It was only years later, when I developed an interest in architecture, that I realised how extraordinary that roof was. I didn’t think much about roofs – in Texas, where I came from, the word was pronounced “ruhffs”, with the vowel in the throat and the lips slightly rounded – until I came to Europe, that continent of roofs: roofs that contained, as in cathedrals, entire forests; or that whirled off into spires and finials; or whose ceilings were baroque optical illusions, or illustrated the Fall of Man. In Houston: none of that. The roof I am talking about just looked like a roof. And it looked old. Not venerable, the way that European roofs looked old, but a little out-of-date, the way my grandparents’ houses looked.

The building, Temple Emanu El in Houston, was barely 30 years old when I first would have become aware of it. But to a child, the place seemed old. It smelled of the industrial cleaning products that were smeared, year in and year out, across its linoleum floors. It smelled of the obligation to turn up once a week. I went. I didn’t particularly like going there. I never thought about the roof.

Decades after that obligation expired, I came back to Houston and saw it again, which is to say, I saw it for the first time. For the first time, I saw how balletic it was, a clash of scalene triangles floating above a cavernous sanctuary. And I gasped at its size. It was a roof, I saw, that contained all the cash, all the brains – all the sheer fucking balls – of the splendid empire in which I had been born. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It hung there so perfectly, so effortlessly, supported, it seemed, by nothing more than the glass that let light pour in beneath its cantilevered eaves.

Built in 1949 by MacKie and Kamrath, a Houston firm whose modernist inspiration was taken from Frank Lloyd Wright, Emanu El’s roof covered nearly three-quarters of an acre. I couldn’t discover what exactly kept it floating there: what, exactly, it was floating on. The main hall could seat around 2,600 people. I searched my memory for a European synagogue that could seat that many people. I couldn’t think of any, so I looked it up. Only two – Berlin and Budapest – had temples that were bigger.

The realisation made Houston, too, seem extraordinary. Houston was a big city with an old Jewish population, but it was not a city, like New York or Los Angeles, that felt Jewish. In New York, after a couple of generations, everyone ends up sounding Jewish. The Houston Jews, on the other hand, sounded like everyone else. We talked like everyone else, dressed like everyone else, looked like everyone else, perfect citizens of the city to which we were proud to belong – and belong we did. Emanu El occupied one of the city’s most prestigious sites, eight full acres on an oak-lined boulevard across from Rice University. Down the boulevard was the Museum of Fine Arts, and close by there loomed the Texas Medical Center, the largest such complex in the world, where I was born. It was a belonging so seamless that it begged the point of what, in fact, we were doing there: not there in the city or the country, but there, in that building, under that roof.

Why, if we were like everyone else, were our parents sending us to Emanu El’s tedious Saturday school? My parents were not religious believers. Neither were their own parents. Though it was common for people like them to observe certain festivals and traditions, I can safely say that nobody we knew believed in the religious content of Judaism: that the Torah had been given to Moses at Sinai; that we were enjoined to weave our lives through a jungle of arcane commandments. This was in contrast to Christians in Texas. Lots of them were believers. They got born again. They listened to rock songs about Jesus. There was no Jewish equivalent to that.

So what were we, like, doing there? My sister and I, who were excellent students at our regular school, hated the so-called ‘religious’ school. We resented the intrusion on our weekend. We didn’t learn much. It was a cycle of repetitive activities – apples and honey for Rosh Hashanah, latkes for Chanukah – and even as a child, one quickly got the point. If I were to speak for my parents now, I would imagine they sent us there because they wished to pass their Jewish identity down to their children. Not in any loud or obnoxious way, of course, but like an heirloom. Houston was the largest city in the South, and its old families of every background had the Southern predilection for a grandmother’s silverware. The silverware, in this case, was a clutch of values they thought of as Jewish.

