Whichever it was, we were wrong. As oft described by Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, antisemitism is an ancient and living conspiracy theory that adapts to new situations, a hatred looking for and finding any excuse: “The antisemite begins convinced that Jews have engaged in a conspiracy and seeks to determine the precise nature of that conspiracy. If something happens in society that I oppose for some reason, the Jews must be behind it.” Meanwhile, “many people, organizations and institutions, including those who valiantly fight other prejudices with all their hearts and might, fail to see antisemitism as a serious danger.”
Deeply Rooted Tropes Persist
We think of blood libel as a medieval concept unimaginable in America. But in 2013, a Palestinian nongovernmental organization led by longtime PLO spokesperson Hanan Ashrawi published an article in Arabic by Nawaf al-Zaru that resurrected this attack on then President Barack Obama’s White House Passover celebration: “Does Obama know the relationship between ‘Passover’ and ‘Christian blood’?! Or ‘Passover’ and ‘Jewish blood rituals’?! Much of the historical stories and tales about Jewish blood rituals in Europe are based on real rituals and are not false as they claim; the Jews used the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover.”
In the mid-1300s, Jews were murdered as the alleged cause of the Black Death. The plague has changed, but the accusations have not. Turkish officials said that Jews and Zionists engineered COVID-19 as a biological weapon. Flyers blaming Jews for COVID-19 were distributed from California to Florida. Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke posted, “Does President Donald Trump have coronavirus? Are Israel and the Global Zionist elite up to their old tricks?”
Jews are accused of plotting world domination and control, from the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and Henry Ford’s “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem” to the Hamas Charter. It’s a fanciful charge against a people who comprise 2 percent of the U.S. population and 0.2 percent of the world population.
Less than 24 hours after the July 2024 Trump assassination attempt, the Jews were blamed. Some of the outlandish charges against Jews include claims of “Jewish space lasers.”
The ADL Global 100 surveyed 11 antisemitic attitudes and beliefs, quantifying the quarter of the globe’s population who hold six or more of them. With our founding tradition of religious freedom, only about 10 percent of Americans held that wide pattern of antisemitic beliefs in 2015; alarmingly, that percentage grew to 24 percent in 2024, equal to 50 million Americans. Episodes have grown geometrically from 942 in 2015 to 2,026 in 2020 to 3,698 in 2022 to 8,873 in 2023.
Antisemitism and Zionism
The rise in reported antisemitism from 2016 to 2022 is consistent with the general rise in hateful rhetoric; at the same time, conspiracy theories burgeoning on social media provided fertile territory for antisemitic tropes. The Unite the Right marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, had long thought the Jews were replacing them, but by this rally in 2017, it had become acceptable to chant that loudly in unison, tiki torches in hand.
The 140 percent increase in antisemitic incidents in America in the past year is fueled by the Israel-Hamas conflict in two ways: in attacks on American Jewry because of their religious attachment to Israel and in the application of antisemitic tropes against the Jewish nation.
By every widely accepted working definition, criticism of Israel like that against any other nation is often not antisemitism. But those definitions also agree that calling for Israel’s elimination and advocating for a homeland for Palestinians while simultaneously opposing that same right of the Jewish people is almost always antisemitic. The distinction is clear and compelling: criticism of the Israeli government or policy is not antisemitism; the effort to delegitimize and destroy Israel is classic antisemitism.
A recent Pew Research Center study noted that caring about a Jewish homeland in Israel is “essential” or “important” to “what being Jewish means” to 82 percent of American Jews; this is reflected in the centrality of the “return to Zion” in Jewish religious liturgy for millennia. But American Jews who express that religious belief are often ostracized or precluded from participating in campus, civic, or organizational activities or locations.
Jewish students attending a Mideast lecture on the University of California Berkeley campus were surrounded by a mob of protesters who broke windows and forced doors to raid the meeting; campus police intervened and escorted the attendees underground to another campus location. Moreover, putting the lie to the notion that “anti-Zionism” is not intrinsically tied to antisemitism, Jews today are often compelled to jettison outward indicators of their Jewishness to avoid confrontation or attack, and Jews have been shot while walking to synagogue. Jewish establishments, such as synagogues and kosher restaurants, are regularly vandalized, and synagogues have long required extreme security measures for places of worship.
