Long Walk Home: Wexler in Jerusalem and the Genocidal American Jew

4 July 2026

“Those who were awake were reading intently. When I saw what they were reading, though, a chill crept over me, too. Not one seemed to need a refresher on Iraq or the Gulf region. Without exception, they were reading new books on the American occupation and reconstruction of Germany and Japan…The task felt classically orientalist, in the sense of gathering knowledge in order to exert control; but what other choice was there?”

Noah Feldman, “'What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building'”, New York Times, 14 November 2004.

“Throw me with your acumen.”

Silence of the Lambs film.

“In an open letter published on Thursday, the scholars denounced the abrupt scrapping of a special issue of the Harvard Educational Review – which was first revealed by the Guardian in July – as an ‘attempt to silence the academic examination of the genocide, starvation and dehumanisation of Palestinian people by the state of Israel and its allies’”.

Alice Speri, “’Censorship’: over 115 scholars condemn cancellation of Harvard journal issue on Palestine”, The Guardian, 14 August 2025.

To speak of a genocidal American Jew seems a generalization that defies the dominant cultural representations in the United States. Notwithstanding Arynne Wexler, Bari Weiss, Ben Shapiro, and Stephen Miller linking the American Jew to genocide is a seismic challenge to his or her self-perception in American society and globally. The preferred role of the American Jew is someone characterized by noble cultural contributions in the United States, and meaningful donations to the colonization of Palestine, also educationally.[1]

In the Americanization of the Jews published in 1995, we are told about the ordinarily liberal American Jewish community in the best tradition of the lucidity of this term, who have largely abandoned any left sympathies of the early 20^th century to the Second World War. Denoting Brandeis’s commitment for Jewish sovereignty by advocating the colonization aspirations of Zionism in Palestine, the dominant strand of American Jews has preferred to project affinity with cultural Zionism and a belief in its ancient ownership of the territory of Zion. Placed in the American academic setting, this book is a stringent opposition to any attempt for an American Jewish contestation of Zionism and Israel. The intellectual alliance is with the Hebrew University and its messianic endeavor of Palestine’s erasure.[2] 

The recent ahistorical interpretation of Zionism by the President of Yeshiva University[3] reinforces the problematic intellectual and diplomatic task that American Jews have played against Palestine and its people for decades, including by Henry Kissinger, Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Aaron Miller, Daniel Shapiro, Antony Blinken, Jared Kushner, and Charles Kushner.

American Jewish progressiveness generated the formation of genuine alliances with the African – American civil rights struggle, yet it generally informed the latter about Zionism mythically, rather than expose its atrocities in Palestine. It took a while for influential African American intellectuals and leaders to grasp the actual manifestation of Zionism in Palestine and its repercussions on Palestinians.

Peter Novick traced Holocaust consciousness among American Jews to the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of growing identity politics. It also coincided with the emergence of the Palestine National Liberation movement that sought to liberate Palestine and address international public opinion at the United Nations about Zionism and Israel’s conduct. Prominent displaced and ethnically cleansed Palestinian intellectuals in the United States were not disaffected from this phenomenon, producing alarming scholarship to eminent American Jewish academics and groups. Holocaust awareness continues to be pervasive among American Jews, serving mostly to shield Israel and Zionism from any palpable description of their illegitimacy and the need to abolish them as part of a necessary transformation towards a decent non-colonial and non-apartheid political existence in the entirety of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea.

With respect to the Holocaust, the Eichmann trial played a galvanizing function linking the horrors of the Second World War to Israel. Israel’s first war criminal, David Ben Gurion, pioneered the use of the Holocaust for diplomatic gains. Despite his condescending local vocabulary about Jews who did not physically join Zionism in Palestine, he nevertheless informed the New York Times readers in a special article about the significance of capturing Eichmann.[4]But, actual education in Israeli schools about the Holocaust commenced in 1979 while Israel had established relations with the German Intelligence Services already in 1956 before initiating diplomatic relations in 1965. During the purportedly formative period of the Eichmann saga, Israel had imposed a military regime against the less than third non-ethnically cleansed Palestinians who obtained meaningless citizenship status unchanged to this day.

