So why is the American Jewish community so nervous? The answer is that the usual moral certainty about Israel and American Jewish identity has been replaced by a nagging moral confusion. “Are settlements right or wrong.? Is Bush a good guy or a bad guy? American Jews don’t know what to believe,” says Marc Klein, editor of the Northern California Jewish Bulletin. For Jewish readers who view The New York Times practically as a secular Talmud, the paper’s decision to back the president against Israel on the $10 billion in housing guarantees was a shock. All of the old verities are up for grabs, including the future of Judaism itself. A much-discussed survey released in August showed that, if current trends continue, as many Jews may be lost to the faith through intermarriage as died in the Holocaust.

To add to the pain, the new ambivalence comes amid a burst of anti-Semitism both in the old Soviet empire and in the United States.The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reports a total of 1,685 incidents (such as swastikas painted on synagogues, and other forms of vandalism) nationwide in 1990, an increase of 18 percent. This year looks to be considerably worse, particularly in the Northeast. Newton, Mass., for instance, has experienced eight anti-Semitic incidents since June alone. Vandals painted swastikas on historic Plymouth Rock and desecrated cemeteries in Hartford, Conn. Rhode Island Gov. Bruce Sundlun, who is Jewish, has been the target of racist taunts, as depositors angry over a bank scandal (page 47) invoke ancient stereotypes.

For Jews, the most sickening moment came in late August in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where an innocent Hasidic Jew, Yankel Rosenbaum, was stabbed to death in retaliation for an unrelated traffic accident that had killed a young African-American boy, Gavin Cato. The murder of Rosenbaum–in which a lynch mob of black youths shouted “Kill the Jews!”–was similar to the recent racist attacks on blacks in neighboring Bensonhurst and Howard Beach, but at first it wasn’t reported as such. “We were shocked that [most of] the newspapers of this city talked about racial strife and not about anti-Semitism,” says Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL. This came as New York Jews were still reeling from the support that an anti-Semitic professor at City College named Leonard Jeffries received from parts of the African-American community. “About the only thing on which all Jews seem to agree is that last month’s murder and rioting are a watershed event in American Jewish life,” wrote the Forward, a 94-year-old Jewish newspaper.

But watershed to what? The encouraging news is that blacks and Jews may not get along quite as badly as the media coverage suggests. In last month’s New York City Council elections, both Jewish and African-American demagogues lost in their respective districts to candidates who were not nearly as well known but who rejected hate politics. In Chicago, disputes between Jews and blacks are “on a low level of intensity,” says Rabbi Herman Schaalman. What’s changed, says Julius Lester, a professor at the University of Massachusetts who is both black and Jewish, is that “there seems to be a lack of disavowal [of black anti-Semitism] by segments of respectable black leadership, which amounts to tacit approval.” In other words, the much-discussed resentment of “Eurocentrism” doesn’t frequently extend to that most European of all ailments-anti-Semitism.

Ironically, Alan Dershowitz, author of the provocative best-seller “Chutzpah,” suggests that Jewish leaders would do well to act more, not less, like black or Cuban-American leaders, who strongly back their besieged brethren, no matter what the charge. Act more assertively to defend the rights of Jews, he exhorts, even offensive ones. But endorsing Dershowitz’s Charles Atlas prescription puts Jews in the hypocritical position of wanting blacks to circle their wagons less, and Jews to circle theirs more. If both groups simply denounced bigotry wherever they saw it, these conflicts might stop escalating.

The problem is that just as the risk of worldwide anti-Semitism increases, its offensiveness to non-Jews appears to diminish. At the same time that the lid has been taken off ancient passions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the statute of limitations seems to be running out on the Holocaust in the United States. Multicultural curricula have begun relegating genocide against the Jews to just another people’s story. Non-Jews have found it easier to brush off the special claims that come with such suffering.

Increasing numbers of American Jews are coming to understand that criticism of Israel is not the same as anti-Semitism. But they fear that the line can get thin. Israeli intransigence in the Middle East will likely heat up anti-Israel sentiment at home-and some American Jews worry that that could turn into anti-Semitic fever. Where’s the moral high ground? If they can’t find it–and defend it from the virus of history–American Jews may find that 1991 looks like a good year by comparison.