell, and Colleen Howell, published online on Feb. 7, Journal on Consumer Culture .

Ryan T. Howell, Ph.D. , is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at San Francisco State University.

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Materialism in American Culture Essay Example

The buying of physical objects is what gives most Americans a rush of adrenaline and satisfaction. Materialism is the belief held by a handful of these people and involves putting material items over spiritual values. They may choose to go shopping for new clothes, go look at fancy houses, or simply buy more things that they do not need over spending time with those close to them. The feelings released from the purchasing and indulging in these items is what drives people to repeat the process. It is an action commonly seen in American society and is typically encouraged through various areas of influence. The American public contains an obsession with materialism because of the motivation from literature, societal norms, and the media. 

In The Great Gatsby, Tom and Daisy’s relationship revolves around the idea of materialism. Tom and Daisy gave more attention to their material belongings and wealth, rather than the toxic state of their relationship. In Source E it states that “...they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness...”. The two were full of money and with that money they would go on luxurious vacations, buy extravagant items, or live in grand houses. They owned so much, believing that the more they purchase, the happier they would become. However, their desolate states never improved and they were left alone in their grand house, with their extravagant items, and the tension that remained. Additionally, Tom and Daisy had become so caught up in their possessions, that they “... let other people clean up the mess that they had made.” (Source E). They lost sight of how important their relationship was and instead focused solely on their careless spending. The two characters went through the story, ignoring their real-life problems, even when one was aware of the fact that the other was cheating. Their belongings and wealth had hid reality from them, and so they treasured their items over their emotional values. 

The societal norms in America both normalize materialism and encourage the excessive buying of items. The American Dream can be interpreted as owning the largest house on the block and indulging in luxurious items. In Source F, however, it can be seen that most Americans believe that the American Dream is actually associated with hard work, going against the materialistic beliefs some hold with this idea. Yet, there are studies that continue to support the ongoing theme of materialism in the United States. Americans tend to splurge on items rather than spending quality time with those close to them because it gives them a greater sense of satisfaction and relief. For example, a study of Commerce Department data showed that U.S. consumers spent an annual $1.2 trillion on unnecessary items such as pleasure boats, jewelry, booze, gambling and candy (Source B). The percentage of unnecessary items Americans buy every year compared to those actually needed has drastically risen since the last century and this large number displays the rapidly growing practice of materialism and how it is becoming extremely common without people even realizing what they are doing. “They experience a rush of excitement and euphoria from making the purchase” (Source A). Materialistic followers will usually choose shopping as their adrenaline producer, receiving more of a rush from the actual buying rather than the owning of the item. This outlet gives them a great sense of satisfaction because in American society, it is normal to be constantly spending money of unnecessary items and not thinking of the consequences. Thus, materialism is becoming vastly normalized in American society and it can be seen everywhere around us. Those who participate in the indulging of unnecessary items will encourage others to do the same and it has come to occupy its place in American societal norms. 

The American media pushes materialism onto people by targeting young, susceptible groups. Social media leads children from a young age to have a greater need for material items.“However the excessive exposure to the external environment hampers the value system of children, making them prone towards materialistic possessions” (Source D). The media is the one outlet where marketers could successfully convince young audiences that they need to own a certain product. The more commercials the child views, the more materialistic they become as their perception of what they do and do not need becomes altered. This manipulative way of marketing sticks with the child for the rest of their life, molding them into a materialistic American. “Although the impact of media decreases with age, media endorsed materialism remains with children their whole life” (Source D). By targeting a young audience, marketers are able to easily influence their consumers. The children’s brains are still developing and so, their attention can be entirely directed to focus on the advertised items. They are at the age where they will take in all of the information given to them and keep it for years after, leaving them as an easy target for marketers and the media to encourage the attachment to material items. As they grow, their choices and actions revolve around the materialism that was pushed onto them early on. 

Materialism is a popular obsession within the American public. It could be found within literature, where the rich seem to be drowning in their possessions, and it has been normalized in our societal norms, where no one would bat an eye at someone wasting their money on unnecessary trinkets. Even from a considerably young age, children are targeted by marketers and influenced to depend on the physical items seen in advertisements. Together, these ways of increasing the commonality of materialism allows American society to grow in its consumerism. Materialism, even with all of its faults, is what has driven American society forward for years.

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Chapter VI: Materialism and Idealism in American Life

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The Nature of College by James Farrell

Materialism.

The other day, Dr. America was searching the America home in search of a widget.  He knew it was in one of the closets, but he couldn’t remember which one.  And in each closet, there was so much stuff that he had difficulty digging through it. In the process, it occurred to the good doctor that his closets are a museum of American material culture, and all his stuff is a manifestation of American materialism.  Each item we own expresses the way we make meanings with the material world.  And what we have shapes what we do and who we are (and vice versa). Perhaps, he thought, it’s time to bring materialism out of the closet.

In the past fifty years, the size of American homes has doubled—and closets have become more commodious—while the number of occupants per home has declined. Still, one of the fastest growing industries in America is self-storage, where Americans rent closets for all the stuff that doesn’t fit in the house. Houses and closets and storage bins—along with shopping centers and discount stores—are particular evidence of a system of stuff and its associated social practices.  Materialism is the way that Americans manage their resource flows, both intentionally and unintentionally.  When a mother buys her daughter a computer, for example, she’s thinking about internet access and word processing, not world processing.  She’s not thinking about her laptop as a material witness to the resource flows of her culture and her planet, even though it takes several hundred pounds of materials to make a computer.  In our common-sense materialist mindset, we can ignore the environmental impacts of our purchases, because it’s the nature of American consuming to let us focus on our stuff and our desires, and not on the material consequences of our lives. In a provocative book called Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, John Ryan and Alan Durning contend that Americans use more than 100 pounds of resources a day—mostly in the processes that produce all the things we buy.  But even though most of us pay attention to the weight of our bodies, most of us ignore the substantial weight of our lives.

