What Happened to the America My Great-Grandmother Believed In?

My great-grandmother was born in 1915 in Chicago, Illinois. She was born into a world of horses and buggies, yet her father swore when she was born that he would get a car for this little girl. (He did.) She came of age during the Great Depression. (In fact, her first job was working at the Baby Ruth candy factory, wrapping candy bars, which she hated. When she finally quit, she had earned all of $0.26 for her final paycheck—and when they refused to mail it to her, she just said forget it. It wasn’t worth spending $0.14 on streetcar fare there and back.) Her wedding in 1935 was on a Friday afternoon, so that the Friday night meal and wedding meal would be one and the same.

After she got married, she moved to Detroit, Michigan, where she lived until she passed away in 2017. And for her entire life, from when she first started voting, she always voted Democrat. I wonder, though, what she would say about the current state of the Democratic party.

Last week’s primary in Michigan was yet another blow for the moderate, establishment wing of the Democratic party. Senator Gary Peters, who has served as a Michigan state senator since 2015, announced in January that he will be retiring and will not seek reelection. Thus began a race for the Democratic nomination for the seat, a race that came down, last week, to Abdul El-Sayed, a public health official, running against Haley Stevens, a congresswoman in the U.S. House of Representatives.

It was a tight, tight race, and in the end, Stevens lost. El-Sayed democratically won the right to run against Republican nominee Mike Rogers in the November election. And I find that concerning.

It’s hard not to look at El-Sayed’s victory, as well as the victories in the New York and Colorado primaries, as deeply troubling signs for the state of American society. It’s hard to ignore what appears to be a running theme: denouncing Israel for the crime-du-jour. And it has become increasingly more difficult to ignore the parallels between the social unrest of Weimar Germany and the convulsions that appear to currently be wracking the United States.

To be very clear, I am not saying that the next stage for the United States is the Holocaust. God forbid anything close to that should ever again come to pass. But I am concerned, and, frankly, saddened, by what appears to be a measure of insanity sweeping the nation.

I’m sad because I love America. We just celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a declaration that was far from unanimous and did not beget a perfect country, but it marked a turning point in the direction of humanity as gradually moving towards human dignity and freedom. The Constitution, which was written eleven years later, birthed a system of government that was radical in its vision, and while it applied freedoms only in a limited sense in the early years, it was expansive enough that under that same Constitution, all citizens are now afforded equal rights and protections.

The land itself is magnificent, too. Israel may have my heart and soul, but America has captured my imagination with its “amber waves of grain” and “purple mountain majesties.” In fact, this is the first summer in many, many years that I haven’t traipsed off to some random corner of the country to hike, to road trip, to see the beauty with which God crafted America. And I met some really wonderful people along those travels, like the woman who had the thickest Alabama accent I’ve ever heard but who delighted in life, or the sweet couple from Louisiana who were celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary and were as deeply in love as the day they got married.

I think America is worth fighting for. I think she is worth saving. I am concerned for America at large, and for the Jews who still live there, including my immediate family. But I do wonder: Where do we draw the line, as Jews, between civic duty to an America that has been a haven for our people and has given us the opportunity to flourish in a post-Holocaust world, and that niggling maybe-it’s-time-to-go voice? Is the writing already on the wall? Or are we reading too much into what may just turn out to be yet another trend in American politics, as there have already been so many in the last 250 years?

I don’t have easy answers to these questions. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that there are no easy answers to these questions, at least not without the benefit of hindsight. But I am worried. I was worried last year after New York City’s mayoral election. I was worried after the primaries in New York in June. I continue to be worried following last week’s primary in Michigan.

And through it all, I hope that the good people who I met along my travels, the ones who make no big waves but simply do good with their lives through hard work, community-building, and charity, that it is their world-view that will prevail. And I hope I see them again the next time I go traipsing across America the Beautiful.