For much of their political history, particularly since the Enlightenment, Jews have identified with the progressive Left. Israel itself, although funded by oligarchs, was launched largely as a socialist experiment, epitomized in the kibbutzim. Read more
Every morning, just as the sun rises, Charleston Harbor hosts a scene of stirring patriotism. There, in the courtyard of Fort Sumter, tourists raise a huge American flag, helped along by a National Park Service ranger. And why not? This, after all, is where the Civil War started more than 160 years ago, and those gigantic Stars and Stripes, 20 feet by 35, confirm the North’s final victory over slavery and the rebs.
Yet if the South was crushed back in 1865, it now holds America’s destiny in its hands. Certainly, that’s clear enough politically: Donald Trump is expected to win every former Confederate state, with erstwhile battlegrounds such as Georgia and North Carolina now tilting to the Republicans. Even Virginia, increasingly dominated by liberal Washington suburbs, could go red too. It’s a similar story at the local level. Except for Richmond, the GOP controls every state house beyond the Mason-Dixon Line. In South Carolina’s General Assembly, the Republicans hold more than twice as many seats as the Democrats.
And if the South is now crucial to the country’s immediate electoral future, broader demographic trends are on its side too. Based on the last census, Texas gained two seats, while Florida and North Carolina each gained one. Accompanied by losses in places such as New York and California, the South is rapidly becoming the most powerful region in the land. Add to that its burgeoning economic strength, and it could soon be more influential than it has been for generations — a shift likely to transform politics, and political culture, right across the nation.
Through the 18th century, the South was central to the American economy. Charleston, an epicentre of the slave trade, was the most prosperous town south of Philadelphia, while South Carolina was among the richest colonial provinces. That wealth allowed the region’s white population to be the wealthiest of the pre-revolutionary era; and self-proclaimed cotton kings to become Old World aristocrats in the swamps and plantations of the New. Stroll the streets of Charleston and you can still see this legacy today. There are elegant mansions, decorated with art, and with silverware imported from Britain. Yet somewhere nearby, their slaves huddled in windowless rooms, forced to suffer the heat and humidity of the South in chains.
It’s ironic that the war the rebels started at Fort Sumter would ultimately destroy the South. That shot heard around the world, courtesy of the Charleston militia in April 1861, would prove no match for the emerging industrial might of the free states in the North. Under blockade from the vastly superior US Navy, buoyant cities like Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans all shrivelled, as the cotton routes to England slammed shut. In 1865, Charleston fell, alongside Fort Sumter. Columbia, the state capital, was razed.
Not that things would improve once the guns fell silent. The Civil War left the South in deplorable shape, becoming in the memorable words of one author the “problem child” of America. Deprived of their slaves, the cotton kings were ruined. Meanwhile many normal Southerners, particularly after Reconstruction, worshipped the memory of the Confederacy while embracing its racist ideology. Across the South, Confederate memorials dotted the landscape; as recently as a few decades ago, Stars and Bars flags were common. All the while, Southerners worshipped Robert E. Lee and the “lost cause” while the beneficiaries of Ulysses S. Grant’s victory dominated the country’s economy, cultural and political life from New England to Oregon.
Read the rest of this piece at Unherd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, looking across the bay towards Charleston, SC, via Flickr under CC 4.0 License.
Suzie Bohlson sits in a sun-drenched California plaza, a pale, slight 53-year-old with a Ph.D. in biology from Notre Dame. Fifteen years ago, she converted to Catholicism, a surprising choice, perhaps, for a young woman from Los Angeles raised in a family of materialist scientists.
The streets of the South Bronx testify to the decay that has afflicted parts of modern American cities. In some ways, they resemble those of Mumbai more than those of gentrified Manhattan. Men lie prostrate outside empty storefronts or relieve themselves in broad daylight on the trash-strewn streets. It’s a hipster-less landscape of despair. Read more
Jews, like elephants, tend to have long memories. We see in the past warnings of the future. As Israel marks its 76th birthday on 14 May, perhaps the most relevant and terrifying precedent comes from the days of the Roman Empire.
