October 7 approaches. Many Israelis will be lighting memorial candles on the anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel. The occasion will also be marked by anti-Zionist demonstrations all across the West. It’s been a year of rockets and drones, rhizomic tunnels, assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank, slaughter in Gaza and now Lebanon. A zeeser jahr—happy Jewish new year? I think not.
Meanwhile in Washington, the House of Representatives has passed a bipartisan bill that adds anti-Semitism to the categories covered by federal anti-discrimination law. The bill urges educational institutions to define that term in a way that could restrict the rhetoric of protesters if it calls for Israel’s destruction, and students who create an environment that seems hostile to Jews could be suspended or expelled. Because this bill contravenes the tradition of free speech on campus, some civil libertarians oppose it, and it is languishing in the Senate, where Democrats hold a majority. But the coming election may raise the chances that it will become law. In a sense, the bill codifies policies that already exist on many campuses. The difference is that it officially applies that standard to Jews.
In an era when speech that slanders oppressed groups is widely penalized, why shouldn’t the same rules apply for Jews?
The answer from some activists has been that Jews today are not oppressed. Some claim there is no real danger—one progressive friend of mine calls it “Jewish paranoia.”—while others insist that the data documenting anti-Semitism are cooked. Yet, statistics compiled by police departments are persuasive evidence that there has been a surge of hate crimes against Jews in the wake of October 7. New York City, which has America’s largest Jewish community, saw a 225 percent rise in such incidents during January of 2024, compared to the same month of the previous year. The offenses range from vandalism and harassment to assaults. My own contention is that the war in Gaza is not the underlying cause of this spike. It is merely the trigger.
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But the existence of a Jewish state, not to mention its current behavior, greatly complicates this issue, and there is much disagreement about what anti-Semitism is. Yet, most people, Jewish and otherwise, agree that the protests have sometimes veered into bigotry. It ought to be possible to distinguish between these tendencies, since Zionism is a political ideology, while the Jews are a people. But opposition to Israel can be a proxy for attitudes that existed long before the foundation of that state. Under the right circumstances, ancient anti-Jewish tropes can burst forth from dormancy, and at some hotbeds of campus activism, they have. A report issued by Columbia University gingerly acknowledges a “slippage” between the terms Zionist and Jew that has “sometimes felt deliberate.” How to tell when anti-Zionism masks the face of hate?
Sometimes it’s easy. A columnist for a Belgian newspaper writes that the slaughter in Gaza makes him want to “ram a sharp knife through the throat of every Jew I meet.” Here, a primitive European tradition of murderousness presents itself as justifiable homicide. But the same sentiment exists in America, as on a sign held by one protester that read, “Rape, torture, and MURDER [sic] is Justified when you do it to JEWS.” Such bluntly vicious messages are more likely to be found in alt-right podcasts and Neo-Nazi marches. The line between criticism and calumny vanishes when Candace Owens, a former Trump associate, calls Josef Mengele’s medical experiments on prisoners in Auschwitz “bizarre propaganda.” The language of the protesters is rarely as overt, but it can be so ambiguous that the target seems to be both Israel and the Jews.
A phalanx of protesters occupies a New York City subway car. One of them challenges the other passengers: “Raise your hand if you are a Zionist. This is your chance to get out.” No one responds, from fear or maybe from the famous New York indifference to rudeness. “OK,” the leader proclaims. “No Zionists here, we’re good.” This incident, recorded on a passenger’s phone, is an example of how terms that claim to mean one thing can signify another. If I had been on that subway car, I would have heard the demand that Zionists identify themselves as an echo of laws dating back to the Middle Ages that obliged Jews to reveal themselves, usually by wearing special clothing. The yellow star that the Nazis forced Jews to wear is the most recent example of this isolating strategy. The traumas of Jewish history are a shadow that falls over the present, and it can make the protesters’ words seem like a threat to every Jewish person on the train—that’s what it would have felt like to me. Yet the epithet that they chose was the Z-word, not an explicitly anti-Semitic slur.