The odd thing about American materialism is that we’re stuffed with stuff, not because we want materials, but because we want functionality, and we want meanings.  We don’t really want a hundred pounds of refrigerator; we just want our food preserved.  We don’t really want a ton of car, but we do want the access to places that it provides, and the symbolic sizzle that comes with it.  We don’t need all the clothes in our closets to stay warm, but we do want the expressive possibilities that accompany all our different outfits.  We don’t plan to provide a pound of material to our parents, but the gift is a way of showing we love them. In many ways, our materialism is essentially in our minds—until we make our meanings material, cluttering up our closets and filling our landfills.

We’re embodied beings in a material world, so materialism isn’t optional.  We will be materialists, but we can choose the shape of our materialism. Right now, most of us practice a materialism that shows little regard for the materials we use in our lives, or for the deep satisfactions that our stuff offers (or not).  We need a new materialism, based on a reverence for the material world, and committed to using it only for our essential human needs (including those that are social, environmental, aesthetic, and spiritual).  This new materialism will let us de-materialize some of the satisfactions of our lives, and find more fulfillment with a smaller ecological footprint. Etymologically, thrift and thriving are related, and they’ll be related again in our commons sense, as we practice a restraint that increases our prosperity and our human flourishing—for all time. Giving up, after all, is a form of giving.  It’s a gift to posterity, because our restraint is somebody else’s reprieve.  Our sufficiency provides for the future’s sufficiency too.

If we continue to stuff our homes with stuff without thinking about the consequences, we’ll eventually inhabit a world that has less room for other species, and a hostile climate and fewer resources for us.  But if we begin to develop a new and improved materialism–an ecological materialism—we might promote a reverence for materials and for the stuff of creation. This new materialism might revive pre-materialist ideals of thrift, frugality and sufficiency, and it might encourage us to design products for repair and re-use, and to consume materials fully before discarding them.  If we practice a materialism that takes materials seriously—both individually and institutionally—we’ll have a better chance of creating a culture in which we have more human satisfaction with less stuff. It will be easier to find the widget we were looking for, and whatever the size of our homes, we’ll feel more at home in the cosmos.

How the American Culture Is Materialistic and How It Is Affecting Kuwait Essay

Introduction, american materialism, how the american materialism affects kuwait, works cited.

The concept of materialism has been extensively been studied by different scholars and researchers. This concept has mainly been studied as a marketing tool which different advertisers use to woo customers to buy their products. Materialism can be defined as an attitude or perception concerning the possession of various things in a persons’ life. Materialism is generally learned via socialization or it can be acquired depending on the environment, which a person is located (cherrier et al 12).

Materialism can also be propagated via other different channels. The marketing strategies of various companies can help in portraying a certain product as classy and therefore help in instilling the mentality of materialism on the population. The media can also be used to propagate the materialism through the different programs and ideologies which it tries to instill on the people so as to achieve a specific goal.

Americans are generally richer than other people in the world. They have so much wealth and attach special importance to the possession of material things. This makes the Americans to sometimes be referred to as the most materialistic society in the world. The Americans spend large sums of money on things which other people would consider not worth to spend such large sums of money.

They generally derive pleasure and attach significant importance to the possession of these materials (Colorado Para 5). The luxury materials which the Americans invest in are houses, luxury vehicles and entertainment and communication gadgets. The Americans usually use this equipment only for pleasure.

The materialism is generally instilled in the citizens as they are growing up. They are shown that for one to be successful on must have a well paying job, a nice car, a house and a family. The Americans therefore strive to achieve this as by achieving they would consider themselves as being successful. Their social status would also improve due to the achievement of the above possessions (Lockett Para 1)

The government has also been termed as materialistic due to the large sums of money it spends on ventures which are not very important. Despite having a large debt, the American government spends large sums of money on the Iraqi and the afghan war.

The war does not warrant the spending of such amounts of money since the money can be used in various other activities which be beneficial to the citizens and the economy in general. The amount of money spent on the wars makes some people to term the American government as materialistic.

The effect on the American culture can also be felt by other countries. Americans has moved to other parts of the world due to globalization. The internet and the media also show so much of the American content or use the views of the Americans. This makes the people of the countries where the information is shown to develop the traits, which are portrayed by the mass communication methods.

During the gulf war, the American army intervened to protect the annexing of Kuwait by the Iraqi government under the leadership of the late Saddam Hussein. When the war ended many Americans were left in Kuwait. These American citizens exert profound influence on the culture of the people of Kuwait by introducing the culture of materialism (Schaap-Jones Para 5).

Entry of the Americans into Kuwait led to the establishment of various American companies in various parts of Kuwait (Schaap-Jones 2010 para 5). These establishments generally promote materialism as they are mainly associated with the social status of different people and tend to show their customers that they are of a higher social status if they visit the establishments.

Before the coming of the Americans the Kuwait culture used to religious based and the citizens of the places were generally not materialistic. These people did not pay attention to the materialistic things. They mainly attached significant importance to religion and culture (Schaap-Jones Para 1).

.The constitution of Kuwait is very liberal. It gives the citizens of Kuwait so much freedom. The freedom allows the citizens to be liberal in their religious and social activities. The freedom offered by the constitution allowed the propagation of materialistic values as the governments could not inhibit the citizens from performing specific actions which would be termed as propagating materialism since the freedom of the citizens was entrenched in the constitution (Schaap-Jones Para 2).

Prior to the development of the satellite television networks, all the television stations in the Arab world were controlled by the government. The governments usually imposed strict regulation to control the content of the television stations. However economic liberalization which started due to the American influence immediately after the gulf war, allowed the setting up of the satellite television stations.

These stations usually employed the western methods of broadcasting which promoted the materialism. The promotion of the materialism is sometimes referred to “affluenza” (Harmon p 1). This is what has happened in Kuwait. There are several satellite televisions which air their programs in Arabic but mainly propagate the western ideas.

Materialism encourages people to work harder so as to be able to maintain their desirable lifestyles. This has therefore made the Kuwaiti women to seek employment so that they can be able to afford the luxurious lifestyles which they crave. By so doing the women are also becoming the major source of livelihoods of different families.