One 19th century Gentile described California as “the Jews’ earthly paradise”. It is paradise no longer. Reports of attacks on Jewish businesses, homes and institutions are becoming ever more commonplace, while university campuses – hardly considered to be bastions of hate – have allowed acts of flagrant anti-Semitism to go unpunished.
In the ever-shrinking world of the Jewish diaspora, Canada, along with Australia and the United States, hosts a most vital and comparatively healthy community. Yet in the midst of the current Israel-Hamas war, that community as well as those elsewhere, are under a siege that, at very least, will change their social and political orientation.
While Jews often seem clannish to outsiders, the reality is somewhat different: we have always suffered from a divisive streak of self-destructiveness. As far back as the levelling of the Temple and the expulsion from the homeland, Jewish unity has been undermined by both class divisions and theological disagreements. Two thousand years later, though General Titus’s legions may be forgotten, fissures and infighting remain.
It is a warm Monday morning in Rome, and the city’s ancient ghetto resembles an armed camp. As carabinieri line the streets, a cloud of melancholy hangs in the air: not only had more than 1,400 Jews recently been slaughtered in Israel, but the date — October 16 — marks the anniversary of its residents forced evacuation to the concentration camps. History, it seems, is repeating itself.
Despite the unconscionable parallels, however, and regardless of the prevalence of Kosher restaurants and carciofi alla giudia, little in the ghetto is as it was. Few Jews, amid Italy’s population of less than 50,000, live there. The same can be said of almost every European city. After the Holocaust, most Jews, as historian Paul Johnson observed, “accepted oppression and second-class status” outside of the ghetto in return for being left alone.
To some extent, life in America was more welcoming; as far back as 1790, George Washington, writing to the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island, went beyond upholding tolerance to embracing full citizenship as part of “their inherent natural rights”. Today, however, that credo is being called into question. Here, as in Europe, the great period of Jewish influence and efflorescence that started a century ago may be peaking. The result, once dismissed as inconceivable, is that the allure of a more separate existence, a ghetto of the spirit, may start to grow.
For now, the golden era of Jewish achievement still twinkles, but only just. Jews remain inordinately celebrated in the arts and sciences; both the Tony Award in 2023 and the Pulitzer for fiction the year before went to writers covering, somewhat obsessively, Jewish themes. The list of Jewish Nobel prize winners has also expanded since the War, constituting well over 20% of the total.
Yet such achievements cannot mask the fact that the Jewish Century is rapidly fading. On the surface, Jewish life, both inside and outside the diaspora, may seem unassailable. But just as terrorists were able to breach Israel’s supposedly impenetrable defences, the forces of antisemitism have penetrated Western society, as young, educated progressives, including a few Jews, make common cause with Hamas and its allies.
Continuing demographic retreat isn’t helping. After the war’s end, 3.8 million European Jews remained; today, there are barely 1.5 million. Even the last great redoubts of Jewish life are threatened by assimilation and the pernicious new hybrid that joins Leftist and Islamist hatred. Nearly 50,000 Jews have left France since 2000, mostly for Israel, the United States and Canada. With no likely source of new immigration, it’s difficult to envision how the country’s Jewish population will ever grow again. Likewise Eastern Europe, once the centre of the Jewish world with its 8 million Jews, is home to fewer than 400,000 today. Indeed, the only place there seems to be growth is among the orthodox — a community that may not live in official ghettos, but is still in inwardly focused and defensively minded areas.
Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: by Jorge Láscar. The Jewish Quarter in Prague, known as Josefov, is located between the Old Town Square and the Vltava River. Its torrid history dates back to the 13th century, when the Jewish community in Prague were ordered to vacate their disparate homes and settle in one area. Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
Back in the early days of California’s ascendancy, the state was described as “the Jews’ early paradise”, a place where the lack of social norms, and enormous opportunities, were ideal for enterprising people unmoored from conventional business ties. In the years ahead, Jews spearheaded much of California’s banking, garment and later entertainment businesses.
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