A Modern Echo of an Ancient Bargain: New York’s Jewish Community Faces a Familiar Dilemma
In the winter of 1789, a pivotal moment unfolded in the French National Assembly. Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, an aristocrat, stood before his peers and made a bold proposition: that Jews should be granted citizenship. His motion carried, but with a profound caveat that would shape Jewish existence for centuries to come. “To the Jews as individuals, everything,” he declared, “To the Jews as a nation, nothing.” This was emancipation, but it came at the steep price of assimilation, a demand for disappearance as a collective people.
The essence of this historical bargain was stark: individuals of the Mosaic persuasion could be French citizens, but they could not be recognised as a distinct people. Private worship was permissible, but public affirmation of collective identity was not. This ancient conditional acceptance has resurfaced in contemporary New York, with Mayor Eric Adams offering the city’s vast Jewish community a version of the same exclusionary bargain, a move he likely doesn’t perceive as a regression.
For over six decades, every sitting mayor of New York has participated in the annual Israel Day Parade. This year, however, Mayor Adams has broken that tradition. While his Police Commissioner, Jessica Tisch, will serve as the grand marshal, and the city has committed to providing comprehensive security, the Mayor’s personal absence speaks volumes. This arrangement encapsulates the core of the dilemma: the Mayor is willing to deploy resources to protect individual Jewish citizens, but he is unwilling to publicly acknowledge and honour the Jewish people as a collective. He will safeguard the Jew as an individual entitled to safety but refuses to stand with the Jew as a member of a nation.
This echoes Clermont-Tonnerre’s decree almost verbatim, 234 years later. The offer remains consistent: everything for the individual Jew, and nothing for the Jewish nation. What is particularly striking is that the politician reviving this 18th-century stipulation, the one who claims to be the most progressive mayor in America, has inadvertently reinstated a deeply reactionary condition. The age-old demand for Jews to diminish their collective identity, to shrink from being a people into a private faith as a prerequisite for acceptance, has been reimposed upon the largest Jewish community outside of Israel by a leader who believes he is championing the marginalised. He has, in essence, repackaged the 1789 deal and presented it as a progressive stance.
Defenders of the Mayor’s decision will argue that his actions are not a rejection of Jewish peoplehood, but rather a response to specific political circumstances concerning Israel, Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or particular government policies. However, the Israel Day Parade is not a political rally for Mr. Netanyahu, nor is it a forum for government ministries or Knesset factions to hold court on Fifth Avenue.
Rabbi Joseph Potasnik of the New York Board of Rabbis succinctly captured the sentiment: “It’s not a policy parade. It’s a Jewish people parade.” This statement underscores the fundamental issue. Mayor Adams has not refused to endorse a specific Israeli cabinet policy; he has refused to stand with a people gathering publicly as a people.
This pattern of behaviour is not new for the Mayor. Early in his tenure, he rescinded his predecessor’s orders that had barred city agencies from boycotting Israel and from adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The Israeli Foreign Ministry at the time characterised these actions as “antisemitic gasoline on an open fire.” Furthermore, Mayor Adams has consistently refused to recognise Israel as a Jewish state and has skipped Israel’s Independence Day celebrations. Each of these decisions conveys the same message: the private Jew is safe under my protection, but the collective Jew is not.
Mayor Adams’ supporters often counter these criticisms by asserting that anti-Zionism is not a call for Jewish disappearance, but rather a rejection of a single political stance among many. They draw an analogy to a mayor skipping a rally for a political party they dislike. However, this comparison fundamentally misunderstands the nature of Zionism for the vast majority of Jews. Zionism is not merely an opinion; it represents the Jewish people’s inherent claim to exist as a people, historically and collectively, beyond the confines of the synagogue. For most Jews globally, it is an integral part of their identity, not a mere intellectual position.
To demand that a Jew renounce Zionism as a price for civic acceptance is not to ask them to change their mind. It is to demand that they discard a fundamental aspect of their heritage – the part that signifies their collective existence – while retaining the portion deemed palatable by others. This is the 1789 bargain, articulated in contemporary language.
History has repeatedly demonstrated that this bargain is a dangerous trap. Clermont-Tonnerre’s France, after emancipating Jews, spent the following century demonstrating its inability to truly accept them. The promise that Jews would be welcomed once they shed their collective identity proved to be a devastating illusion. Jews assimilated, converted, served, and even died for nations that demanded their disappearance, yet this did not shield them when the darkest chapters of history unfolded. The Jew who agreed to vanish as a nation was nonetheless murdered as one.
Vienna offered a chillingly modern iteration of this phenomenon. Karl Lueger, its mayor from 1897 to 1910, presided over a sophisticated and popular city hall that was openly anti-Jewish, all without the explicit presence of death camps. A young Adolf Hitler observed Lueger’s methods of galvanising public sentiment and later lauded him as the preeminent German mayor of his era. The isolation of the Jewish collective does not necessitate a tyrannical figure to initiate; it can begin with a respected elected official who decides that Jewish peoplehood is an inconvenient element that a “decent” society can do without.
This historical context is precisely why the Jewish community of New York should reject this renewed bargain, rather than attempting to negotiate its terms. The natural instinct when a mayor signals that Zionism is problematic is to prove oneself as a “good” Jew – to moderate public displays of identity, to downplay collective affiliations, and to articulate personal grievances with Israeli policies. However, this instinct plays directly into the bargain’s design. It accepts the flawed premise that Jewish peoplehood is a liability to be managed, rather than an intrinsic aspect of identity to be lived. Every Jew who has ever accepted such a deal has learned that the boundaries of acceptable Jewishness are fluid and invariably shift towards further exclusion.
Therefore, the appropriate response to Mayor Adams’ stance is not a louder debate about Israeli policy. It is a more robust and visible affirmation of Jewish peoplehood. The answer lies in a parade that the Mayor cannot diminish.
The community must march, bringing their flags, their children, the Holocaust survivors, and the survivors of October 7th. They must bring together secular Israelis and Jews of Persian, Bukharian, and Russian-speaking backgrounds. They must include the Reform, the Orthodox, and those who find their connection to Judaism outside of any synagogue. Crucially, they must march with every ally who understands that a truly free city does not ask its residents to diminish themselves as a condition of belonging.
Mayor Adams has presented New York’s Jews with a 234-year-old deal, repackaged as a new moral imperative: “Everything to you as individuals. Nothing to you as a people.” The Jews of New York have heard this tune before, in French and in German, and they are acutely aware of the tragic consequences for those who have acquiesced. The parade, in its very existence and its defiant public presence, is already the correct and powerful response. The community will embrace the “everything” offered to them as individuals, and they will steadfastly refuse the “nothing” demanded of their collective identity. They will march up Fifth Avenue as the very thing the bargain forbids: a people, visible, proud, and unafraid.