This will ultimately result in social tensions in the comparatively conservative Kuwaiti society. This is because the women were traditionally meant to stay home and take care of the family whereas the men were the breadwinners of the family (Cherian Para 10).

American imposed materialism has also come up with advantages. Materialism has emphasized the benefit of acquiring high quality education which is usually provided in the private institutions of leaning. Materialism has therefore encouraged the young people to enroll to different private educational institutions so as to attain the high quality education (Schaap-Jones Para 7).

Most of the citizens of Kuwait see that the increased materialism of the society has a bad influence on the society. Most of the people who are of this view are mainly the old people who would like to be conservative. However the younger generation sees no problem with being materialistic as materialism enables them to acquire gadgets and tools which make their lives more enjoyable. The Kuwaiti population is therefore becoming more and more materialistic and the levels of materialism may be higher for future generations.

Cherian, Sunil. “I’m jealous of Kuwaiti mothers.” Kuwait Times . 2010. Web.

Cherrier, Helene et al. The globalizing Arab world: impacts on the consumers level of materialism and vanity. N.d. Web.

Colorado, Ray. “Understanding America.” Understanding America. 2001. Web.

Harmon, Mark. “Arab youth TV viewing & affluenza.” Arab media & society. 2008. Web.

Locket, Terrel. “American Materialism.” Bukisa: Share Your Knowledge. 2010. Web.

Schaap-Jones. The Effects of Globalization on Kuwait. 2010. Web.

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American Psycho

Bret easton ellis, everything you need for every book you read..

In American Psycho , Patrick Bateman and his band of incredibly wealthy Wall Street colleagues live lives of utter excess, purchasing nothing but the finest things, wearing only the finest clothes, eating at only the chicest restaurants, and looking down on any who fall short of their standard. These characters are exaggerated stereotypes of the 1980s Wall Street “yuppie” class that Ellis means to critique – often to the point of satire – in his novel. Ellis engages in this critique not through any attempt at realism, but rather by amplifying the characters’ obsession with materiality and abandonment of all values other than wealth to extreme degrees.

Every time Bateman encounters another person, he describes in detail what they are wearing and the high-end designer labels of their clothes. His meticulous descriptions and severe judgments reveal a character who calculates a person’s worth based entirely on their wealth and outward appearance. Bateman and his friends’ obsessions with their own images – being seen in the right places, with the right people, looking the right way – displays a hollowness of self, suggesting that the shallowness of this “yuppie” class may be connected to feelings that they exist within a culture that says the only way for them to attain self-esteem, value, and place in society is to buy it. Bateman and his associates also have a practice of ridiculing homeless people and beggars. Bateman, for instance, describes one homeless woman as “ugly” and “old,” and makes a practice of dangling money in front of beggars’ faces, only to gleefully snatch it away and enjoy their anguish and tears. Bateman and his Wall Street friends are model citizens in a capitalist society: they work, make money, and spend it. Because beggars and the homeless do not have the wealth and possessions that they do, they are seen as devoid of value and humanity, not worthy of respect or care.

But Ellis pushes even further (the novel isn’t called American Jerk after all; it’s American Psycho ). Bateman’s hatred and mistreatment of the homeless turns violent when he first interrogates and then attacks a homeless man, Al , and his dog. After telling him to “get a job” and ridiculing him for “reek[ing] of… shit,” Bateman slowly and meticulously drives a blade into the man’s eyes and stomps on his dog’s legs. He goes on to kill a number of other homeless people, including Al. These attacks indicate, obviously, that not only does Bateman believe that the homeless are beneath his care, but that they are undeserving even to live. They also suggest a kind of desperation on Bateman’s part, however: he kills the homeless not just because he can, but because his worldview means he must. A homeless person being allowed to live suggests that people have inherent worth that has nothing to do with their wealth. By this logic, only by murdering and torturing the homeless – only by asserting that they have no worth – can Bateman fully believe that his wealth and possessions and status give him worth.

The novel, then, pushes Bateman and his friends’ ideas about homeless people to their furthest logical extensions until the result reveals the insanity – the psychotic-ness – of the original belief. The novel does the same with the idea of “consumption.” Bateman and his wealth- and possession-obsessed friends believe that consumption, the purchase of material goods, is all that matters. As it progresses, the novel graphically relates Bateman’s consumption of material goods – the best clothes, electronics, fine dining – to a cannibalistic consumption, as he starts eating the remains of his victims and consuming their own flesh in front of them. At one point, for instance, the novel describes “the fresh smell of blood cooking” and a pair of cooked breasts lying, “rather delicately, on a china plate I bought at the Pottery Barn.” Here, Ellis compares the insanity of Bateman’s meticulous materialism to the methodical consumption of human flesh. As cannibalism is a human eating the flesh of another human, the novel suggests that materialism is eating away at Bateman’s own humanity and his ability to value others as anything other than flesh to be used. Bateman’s sociopathic appetite for violence and disregard for others’ humanity, the novel insists, is just the ultimate end point for a capitalist, consumer culture that values only wealth and materialism and sees no inherent value in anything else.

Materialism and Consumption ThemeTracker

Materialism and Consumption Quotes in American Psycho

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Misérables on its side blocking his view…

“I’m resourceful,” Price is saying, “I’m creative, I’m young, unscrupulous, highly motivated, highly skilled. In essence what I’m saying is that society can not afford to lose me. I’m an asset .”

All of the men outside Tunnel tonight are for some reason wearing tuxedos, except for a middle-aged homeless bum who sits by a Dumpster, only a few feet away from the ropes, holding out to anyone who pays attention a Styrofoam coffee cup, begging for change, and as Price leads us around the crowd up to the ropes, motioning to one of the doormen, Van Patten waves a crisp one-dollar bill in front of the homeless bum’s face, which momentarily lights up, then Van Patten pockets it as we’re whisked into the club, handed a dozen drink tickets and two VIP Basement passes.

