The Danger of Jewish Self-Defense

A community that defines itself primarily by defending Judaism will eventually forget how to cultivate it. American Jews today risk forgetting this. Recently, antisemitism has surged into prominence, amplified by figures such as Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Hasan Piker. At the same time, debates over Israel have become increasingly polarized in public life and within the Jewish community. Young conservatives and liberals alike are fed up with AIPAC’s influence, while overtly anti-Israel politicians like Zohran Mamdani are seeing unprecedented electoral success. Jewish institutions are understandably devoting enormous energy to combating antisemitism and defending Israel. Although necessary, such efforts carry a hidden danger. When external danger feels acute, Jewish identity risks becoming less a civilization to nurture than a reputation to defend.

Nurturing a civilization means sustaining the habits that have defined Jewish life at its best: intellectual rigor, honest argument, the willingness to sit with difficult questions. Communities under pressure tend to look outward, but civilizations need to be able to look inward and examine themselves as well, answering questions from within, not only accusations from without.

In such a tense environment, the quiet yet essential work of self-examination becomes almost impossible. Defensiveness crowds out reflection. But in the attempt to defend ourselves from external threats, we risk neglecting the more difficult task of defending Judaism from our own complacency. The danger of Jewish self-defense is that it elevates the fighter against antisemitism above the scholar, and it elevates rigid advocacy above intellectual vitality.

One hundred years ago, Elliot E. Cohen warned against precisely this danger. In his 1925 essay “The Age of Brass,” published in the Menorah Journal, Cohen argued that American Jewish life had become preoccupied with publicity, self-promotion, and the desire to prove Jewish virtue to the surrounding society.¹ He termed this phenomenon the “Age of Brass”: a culture of loud declarations and defensive pride in which Jewish leaders constantly proclaimed the greatness of the Jewish people in order to justify their place in American life. “American Jewry must be made to see,” he wrote, “that a life of apology is a shameful apology for a life.” A culture devoted to explaining itself inevitably loses the capacity to create. The two tendencies — loud self-promotion and apologetic self-justification — stem from the same underlying anxiety: the need to prove Jewish worth to Jews themselves and to non-Jews. In both cases, time and energy are spent outward rather than inward. The result is a community so preoccupied with its image that it has little time left for genuine intellectual and creative pursuits.

The result is a community so preoccupied with its image that it has little time left for genuine intellectual and creative pursuits.

Cohen was particularly critical of the sweeping claims invoked to justify Jewish importance. Rabbis and communal leaders frequently insisted that Jews were the moral teachers of humanity, that Judaism was the source of Western ethics, or that Jewish dispersion throughout the world had served a providential mission to spread morality.² Cohen regarded such assertions as historically dubious and intellectually unserious. What makes Cohen’s essay unsettling is how familiar these arguments remain. Even today, we hear similar claims from our leadership class: that Judaism introduced morality to the world, or that Jewish values form the foundation of Western civilization. These assertions are usually offered with good intentions— as expressions of pride to shore up communal confidence. But their underlying logic mirrors the apologetics Cohen criticized a century ago.

There is a rather sad irony worth noting. At the very moment Jewish leaders are doubling down on these claims, non-Jews are growing less receptive to them. Jewish leaders who insist on Judaism’s foundational role in Western ethics are making an argument to an increasingly indifferent audience. Putting aside the ideological frailty of this defensive Judaism, it fails to achieve even its own goals. The same tendency appears on both sides of the political divide. On the right, Jewish values and American values are treated as simply interchangeable.³ On the left, the complex tradition of Jewish thought is reduced to a handful of progressive commitments–Tikkun Olam, for example–detached from the textual and intellectual tradition that gave them meaning. In both cases, Judaism is hollowed out for the sake of ineffective public relations.

Cohen feared that such rhetoric would ultimately alienate the very people Jewish culture most needed to attract: intellectually serious Jews. Communal propaganda and overconfidence fail to engage those searching for intellectual depth. Cohen saw this dynamic in his own time. Young Jews exposed only to this thin version of Judaism began to reconsider whether the Jewish tradition was even worth embracing. As Cohen wrote, “if that were all there was to Jewishness, they were not so sure they were proud to be Jews after all.” Many assumed that this defensive culture represented the entirety of Jewish life. “Because it did not occur to them that there was any Judaism beside the prevalent ‘official American Judaism,’” Cohen noted, “they came to regard themselves Jews only by an unavoidable — and unfortunate — accident of birth.”

Thin Judaism is not Judaism that has been attacked from without. It is Judaism that has been thinned out from within. It retains the outward markers–the communal organizations, the advocacy, the pride–but has lost the intellectual substance that once gave those outward markers meaning. It can identify its enemies but has forgotten its own identity. It can defend its reputation but no longer contributes to the exchange of ideas that has long defined Jewish life.

