Between 1956 and 1961, three of America’s biggest celebrities—Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Sammy Davis, Jr.—converted to Judaism. In 2022, one of America’s biggest celebrities, Kanye West, became one the country’s most prominent anti-Semites. John Podhoretz reflects on what this says about the changing place of Jews in the United States, and suggests that they might no longer be, in Davis’s words, “a swinging bunch of people.”

We may not have our Christmas mornings booked, and we may not paint Easter eggs, but we are not on the sidelines any longer. In fact, as shown in the disgraceful lack of Jewish participation in the lawsuits targeting the new Ivy League discrimination against Asians—a recapitulation in almost every respect of the barriers put up against us once upon a time—many Jews are themselves now beneficiaries of the ancillary boons that come from generations of elite education and professional networking, boons that they do not wish to sacrifice.

Therefore, whatever we are and whatever we can be, we cannot be cool. Cool has a transgressive aspect, and Jews are the ultimate A students who want to please the teacher and get in good with the administration. Nor can we hope to win over the likes of West with efforts to convince him that Jews also have a history of oppression, and that Jews today are under a new kind of threat—a threat that he himself represents in part. Indeed, West’s own conduct shows how potentially double-edged the undeniable Jewish success in non-Jewish America might be in the long term. Throughout history, Jews who have made their mark in Diaspora societies have seen their unexpected prominence used as a weapon against them.

There is a strange but alluring temptation, therefore, to lean into the victimization of Jews over the past few years as a means of producing a more favorable atmosphere, the sort that might cause a West to consider conversion rather than becoming a modern-day mouthpiece for the ideas in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

But this would be exactly the wrong tack to take. For one thing, it would be a disgraceful way to respond to the violence being done to Jews today, and an intellectually indefensible way to instruct young Jews on how to respond to attacks on their identities as Jews.

Two weeks ago, a terrorist—most likely working for Hizballah—managed to cross into Israel from Lebanon and plant an explosive device near Megiddo that wounded a civilian. The attack, according to Matthew Levitt, is a sign of the Iran-backed militia’s increasing willingness to challenge the tacit understanding it has had with the IDF for over a decade. Such renewed aggression can also be found in the rhetoric of the group’s leaders:

In the lead-up to the 2006 war, [Hizballah’s] Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah famously miscalculated how Israel would respond to the cross-border abduction of its soldiers. According to Israeli analysts, however, he now believes he can predict the enemy’s behavior more accurately, leading him to sharpen his rhetoric and approve a series of increasingly aggressive actions over the past three years.

Nasrallah’s willingness to risk conflict with Israel was partly driven by domestic economic and political pressures. . . . Yet he also seemed to believe that Israel was unlikely to respond in a serious way to his threats given Hizballah’s enlarged precision-missile arsenal and air-defense systems.

In addition to the bombing, this month has seen increased reports of cross-border harassment against Israelis, such as aiming laser beams at drivers and homes, setting off loud explosions on the Lebanese frontier, and pouring sewage toward Israeli towns. Hizballah has also disrupted Israeli efforts to reinforce the security barrier in several spots along the Blue Line, [which serves as the de-facto border between Lebanon and the Jewish state].

This creeping aggressiveness—coupled with Nasrallah’s sense of having deterred Israel and weakened its military posture—indicate that Hizballah will continue trying to move the goalposts.