“Don’t wear that outfit again,” I say, looking her over quickly… “do not wear that outfit again. Wear a dress. A skirt or something… You’re prettier than that… And high heels,” I mention. “I like high heels.” She shakes her head good-naturedly as she exits…

“Why don’t you get another one?” I ask. “Why don’t you get another job?” “I’m not…” He coughs, holding himself, shaking miserably, violently, unable to finish the sentence. “You’re not what?” I ask softly. “Qualified for anything else?” … “Listen, do you think it’s fair to take money from people who do have jobs? Who do work?” His face crumples and he gasps, his voice raspy, “What am I gonna do?”

“My life is a living hell,” I mention off the cuff, while casually moving leeks around on my plate, which by the way is a porcelain triangle. “And there are many more people I, uh, want to… want to, well, I guess murder .” I say emphasizing this last word, staring straight into Armstrong’s face.

…I’m sweaty and a pounding migraine thumps dull in my head and I’m experiencing a major-league anxiety attack, searching my pockets for Valium, Xanax, a leftover Halcion, anything… I’ve forgotten who I had lunch with earlier, and even more important, where .

My priorities before Christmas include the following: (1) to get an eight o’clock reservation on a Friday night at Dorsia with Courtney, (2) to get myself invited to the Trump Christmas Party aboard their yacht, (3) to find out as much as humanly possible about Paul Owen’s mysterious Fisher account, (4) to saw a hardbody’s head off and Federal Express it to Robin Barker – the dumb bastard – over at Solomon Brothers and (5) to apologize to Evelyn without making it look like an apology.

I feel empty, hardly here at all, but even the arrival of the police seems insufficient reason to move and I stand with the crowd outside the penguin habitat… until finally I’m walking down Fifth Avenue, surprised by how little blood has stained my jacket, and I stop in a bookstore and buy a book and then at a Dove Bar stand on the corner of Fifty-sixth Street, where I buy a Dove bar – a coconut one – and I imagine a hole, widening in the sun…

…while I grind the bone and fat and flesh into patties, and though it does sporadically penetrate how unacceptable some of what I’m doing actually is, I just remind myself that this thing, this girl, this meat, is nothing, is shit, and along with a Xanax (which I’m now taking half-hourly) this thought momentarily calms me and then I’m humming…

“Please do not sit in the same row in court with Janet. When I look over toward you there she sits contemplating me with her mad eyes like a deranged seagull studying a clam… I can feel her spreading hot sauce on me already…”

…it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world can be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason?... Evil is its only purpose. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in.. this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…

While walking back to the highway, I stop, choke back a sob, my throat tightens. “I just want to…” Facing the skyline, through all the baby talk, I murmur, “keep the game going.” As I stand, frozen in my position, an old woman emerges behind a Threepenny Opera poster at a deserted bus stop and she’s homeless and begging, hobbling over, her face covered with sores that look like bugs, holding out a shaking red hand. “Oh will you please go away?” I sigh. She tells me to get a haircut.

“Well, though I know I should have done that instead of not doing it, I’m twenty-seven for Christ sakes and this is, uh, how life presents itself in a bar or in a club in New York, maybe anywhere , at the end of the century and how people, you know, me , behave, and this is what being Pat rick means to me, I guess, so, well, yup, uh…” and this is followed by a sigh, then a slight shrug and another sigh, and above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry’s is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes’ color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.

• Israel-Hamas War

Netanyahu’s Appetite for Confronting U.S. Presidents May Cost Israel This Time

I t was fully expected that Israel would be displeased that the United States abstained on a United Nations resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire—instead of blocking it with a veto. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction was outright ridiculous, as he announced he won’t send his top advisors to Washington for talks about the war. Why did he do that?

Netanyahu has a long history of angering presidents—mostly, although not exclusively, Democrats. After he lectured Bill Clinton in the White House in 1996, the President grumbled to his staff: “Who the f**k does he think he is? Who’s the f**king superpower here?”

While you might think that Israel’s longest serving prime minister would have learned from experience, think about this: He probably has concluded that he always gets away with it. Netanyahu, a self-described expert on the U.S., is taking U.S. support for granted—in the belief that Evangelical Christians and America’s tiny Jewish minority will ensure that Israel is always loved, constantly armed, and repeatedly forgiven for any missteps.

And yet, at this point, after President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have said that Israel has been bombing indiscriminately in Gaza, and Biden said the military reaction to the Hamas massacres of October 7 has been “over the top,” Netanyahu still thinks he can take a slap at Biden.

It’s getting pretty clear that Israel’s prime minister is gambling, and he’s putting his chips on Donald Trump. Netanyahu—and the rightwing extremists in his government who want to annex the West Bank, and now would like to rebuild Jewish settlements in Gaza—feel that if Trump is back in the White House, he will again let Israel do whatever it wants. And, in their view, if Republicans can capture the Senate and keep the House, then Israel will really have it made.

That’s a lousy bet. No one can count on Trump to stick to whatever position he’s voicing at the moment. In fact, the former president bears a grudge against Netanyahu for congratulating Biden on his election victory in 2020. Trump harshly criticizes American Jews for voting for Democrats, and in an interview with an Israeli newspaper now says the Gaza war looks bad and tells Netanyahu to finish it fast and focus on peace.

For decades, in Israeli politics, the government wanted to look like it was 100% in lockstep with the U.S.—that beacon of a free country that, since the Yom Kippur War of 1973, has been Israel’s main arms supplier and protector in the world’s diplomatic arenas. Israel was proud to say that it maintained bipartisan support in the U.S., and both its diplomats and the American lobby AIPAC took pains to make friends with both Democrats and Republicans.

But Netanyahu has embraced the hubris of thinking he’ll look strong to his political base if he challenges American presidents and other foreign critics. He and his closest officials have strengthened ties with the Republicans—especially hawkish conservatives who admire what the small Jewish state is able to accomplish in an overwhelmingly Muslim region.

Read More: Israel Must Not Let Netanyahu Reject the Biden Peace Plan

When Israeli leaders perceived that many Democrats were questioning Israeli actions, especially its occupation of the West Bank since 1967, Israel turned a cold shoulder to the progressives. And the American Left, no longer admiring Israel as a liberal and enlightened enclave in the Middle East, made Zionism one of its main targets for condemnation.