The actual context of the trial is traditional Cold War diplomacy of gaining propaganda superiority against non-close allies. By that time, the United States had shifted from West Germany to the Soviet Union as the primary evil, forming relations with the German Intelligence authorities who knew the whereabouts of Eichmann.[5] From there, the road to the Israeli government was paved with impure intentions countering Egyptian support for the Palestine cause.[6] According to an authoritative contemporaneous memorandum by the CIA dated 28 March 1961:

The legal and moral aspects of the case do not concern us here. What is of intelligence interest, however, are the political and propaganda implications of the trial. There will be considerable latitude for various interested states to exploit the proceedings for their own purposes.[7]

Harvard law professor Noah Feldman’s theo-political engagement with God and Jewishness has led him to conclude or assert the centrality of Israel to American Jews.[8] This is a true representation of a habitually solid brand at Harvard that did not overlook the captivating Martha Minow and her followers in the field of international law and human rights. Israel has been an anchor for a proud American Jewish identity for several generations despite the nature of its foundation, its regime’s conduct, and the character of its governance.[9]

American Jews with any form of tie to Israel, ideological or otherwise, have never contemplated that they reinforce Israel’s actual apartheid system and colonial design. They have not concerned themselves with Israel’s generational putrid accusatorial terrorism at home and abroad, that is the killing of Israeli Jews to blame Palestinians[10] and the killing of Arabs in neighboring countries to stir chaos and confusion. Israel’s foreign exercise in damaging performance is common knowledge among Israeli Jews stemming from the Tel-Aviv University associated Mossad building and regularly ‘falsely’ reported by Haaretz newspaper.

Positive cherishing sentiments towards Israel among weighty American Jewish individuals and groups is additional to the attempt to realize political domination by the Israel lobby at the White House and Congress. While in the past decade the Israel lobby has witnessed ups and downs in its quest for electoral hegemony through television ads against candidates that may not support Israel, its hold on the White House and Congress at least since the early 1990s has been verging on the absolute. Major figures in both the Democratic and Republican parties routinely appear before AIPAC’s annual conference, and all presidents since Bill Clinton, with the minor exception of Obama’s unpersuasive balancing act during his second term, have succumbed to the whims of the Israel lobby with no shame or regret. The operating framework of the Israel lobby is that of the Manhattan Financial District coined as the takeover model, or in other simpler words, subtle bribery.

David Hollinger has attempted to provide an academic explanation for American Jewish overrepresentation in American public life, attributing it to the literacy rate and professional function in Eastern and Central Europe,[11]the places where they originated from. He did not address Israel in any sense. Hollinger’s theory did not collapse, rather only exposed as insufficient when Jimmy Carter’s book about Palestine and Israel with the term apartheid in its title was assailed, and Mearsheimer and Walt’s Israel lobby thesis was a pretext for character assassination.

Hollinger's proposition may have been influenced by Jerry Seinfeld’s show, which commonly bragged about American Jewish wealth and power and disdained intellectuals’ criticism of Israel, particularly of Palestinian origin who worked from New York.  

The act of resistance from occupied, besieged, and maimed Gaza on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s subsequent genocide revealed the fragility of the moral character among large segments of the American Jewish community. The composition of the complicit Biden administration was practically a reflection of the success that Hollinger tried to analyze. The Democratic National Committee’s report about the Party’s defeat in the presidential elections omitted the war on Gaza and the ensuing mass protests in the United States as a reason for the electoral loss,[12] a sign of Hollinger’s lively theory.