This echo of the past is one reason why it can be difficult to tell anti-Zionism from bigotry. Opposition to Israel is a legitimate political position—even for some Jewish people—but sometimes the tactics of protesters have crossed over into the classic sign of anti-Semitism: collective responsibility. Demonstrators who invaded a Hunter College classroom instructed all Jewish students not to speak. Students in London, on the hunt for Zios, ripped mezuzahs from dormitory doors. At Columbia, a Jewish student who had put up a mezuzah was subjected to constant pounding on her door. Protesters in Woodstock surrounded a busload of children heading for a Jewish school and threatened to add their names to a “Zionist watchlist.” These incidents raise a difficult, but necessary question: Where is the line between critical speech and hate speech, and how should progressives react when it is crossed?
At the University of Wisconsin, pro-Palestinian groups declared that they would no longer “normalize genocidal extremists walking around our campus.” Though this demand was aimed at organizations that have connections with Israel, it effectively warned all students to affirm their opposition to Zionism or be driven from the university. This is not free speech, but a diktat of what speech is permissible. Like the incident in the subway car, it attempts to segregate people according to beliefs they may not avow. Why does that have a special meaning to Jews? Because there have been many occasions in the past when they were forced to hide their affinities in order to live in peace or just to survive. Jews who feel unsafe in the current climate on campus may not be familiar with their history, but they are bound to feel its vibrations. This reverberation made the incident at U.W. feel like an ultimatum. The university suspended the offending groups, but such actions have been tolerated on other campuses. At UCLA, Jewish students were singled out and blocked from crossing parts of the campus that were near a protest encampment. After several students sued the university, a judge ruled that permitting the blockade was illegal.
If there is anything we have learned from studying bigotry, it’s that code words matter. But because the long arc of anti-Semitism isn’t taught in most public schools, a well-educated person can be ignorant of these attitudes, or even believe that they no longer exist. Take the message on one placard in a demo that passed under my window. Next to a large Star of David, a protester had written, “Zionists lie, cheat, steal, and kill.” Replace the Z-word with the word Jews, and his statement is a slur. But it’s entirely possible that the writer of this poster never meant to insult all Jewish people. Whatever his intention, his language echoed sentiments that have labeled—and libeled—Jews for centuries. The Holocaust may have repressed anti-Semitic epithets in polite society, but a term like Zio, applied willy-nilly to Jews, is an updated euphemism. There’s an old riddle that unpacks this phony politesse. “What’s a Hebe?” The answer: “The Hebrew gentleman who’s just left the room
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One of the most enduring myths about the Hebrew gentleman is that he is part of a cabal out to control the world. This may be the oldest conspiracy theory in the West, and it’s central to the image of the Jew as an icon of greed and evil power. It takes a dwarf star of the corporate cosmos like Elon Musk to imagine that George Soros, the liberal financier, is an incarnation of Magneto, the Jewish supervillain of Marvel Comics fame who seeks vengeance against the gentile world. Such is life in the tweet zone, where divas of the far right imagine that a Jewish “ring” works its sinister magic in Hollywood (quoting Candace Owens), or that missiles fired from Israel started the California wildfires (re Marjorie Taylor Greene), or that Jews run the White House (according to the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes). Slurs like those have exponentially inflated the audience for bigoted fanatics, and Taylor Greene was reelected to Congress. But who could imagine that bizarre fantasies about Jews would emerge on the militant edges of the left?
Nicolás Maduro, the socialist president of Venezuela, blames a “coup led by Zionists” for his troubles, echoing the Nazi vision of a plot by Jewish bankers to ruin Germany. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a leader of the French left, has accused several Jewish politicians of speaking the language of global finance rather than French. A variation on this theme was sounded by protesters in Montreal who shouted at a group of Canadian Jews, “You have no home.” Activists in Berkeley disrupted the City Council, which had met to issue a proclamation acknowledging the Holocaust, with accusations that the Council was controlled by “Zionist money.” Why would the legendary Elders of Zion care about a local government in California? The question is pointless; what matters is the myth of an international Jewish plot.
It’s easy to draw the wrong conclusion from fringe groups, and the supporters of Hamas may not represent the Palestinian Movement as a whole. Several surveys of students have found that animosity toward Israel does not usually correlate with anti-Semitic attitudes. A report from the City University of New York reached a similar conclusion (though it acknowledged that CUNY administrators hadn’t dealt effectively with complaints from Jews). But the movement includes many people who are not students, and in any case, actions speak louder than polls. Some protesters have trashed posters of the hostages—I saw a swastika scrawled across the face of an abducted child. One group invaded the office of a Jewish Congressman and ripped down his hostage posters, littering the hallway with them. Shots have been fired at Jewish schools, and a fire was set outside Baltimore’s Jewish Museum. In Montreal, a synagogue was firebombed. Lone wolves were probably responsible for these attacks, but the movement has yet to condemn them. Silence in the face of desecration is an invitation to go further, with predictable results.
Brooklyn may be the capitol of anti-Semitic violence in America. An Orthodox Jew is stabbed by someone shouting, “Free Palestine.” A Hasid standing in front of his building is punched by an assailant who snarls, “Good shabbas.” Meanwhile, brutality against Muslims has been extreme to the point of murder. The salient question is whether such acts and the hate speech that incites them are condemned. Progressives take Islamophobia seriously, as they should, but they are less likely to reckon with anti-Semitism. Some protesters can’t see what is before their eyes.
I’ve always regarded the left as a sentinel against prejudice, so I’m shocked to see indifference to this bigotry. But it’s part of an old, largely repressed tradition. In the 19th Century, some socialists tarred the Jews as mercenary agents of capitalism. Though this canard no longer seems legitimate, it can still color assumptions, even in academic circles. At Columbia University, three deans were fired after they exchanged disparaging texts about complaints from the campus chapter of the Jewish organization Hillel. “This comes from such a place of privilege,” one dean wrote, while another noted that the director of Hillel “knows exactly how to take full advantage of this moment.” His colleague replied, “Huge fundraising potential.” Erudition is no barrier to the belief that money is a singular motivation for Jews. This stereotype persists across the political spectrum, as does the notion of a conspiratorial Jewish sect. All Jews are in league with George Soros.
Some anti-Zionists maintain that the sexual violence on October 7 never happened, or that, as colonizers, the Israeli victims were responsible for their own murders. This faction is part of the “global intifada” front, which regards the Palestinian struggle as part of a worldwide war against the imperial West. The radical group Unity of Fields (a/k/a Palestine Action US) sees “true divestment” as “nothing short of the collapse of the university structure and American empire itself.” There were similar convictions in the anti-war movement of the 1960s among those who shouted “two, three, many Vietnams,” and that vanguard still exists. But the protests represent a much broader spectrum, ranging from young people who want Israel to be replaced by a multi-religious state, to (mostly older) folks who support the two-state solution. There are Jewish activists on every side of this issue. What else is new?
Yet, most American Jews—some 85 percent, according to one poll—side with Israel in the current conflict. How is it possible to distinguish between this consensus and the conviction that all Jewish people are guilty of collusion with Israeli policies? It is possible, but not always easy, especially for those who believe that anti-Semitism isn’t a serious problem. In this contention, Jews are privileged because they are white—or, to use a more precise term, white-adjacent. The binary of privilege and oppression is rational in a way that far-right ravings are not, but it can lead to a tolerance of bigotry. To deny the gravity of anti-Semitism because it isn’t “systemic” may not show a bias, but it does reveal a failure to understand the operations of stigma and the role that Jews play in them.
Stigma is a system of arranging human differences into a hierarchy. Its purpose is to enforce the social order. Racism is its primary agent in America, but sexism is also a fundamental force, and other biases haunt many groups. Stigma is not a pyramid; it is more like an octopus, and its tentacles reach nearly all of us. Jews who are woke to their history are acutely aware that this ranking is arbitrary. After all, the same Jewish person can be white in some places and eras, but not in others. Jews have often resided on the border of whatever concepts of identity a society devises. They are among the oldest possessors of what the sociologist Erving Goffman called “a soiled identity.” And this role makes it easy to project all sorts of anxieties onto them. The rage at Israel can be a response to its behavior or a retreat to the primitive recesses of the Western mind. For some, it is both.
But the re-emergence of these attitudes isn’t just directed at Jews. Bigotry has made a comeback as a theme of radical entertainment. The churning media environment is an ideal setting for outrageous statements, and the internet has replaced the gatekeepers of cultural discourse with a scrum of entertaining extremists (a/k/a “edgelords.”) Anti-Semitism provides a transgressive thrill to their audience, much as rock ’n’ roll once did. But unlike the rebellious culture of the past, this aggro is directed at stigmatized groups: women, Asians, transpeople, and, inevitably, blacks. In the name of truth-telling, all these biases have spread beyond the domain of tweeting Hitlers, and anti-Semitism isn’t exempt. When I hear the comic Dave Chapelle mock the pronunciation of Rosh Hashanah before an audience of millions on Saturday Night Live, or Joe Rogan remark on his popular podcast that Jews really do love money, I conclude that these quips are more than subversive banter. They are harbingers of a back-to-the-future culture of hate.
I wasn’t surprised when Kanye West insisted that he can’t be an anti-Semite because “I just fucked a Jewish bitch.” That is the detritus of a deranged mind. What shocked me was the audience at a concert in Buffalo merrily rapping along with him. I wasn’t surprised when Roger Waters, the co-founder of Pink Floyd, sent a giant pig balloon adorned with a Star of David sailing over an arena in Germany. Waters has long been accused of anti-Semitism, so the sight of him shooting at the balloon in a Nazi-like uniform was more of the same. The stunner was his contention that the Jewish Star merely represented Israel. It is also a symbol of Jewish identity, and to see it scrawled on a pig is deeply offensive, just as it would be to Muslims if the pig were festooned with a Star and Crescent. Fortunately for Waters, rabbis don’t issue fatwas.
When a statue of Anne Frank is defaced in Amsterdam, the target is the past itself, as if the slaughter in Gaza cancels the Holocaust. Once it becomes tolerable to scrawl swastikas on synagogues, the implication is that all Jews are agents of whatever Israel does. The same would be true for graffiti on a mosque that calls all Muslims terrorists. This denial of individualism is the essence of bigotry. And in the end, it confines nearly everyone to a slot in the order. Conflicts among minorities fighting over scraps of status invigorate this system. Toward what end remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: what happens to Jews does not occur in isolation. That’s why progressives must take the current surge in anti-Semitism seriously. August Bebel, a leader of the German left in the late 19th Century, was right to call it “the socialism of fools.”
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But indifference to anti-Jewish rhetoric isn’t just a moral lapse; it’s also a strategic error. It allows Trump to cast himself as the protector of the Jews, even though he tolerates and sometimes praises hardcore anti-Semites. It splits the alliance between liberals and radicals that made the antiwar protests of the ‘60s so effective. It creates a pretext for conservatives to attack universities. And it exposes a contradiction in the protest movement. If rage at Israel is distinct from contempt for Jews, why do those two emotions cross over? For all those reasons, it’s urgent for the left to separate solidarity with the Palestinian people from the socialism of fools. I don’t have a conclusive formula for doing that, since the very definition of anti-Semitism is subject to argument. But I do have a suggestion: Listen.
Listen to those who feel aggrieved. Most people who object to words that threaten their identity have good reasons, even when their complaints seem excessive to outsiders. But, because the deeper meaning of these words can lurk beneath the conscious mind, it must be explained by those who are offended. To cry anti-Semitism without saying why is to invite the charge of hiding behind a trope. This obligation to clarify is especially important when addressing a generation that has a cinematic view of the Holocaust and a Seinfeldian image of Jewish success. Young people need to understand the imprint of history and its relationship to the outrage and anxiety many Jews feel today. Being aware of this context, and of the sensitivities that arise from it, does not mean Israel can’t be censured, or that the Zionism can’t be denounced. On the contrary, creating a vocabulary free of bigotry is a way for protesters to assure that their passion for justice is not a proxy for hate.
The Palestinian Movement has grown into a global crusade. But what kind of movement will it be: one driven by radical humanism or by sectarian violence? One that celebrates the atrocities of October 7, or one that seeks coexistence rather than conquest? One that is drawn to the charismatic allure of authoritarian men, or one that embraces the tradition of bread and roses for everyone? This has long been a question, especially for radicals, and there is no permanent answer. But now, with the fate of millions at stake, it is a fateful choice.