As statistics and our own sensibilities show, that has contributed to an upsurge in antisemitism —in the U.S. and worldwide—notably since October 7 and the Israeli invasion of Gaza that followed. Jews in many countries are being harassed or attacked by anti-Semites and anti-Zionists, who are cut from the same cloth, on both the political Left and Right.

Netanyahu’s bull-headed insensitivity is partially to blame. In the U.S., he was turning off liberals long before his current feud with Biden. Recall his 2015 address to Congress, after an invitation extended only by Republicans. His speech called on America to reject Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Netanyahu preached, then lost. The support Israel forfeited from Democrats has had lasting impact.

The alliance between Israel and the U.S. is not a force of nature that can be taken for granted. Thirty years ago, we wrote a book aimed at deciphering the secrets of an alliance between a superpower and a tiny country in a far-off strategic region. We outlined factors such as shared democratic values, the importance of the Jewish American community, the strong attachment of Evangelicals to the Holy Land, and memories of the Holocaust.

We also warned that the passage of time and changes in U.S. demography could erode support for Israel. It's happening now, with protests on American campuses against the war in Gaza. Many of the protestors consume a diet of self-selected, sometimes fake news and have little understanding of the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel still enjoys widespread support in America, though it’s constantly eroded by the behavior of Netanyahu and the extremists in his cabinet. “It seems that U.S. officials speak politely but firmly to their Israeli counterparts,” former Israeli ambassador to Washington Danny Ayalon told us. “But the Israelis pretend they don’t understand what they’re being told.”

For now, the Israeli government and military officials who were going to fly to Washington this week will stay home. They had been invited by the White House to hear alternatives developed by Pentagon and CIA strategists: ways of crushing the last remnants of Hamas, and hopefully liberating hostages, without a huge attack on Rafah, where over a million Palestinian refugees have gathered.

Netanyahu isn’t really interested in those talks. He explicitly declares that the Israel Defense Forces must enter Rafah, to kill or capture the top Hamas military chiefs. That means he, apparently backed by everyone in his post-October 7 war cabinet, feels it is necessary to restore Israeli deterrence by showing the power of the IDF.

To the Biden Administration and most of the world, that looks like indifference toward the tens of thousands of Gaza civilians who have been killed or wounded, and the hundreds of thousands made homeless.

Biden’s decision to abstain at the U.N. – rather than protect Israel, as usual, with a veto – was a message to Netanyahu that enough is enough. Netanyahu thinks he’s able to slap back, but his petulance reminds us of the satirical Peter Sellers movie of 1959, “The Mouse that Roared,” in which a tiny fictitious country declares war on the U.S. in the hope of receiving reconstruction aid.

That was farce, of course. The reality is that Israel cannot afford to endanger the aid that's already flowing. On top of $3.8 billion in annual direct military assistance, the U.S. has sent more than 400 transport planes and 30 ships carrying 20,000 tons of ammunition, rockets, and other essential military equipment to help Israel prosecute the Gaza war. "Without this re-supply, the Israeli army wouldn't be able to keep fighting beyond another six months," a former Israeli general told us.

Darker days for American-Israeli relations could follow, especially if Netanyahu keeps misjudging the country that’s been Israel’s greatest defender.

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Pleasantview DAR announces essay winners

River City Middle School's Faith Harmon is the eighth grade winner of the Pleasantview Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution's American History Essay Contest. From left: Andy Preiss, Mark Harmon, Faith Harmon, Staci Harmon, Nancy Hicks and Janey Ortega. Courtesy photo

Hailey Jenny-Jeanne Farr of River City Middle School is the seventh grade winner of the Pleasantview Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution's American History Essay Contest. From left: Andy Preiss, Trina Caudle, Hailey Jenny-Jeanne Farr and Deb Tierney.

Milli’on Horfelt of Post Falls Middle School is the sixth grade winner of the Pleasantview Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution's American History Essay Contest. From left: Sally Holtz, Milli’on Horfelt, Vicki Horfelt and Mark Mason.

The Pleasantview Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution has announced the winners of the American History essay contest for 2024.

The Pleasantview American History essay contest was open to students in sixth through eighth grades in all accredited schools in the Post Falls area.

The topic of the American History contest this year was:

"On May 14, 1897, John Phillip Sousa played his new march, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” This song would become the national march of the United States on Dec. 11, 1987. Imagine it is 1897 and you are a newspaper reporter for “The Philadelphia Times.” Your newspaper editor has asked you to write an article about the song being performed that day. Your article needs to tell us about Sousa’s life and the story behind the song. It is the first performance of the song, so make sure your article includes your thoughts about the music and how the audience reacts to what is seen and heard that day."

The entries were judged by grade level. The winners of the contest are:

• Sixth grade — Milli’on Horfelt, Post Falls Middle School

• Seventh grade — Hailey Jenny-Jeanne Farr, River City Middle School

• Eighth grade — Faith Harmon, River City Middle School

Winners earned certificates, bronze medals and monetary awards. Pleasantview Chapter winners will be submitted to the Idaho State Society for consideration in the state and national contests.

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Opinion Guest Essay

The Great Rupture in American Jewish Life

Credit... Daniel Benneworth-Gray

Supported by

By Peter Beinart

Mr. Beinart is the editor at large of Jewish Currents and a journalist and writer who has written extensively on the Middle East, Jewish life and American foreign policy.

• March 22, 2024

F or the last decade or so, an ideological tremor has been unsettling American Jewish life. Since Oct. 7, it has become an earthquake. It concerns the relationship between liberalism and Zionism, two creeds that for more than half a century have defined American Jewish identity. In the years to come, American Jews will face growing pressure to choose between them.

They will face that pressure because Israel’s war in Gaza has supercharged a transformation on the American left. Solidarity with Palestinians is becoming as essential to leftist politics as support for abortion rights or opposition to fossil fuels. And as happened during the Vietnam War and the struggle against South African apartheid, leftist fervor is reshaping the liberal mainstream. In December, the United Automobile Workers demanded a cease-fire and formed a divestment working group to consider the union’s “economic ties to the conflict.” In January, the National L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force called for a cease-fire as well. In February, the leadership of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the nation’s oldest Black Protestant denomination, called on the United States to halt aid to the Jewish state. Across blue America, many liberals who once supported Israel or avoided the subject are making the Palestinian cause their own.

