Part of the community, as a result of this, grows tougher. It knows it has to develop within itself the resources to withstand this because it becomes more and more serious from year to year. And by the way, I think the alignment between Israel and America stays the same throughout. So the  problem of persuading Jews that there is a war out there in which you have to engage is the same problem that there is of convincing Americans there is a real war out there in which you have to engage. So these two things are one. 

Here too, Jewish life, in this respect and in others, is going to depend very much on the strength of American liberalism. If American liberalism becomes muscular once again, and speaks in a voice of moral confidence, then you will have a much more confident American Jewry. Alas, if you find a defensiveness on the part of America, and a kind of Obama approach to have a weak America that he presumes is more attractive to others, to not impose ourselves, to not think that Western civilisation is any better than any other civilisation, then it will be very hard for Jews alone to withstand that kind of pressure. 

JW: We ought to bear in mind not only the political dimension of liberalism, but also its cultural implications. A colleague about my age who describes herself as a liberal, recently lamented that for the first time in her life she felt that the prevailing culture was against the Jews in America. What she was referring to was not the type of things that you were describing, Ruth, but rather challenges to the very idea that Jews have a right to their own distinctive culture, let alone their own state. 

On the question of intermarriage, for example, we see a rising cultural revulsion at Jewish insistence on endogamy as a means of assuring group survival for a small minority. In an era of cultural blending and the glorification of hybridity, it has become ever more difficult for Jews to assert the rightness of their wish to survive as a distinctive group, even as they eagerly participate in the larger society. Needless to say, such distinctiveness in no way infringes upon American patriotism; if anything, patriotism of all sorts is under assault, still another reason for some to reject Israel's insistence on its own self-defence and the rightness of its cause. In some circles, Jews are questioned about their legitimacy as a group; and it has become fashionable to lump them together with all other whites. The challenges to Jewish distinctiveness are infiltrating the Jewish psyche. 

As to the second part of your question about the long-term impact — and this is something that keeps me up at night — my concern is that the American Jewish community is not producing enough of those who are militant and have an understanding of the type of toughness that Ruth was talking about. The prevailing mode is to bow to current cultural fashions, even as those fashions are rapidly fading from the scene. 

As an historian I can trace how Jews are often Johnny-come-latelys: just as they finally catch on to the latest fad, the next one has already begun. This was true of the Jewish Enlightenment — no sooner had Jews been bitten by that cultural bug, than Romanticism swept away rationalistic ideals. The Romantics did not value many of the views enlightened Jews were espousing. Ironically, many of the children of Jewish Enlightenment proponents despised Judaism for being cold and rationalistic, something their own parents projected on to Judaism in order to keep up with the times.