Rather than “antisemitism” being the biggest threat to the survival of the Jewish people, it actually appears that assimilation into the dominant culture is a much bigger concern. Jewish American lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, in his book The Vanishing American Jew explored the “threat” to Jewish life posed by being warmly welcomed into societies such as America and Australia:

American Jewish life is in danger of disappearing, just as most American Jews have achieved everything we ever wanted: acceptance, influence, affluence, equality. As the result of skyrocketing rates of intermarriage and assimilation, as well as “the lowest birth rate of any religious or ethnic community in the United States,” the era of enormous Jewish influence on American life may soon be coming to an end.



But today’s most serious threats come not from those who would persecute us, but from those who would, without any malice, kill us with kindness–by assimilating us, marrying us, and merging with us out of respect, admiration, and even love. The continuity of the most influential Jewish community in history is at imminent risk, unless we do something dramatic now to confront the quickly changing dangers.

Imagine a situation in which the primary “threat” to your survival as a religious community is….kindness in various forms. The problem, from the perspective of Jewish survival, has not been that the dominant American culture hated and excluded Jews. On the contrary, the challenge for the survival of Rabbinic Judaism has been that the dominant American culture was so enticing, so attractive, so welcoming that too many Jews have chosen to assimilate to it. https://orthodoxreflections.com/does-rabbinic-judaism-need-enemies-to-survive/