JTA — Growing up in Argentina, I found American exceptionalism and how it held up Jews as inextricable from the national fabric to be a source of both bewilderment and envy.

Argentinean Jews are patriots. My childhood hero was José de San Martín, the Argentine George Washington. As a teenager, I had a poster of Raúl Alfonsín (the president who brought democracy back to Argentina) on my wall, and you can see me go insane when the national soccer team plays.

Yet the country didn’t feel like the United States felt to American Jews. There was a sense of temporality in the Jewish experience, aided by the country’s perpetual political and economic instability. It was as if we could never fully trust our country.

That was how Jews everywhere felt throughout their long exile. Even when they didn’t experience persecution or discrimination, there was always an insecurity that they accepted as one of the facts of life.

Not so in America, where I moved in 2012. American Jewish intellectual Will Heber claimed in his 1955 book “Protestant, Catholic, Jewish” that “The American Jew does not live in exile; he lives in a land he regards as his own, and it is within that land that he shapes a Jewish identity that is voluntary, confident, and thoroughly American.”

Even when, in past decades, Jews experienced discrimination, they could point towards an unequivocal positive trajectory of integration. Instances of antisemitism weren’t seen as disproving American uniqueness. Instead, the way Jew-hatred receded in the postwar years was seen as further evidence that America was “home” in a way that no other diaspora ever was.

American Jews have lost something invaluable in the last decade: the feeling that their country and their community are exceptional.

Jews here are starting to feel like their brethren throughout history; they can’t fully trust America. It is as though Jewish history has finally caught up with them.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 proved that an unpredictable candidate who flirted with racism and xenophobia could get elected to the highest office in the land. His election and his populist style insinuated a sense among many Jews that America had lost its predictability. Many Jews consider Trump friendly to them and Israel, and the weakening of institutions that followed may not have targeted Jews directly, but Jews know intuitively that those institutions are key to their long-term safety.

After the murderous Hamas raids in Israel on October 7, 2023, that feeling of lost trust grew by orders of magnitude. The places that had come to symbolize the integration of Jews in American society, like........

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