This transformation remains in its early stages. In many prominent liberal institutions — most significantly, the Democratic Party — supporters of Israel remain not only welcome but also dominant. But the leaders of those institutions no longer represent much of their base. The Democratic majority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer, acknowledged this divide in a speech on Israel on the Senate floor last week. He reiterated his longstanding commitment to the Jewish state, though not its prime minister. But he also conceded, in the speech’s most remarkable line, that he “can understand the idealism that inspires so many young people in particular to support a one-state solution” — a solution that does not involve a Jewish state. Those are the words of a politician who understands that his party is undergoing profound change.

The American Jews most committed to Zionism, the ones who run establishment institutions, understand that liberal America is becoming less ideologically hospitable. And they are responding by forging common cause with the American right. It’s no surprise that the Anti-Defamation League, which only a few years ago harshly criticized Donald Trump’s immigration policies, recently honored his son-in-law and former senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

Mr. Trump himself recognizes the emerging political split. “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” he said in an interview published on Monday. “They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.” It’s typical Trumpian indecency and hyperbole, but it’s rooted in a political reality. For American Jews who want to preserve their country’s unconditional support for Israel for another generation, there is only one reliable political partner: a Republican Party that views standing for Palestinian rights as part of the “woke” agenda.

The American Jews who are making a different choice — jettisoning Zionism because they can’t reconcile it with the liberal principle of equality under the law — garner less attention because they remain further from power. But their numbers are larger than many recognize, especially among millennials and Gen Z. And they face their own dilemmas. They are joining a Palestine solidarity movement that is growing larger, but also more radical, in response to Israel’s destruction of Gaza. That growing radicalism has produced a paradox: A movement that welcomes more and more American Jews finds it harder to explain where Israeli Jews fit into its vision of Palestinian liberation.

The emerging rupture between American liberalism and American Zionism constitutes the greatest transformation in American Jewish politics in half a century. It will redefine American Jewish life for decades to come.

“A merican Jews,” writes Marc Dollinger in his book “Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America,” have long depicted themselves as “guardians of liberal America.” Since they came to the United States in large numbers around the turn of the 20th century, Jews have been wildly overrepresented in movements for civil, women’s, labor and gay rights. Since the 1930s, despite their rising prosperity, they have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. For generations of American Jews, the icons of American liberalism — Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Gloria Steinem — have been secular saints.

The American Jewish love affair with Zionism dates from the early 20th century as well. But it came to dominate communal life only after Israel’s dramatic victory in the 1967 war exhilarated American Jews eager for an antidote to Jewish powerlessness during the Holocaust. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which was nearly bankrupt on the eve of the 1967 war, had become American Jewry’s most powerful institution by the 1980s. American Jews, wrote Albert Vorspan, a leader of Reform Judaism, in 1988, “have made of Israel an icon — a surrogate faith, surrogate synagogue, surrogate God.”

Given the depth of these twin commitments, it’s no surprise that American Jews have long sought to fuse them by describing Zionism as a liberal cause. It has always been a strange pairing. American liberals generally consider themselves advocates of equal citizenship irrespective of ethnicity, religion and race. Zionism — or at the least the version that has guided Israel since its founding — requires Jewish dominance. From 1948 to 1966, Israel held most of its Palestinian citizens under military law; since 1967 it has ruled millions of Palestinians who hold no citizenship at all. Even so, American Jews could until recently assert their Zionism without having their liberal credentials challenged.

The primary reason was the absence from American public discourse of Palestinians, the people whose testimony would cast those credentials into greatest doubt. In 1984, the Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said argued that in the West, Palestinians lack “permission to narrate” their own experience. For decades after he wrote those words, they remained true. A study by the University of Arizona’s Maha Nassar found that of the opinion articles about Palestinians published in The New York Times and The Washington Post between 2000 and 2009, Palestinians themselves wrote roughly 1 percent.

But in recent years, Palestinian voices, while still embattled and even censored , have begun to carry. Palestinians have turned to social media to combat their exclusion from the press. In an era of youth-led activism, they have joined intersectional movements forged by parallel experiences of discrimination and injustice. Meanwhile, Israel — under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu for most of the past two decades — has lurched to the right, producing politicians so openly racist that their behavior cannot be defended in liberal terms.

Many Palestine solidarity activists identify as leftists, not liberals. But like the activists of the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements, they have helped change liberal opinion with their radical critiques. In 2002, according to Gallup , Democrats sympathized with Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 34 points. By early 2023, they favored the Palestinians by 11 points. And because opinion about Israel cleaves along generational lines, that pro-Palestinian skew is much greater among the young. According to a Quinnipiac University poll in November, Democrats under the age of 35 sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis by 58 points.

Given this generational gulf, universities offer a preview of the way many liberals — or “progressives,” a term that straddles liberalism and leftism and enjoys more currency among young Americans — may view Zionism in the years to come. Supporting Palestine has become a core feature of progressive politics on many campuses. At Columbia, for example, 94 campus organizations — including the Vietnamese Students Association, the Reproductive Justice Collective and Poetry Slam, Columbia’s “only recreational spoken word club” — announced in November that they “see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective liberation.” As a result, Zionist Jewish students find themselves at odds with most of their politically active peers.

Accompanying this shift, on campus and beyond, has been a rise in Israel-related antisemitism. It follows a pattern in American history. From the hostility toward German Americans during World War I to violence against American Muslims after Sept. 11 and assaults on Asian Americans during the Covid pandemic, Americans have a long and ugly tradition of expressing their hostility toward foreign governments or movements by targeting compatriots who share a religion, ethnicity or nationality with those overseas adversaries. Today, tragically, some Americans who loathe Israel are taking it out on American Jews. (Palestinian Americans, who have endured multiple violent hate crimes since Oct. 7, are experiencing their own version of this phenomenon.) The spike in antisemitism since Oct. 7 follows a pattern. Five years ago, the political scientist Ayal Feinberg, using data from 2001 and 2014, found that reported antisemitic incidents in the United States spike when the Israeli military conducts a substantial military operation.

