Jewish Exceptionalism: a path to genocide

JVL Introduction

This is a beautifully written lament for the lost illusions of an American Jew born in the mid-‘70s, and a searing indictment of the American Jewish establishment. Moser speaks more eloquently than any reviewer, so this introduction can do little more than highlight his own words.

The issues are entered through the prism of the synagogue roof at Congregation Emanu El in Houston, expressing “a confident style, an American style, a style that spoke of all the securities of the world of my childhood.” The Houston Jews, he writes: “talked like everyone else, dressed like everyone else, looked like everyone else, perfect citizens of the city to which we were proud to belong – and belong we did”. It was a congregation where everyone was a Democrat.

He probes deeper. “But the belonging my generation took for granted was fresh…. We had absorbed the idea of ourselves as part of America so entirely. I don’t think we would have been able to conceive that we had ever been outsiders…. The Jews were more than accepted by the establishment: they were the establishment.”

But there was always a subtext – the subtext of moral superiority. “We really did think, in some way that we would never have dared to articulate, that Jews were better…  American exceptionalism, Jewish moral superiority: maybe that was what made that building, when I saw it again many years later, look like an ambassador from another galaxy.”

This is about the destruction of his Jewish American dream, the stripping away of the pretence of “liberalism, of tolerance, to which the American Jewish leadership had, for generations, paid such pious lip service…In fact, this group had identified only with power.. it was an alliance with the very power of America itself… under the cover of powerlessness: of fighting antisemitism, whose impact in our country they wildly and self-pityingly overstated.”

Then came October 7^th – and any pretence of American Jewish liberalism vanished.

Moser’s conclusion – his criticisms of the Jewish establishments throughout the world – are devasting. “We saw leaders who – fearfully, pathetically – refused to speak against the genocide… By their cowardice, by their refusal, they made their institutions complicit in Israel’s butchery. Never in history has so much of the Jewish leadership been stained with this much guilt – a guilt that can never be washed out…. There was revealed a moral collapse, a near-universal collusion and corruption, from which the Jewish world will never recover – and will not deserve to recover.”

“With the hot air of moral superiority sucked out from underneath its eaves, the roof has started to wobble; the roof has started to leak. And why, after what has been done to Palestine, does this matter? What is all of Jewish culture worth in the face of a burning child? “

“It is perhaps time to say we have talked enough about ourselves… We should be talking … about the parents we have seen holding the severed heads of their own children. We should be asking, now, whether we care about the Palestinians. If we don’t, why should anyone care about us?”

GB

This article was originally published by Equator on Wed 29 Oct 2025. Read the original here.