October 6, 2006
The Yom Kippur War Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:30 PM EST Today marks the thirty-third anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, which saw Egypt and Syria launch a surprise attack on Israel just as the country had its guard down, with most of its citizens observing the Jewish Day of Atonement. While the war had tremendous long-term implications for the geopolitical and diplomatic future of the Middle East, it also had a profound effect on American Jews, whose ideas about particularism and universalism underwent considerable change in the wake of Israel’s near defeat at the hands of two foreign armies.
Popular convention holds that the turning point in American Jewish self-perception came not in 1973 but in 1967, when Israel defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the Six-Day War, capturing vast amounts of new territory and defying conventional wisdom (now widely discredited) that the small start-up country stood no chance against its well-armed, more populous enemies. “Has the Six-Day War changed my Weltanschauung?” Elie Wiesel famously asked. “I would go even further and say that the change was total, for it involved my very being as both a person and a Jew.” Historians tend to agree. Before 1967, they claim, American Jews sought to keep their Jewish identity subdued, even beneath the radar screen. After 1967 they were free to express tremendous pride and to emphasize their hyphenated identity.
I wrote an academic article on this question several years ago and found that, far from jettisoning their liberal cosmopolitanism, most Jews in the wake of the Six-Day War remained firmly committed on a concrete level to the same causes that the community had championed for several decades: civil rights, the fight against poverty, religious pluralism, and the expansion of the New Deal/Great Society state. Though relations with the black community were strained in the wake of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s embrace of the Arab cause, most Jews continued their strong support of integration and remained far to the left of their white Christian neighbors on questions concerning race and economics.
1973, however, may very well have signaled a breaking point for many American Jews. Whereas 1967 saw the Jewish state triumph unexpectedly over seemingly superior forces, the Yom Kippur War saw the Jewish state draw frighteningly near to defeat. But for a last-minute infusion of war supplies from the United States, Israel might very well have suffered a crushing blow. In the wake of the 1973 war, many American Jews, and certainly many American Jewish institutions, became less interested in universalism and cosmopolitanism and far more interested in emphasizing the themes of Jewish continuity (whether in Israel or the Diaspora—particularly in the Soviet Union) and self-defense. That Jewish groups soon broke with their longstanding civil rights partners over the question of affirmative action in higher education admissions only further exacerbated the new tendency toward group cohesion and particularism.
I don’t mean to suggest an absolute shift in perception and priorities. Many Jews remain estranged from their religious or cultural heritage and far more inclined to view themselves exclusively as Americans, and many American Jews who remain connected to their heritage are deeply committed to the spirit of universalism and cosmopolitanism that has been a hallmark of American Jewry for well over 200 years. But 1973 did change the world in which American Jews lived, and since then Jews in the United States have grappled with new difficulties related to their existence as hyphenated Americans.
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