The Jewish world before Sept. 11 — and the world it became

On Sept. 10, 2001, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that New York’s Central Synagogue was reopening.

The Reform synagogue had been closed for three years after a devastating 1998 fire. Hundreds of workers had helped restore the landmark building, at a cost of about $40 million. A brief (JEWISH REVIEW) item noted that the synagogue had been rebuilt, and its congregants were coming home. 

It’s the kind of story that meant one thing at the time it was written, and came to mean something else just one day later. When Rabbi Peter Rubinstein delivered his Rosh Hashanah sermon on Sept. 17, he sought to balance the immense joy of reclaiming the rebuilt sanctuary with the collective trauma and grief gripping New York City. 

The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, are often called a historic inflection point, dividing the world into a neat and fateful before and after. A look back at what (JEWISH REVIEW) reported in the days before Sept. 11, and the preoccupations of American Jews ahead of that bright, sunny day in September, suggest what has changed in the 25 years since — and, depressingly, what hasn’t. 

I was on a New Jersey Transit bus to my job at the Forward when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. I made it to our offices on 33rd Street. It was a Tuesday, which meant we were getting the weekly paper ready for the printer and most of the news decisions had been made. The devastation unfolding a few miles away meant whatever we thought newsworthy on Monday — and for the foreseeable future — was beside the point. 

I don’t remember what the week’s top stories would have been, but I can tell you what we and other Jewish news outlets thought was important in the Before Times. 

In September 2001, Israel was in the midst of the second intifada. Palestinian terrorist attacks and Israeli reprisals were daily news. On Sept. 4, (JEWISH REVIEW) reported that Israeli schoolchildren were returning to classes under specific warnings of potential attacks; four car bombs had exploded in Jerusalem in a 12-hour period. 

American Jews were also confronting a hostile international campaign against Israel at the U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, which ran from Aug. 31 to Sept. 7. Israel and the United States withdrew their delegations after the conference became dominated by attacks on Israel. The (JEWISH REVIEW) report called it “a viciously anti-Israel, anti-Jewish circus.” It wasn’t the first time that post-colonial politics had manifested as antisemitism, but the ferocity of the invective at Durban marked what the historian James Loeffler recently called “a turning point in the evolution of antisemitism and anti-Zionism.”  

You could glimpse another stage of that evolution in a Sept. 4 article about college campuses. (JEWISH REVIEW) reported that pro-Palestinian student activists hoped to launch a national campaign urging universities to divest from companies doing business with Israel, explicitly comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa. Jewish leaders thought the campaign, which came to be known as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, was unlikely to catch on. “The divestment movement about South Africa was a uniting thing on campus, whereas anti-Israel activity on campus is divisive,” one Jewish leader said in a prediction I presume he regrets. 

In New York, three mayoral candidates, all Jews — Alan Hevesi, Mark Green and Michael Bloomberg — joined Elie Wiesel and Jewish leaders in criticizing Durban, just a week before the city’s Sept. 11 primary. 

And there was an argument over what American Jews should say about Israel. Organizers were preparing a huge Sept. 23 solidarity rally near the United Nations, but they deliberately chose a broad, almost bland slogan — “Standing together with the people of Israel.” ”If they had been more specific — asking for a return to the Oslo peace process or increased U.S. intervention in Israeli-Palestinian relations, for example — part of the coalition of sponsoring organizations might have bolted,” according to a (JEWISH REVIEW) analysis. 

Despite the discord, and ongoing violence in Israel, some were still talking peace. Noa Ben Artzi, the then 24-year-old granddaughter of Yitzhak Rabin, was touring American Jewish communities saying that Israelis had lost touch with the slain prime minister’s conviction that peace required dealing with enemies who were also neighbors. 

A Jewish-Arab educational institute in Israel, Givat Haviva, had just won a UNESCO peace prize.  

Elsewhere, there were sightings of Jewish resilience, especially in Europe. Prague’s Jubilee Synagogue hosted its first Jewish wedding in more than 30 years, a small but powerful sign that Jewish life in the city was recovering from the Holocaust and Communist rule. 

