In a provocative speech delivered at the National Conservatism Conference in Jerusalem last week, Passage Press publisher Jonathan Keeperman explained to an audience composed largely of Jewish nationalists why the younger members of the American right feel dwindling sympathy for the Israeli cause. Keeperman explained that Fifty-seven percent of Republicans under 50  fall into this group. Although most Boomer Republicans still express a commitment to the Jewish state, this sentiment grows weaker the further away one moves chronologically in age among Republicans.

Israeli sympathy is weakest among the young populist right, which generally opposes foreign entanglements, but which seems especially miffed by the Zionist lobby. Keeperman, in discussing this problem, mentions Peter Novick’s classic, The Holocaust in American Life, in passing.

American Jews of my parents’ generation viewed Nazism as a movement that was hostile to Christians as well as Jews, even if it was more genocidally hostile to the latter. But, as Novick shows, beginning in the 1960s during the early stages of America’s political and cultural radicalization, the Holocaust narrative shifted from highlighting a neopagan attempt to exterminate European Jewry to the inevitable culmination of millennia of white Christian anti-Semitism. This new narrative, according to Novick, was integral to the then intensifying American Jewish commitment to Israel. After all, if white Christians tried collectively to kill all Jews in the 20^th century one time, they might try the same thing in the future. Therefore, Jews needed Israel as a place of refuge not only from their explicit persecutors but also from the multitudinous insidious Gentiles all over the Western world who harbored a hatred they didn’t always show.

From the 1960s onward, Zionism became linked to a growing concern about an always “rising anti-Semitism,” which Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and its counterparts in Europe were eager to report and embellish. Moreover, we were told this scourge came predominantly from one poisonous source. Antisemites were white Christians who harbored a millennial hatred against Jews and who, unless reeducated, would force all American Jews “to make Aliyah,” that is, move to Israel. The fact that the growth of Muslim anti-Semitism in the West had something to do with the (predominantly leftist) voting patterns of Jews in the West, who favored politicians committed to inflicting open borders on us, was irrelevant from this perspective. The blame for erupting anti-Semitism had to be laid at the doorstep of white Christians, even if they had little to do with causing the growing problem.