Last month, a seemingly minor event took place that signifies sea-changes in American Jewry: a Jewish school in the New York City neighborhood of Kew Gardens Hills changed its name from “Schechter Queens” to “Queens Hebrew Academy.” The school was the first to take its name from Solomon Schechter, a distinguished scholar and a founder of Conservative Judaism in America, after whom numerous schools associated with that movement were named. But with changing demographics, the student body at Schechter Queens has been increasingly inclined toward Orthodoxy.

Gil Troy, who graduated from this school decades ago, during the high point of Conservative Judaism in America, reflects on this event, continuing observations he and his brother Tevi made on the Mosaic podcast in 2021:

Solomon Schechter’s transformation after 68 years tells an ideological tale, too. It’s a story of the rise—and now fall—of a school, and school network, that embodied the peoplehood-centered, deeply Zionist, patriotic and achievement-oriented Judaism that made American Jewry great. Schechter offered an extraordinary education, raising proud Jews, proud Americans, proud Zionists—and proud Queens kids, too.

Today, Conservative Judaism, which thrived in a middle-class-oriented, temperamentally moderate America, faces severe ideological, demographic and institutional challenges beyond the scope of what I can say here.

But as Solomon Schechter of Queens transitions into Queens Hebrew Academy, let us hail the American-Jewish literacy it conveyed. . . . We were born into a world far better than the East European hell our grandparents fled. We knew that, by rolling up our sleeves rather than throwing up our hands, we would make a better world for our children too. And we were grateful to Solomon Schechter School of Queens which we trusted to help us—and them—forge ahead.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”