For Cohen, the danger was existential. Jewish cultural traditions do not survive through loyalty alone; they survive because they inspire intellectual devotion. If Judaism ceases to challenge the minds of thoughtful Jews, it will slowly lose them. “Judaism cannot survive,” Cohen predicted, “if intelligent Jews come to despise it.” Such alienation rarely takes the form of dramatic rebellion. More often it appears as quiet disengagement. “Jews do not go over to the enemy; seeing no reason to continue the battle, they merely drop out of the ranks. But the effect is the same.” Cohen demonstrated that the antidote was renewal. Through the circle of writers associated with the Menorah Journal, he sought to cultivate a serious Jewish intellectual culture in America–one devoted to scholarship, literature, philosophy, and criticism. Their ambition was nothing less than a modern Jewish renaissance grounded in intellectual creativity and the pursuit of truth.

In many respects, this vision represented a return to one of Jewish tradition’s deepest instincts. Jewish civilization has long placed extraordinary value on intellectual achievement. In his book Unheroic Conduct, the Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin argues that rabbinic Judaism developed a strikingly countercultural model of virtue.⁴ In the surrounding culture, masculine honor was typically associated with strength and warfare; Jewish culture instead elevated the student immersed in study. The scholar triumphed over the warrior.

The literary critic Lionel Trilling, himself a contributor to the Menorah Journal in the 1920s, made a similar observation in his essay “Wordsworth and the Rabbis.”⁵ Trilling noted that the rabbis in Ethics of the Fathers articulated a conception of masculinity grounded in intellectual discipline and moral refinement.⁶ The rabbinic ideal was the gentle, learned man, whose authority derived from knowledge rather than force.

Seen in this light, Cohen’s call for a Jewish intellectual renaissance appears less radical than restorative. He was urging American Jews to reclaim a civilizational instinct that had long since defined us: the belief that intellectual and moral achievement represent the highest forms of human excellence. Today, the most celebrated Jew is often the one who most loudly fights antisemitism. A healthier Jewish civilization would once again make the scholar its hero.

A healthier Jewish civilization would once again make the scholar its hero.

Of course, there is a place for the fighter in Judaism. King David is both warrior and psalmist. The tradition has never been naive about the need for self-defense. But in the classical Jewish imagination, even the warrior aspires to something beyond warfare. David’s lasting legacy was not only his military victories but the psalms he composed. The fighter was always meant to serve a cause larger than himself. It is that larger vision that the current moment risks losing entirely. The Jewish community in America must prioritize intellectual engagement above all else.

Cohen’s warning has resonated with later thinkers. After Cohen tragically took his own life in 1959, the rabbi and scholar Robert Gordis wrote the following in Commentary, the magazine Cohen founded:

The other day I reread his [Cohen’s] unforgettable piece, “The Age of Brass,” which, after a quarter of a century, still retains its freshness and power. It deserves to be reprinted for our generation as do others of his all too infrequent writings. To be sure, this piece, which is in a sense an apologia pro vita sua written at the inception of his career, breathes a confidence in the power of knowledge and a respect for the human intelligence which is no longer fashionable in this day of frenzied faiths. It is all the more necessary and relevant on this account. Writing before Hitler and the spawn of philosophies that have emerged either as a consequence or as a reaction to that holocaust of irrationality, he expressed his conviction that only intellectual and moral integrity has the capacity to save the Jewish community in particular and mankind in general.⁷

Gordis, through Cohen, identified a recurring temptation within American Jewish life: the substitution of intellectual seriousness and the pursuit of truth with apologetics and self-congratulation. Decades later, Gordis’s observation seems prophetic. Rising antisemitism and political polarization have created powerful incentives for Jewish communities to define themselves primarily through defense and advocacy. External threats cause the spotlight to shine on the loudest combatants of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Precisely in such moments, the danger Cohen identified becomes most acute. Nearly seven decades after Gordis called for “The Age of Brass” to be reprinted, I humbly repeat his request.

American Jewry cannot flourish merely by insisting on its own importance. It flourishes by producing ideas, cultivating learning, and striving for truth. Cohen’s warning remains as relevant as ever a century later.

American Jewry cannot flourish merely by insisting on its own importance. It flourishes by producing ideas, cultivating learning, and striving for truth.

Cohen’s answer to the Age of Brass was the Menorah Journal— a small circle of writers committed to producing an intellectual Jewish culture. We do not need to recreate it. But we need something like its spirit, and the most natural place to look for it is among young Jews themselves. The students who will become the next generation of rabbis, teachers, and communal leaders are still forming their sense of what Jewish culture is and what it can be. If they are shown only a Judaism whose contours are defined by its enemies, that is the Judaism they will inherit and transmit. But Judaism has, and has always had, more to offer than that.

Young Jews who encounter Judaism’s intellectual tradition in its entirety — who discover that there is more to Jewish life than fighting antisemites, practicing public relations, and spewing unserious self-promotion — may find it worth taking seriously. Creating communities of young Jews committed to a Jewish culture that once again celebrates scholarship and intellectual achievement is the single most urgent task facing American Jewish life today. The fighter defends what exists. It is the scholar who ensures there is something worth defending. The question facing American Jews today is not only whether we can defend Judaism from its enemies, but whether we can defend it from becoming thin, reactive, self-congratulatory, and complacent. If we allow the fighter to permanently replace the thinker, we will not need our enemies to diminish Jewish civilization. We will have done it ourselves.