"My Shaken America" - Some Fourth of July reflections by Andy Markovits in 2025
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From this day onward and for much of my life, I came to associate the United States of America as the ally and friend of the Jews, as the bulwark against antisemitism, as our liberator from the Holocaust and others of Europe’s many evils befalling the Jews.
This, at least in our case, was empirically wrong and demonstrably false for if anything, our liberators from the Nazis and the Holocaust were none other than the Red Army of the Soviet Union. Indeed, officers of the Red Army were housed in our apartment in Timisoara to my parents’ chagrin and discomfort, but – at least in the case of one officer with the first name Josif – to my delight since he became a friend who brought me MEDVED chocolate (the Russian word for “bear” which resembles the Hungarian “medve” and has always been my darling animal in addition to dogs) on a daily basis, let me ride with him in his American-made Willy’s Jeep and even taught me a little chess. But my parents’ profound bourgeois background and deeply ingrained culture of the Central European “Bildungsbuergertum” not only made them dislike anything socialist but truly disdain anything from the Continent’s east, including Ostjuden! So, the Soviet Union and European socialism were off the table as our heroic counternarrative to the Holocaust.
There was Britain, of course, with its stalwart resistance against the Nazis led by the indomitable Winston Churchill. But somehow its aura remained, for whatever reason, unapproachable for us, insular in a haughty way that would never accommodate the Markovits’s. Even though it was the British Army that liberated my aunt from Bergen Belsen camp and made her one of the few returnees of the Markovits family from the death camps, the narrative of liberation, of a distinguishable alternative and counterweight to Nazism never attached itself to Britain. Thus, America remained all alone as the Nazis’ real opponent and vanquisher in my world. (Quentin Tarantino’s brilliant film “Inglorious Basterds” embodied EXACTLY what I had dreamed of as a young boy growing up in Timisoara and later in Vienna: American GIs killing Nazis!) With one of my father’s elder brothers who survived Auschwitz finding his way to New York in the late 1940s, we even had family in this distant land.
From my early youth, America – not Israel – became synonymous for me with Jewish Life, the place where Jews flourished but most important the place whose armed might defeated the Nazis and saved the Jews. America had one additional attraction over Israel: the immense seduction of its soft power comprised of the English language and its popular culture manifested in the movies and music! This love affair has continued unabated for 70 years of my life!
Perhaps explicable with my background of a tolerated, though never accepted, Jew anywhere I lived in Europe (mainly Romania and Austria); American might served as a protector regardless how distant this was. But might alone was insufficient! It had also to be a moral might, an agent of pluralism in society, and a purveyor of culture that countered the stifling elitism of the cultures that controlled every aspect of my private and public life in Europe. America, in short, attained a liberatory dimension to me that it never lost. With all its awful shortcomings – and there were many, from slavery to the conquest and destruction of Native Americans to mention but two of the most egregious ones – the United States stood for the longest living liberal democracy in the world, a true beacon for hope in which refugees like my father and I somehow would find not only material comfort but, above all, a really accepted and celebrated sovereignty as valued human beings without any qualifications and amendments. I will never forget when I sat with my father on the lawn of the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts amid one million people celebrating the bicentennial of the American Republic on the Fourth of July 1976 when my father turned to me with tears in his eyes, grabbed my hands and just said softly: This is good! His words were not only praising my recently completed doctorate at Columbia University and my first academic job at Harvard University no less; but they also bespoke a deep comfort for our safety and dignity as Jews that I had never seen my father ever express in all his years in Romania and Austria.
My arrival at Columbia in September of 1967 was among the most revelatory and truly liberating experiences of my life. Here I was at this great university precisely at the peak of its enlightened teaching and political activism. And at the center of it all were brilliant Jewish professors who were simply unimaginable at the restrictive dankness of Vienna’s Theresianische Akademie that ruled full eight years of my preceding existence. Even though I only experienced one overt case of antisemitism directed at me in all that time, the subtle hints and unspoken, but palpable, gestures said it all: You don’t truly belong here! At Columbia, by contrast, I felt like a very ornate welcome mat had been rolled out just for me by students and faculty alike! Welcome here Andy! Bloom away, flourish, grow! Seize the moment!
Columbia formed me and made me who I became for the rest of my life: A competent professional who mastered his craft but – most important – learned to love its exercise in all its facets with teaching and research at its core. The deep liberalism of Columbia’s faculty and students that formed the Zeitgeist of the late 1960s did not so much convince me of the value and validity of the content of their social and political claims as much as it solidified in my core being the value and validity of dissent, of opposition, of contesting ideas and challenging power. In other words, it created in me a lasting love for the essence of democracy which must extol, if not always exist, in some form of opposition. And it is precisely for that reason that I never joined any of the student movements of the time that dominated my political world. My commitment to dissent would not allow me to join any commitment meaning that the only commitment that I came to value was some form of dissent.
Events of the last 18 months have deeply shattered this halcyon state of mind that has accorded me such comfort but also pride in America’s role in my life.
Briefly put, I see the last few remaining years of my life being crushed by the Scylla of Trumpism, that is about to destroy pretty much every aspect of America that I came to value and love, and the Charybdis of antisemitism that is most vocal and potent at the most hallowed places of my life, namely the world of elite universities like Columbia, Harvard and the University of Michigan!
Trumpism: Where to begin?
A movement proud of its arrogance and ignorance, only valorizing the naked exercise of power both domestically and internationally. A movement full of contempt for the weak, extolling brute force and disdaining collaboration and consensus. A movement delighting in undermining the value and validity of knowledge and science by advocating demonstrable falsehoods and that endanger the quality of life for millions of its citizens merely to provoke established truths in its effort to be outrageous and contrarian. A movement that has come to twist language into an Orwellian dimension the likes of which has not appeared in any liberal democracy before. A movement that openly mocks the most essential values of liberal democracy and extols those of dictatorships. A movement that delights in chaos and destruction for their own sake, for the pleasure of causing havoc and upending the existing establishment just to assert its wanton power. Whether full-blown fascism will really bury the oldest liberal democracy in its 250th year of existence remains uncertain. But that Trumpism has caused lasting damage to the very fabric of liberal democracy in America’s existence cannot be doubted.
The America that represented a haven for me, that offered me safety, succor and success, no longer exists—which is extremely scary and depressing!
And what constituted my America? It was not the natural wonders of the Rockies, the beauty of its oceans, the expanse of its cities, the variety of its economic life – it was first and foremost the world of elite universities which became my home, my place of work but also of comfort and community!
And those will never be the same since October 7, 2023! In fact, I would argue that there exist few institutions in contemporary America in which a Jew might feel more uncomfortable being consciously Jewish than in the world of elite higher education.
Let me end with two vignettes from my very own University of Michigan that happened in March 2024, the last semester of my teaching at this fine university.
First, I noticed repeatedly that at the end of my lectures, a few students would proceed to hide their Magen David necklaces under their sweaters before leaving the lecture hall and entering the public spaces of the campus. They would do this as a matter of course, totally automatically, like putting on their scarves to be protected from the cold wind so common to Ann Arbor winters!
Second, while walking one day across campus at that time, I witnessed a young woman scream full force and with venom at another young woman: Go back to Poland, go back to Poland!
In other words, a young Jewish woman from Michigan – from America – should abandon Israel and return to Poland where – most likely – her family escaped the Holocaust by receiving refuge in America! Insane and beyond scary!
I never ever thought that I would experience any of these two occurrences at an American university, THE place of my safety, my success, my happiness!
posted by Jeff Weintraub at 12:46 PM
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