Attributing the growing discomfort of pro-Israel Jewish students entirely to antisemitism, however, misses something fundamental. Unlike establishment Jewish organizations, Jewish students often distinguish between bigotry and ideological antagonism. In a 2022 study , the political scientist Eitan Hersh found that more than 50 percent of Jewish college students felt “they pay a social cost for supporting the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.” And yet, in general, Dr. Hersh reported, “the students do not fear antisemitism.”

Surveys since Oct. 7 find something similar. Asked in November in a Hillel International poll to describe the climate on campus since the start of the war, 20 percent of Jewish students answered “unsafe” and 23 percent answered “scary.” By contrast, 45 percent answered “uncomfortable” and 53 percent answered “tense.” A survey that same month by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that only 37 percent of American Jewish voters ages 18 to 35 consider campus antisemitism a “very serious problem,” compared with nearly 80 percent of American Jewish voters over the age of 35.

While some young pro-Israel American Jews experience antisemitism, they more frequently report ideological exclusion. As Zionism becomes associated with the political right, their experiences on progressive campuses are coming to resemble the experiences of young Republicans. The difference is that unlike young Republicans, most young American Zionists were raised to believe that theirs was a liberal creed. When their parents attended college, that assertion was rarely challenged. On the same campuses where their parents felt at home, Jewish students who view Zionism as central to their identity now often feel like outsiders.

In 1979, Mr. Said observed that in the West, “to be a Palestinian is in political terms to be an outlaw.” In much of America — including Washington — that remains true. But within progressive institutions one can glimpse the beginning of a historic inversion. Often, it’s now the Zionists who feel like outlaws.

G iven the organized American Jewish community’s professed devotion to liberal principles, which include free speech, one might imagine that Jewish institutions would greet this ideological shift by urging pro-Israel students to tolerate and even learn from their pro-Palestinian peers. Such a stance would flow naturally from the statements establishment Jewish groups have made in the past. A few years ago, the Anti-Defamation League declared that “our country’s universities serve as laboratories for the exchange of differing viewpoints and beliefs. Offensive, hateful speech is protected by the Constitution’s First Amendment.”

But as pro-Palestinian sentiment has grown in progressive America, pro-Israel Jewish leaders have apparently made an exception for anti-Zionism. While still claiming to support free speech on campus, the ADL last October asked college presidents to investigate local chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine to determine whether they violated university regulations or state or federal laws, a demand that the American Civil Liberties Union warned could “chill speech” and “betray the spirit of free inquiry.” After the University of Pennsylvania hosted a Palestinian literature festival last fall, Marc Rowan, chair of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York and chair of the board of advisers of Penn’s Wharton business school, condemned the university’s president for giving the festival Penn’s “imprimatur.” In December, he encouraged trustees to alter university policies in ways that Penn’s branch of the American Association of University Professors warn ed could “silence and punish speech with which trustees disagree.”

In this effort to limit pro-Palestinian speech, establishment Jewish leaders are finding their strongest allies on the authoritarian right. Pro-Trump Republicans have their own censorship agenda: They want to stop schools and universities from emphasizing America’s history of racial and other oppression. Calling that pedagogy antisemitic makes it easier to ban or defund. At a much discussed congressional hearing in December featuring the presidents of Harvard, Penn and M.I.T., the Republican representative Virginia Foxx noted that Harvard teaches courses like “Race and Racism in the Making of the United States as a Global Power” and hosts seminars such as “Scientific Racism and Anti-Racism: History and Recent Perspectives” before declaring that “Harvard also, not coincidentally but causally, was ground zero for antisemitism following Oct. 7.”

Ms. Foxx’s view is typical. While some Democrats also equate anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the politicians and business leaders most eager to suppress pro-Palestinian speech are conservatives who link such speech to the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda they despise. Elise Stefanik, a Trump acolyte who has accused Harvard of “caving to the woke left,” became the star of that congressional hearing by demanding that Harvard’s president , Claudine Gay, punish students who chant slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” (Ms. Gay was subsequently forced to resign following charges of plagiarism.) Elon Musk, who in November said that the phrase “from the river to the sea” was banned from his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), the following month declared , “D.E.I. must die.” The first governor to ban Students for Justice in Palestine chapters at his state’s public universities was Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who has also signed legislation that limits what those universities can teach about race and gender.

This alignment between the American Jewish organizational establishment and the Trumpist right is not limited to universities. If the ADL has aligned with Republicans who want to silence “woke” activists on campus, AIPAC has joined forces with Republicans who want to disenfranchise “woke” voters. In the 2022 midterm elections, AIPAC endorsed at least 109 Republicans who opposed certifying the 2020 election. For an organization single-mindedly focused on sustaining unconditional U.S. support for Israel, that constituted a rational decision. Since Republican members of Congress don’t have to mollify pro-Palestinian voters, they’re AIPAC’s most dependable allies. And if many of those Republicans used specious claims of Black voter fraud to oppose the democratic transfer of power in 2020 — and may do so again — that’s a price AIPAC seems to be prepared to pay.

F or the many American Jews who still consider themselves both progressives and Zionists, this growing alliance between leading Zionist institutions and a Trumpist Republican Party is uncomfortable. But in the short term, they have an answer: politicians like President Biden, whose views about both Israel and American democracy roughly reflect their own. In his speech last week, Mr. Schumer called these liberal Zionists American Jewry’s “silent majority.”

For the moment he may be right. In the years to come, however, as generational currents pull the Democratic Party in a more pro-Palestinian direction and push America’s pro-Israel establishment to the right, liberal Zionists will likely find it harder to reconcile their two faiths. Young American Jews offer a glimpse into that future, in which a sizable wing of American Jewry decides that to hold fast to its progressive principles it must jettison Zionism and embrace equal citizenship in Israel and Palestine, as well as in the United States.

