In choosing the title “Jews and Power” for its second annual New York Festival of Ideas, the Jewish cultural organization Nextbook extended its tradition of provocative juxtapositions. The theme of last year’s festival was “Jesus in Jewish Culture,” historically an extremely touchy subject. But in today’s world, “Jews and Power” may be an even more explosive combination. The Vatican has renounced the old accusation of deicide, and it would take some looking to find a mainstream Christian who hates the Jews because they crucified Jesus. (Mel Gibson is the only name that springs to mind.) But in the era of Walt and Mearsheimer, suspicion of Jewish power — one of the deadliest tropes of 19th-century anti-Semitism — is becoming more, not less, respectable in intellectual and academic circles. So long as a good portion of the left, especially in Europe, can believe that American foreign policy is run by a “cabal” of “neoconservatives” under the sinister influence of Leo Strauss, who use their power to promote Israel’s interests at the expense of America’s, “Jews and Power” will remain a problematic conjunction.

The festival, held last Sunday at the Times Center, drew some 550 people to hear writers and scholars discuss topics ranging from the Israel lobby to sexual imagery in Holocaust films. The event’s title was borrowed from the book “Jews and Power” by Ruth Wisse, published last year as part of Nextbook’s “Jewish Encounters” series. (Full disclosure: I am writing a book for the same series.) In the day’s closing event, Ms. Wisse, a professor of Yiddish at Harvard, explained her book’s thesis in an interview with the journalist Bret Stephens. The persistent Jewish anxiety about power, Ms. Wisse held, is a product of the Jews’ strangely depoliticized history.

After the Babylonian and Roman conquests of Judea, she explained, Jewish communal life was divorced from political sovereignty. As a result, the Jews came to understand politics not as a secular affair, a matter of states and armies, but as a religious one, in which mundane events are the expression of divine will. This was “liberating,” Ms. Wisse allowed, because it meant that no worldly defeat — no exile, expulsion, or persecution — could mean the final destruction of the Jewish people. No matter what happened on earth, the Jews’ real destiny was in the hands of God.

But in the modern age, this trust that God would guide history began to fail. Jews started to realize that statelessness meant defenselessness — that they had become what Ms. Wisse called “no-fail targets,” able to be attacked and despoiled with impunity. After the Holocaust, it became undeniable that the Jews had to “do it themselves,” to reclaim the political power they lost thousands of years before.

Despite the creation of the state of Israel, however, Ms. Wisse finds a persistent frailty in the Jewish understanding of power — especially, she implied, among American Jews. She found a telling example in the story of Szmul Zygielbojm, a Jewish member of Poland’s government in exile during World War II, who committed suicide in 1942 as a protest against the world’s failure to stop the Holocaust. Ms. Wisse remembered hearing about Zygielbojm’s death at the time and being angered to the point of “hate”: What the Jews needed, she concluded, was not exemplary martyrs, but a willingness to live and fight. “The goal of my writing,” she said, is to teach the Jews “to be tougher.”

Ms. Wisse’s strong, even belligerent language offered an instructive contrast with the discussion earlier that morning of “Culture, Taste, and Power.” This panel, focusing on the benign subject of Jewish cultural achievement, was the least challenging of the day. In fact, Stephen Greenblatt, a professor at Harvard who is one of America’s leading literary scholars, and Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra, devoted most of their attention, not to our own time and place, but to the situation of Jews in Germany during the Weimar and Nazi periods.

This is a rich and disturbing subject, as Mr. Greenblatt proved when he showed clips from the rarely seen Nazi propaganda film “Jud Süss.” The 1940 movie, one of the most notorious documents of Nazi anti-Semitism, is so vicious in its depiction of Jews that it was shown to SS recruits as part of their training. Its director, Veit Harlan, was the only film director to be prosecuted at Nuremberg. Yet as Mr. Greenblatt pointed out, “Jud Süss” was based on a novel by a Jewish writer, Lion Feuchtwanger, who used the true story of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, an 18th-century banker, to diagnose the historical and psychological roots of anti-Semitism.

Mr. Botstein, too, dwelled on the nightmarish complexities of the German-Jewish predicament. Music, he said, was one of the ways talented German Jews hoped to achieve cultural status without sacrificing their Jewishness. The great example was Felix Mendelssohn, who, though raised a Christian, accepted his Jewish identity and refused to change his name, despite his father’s urging. Yet the very success of composers such as Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer exposed them to the hatred of Richard Wagner, who argued that Jews were essentially uncreative, since they had no organic connection to the German spirit. This paradox — that Jewish cultural power only underscored Jews’ alienness, and thus their essential powerlessness — came to a head in the 1930s, when the stars of the Weimar period became the Nazis’ “degenerate” artists.