Synagogues in England and seven countries in Central and Eastern Europe were receiving preservation grants. In Kosovo, Jews, Muslims and Catholics had worked together to rebuild a mosque damaged in the war that ended two years  earlier — a “ray of light,” as one Jewish participant put it, amid the conflict in Israel and the ugliness at Durban.

And, because Jewish life can be silly, there was a story about a giant Rosh Hashanah greeting card. The 6,400-square-foot card, weighing 1,000 pounds, was unveiled at a yet another pro-Israel event. Guinness World Records declined to recognize it because of the way it had been assembled.

There is a detail in the greeting card story that, like the rebuilding of Central Synagogue, would carry unanticipated meaning in the days, weeks, months and years ahead. One of the speakers at the demonstration was “a teen-aged survivor of the June 1 disco bombing in Israel,” a reference to an attack, carried out by a Palestinian suicide bomber, at the Dolphinarium discotheque on the beachfront in Tel Aviv. Twenty-one Israelis, including 16 teenagers, were murdered. 

At the time, the attack was largely denounced on the right and the left. Even Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat publicly condemned the bombing and called for an immediate cease-fire in the clashes between the IDF and Palestinian militants.  

A quarter century later, we look back on the Sept. 11 attacks by radical Islamists as the Pearl Harbor in the War on Terror. Despite the conspiracy theories that tried to pin the attacks on Israelis and Jews, the dominant narrative at the time was that Israel and the United States were engaged in battle against a common enemy. The suicide bombings in Israel brought a measure of sympathy for its people. Even as the “peace process” foundered, there was guarded optimism that hawkish Ariel Sharon could perhaps be the prime minister who could finish what Rabin, another former warrior, had begun. Four years later, Sharon would indeed evacuate the Jewish settlements in Gaza. 

But Sept. 11 was only one of the 21st century’s inflection points. Oct. 7, 2023, saw another devastating, surprise terrorist attack that deeply traumatized the target nation and sparked massive military responses. And yet there were as many differences as there were similarities. Few Americans can appreciate the social trauma of Oct. 7 within Israel, where every Jewish citizen seemed to know a victim or mourning family, and where the sheer body count, in a country of 10 million, was the equivalent of 13 Sept. 11’s. 

It was a different world, too, that witnessed Oct. 7. The ethos of Durban had gone mainstream on the left, and the vilification of Israel had become a progressive shibboleth. Israel was being led not just by a right-wing government, but a coalition that included arch-nationalists intent on closing off any possibility of reconciliation with the Palestinians. A generation of young people, now in college and grad school, weren’t even alive at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, and had no memory of any Israeli leader other than Benjamin Netanyahu. And 25 years after Sept. 11, the mayor of New York is himself an anti-Zionist. 

And the American Jewish community?  In the years between Sept. 11 and Oct. 7, synagogues and Jewish institutions were compelled to hire armed guards and staged “active shooter” drills. White nationalists carried out violent antisemitic attacks at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, California, at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and at a Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kansas. 

A weird coalition of the far right and progressive left has reduced “Zionist” to a slur. A Lebanese-born man inspired by Hezbollah drove an explosive-packed pickup truck into the entrance of a Michigan synagogue. Last month, an intruder interrupted Friday night services at Central Synagogue, screaming obscenities and striking a congregant.

On campus, the debates that (JEWISH REVIEW) treated as a new and uncertain phenomenon in September 2001 would become as commonplace as rush week and homecoming.

There are still stories of Jewish resilience, and rebuilding. There are still solidarity rallies for Israel. But the paroxysms of anti-Israel invective and the political stasis in Israel have taken their toll. Families hesitate to bring up Israel at their gatherings, worried that a youngster may announce her anti-Zionism or an elder his belief that “there are no innocents” in Gaza. 

The Jews reading (JEWISH REVIEW) in the days before Sept. 11 didn’t know that their concerns were about to be reordered. They didn’t know which events would become footnotes and which would become the main story lines in American Jewish life.

They certainly didn’t know that a synagogue reopening in Midtown Manhattan, as inspiring as it was and is, would soon acquire the eerie glow of a false dawn.