In any case, the duty to attend Saturday school, like all childhood duties, eventually expired. In all, I must have spent around 10 years going there. By then, the building, 30 years old when I was a boy, was 40; and when I went back and noticed its roof, it was over 60. Old enough to be out-of-date when I was a child, it was not quite old enough to be interesting, ‘historic’. Talented buildings, like certain talented people, need time to develop. That time had been granted. As it had reminded me of my grandparents when I was young, it now reminded me of them in a different way. This was their building – they were among the founders of this congregation – now stood as a survival, a token, of their world, a masterpiece of a style since repackaged as ‘Mid-Century Modern’: a confident style, an American style, a style that spoke of all the securities of the world of my childhood.

When I came back, those securities had eroded to the point that I could hardly recall them without an ironic pang. All my life, the ideas that they embodied seemed so secure that one hardly registered them as ideas, as one does not notice the statue of a general one has walked by a thousand times on the way to work. Yet now they seemed to me as clueless as a shiny, marble Lenin on an Eastern European boulevard, unaware that, a few weeks later, the Soviet Union was going to collapse, and it was going to be carted off to the junkyard. At Emanu El, the union of American exceptionalism and liberal Zionism had been given plastic form. But the junkyard loomed.

What were we doing there? If I had to answer for myself rather than my parents, I would say: learning about the Holocaust. This was something we learnt about at Emanu El. We had also learnt about it in my regular, non-Jewish school. But I surely learnt more about it at Emanu El than I did there. There were films, and sometimes there were guest speakers, Holocaust survivors.

Did I need it? My own grandfather was a refugee from Nazi Germany; I had plenty of exposure to the story of the Holocaust. Not everyone had that proximity. It was good to be educated about antisemitism, though it was perplexing at the same time: I was always warned about the approach of this ineradicable malady, which I am still yet to experience.

This was part of my luck, the luck of someone born in the right place at the right time; and that I was lucky was impressed on me from the time I was young. I knew I was lucky. I knew that many people – most people – were not. I was brought up with a strong sense of noblesse oblige. If this had embarrassing manifestations – and: believe me – it seemed salutary in an America where the ostentatious, the unscrupulous, seemed to come out on top. There was a sense of the duty that our luck brought with it. There was a sense that this luck was fragile: that it could run out.

It hadn’t. It didn’t. And so the main lesson was to do things for others. This was not, of course, a very original lesson, and it hardly required a deep engagement with Judaic religion or culture. Yet it had a specific political and ethnic tinge. Emanu El was a congregation where everyone, as far as anyone knew, was a Democrat. I remember the frisson caused when a Jewish Republican appeared, and how he was snubbed, and how he eventually moved to Las Vegas.

This was less a matter of ideology than of hygiene. We might not always have known what we were – it was not an overtly political crowd, I don’t think – but we sensed what we were not, and spurned such people as instinctively as we turned from spoiled food. In this, too, we were typical of American Jewry. The Jews had always been the most liberal, progressive ethnic group in the United States. Our liberalism was older than the Holocaust, more deeply rooted – rooted in the awareness of being a minority, in a remembrance of past persecutions – and the point of Holocaust education was not, at least as far as I understood it, only about the Jews.

This seems so obvious that it is tedious, now, to restate it. I am bored typing this, as I would be bored explaining something again to a person who, the first time I explained it, was scrolling through his phone. But as I type, I feel something worse than boredom. I feel something like biting into a rotten fruit. My face contracts. I cringe. Because for so many people, the point that seemed so obvious even to schoolchildren turned out not to be obvious at all. For so many people – Jews, of course, but also the kinds of gentiles who ‘support Israel’ – it was just about the Jews.

And what was it about the Jews? Years later, I felt a thrill of recognition when I read that Philip Roth described his religious education as offering “no body of law, no body of learning and no language, and finally, no Lord… But there were reminders constantly that one was a Jew and that there were goyim out there”. He was being taught “a psychology”, he recalled, one that “can be translated into three words – ‘Jews are better.’” When I read this sentence now, my thrill of recognition turns into a shock. This would never have been said. What would have been said – what often was said – was exactly the opposite: that all people are equal, that black people were as good as white people, that women were as good as men.

This was the perfectly standard belief system of modern liberal America. It required no religious imprimatur. But these values, in that world, were also described as Jewish. In olden days, their neglect had led to the Holocaust. Today, their neglect could lead to another.

But there is text, and there is subtext. When I read Roth, I realise the subtext was always moral superiority. We really did think, in some way that we would never have dared to articulate, that Jews were better. Was this in some ways related to the Holocaust, to a responsibility that that event imposed on us? Of course. Was it different from the ethnocentrism of almost every other class of humanity? Of course not. It was maybe a bit smug or snobbish. But it was couched in the language of a duty to say yes to certain things and no to others – rules that seemed useful to me then, and still seem useful to me now.

There was a great emphasis on philanthropy, a characteristic that Jews shared with all Americans. People I knew devoted a great deal of time to volunteering, to fundraising, which I can only find laudable. The desire to contribute, to uplift was sincere. If the forms which it took could sometimes seem condescending or silly – all those galas and charity balls – it was hard for me to fault the sentiment behind them, or to ignore their results. The Texas Medical Center was largely the result of this sentiment, and so was the Museum of Fine Arts, and so was Rice University. Other countries had similar institutions, but American public spiritedness seemed to have produced more splendid results than anywhere else in the world.

For Jews, the state of Israel was a prime recipient of such public-spiritedness. Israel was like a hospital or a university or a park, and I think that most Jewish-Americans looked at Israel with the same kind of benevolence with which they might view a dog shelter or a food bank: which is to say that they were happy it existed, willing to help, grateful for a brief tour, but not overly interested in its inner workings. This was typical of other groups of Americans who maintained a fond attachment to a supposed ancestral homeland about whose reality they were only vaguely curious. They rarely knew much about these places. I did not know a soul who spoke Hebrew growing up: such people tended to be from very religious families and go to Jewish schools, and those weren’t the people I knew. Nothing about us was more American than the conviction that everybody, everywhere, speaks English. This felt like universalism. In fact, it was superiority.

When I was older and met people who, as children, had been heavily indoctrinated by Zionism, I found such people strange. For most people I knew, Israel was there. It seemed perfectly natural that it was there, and we were ‘proud’ of it in some way, with the same tenderness and indifference that Americans regarded the rest of the world; but such pride hardly impinged on the rest of our lives.

At Emanu El, Israel was not emphasised. When I met people obsessed with it, I saw that they had grown up in a more narrowly Jewish world than I had. These people bored me. They were like gay men whose only cultural references were to pop divas, or like straight men who could only talk about sports. I thought it was fine to be interested in Israel, just as it was fine to be interested in the Houston Astros or in Judy Garland; but the Israel crowd, the people who made it part of their ‘identity’, were provincials. They seemed, frankly, like losers.

The superiority was worn lightly. It was not aggressive toward others. We are nice people; we are here to help. When I put it that way – well, this was practically the motto of the United States of America. We believed in our usefulness. We saw the rest of the world as our protectorate and sincerely wanted it to flourish beneath our tutelage. This attitude could be traced back to the seventeenth century, but I think most people derived it from the only historical event that most Americans knew anything about, the war against Hitler.

The story of this war, told and endlessly retold, was the great epic of our culture. We lived in the shadow of that war, in the negative sense. In the positive sense: we – not ‘we’ ourselves, of course, but a broader national ‘we’ – had saved the world from the Nazis. And because the Jews were at the centre of that epic, these retellings Americanised the Jews.

This process was so complete that it was astonishing to learn, much later, how recent its completion was. In 1953, Saul Bellow published The Adventures of Augie March. The novel’s first line – “I am an American, Chicago-born” – was taken as a revolutionary claim of belonging. Twenty-three years later, when I came into the world, it would have felt preposterous to write, “I am an American, Houston-born.” But the belonging my generation took for granted was fresh. When I was working on my biography of Susan Sontag, I would learn that one of the attractions she exercised over Jewish writers of her age was her Americanness, how naturally she seemed to accept her position among an elite that, they had always sensed, was mostly closed to Jews. My generation did not think that way. We had absorbed the idea of ourselves as part of America so entirely. I don’t think we would have been able to conceive that we had ever been outsiders.

That, perhaps, was the message of the glamorous architecture, the unimpeachable zip code, of Emanu El. The Jews were more than accepted by the establishment: they were the establishment. That vast roof had no pillars supporting it. What bore it aloft, instead, was the same air of moral righteousness that supported so many other institutions of America’s empire. This might have been the vacuousness of the place that I felt, despite myself, as a child.

We bemoaned the Holocaust, which is to say we bemoaned the cruelties of others; we were enjoined to struggle against racism, which is to say to struggle against the racism of others. We were called to play a certain role, which was to improve other people. This was a kind of mission civilisatrice. It was taken for granted that our values were improving values, and in our defence, I think that these values – democracy, equality, freedom – were good values. The question was whether we were the right people to defend them, whether the United States, through its behaviour in the world, displayed any belief in those values. We didn’t ask. We knew Americans were better.

There was no clash between American exceptionalism and Jewish moral superiority. We did not look too closely at these assumptions, and neither did we wonder what might be lost when we abandoned our oppositional stance. For so long, the Jews’ insistence on clinging to their uniqueness made other people uncomfortable. It was a position that African-Americans never lost because they were never allowed to. America let the Jews lose it. We were happy to oblige, including because we had forgotten what made us unique in the first place.

American exceptionalism, Jewish moral superiority: maybe that was what made that building, when I saw it again many years later, look like an ambassador from another galaxy. It would have been hard for me to imagine, when I was a 13-year-old watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on CNN, how completely those beliefs would crumble. Oh, how sincerely, how naturally we believed. And oh, how touching and dumb it seems to me now that we believed it, that we – our class, our nation – were a powerful force for good! Oh, how we believed – when I write this, I am translating from wedges of Akkadian cuneiform – that all of history had tended, inexorably, toward us!

To have the mask torn off, slowly, year by year; to realise the cruelty and the vacuity of the old order: it was a maddening experience. It is cruel to have one’s belief in progress taken away: the belief in our own superiority, the belief in our own philanthropic approach to the rest of the world, the belief that one’s own ideas were the best ideas. People younger than I am, who have no recollection of that time of belief in our moral excellence, cannot know the confused outrage that came when it was stripped away. The nihilism, the desire of younger people to demolish the old order: I understood it.

At the same time, did we not know that America was a great empire? Did we not understand that what kept the roof over its head was the tremendous violence it wielded against anyone who opposed it? Imperial powers can weather even the most crushing military defeats. They can be diminished. They almost always revive eventually, but in those defeats, in that imperial retreat: what happens to the minorities who tie their fates too closely to those empires?

History was full of admonishing stories. So many minority groups had waxed fat when the going was good, only to become scapegoats when the ruling class came under stress; and the marriage of American exceptionalism to Jewish moral superiority had hardly lasted two generations. This might have been a caution. But history was over, we had won, and the lesson that minorities ought to keep a respectful distance from the forces of imperialism was forgotten. Another lesson, which seemed too obvious to be a lesson, was that minorities of all kinds ought to stick together. This convivencia might have lasted forever, flourishing in the imperial shade. But the American Jews, at least our institutional leadership, the people who presided over institutions like Emanu El, somewhere stopped behaving with the prudence of a minority. And then, as it always does, the stress arose.

One motive for the attacks of 11 September 2001 – which stamped an indelible expiration date on the assumptions with which my generation grew up – was to cause a hysterical overreaction. Osama bin Laden had the insight that only America truly had the power to undermine and destroy America. The attacks on the Israeli state on 7 October 2023 seemed to depart from a similar principle. Those who planned them surely knew that the occupying state was constitutionally incapable of moderation, that it would shed any pretence to diplomacy, and that it would unleash a vengeance that would horrify the world. So it did.

