Israel, Affirmative Action, and the Vulnerability of American Jews—a View from 1975

Nathan Glazer—an often pathbreaking social scientist, tireless political commentator, keen observer of the American Jewish scene, and one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism—died on Saturday at the age of ninety-five. Among the numerous articles he wrote for Commentary on both Jewish and general themes was his prescient 1975 essay, “The Exposed American Jew.” It begins by speculating on why, unlike the pattern elsewhere and often in Jewish history, the political trauma of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the cultural upheaval of the sexual revolution had produced no anti-Semitic backlash in America. Then it moves to what Glazer describes as a new class of potentially unsettling threats to the position of American Jews: affirmative action, “the new ethnic frankness,” and the anti-Israel turn in elite circles: