As Israel’s devastating bombardment of Gaza grinds on, debates over antisemitism in America have grown louder. In recent days, Congress has taken university presidents to task for failing to protect Jewish students from harmful speech and declared anti-Zionism to be antisemitism. Meanwhile, protests against Israeli restaurants in Philadelphia and a teach-in on the “counteroffensive” of October 7 at Columbia’s School of Social Work have revived concerns about anti-Jewish animus within the movement for Palestinian liberation.
My own thoughts about antisemitism in America today, and the discourse around that subject, are numerous and varied. Rather than trying to meld them into a single thesis, I’ve decided to sketch out seven:
1. Antisemitism is a genuine social problem in the U.S. But the U.S. is nevertheless an exceptionally safe country for Jews.
In 2022, Jews were the most common victims of religion-related hate crimes in the U.S. with the FBI recording 1,122 different incidents of antisemitic crimes. And the Anti-Defamation League has recorded a significant uptick in antisemitic incidents since the October 7 attack and the onset of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
The acceptable number of antisemitic hate crimes is zero. But it also doesn’t improve the well-being of Jewish Americans to give them an exaggerated sense of their ethnic group’s vulnerability in the U.S. There are 7.3 million Jews in America. Only an infinitesimal fraction of American Jews suffer acts of prejudicial violence, vandalism, or harassment in a given year. And by virtually every other metric, our community is thriving. We enjoy an extraordinary amount of political, economic, and cultural power in the U.S. And the American public has broadly favorable views about Jewish people.
In a Pew poll released this year, Americans expressed a more favorable view of Jews than of any other religious group in the U.S.
Both of the nation’s major political parties, meanwhile, jockey to portray the other as insufficiently sensitive to Jewish welfare.
This is not to say that there are no antisemitic currents in Republican politics. The GOP’s demagogy about George Soros orchestrating migrant invasions of the U.S. in 2018 bore more than a little resemblance to the antisemitic conspiracy theories that led Robert Bowers to massacre Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue. And young, extremely online conservative apparatchiks have been caught playing footsie with neo-Nazis in recent years.
Nevertheless, for a party of reactionary nationalism, the Republicans are unusually Jew-friendly. This is partly attributable to Evangelical Christians’ investment in an end-times prophecy that requires the maintenance of a Jewish state in Israel. It likely also reflects the prevalence of anti-Arab racism on the American right since 9/11 and the accompanying sense that Jews constitute a vital ally in the civilizational struggle against “radical Islamic terrorism.”
Whatever its unsavory origins, however, the fact remains that a twisted strain of philosemitism is more prevalent on the mainstream right than overt antisemitism is. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, is if anything excessively sensitive to the interests of the Jewish community.
2. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.
On that last point, Congress recently passed a resolution asserting that anti-Zionism is tantamount to anti-Jewish bigotry. A majority of Democrats declined to vote for the measure, but only 13 Democrats voted against it (with the rest voting “present”). This is disappointing, since it plainly is not the case that all opposition to Zionism is rooted in antisemitism. After all, there are ultra-Orthodox Jews who favor the dismantling of Israel on the grounds that Jews are theologically forbidden from reestablishing sovereignty over the land of Israel until the Messiah arrives. There are socialists and libertarians who believe that human beings have an inherent right to move freely across national borders, an idea that is difficult to square with the maintenance of a majority Jewish state in the Middle East. And of course, there are Palestinians for whom the founding of the Jewish state ultimately meant expulsion and subjugation.
There are hateful strands of anti-Zionism. Calls for Jews to be ethnically cleansed are always antisemitic, even if they are phrased in the jargon of “decolonization.” But calling for the establishment of a binational, secular democracy “from the river to the sea” is not anti-Jewish. One can question the practicality of such anti-Zionism, 75 years after Israel’s founding. As I’ve written recently, it is extremely difficult to imagine a state as powerful as Israel ever forfeiting its most fundamental ideological commitment (i.e., the maintenance of a majority Jewish nation-state). But utopianism is not antisemitism.
3. Antisemitism is much more prevalent on the American right than on the American left.
There is a popular idea that antisemitism in the U.S. follows a “horseshoe” pattern, rising in prevalence as one moves toward the far-right or far-left end of the ideological spectrum while becoming marginal at the center. Prominent displays of anti-Israeli animus by ostensible radicals on campuses and social media have reinforced this impression. But as Matt Yglesias has noted, the empirical evidence suggests that these high-profile campus controversies are misleading.
In a 2022 study, the political scientists Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden sought to measure the prevalence of antisemitism at various points on America’s ideological spectrum. They designed a large-sample survey to gauge the popularity of anti-Jewish views among American ideologues of every stripe. And they oversampled young respondents, so as to test the hypothesis that antisemitism was especially prominent among young radicals.
They found that, in point of fact, antisemitism was highly concentrated among young adults on the far right but not among those on the far left. When presented with antisemitic statements about Jews, those on the left were much less likely than those on the right to agree. Left-wing respondents espoused comparable levels of antisemitism to moderate ones, although white liberals were even less antisemitic than white moderates.
A single survey experiment should not be taken as the final word on any subject. But the best quantitative research available indicates that young progressives have unusually negative views of Israel but not unusually negative views of Jewish people.
4. That said, some of the more doctrinaire variants of social-justice ideology are problematic from a Jewish point of view.
The tendency to divide groups up into neat “oppressor” and “oppressed” categories is not a terribly sophisticated way of understanding a great many social phenomena. But it’s an especially awkward framework for analyzing issues that concern a historically oppressed, widely hated minority group that, nonetheless, enjoys grossly disproportionate power and privilege in American society.
Further, some crude strands of anti-racist thinking suggest that if one social group is overrepresented among the wealthy and academically successful while another social group is underrepresented, then the former must necessarily be oppressing the latter in insidious ways. Applied universally, this logic would imply that America’s Jews oppress its “goyim.”
In practice, I don’t think many people in social-justice circles believe anything like that. But there is a more common tendency among social-justice activists to code all Jews as “white” and elide or ignore the challenges that antisemitism poses to crude “oppressor vs. oppressed” binaries.
5. Some strains of pro-Palestine activism in the U.S. betray anti-Jewish animus.
Apologists for the Israeli government routinely use spurious allegations of antisemitism to suppress dissent against Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians. It is also clearly true that many proponents of Palestinian liberation have bigoted views of Jews in general and Israeli Jews in particular. Since October 7, this has manifested most commonly in a callous indifference to the latter’s suffering. Apologias for, and denials of, the atrocities committed against Israeli Jewish civilians are disconcertingly prevalent among pro-Palestine activists. The organizers of one of Brooklyn’s largest demonstrations against Israel’s war named their protest after Hamas’s October 7 operation (the former was dubbed “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” the latter “Flood Brooklyn for Gaza”).
The Philly Palestine coalition has called for boycotts of restaurants and businesses that sell “Israeli food.” By this, they did not mean food products made in Israel but simply cuisine marketed as Israeli. The rationale for this position is that foods like hummus and falafel are in truth Palestinian and thus describing such food as Israeli constitutes cultural appropriation. But this is just ethnic chauvinism dressed up in progressive verbiage. The borders and national identities of the Levant are of far more recent vintage than many of its characteristic dishes. Many Israeli Jews descend from families that have resided in the Middle East for more than a millenium. The region’s traditional foods are as much theirs as they are anyone else’s. And an Israeli American — with no connection to the IDF or Israeli government — who merely wishes to serve the cuisine their mothers taught them to make are not apt targets for political protest.
6. The existence of antisemitism within the pro-Palestine movement tells us nothing about the merits of the Palestinian cause.
In truth, it would be bizarre if that movement were wholly devoid of anti-Israeli prejudice. Wars between nations invariably bring such retrograde impulses to the surface. Recall the frenzy of brain-dead anti-Russian American boycotts and protests that broke out in the U.S. within a month of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. For nearly a century, Palestinians have been suffering at the hands of an Israeli state whose words and deeds devalue their lives. Over the past two months, Israel has killed at least 17,000 Gazans, the vast majority of them civilians. The Israeli bombardment campaign has destroyed northern Gaza about as thoroughly as Allied bombing campaigns destroyed German cities during the World War II. Meanwhile, Jewish settlers continue to dispossess Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
None of this justifies bigoted denunciations of Israeli American cafés, let alone celebrations of atrocities committed against Israel’s Jews, Arabs, Bedouins, and Thai guest workers. But it goes a long way toward explaining the existence of anti-Jewish sentiments among some who identify with the Palestinian cause.
It is unfortunate that humans often respond to their victimization at the hands of a state by loathing the ethnic group associated with that state. But it is a phenomenon witnessed in every human community. No small number of Israel’s Mizrahi Jews, many of whom were expelled from their homes in Arab states in 1948, have responded to that trauma by embracing a worldview and politics that evinces contempt for Arab Palestinians.
The presence of antisemitism within the pro-Palestine movement therefore does not delegitimize opposition to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza or occupation of the West Bank, any more than boycotts of Russian tearooms discredited opposition to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, such antisemitism is morally wrong and politically self-defeating, and activists should strive to dissociate the Palestinian cause from it to the furthest possible extent.
7. Anti-Palestinian sentiment is a much bigger problem in America today than antisemitism.
Ultimately, America’s most powerful institutions recognize the value of Jewish life. The U.S. Congress has less tolerance for antisemitism than it does for most other varieties of bigotry. America’s political leaders more or less unanimously denounced the mass killing of Israeli civilians on October 7. And historically, they have taken even tendentious allegations of anti-Jewish discrimination seriously with many U.S. states criminalizing boycotts of Israel in the name of combating antisemitism.
By contrast, America’s elected officials are utterly insensitive to Palestinian suffering and subjugation. Even as Israel has consolidated apartheid rule in the West Bank, the U.S. has carried on supplying it with billions of dollars worth of weapons and advancing its diplomatic goals in the Middle East. Faced with the mass killing and immiseration of Palestinians in Gaza, most American officials have simply reiterated their support for Israel while (at best) making a pro forma statement about the importance of minimizing civilian casualties. House Republicans, meanwhile, introduced a bill that would bar all Palestinian refugees from the U.S. and expel any Palestinian currently in the country on a temporary visa. Titled the “Safeguarding Americans From Extremism (SAFE) Act,” the bill is explicitly premised on the idea that Palestinians are all presumptively terrorists and must therefore be kept far from our nation’s shores. It seems safe to say that any congressperson who introduced a bill targeting Israeli immigrants in this manner would be expelled from the House in short order.
Again, this does not mean that antisemitism is not a problem or not worth combating. But to the extent that bigotry is influencing American policy toward the Israel-Palestine conflict, it is not doing so at Israel’s expense.