As a grotesque bonus, this atrocity stripped the pretence of liberalism, of tolerance, to which the American Jewish leadership had, for generations, paid such pious lip service. In fact, this group had identified only with power. It was not the power of a leader, a party or a faction. It was an alliance with all parties, all leaders, which is to say that it was an alliance with the very power of America itself.

It was ironic that they had done this under the cover of powerlessness: of fighting antisemitism, whose impact in our country they wildly and self-pityingly overstated; of supporting ‘peace in the Middle East’ in a way that sounded ‘decent’ to distracted Americans. But under the pressure of the 7 October attacks, any pretence of American Jewish liberalism among these institutions vanished. Their protests against racism were revealed to be so shamelessly self-serving that the very word “antisemitism” was stripped of any meaning.

They bullied students, defenestrated politicians, cowed newspapers, wrecked universities. They supported and funded a reign of terror over a helpless civilian population in Palestine that seemed like something out of some other century: like something – now that you mention it – that happened to the Jews. When I wonder how this happened, I remember that roof, floating atop the sanctuary; I remember finding no law there, no learning, no language, no Lord; and I realise that I underestimated what I did find there.

A separate identity. A sense of superiority. These could be found in almost any group. Yet both identity and superiority were whispered, not shouted, and because of that whispering, I ignored them. I did not reflect that identity and superiority are two ingredients needed for patriotism to ferment into nationalism. A third, a sense of victimisation, of defensiveness, was furnished by the Holocaust. Added to a belief in American supremacy that was so universal it hardly needed to be spoken, certain spirits were being prepared for radicalisation.

As any gas will expand to fill the space allotted it, I saw the gas of Zionism expand over my lifetime, to take over the void left by the absence of law, or texts, or traditions. For many of these people, not even the most sacred belief with which I was raised – the duty to support universal human rights, to oppose racism and genocide – turned out to be sincere. The duty to remember the Holocaust meant, instead, an insistence that other people kowtow to a fantasy of moral excellence.

The swagger of the American Zionists – their conviction that they were so fully part of the imperial power structure that nothing could stop them, and above all the unspeakable criminal enterprise to which they lent their names and fortunes – was only possible for people who believed their luck would never run out. They flaunted their power; they boasted of it, even in the face of research that showed how repulsive their cause had become to most Americans, including to a large number of American Jews.

The Zionists mocked the values of Jewish people who identified with the socialist left or, more commonly, with the liberal coalition that emerged out of the New Deal and the Second World War. These were people who believed – perhaps more fervently than any other American ethnic group – in the founding ideas of liberalism. They hated any form of racism, which they saw as directly threatening to them, and which many of them saw in the Israeli state. For many Jewish families, Israel was an uncomfortable topic. If they ‘supported’ it generally, this was often because they feared antisemitism, feared what could happen to the Jews there, and thought Israel’s inequalities could be reformed, as they had been in our own country.

Yet for many of us, the transformation of once-respectable organisations into enforcers of absolute fealty to an openly criminal foreign state was a betrayal. These people treated the Jews like a conquered territory. While whining endlessly about their vulnerability, they jettisoned the modest comportment, the salutary caution, that all minorities know instinctively are means of self-protection. It was one thing to assert belonging. It was another to assert domination. The Zionists were deluded into thinking that because the majority had found a temporary use for them, they could behave as arrogantly, as brutally, as they liked.

They could rubbish the liberal values that made America the greatest haven the Jews had ever known: far more than Israel, which, for 80 years, had been the most dangerous place in the world for Jews. They could rampage through our universities, wreck our judiciary, dismantle our First Amendment. Rather than expressing solidarity with minorities, they could encourage the state to throw them into cages. They could spit in the face of public opinion; insist on ever-more-degrading concessions from those they affect to own; make up lists of people they want to deport.

They could ignore the lesson learnt over the centuries, that America always, eventually, betrays its small clients: its friendly democrats as well as its wicked dictators. They can believe there will be no consequences for the Jews in America for consorting with antisemites and racists. The leadership at places like Emanu El were not swaggerers. Many harboured private concerns. But all across the Jewish world, we saw leaders who – fearfully, pathetically – refused to speak against the genocide. They could have. They would have lost some people; they would have gained some people. By their cowardice, by their refusal, they made their institutions complicit in Israel’s butchery. Never in history has so much of the Jewish leadership been stained with this much guilt – a guilt that can never be washed out.

