When Society’s Good Intentions for Jews Replace Equal Citizenship

A secular Manhattan school responded to October 7 by holding a Shabbat gathering. The head of school spoke with moral seriousness. Jewish families felt seen. Non-Jewish families showed up in solidarity. By any reasonable measure, this is a success story.

And that is precisely what makes it worth examining.

A Jerusalem Post report describes Town School’s response as sincere, generous, and embraced by the entire community. It is all of those things. But it also reflects a logic that deserves scrutiny — not because the intent is bad, but because the structure is fragile. What Town School offers is care. What it cannot offer is civic security. The difference matters more than most people realize.

The question is not whether warmth is preferable to hostility. It is whether a framework built on institutional affirmation can ever produce durable belonging — or whether it quietly substitutes recognition for citizenship, comfort for equality, and goodwill for rights.

The American alternative has a founding text. In 1790, George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport that the new republic “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” As I have written elsewhere, this was not ceremony. It was a covenant.

Belonging depended on conduct, not creed. Citizenship was the baseline. Recognition was irrelevant.

Call this the Washington model: belonging is presumed, not conferred. The government does not identify groups, affirm them, or protect them through recognition. It simply refuses to make identity the basis of civic standing.

The affirmation model works differently. Jewish belonging is validated by institutions. Jewish life is welcomed through programming. Jewish safety flows from administrative judgment. This is the logic of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

It feels compassionate. It is also a departure from the civic architecture that made America uniquely stable for Jews.

American Jews did not flourish because institutions learned to include them. They flourished because the regime limited the authority of institutions to decide who belonged at all. Jews attended public schools, served in the military, and entered professions — not because administrators welcomed them, but because the law made no provision for excluding them. That is pluralism as structure, not performance.

DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — inverts this. It treats belonging as something institutions must actively produce. Once belonging is conferred, it becomes conditional and, therefore, unstable.

None of this denies that schools should protect Jewish students in moments of fear, address antisemitism, enforce rules, and help manage difference. Care matters. Moral clarity matters. But short-term care does not require long-term structural dependency. The question is whether the framework makes Jewish belonging more secure over time or more fragile.

Critics of DEI often focus on excesses — ideological trainings, bureaucratic bloat, activist capture. They miss the point. The problem is not tone. It is structure. DEI replaces equal citizenship with managed identity. It reduces civic standing to recognition, safety to visibility, equality to representation. It grants institutions precisely the authority that liberal pluralism once denied them.

For Jews, this is perilous. Judaism is not simply cultural identity. It is a peoplehood and faith defined by continuity, obligation, and collective memory. America worked for Jews because the regime did not require Judaism to be translated into something thinner in order to belong.

DEI struggles with this. Jewish identity gets reframed as culture — ritual without peoplehood, heritage without permanence, symbolism without sovereignty. That version of Jewishness is easy to affirm because it makes no claims. But that ease is the warning sign.

This is not only imposed from outside. Jews have often been among the architects of DEI frameworks, usually with the best intentions. The same communal instinct that built hospitals, schools, and social agencies now sometimes builds systems that make Jewish belonging contingent rather than secure. Good faith does not neutralize structural risk.

Jews are not uniquely burdened by DEI, but they are diagnostically revealing. Any system that cannot accommodate a people simultaneously religious, ethnic, historical, and transnational will fracture under pressure from other complex identities. Jews expose the structural weakness. They are not the cause of it.

Feeling welcomed and being secure are not the same thing. Inclusion produces comfort. Citizenship produces stability. Belonging grounded in recognition depends on continued moral approval. Belonging grounded in citizenship does not. The former fluctuates with ideology; the latter endures through disagreement.

The educators at Town School appear to be acting in good faith. But no minority should rely on the personal virtue of administrators for its security. Sincerity is not a system. Good intentions do not correct for flawed design.

If Jewish security comes to depend on institutional affirmation rather than civic equality, Jews will be less secure, not more. And if this model becomes dominant, it will erode pluralism for everyone. No minority should want its standing to depend on recognition. No society should delegate belonging to administrators. No liberal order survives when citizenship is replaced by curation.

Institutions turn to DEI not out of malice but out of lost confidence. When leaders no longer trust law, equality, and restraint to hold, they substitute recognition for rights and symbolism for structure. DEI fills the vacuum left by civic uncertainty. It cannot repair it.

The American experiment succeeded not by perfecting inclusion but by constraining power. It did not ask institutions to decide who belonged. It presumed belonging and limited the authority of those who might question it.

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, Jews should be clear-eyed about this distinction. A pluralistic society is strongest when belonging is presumed rather than curated, and when citizenship is treated as a baseline rather than a reward.

Warmth matters. Goodwill matters. But they are not substitutes for equality under a civic order that does not ask groups to justify their place.

Jewish history is clear on this point. Societies where Jews are welcomed at the discretion of elites are less stable than those where Jewish belonging is assumed as principle. The former depends on mood and politics. The latter endures through disagreement.

Washington’s letter to Newport promised something no amount of programming can replicate: a republic that gives to bigotry no sanction because it refuses to make belonging a matter of official judgment at all. That is an inheritance worth defending. The distinction between the affirmation model and the Washington model is not only a Jewish concern. It is central to the durability of pluralism.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.