For an American Jewish establishment that equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism, these anti-Zionist Jews are inconvenient. Sometimes, pro-Israel Jewish organizations pretend they don’t exist. In November, after Columbia suspended two anti-Zionist campus groups, the ADL thanked university leaders for acting “to protect Jewish students” — even though one of the suspended groups was Jewish Voice for Peace. At other times, pro-Israel leaders describe anti-Zionist Jews as a negligible fringe. If American Jews are divided over the war in Gaza, Andrés Spokoiny, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Funders Network, an organization for Jewish philanthropists, declared in December, “the split is 98 percent/2 percent.”

Among older American Jews, this assertion of a Zionist consensus contains some truth. But among younger American Jews, it’s false. In 2021, even before Israel’s current far-right government took power, the Jewish Electorate Institute found that 38 percent of American Jewish voters under the age of 40 viewed Israel as an apartheid state, compared with 47 percent who said it’s not. In November, it revealed that 49 percent of American Jewish voters ages 18 to 35 opposed Mr. Biden’s request for additional military aid to Israel. On many campuses, Jewish students are at the forefront of protests for a cease-fire and divestment from Israel. They don’t speak for all — and maybe not even most — of their Jewish peers. But they represent far more than 2 percent.

These progressive Jews are, as the U.S. editor of The London Review of Books, Adam Shatz, noted to me, a double minority. Their anti-Zionism makes them a minority among American Jews, while their Jewishness makes them a minority in the Palestine solidarity movement. Fifteen years ago, when the liberal Zionist group J Street was intent on being the “ blocking back ” for President Barack Obama’s push for a two-state solution, some liberal Jews imagined themselves leading the push to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Today, the prospect of partition has diminished, and Palestinians increasingly set the terms of activist criticism of Israel. That discourse, which is peppered with terms like “apartheid” and “decolonization," is generally hostile to a Jewish state within any borders.

There’s nothing antisemitic about envisioning a future in which Palestinians and Jews coexist on the basis of legal equality rather than Jewish supremacy. But in pro-Palestine activist circles in the United States, coexistence has receded as a theme. In 1999, Mr. Said argued for “a binational Israeli-Palestinian state” that offered “self-determination for both peoples.” In his 2007 book, “One Country,” Ali Abunimah, a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, an influential source of pro-Palestine news and opinion, imagined one state whose name reflected the identities of both major communities that inhabit it. The terms “‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ are dear to those who use them and they should not be abandoned,” he argued. “The country could be called Yisrael-Falastin in Hebrew and Filastin-Isra’il in Arabic.”

In recent years, however, as Israel has moved to the right, pro-Palestinian discourse in the United States has hardened. The phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which dates from the 1960s but has gained new prominence since Oct. 7, does not acknowledge Palestine and Israel’s binational character. To many American Jews, in fact, the phrase suggests a Palestine free of Jews. It sounds expulsionist, if not genocidal. It’s an ironic charge, given that it is Israel that today controls the land between the river and the sea, whose leaders openly advocate the mass exodus of Palestinians and that the International Court of Justice says could plausibly be committing genocide in Gaza.

Palestinian scholars like Maha Nassar and Ahmad Khalidi argue that “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” does not imply the subjugation of Jews. It instead reflects the longstanding Palestinian belief that Palestine should have become an independent country when released from European colonial control, a vision that does not preclude Jews from living freely alongside their Muslim and Christian neighbors. The Jewish groups closest to the Palestine solidarity movement agree: Jewish Voice for Peace’s Los Angeles chapter has argued that the slogan is no more anti-Jewish than the phrase “Black lives matter” is anti-white. And if the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States calls for the genocide of Jews, it’s hard to explain why so many Jews have joined its ranks. Rabbi Alissa Wise, an organizer of Rabbis for Cease-Fire, estimates that other than Palestinians, no other group has been as prominent in the protests against the war as Jews.

Still, imagining a “free Palestine” from the river to the sea requires imagining that Israeli Jews will become Palestinians, which erases their collective identity. That’s a departure from the more inclusive vision that Mr. Said and Mr. Abunimah outlined years ago. It’s harder for Palestinian activists to offer that more inclusive vision when they are watching Israel bomb and starve Gaza. But the rise of Hamas makes it even more essential.

Jews who identify with the Palestinian struggle may find it difficult to offer this critique. Many have defected from the Zionist milieu in which they were raised. Having made that painful transition, which can rupture relations with friends and family, they may be disinclined to question their new ideological home. It’s frightening to risk alienating one community when you’ve already alienated another. Questioning the Palestine solidarity movement also violates the notion, prevalent in some quarters of the American left, that members of an oppressor group should not second-guess representatives of the oppressed.

But these identity hierarchies suppress critical thought. Palestinians aren’t a monolith, and progressive Jews aren’t merely allies. They are members of a small and long-persecuted people who have not only the right but also the obligation to care about Jews in Israel, and to push the Palestine solidarity movement to more explicitly include them in its vision of liberation, in the spirit of the Freedom Charter adopted during apartheid by the African National Congress and its allies, which declared in its second sentence that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black and white.”

For many American Jews, it is painful to watch their children’s or grandchildren’s generation question Zionism. It is infuriating to watch students at liberal institutions with which they once felt aligned treat Zionism as a racist creed. It is tempting to attribute all this to antisemitism, even if that requires defining many young American Jews as antisemites themselves.

But the American Jews who insist that Zionism and liberalism remain compatible should ask themselves why Israel now attracts the fervent support of Representative Stefanik but repels the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the United Automobile Workers. Why it enjoys the admiration of Elon Musk and Viktor Orban but is labeled a perpetrator of apartheid by Human Rights Watch and likened to the Jim Crow South by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Why it is more likely to retain unconditional American support if Mr. Trump succeeds in turning the United States into a white Christian supremacist state than if he fails.

For many decades, American Jews have built our political identity on a contradiction: Pursue equal citizenship here; defend group supremacy there. Now here and there are converging. In the years to come, we will have to choose.

Peter Beinart ( @PeterBeinart ) is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also the editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook , a weekly newsletter.

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