The destruction of Gaza is the worst event of my lifetime. The genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia did not have the enthusiastic support of the US. They were not cheered by American Jewish leaders, who were happy to sacrifice our civil liberties, our free press, our judiciary, our foreign relations, to sustain the killing.

If Auschwitz, in the twentieth century, was a crime of a new kind, so too, in the twenty-first, is the destruction of Gaza. New because viewed live; new because, while many countries opposed Nazism, no Western governments opposed Israel. Both political parties in the US supported the rampage, and so did almost every Western country: the countries that had supposedly learnt the lesson of Auschwitz, the countries that had pledged that “never again” would something similar happen. New because, during the Holocaust, most of the world’s citizens could claim they had no idea what was happening to the Jews, but nobody could claim ignorance of what was happening to the Palestinians.

We watched it every single day, reel after reel, photograph after photograph. And we saw how practically the entire American Jewish establishment, their silence and approbation, revealed a moral collapse, a near-universal collusion and corruption, from which the Jewish world will never recover – and will not deserve to recover.

The establishment can resort to bullying and slander; they can call the cops on their own children, but their cause, the cause of Zionism, is dead, and the decent part of the Jewish people will shun the houses of ill repute over which this establishment presides.

Zionism once had intellectually respectable defenders. It no longer does. Simply because people respect something does not make it respectable; and the fact that people can be found to defend something does not, for that reason, make it defensible. You can see it in their justifications of mass starvation; in their self-pitying whinging; in the grammar, even, of their online posts.

On the other side are people who go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning feeling pain and horror. These are the humanitarians and activists; the people whose hatred of antisemitism is part of a commitment to fighting all forms of exclusion. They are the cosmopolitan people – and they are the younger generations, people who have seen with their own eyes the crimes of the so-called Jewish state, and who feel the sacrilege, the impious desecration, of the values they thought were Jewish. These people will never return to these institutions. They will not send their children to them. They will attempt to build others, as so many are doing now. But they will never have the numbers to build the proud, imperial synagogues that seemed natural to me in childhood. Most, over time, will drift away.

People who call themselves Jews will continue to exist. But the word, once a source of pride, has been irreparably stained. With the hot air of moral superiority sucked out from underneath its eaves, the roof has started to wobble; the roof has started to leak. And why, after what has been done to Palestine, does this matter? What is all of Jewish culture worth in the face of a burning child? How utterly our leaders have forfeited our people’s claim to sympathy; how scandalously they have traduced our martyrs.

It is perhaps time to say we have talked enough about ourselves. The Palestinians “are only recognised because of the Jews,” Mahmoud Darwish said. “Do you know why we, Palestinians, are well known? Because you are our enemies.” And really: we ought to be talking about Mohammed Bhar, a man with Down’s Syndrome who could not eat or drink or change his clothes without his mother’s help – and who was attacked by the dogs of Israeli soldiers and left to bleed to death. We ought to be talking about Shaban al-Dalou, a nineteen-year-old burnt to death in a hospital tent, his arm attached to an IV. We ought to talk about Hind Rajab, the six-year-old girl who was fleeing Gaza City with her family, who were killed in their car, all around her, leaving her trapped inside: about how the terrified child used a phone to beg for help before being murdered herself, about how, after her death, her body was left to rot for almost two weeks.

We should be talking about the dynamited cancer hospitals, the razed universities, the slaughtered journalists, the use of mass starvation, the human shields, the torture and rape and killing of detainees. We should start talking now about a list of crimes so long and so perverse that – as in the years following the Nazi Holocaust – humanity will require decades to tally them.

We should be talking – because we will be talking for the rest of our lives – about the parents we have seen holding the severed heads of their own children. We should be asking, now, whether we care about the Palestinians. If we don’t, why should anyone care about us?