This is a bitter history, yet by focusing on the German past rather than the American present, the panelists were actually offering a kind of a reassurance. For if there was one thing Mr. Greenblatt and Mr. Botstein agreed on, it was that American Jews are completely secure in their cultural status. As Nextbook’s program director, Matthew Brogan, pointed out in his opening remarks, the biggest defenders of the Western canon are “two men named Bloom”: Harold Bloom, the literary critic, and the late philosopher Allan Bloom.

Yet Mr. Brogan’s joke about the two Blooms set me thinking about another German Jew, one whose name did not come up during the discussion. In 1912, Moritz Goldstein wrote a fiercely controversial essay called “German-Jewish Parnassus,” in which he argued that the Jews had become the administrators of a German cultural heritage they did not share. For all their pre-eminence as critics, journalists, conductors, and so on, German Jews were actually resented by the people whose achievements they loved and celebrated. Goldstein’s essay was a wake-up call for the generation of Jewish intellectuals that included Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka, who grew more and more aware of the gulf dividing them from German culture.

I would agree with Mr. Greenblatt and Mr. Botstein that Goldstein’s diagnosis does not apply to American Jews. Thanks to American pluralism, and to our history as a nation of immigrants, there is no single, monolithic American culture from which Jews might be excluded as rootless aliens. The kind of anti-Semitism and cultural xenophobia that confronted the first generation of American Jewish writers, like Lionel Trilling and Saul Bellow, has long vanished. Indeed, Trilling and Bellow are themselves now considered glories of American literature.

Still, it was remarkable that no sooner had Sunday’s panelists asserted their complete at-home-ness in American culture than they began — jokingly but unmistakably — to qualify it. Mr. Greenblatt admitted that he feels “a slight frisson of anxiety when Jews approach, not the pinnacle of cultural power … but a very visibly political kind of power,” and that he takes a special kind of notice when names such as Henry Kissinger and Paul Wolfowitz appear in the news. Mr. Botstein, for his part, said that he was pleased when the Keating Five scandal broke, in 1989, because “here was a scandal with no Jews.” Perhaps there is trouble in Parnassus after all?

The nature of that trouble came into the open in the next panel I attended, “Israel, America, and Jewish Power.” “When did American Jews begin to feel powerful?” asked the moderator, Warren Bass of the Washington Post, but the ensuing discussion suggested that American Jews do not feel very confident in their power. On the contrary, it seems that as Jewish power and security objectively increase, Jewish anxiety grows apace. A veteran State Department adviser on the Middle East, Aaron David Miller, referred to this phenomenon as “the cosmic oy vey”: the Jewish inability to admit when things are going well. In particular, he argued that the American-Israeli relationship has never been stronger than in the Clinton and Bush years, and that it will only grow closer in the years to come. “The debate between Israel’s supporters and detractors is over,” he declared; “the U.S.-Israel relationship is in fact unbreakable.”

Why was it, then, that Paul Berman, the eminent writer and intellectual, remained so apprehensive about the future? As Mr. Berman pointed out, there may be a pro-Israel consensus among America’s political elites, but there is certainly not one among the intellectual and literary elites. On the contrary, “a considerable opinion wants to see the abolition of Israel.” Mr. Berman cited the notorious essay by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books calling for a “one-state solution” in the Middle East — that is, for the abolition of Israel as a Jewish state. Such an outcome, Mr. Berman pointed out, would certainly lead to either genocidal massacres of Israel’s Jews or to a massive refugee problem.

Here is the source of the anxiety that plagues any discussion of Jews and power. “The right of the Jewish people to exist,” Mr. Berman said, “has continually been challenged for 100 years,” and it is still being challenged: violently by Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, rhetorically by the anti-Zionist left. That American Jews feel distinctly threatened by this existential challenge to Israel was obvious from the passionate audience engagement at the Nextbook festival. For the implicit assumption of this panel, and of the conference as a whole, is that the destiny of the Jewish people in America and Israel is one.

But this means that Mr. Botstein was wrong to declare that Jews are “no longer a nation but American citizens of Jewish faith” — a locution that, intentionally or not, copied the old assimilationist formula about French or German citizens of the Mosaic or Israelite faith. The fundamental principle of American Zionism, from Louis Brandeis down to the present, is that being an American and being a Jew are not conflicting identities, that it is not necessary to sacrifice one to the other. On the contrary, as Mr. Berman argued on Sunday, what unites America and Israel is a dedication to “the liberal democratic idea” and to rationalism, as against the irrational, authoritarian culture of their enemies. So long as both countries remain true to their liberal values, the conjunction of Jews and power will not be a prospect to fear, but a reason to be proud.

akirsch@nysun.com