Not understanding the 7 October 2023 and wholeheartedly engaging in misrepresenting it is a routine intellectual behavior among many American Jews in the spirit of Seinfeld’s bluntly implicit adoration of Israel. Here, it is difficult to attribute any failing of reason or morality. Yet, the more facts were revealed, the more defensive and denying this community became, leaving no doubt as to the legitimacy of the phrase genocidal American Jew that captures not only Arynne Wexler, but also groups such as The American Jewish Committee, The Anti–Defamation League, Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and J-Street[13] as well as various academics from Richard Epstein to Michael Walzer.

The United States is the most powerful country on earth, but not without limits. Its effects on the rights of Palestinians cannot be underestimated. That influence is grotesquely derived from the epistemological and powerful location of the American Jewish community and Israel’s logistical services for an empire interested in dominating the Gulf region. To defeat genocide, apartheid, and colonial Israel, American Jews must either abandon the notorious country or continue to be implicit in its fundamentally illegal nature.

Jerry Seinfeld. Source: The Forward, 28 April 2016.

[1] See Samuel Finkel, “American Jews and the Hebrew University”, 39 American Jewish Year Book, pp.193-201 (1937-1938).

[2] The Americanization of the Jews, (Robert Seltzer & Norman Cohen eds.)(NYU Press, 1995).

[3] Ari Berman, “What Zionism Has Always Meant”, New York Times, 1 July 2026.

[4] David Ben Gurion, “The Eichmann Case as Seen by Ben Gurion”, New York Times, 18 December 1960.

[5] Scott Shane, “C.I.A. Knew Where Eichmann Was Hiding, Documents Show”, New York Times, 7 June 2006.

[6] See a similar episode in the 1980s when the United States extradited John Demjanjuk to Israel. The U.S. Justice Department began its investigation regarding Demjanjuk in 1975, when Palestinian presence at the United Nations was growing and Israel practically lost the 1973 war to Egypt who freed its occupied territories after Israel’s aggression in 1967. Israel’s constant violations of international law in the 1967 occupied territories were not a matter for serious concern to consecutive American administrations. When Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in the 1980s, the country was after its aerial blood bath bombardment in Lebanon against Palestinians and Lebanese, while constantly resorting to criminal proxies to carry out political assassinations.    

[7] Sherman Kent for the Board of National Estimates, The Eichmann Case Memorandum – CIA, 28 March 1961 (Approved for Release 7 March 2007). The Eichmann chapter came few years after the coordinated 1956 Tripartite Aggression against Egypt (Israel, Britian, and France) with the United States acting as a subsequent ‘peacemaker’.

[8] See Martin Raffel, ‘To Be a Jew Today’, Hadassah Magazine, May 2024.

[9] See Gal Beckerman, “American Jews Face a Choice: Create Meaning or Fade Away”, New York Times, 12 November 2018.

[10] See, for example, Clyde Haberman, “20 Killed in Terrorist Bombing of Bus in Tel-Aviv”, New York Times, 20 October 1994; Serge Schmemann, “Israeli Rage Rises as Bomb Kills 19, Imperiling Peace”, New York Times, 4 March 1996; John Kifner, “Again in Israel, Sabbath Closes In Terror Attack”, New York Times, 31 March 2002; AP, “At Least Seven Dead in Bus Explosion in Northern Israel”, New York Times, 4 June 2002; James Bennet et al, “Suicide Bomber Hits Jerusalem; At Least 14 Die”, New York Times, 18 June 2002; James Bennet, “Israel Acts to Seize Land After Blast; Bush Delays Talks”, New York Times, 19 June 2002. 

[11] David Hollinger, “Rich, Powerful, and Smart: Jewish Overrepresentation Should Be Explained Instead of Avoided or Mystified”, 94(4) The Jewish Quarterly Review, pp.595-602 (2004).

[12] Martin Barnay, “The US Democrats’ foreign policy dead end”, Le Monde Diplomatique, July 2026.

[13] See Norman Solomon, “Has J-Street Gone Along with Genocide?”, The Nation, 27 February 2025.