All posts tagged: golden age

How anti-Semitism threatens American democracy

How anti-Semitism threatens American democracy

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. In our April cover story, my colleague Franklin Foer explores how anti-Semitism on both the right and the left threatens to end a period of unprecedented safety and prosperity for American Jews—and the liberal order they helped establish. Frank and I chatted last week about the past and future of anti-Semitism, and about some lesser-understood moments in American Jewish history. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: What Liberalism Did Isabel Fattal: You write that “part of the reason I failed to appreciate the extent of the anti-Semitism on the left is that I assumed its criticisms of the Israeli government were, at bottom, a harsher version of my own.” How did October 7 change this thinking for you? Franklin Foer: For a long time, I didn’t actually think that anti-Semitism was an American problem. And then …

Atlantic’s April issue: Golden Age for Jewish Americans

Atlantic’s April issue: Golden Age for Jewish Americans

Published by skeptic

On March 18, Foer will discuss the cover story at Sixth & I, in Washington, D.C.; the conversation will also be streamed online March 4, 2024, 7:44 AM ET For The Atlantic’s April cover story, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” staff writer Franklin Foer reports on how the rise of anti-Semitism on both the right and the left threatens to end an era of unprecedented safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans, one that spanned the latter part of the 20th century. Foer argues that, with the first decades of the 21st century marked by conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, the liberal order that Jewish Americans helped establish, rooted in values of tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism, is being demolished. The rise of anti-Semitism on the political right is well documented, with Donald Trump attracting the allegiance of white supremacists and freely borrowing their tropes. Foer reports from the Bay Area on the anti-Semitism that has spread on the American left since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. He writes …

I Wanna Dance With Somebody

I Wanna Dance With Somebody

Published by skeptic

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they need to stop making excuses, look in the mirror, and confront head-on the gap between who they are and who they want to be. A few months ago, that happened to me. I could no longer put off the full and joyous life I felt I deserved. I decided it was finally time to learn to salsa. I’m a very good dancer, generally speaking. Get me in a club, and I’ll be in the center of your dance circle. Invite me to your wedding, and guests will think I’m a professional party motivator. Hip-hop, old-school disco, merengue, bachata—even my cumbia’s not half bad. But salsa has always eluded me. Not because I couldn’t master the steps or the rhythms, but because dancing salsa, for a woman, traditionally requires being led. The horns could be soaring, the rhythm rising up from my toes and bursting through my chest, but when I’d get onto the dance floor with my partner and he’d start nudging me this way and …