Streets, bridges, schools, and public buildings hosted demonstrators carrying or wearing Hamas flags, shouting Hamas slogans, and marking Hamas symbols on the homes of Jewish leaders in the community. At Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, protesters spray-painted a statue “Hamas is coming.”
There is no organization on earth more antisemitic than Hamas; its charter quotes extensively from the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” concluding with a call to kill every Jew everywhere, behind every rock and tree. On October 7, 2023, that fatal mantra became a reality for 1,200 Jews. Not since the Third Reich has there been such a call for worldwide annihilation of the Jews.
Marching in Hamas garb is fully the equivalent of marching in a white robe and hood, tagging victims’ residences with spray paint instead of a burning cross. As Pew reported, 53 percent of Jews surveyed say that, as a Jewish person in the United States, they feel less safe today than they did five years ago. But, most chilling of all, our colleagues in the civil rights community do not recognize or rise against this call for antisemitic violence.
While Israel’s war with Hamas and Hezbollah law has fueled waves of antisemitism in America, antisemitic conspiracy theories long leveled against individual Jewish communities are being aimed at Israel. Though Israel constitutes less than 1 percent of the land and less than 2 percent of the population of the Middle East, it is accused of dominating and controlling the region and even the world.
Second, just as Jews have for centuries been delegitimized, banned from professions and land ownership, and exiled from communities and nations throughout the world, Israel is being delegitimized by the conspiracy theory that it is a “settler colonial” enterprise, notwithstanding the millennia-old historic Jewish connection to and presence in the land. Jews' very presence is portrayed as a provocation to “resist,” to which they have no legitimate right to self-defense. This outrageous premise is used to justify the October 7 massacre of sleeping families and fleeing concertgoers as “legitimate resistance” instead of a savage pogrom.
I’m not surprised that antisemites accuse Jews of being colonialist strangers to Israel, but I am shocked by the silence of the world’s 2.4 billion Christians. Jesus, his followers, and his community were all Jews, walking the hills from Jerusalem to Galilee 1,000 years after King David ruled and 600 years before Islam was born. The conspiracy theory that Jews have no history or cultural roots in Israel, denying Jews their history and culture, is an act of antisemitism and a narrative that only more recently became popularized.
What Do We Do Now?
Deeply ingrained in 2,000 years of Western and Near Eastern civilization, antisemitism will never disappear. So, what is our strategy to fight it? My mentor, the late Earl Raab of Brandeis University’s Perlmutter Institute, noted that antisemitic attitudes generally do not transmute into action without three other factors: (1) political and social instability, which makes antisemitism useful, (2) political leaders willing to use it, (3) a mass population willing to accept it.
The first two factors have been satisfied. Political leaders on all ends of the spectrum have magnified and used the COVID pandemic and resulting shutdown, as well as years of persistent trauma to our political institutions, to trigger and exacerbate instability. No branch of government nor the fourth estate of journalism has the support and confidence needed for a safe democracy. Conspiracy theories abound and spread consistently. We are spinning in political and social instability.
Second, antisemitism is being mobilized into political force. A Maryland School Board is being sued for acting on complaints of antisemitism against middle school teachers. Campus protests nationwide have turned into violence and intimidation against students who wear Star of David necklaces. Demands to protect Jewish students are misbranded as attacks on the First Amendment.
The Democratic Socialists of America rescinded its endorsement of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a strident Palestinian advocate, because she had the temerity to participate in a public conversation on antisemitism with Jewish community leaders. Condemning blatantly antisemitic speech and conduct has become a political liability, and failing to condemn it has become socially acceptable.
Given this environment, we must focus on the third element needed for antisemitism to thrive. To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, all that is needed for core antisemites and their opportunistic enablers to succeed is for good people to do nothing. Lawyers must become influencers in every sphere. We must facilitate measures to interrupt antisemitism and empower bystanders and allies to support victims.
If we heard cheers of pride and exhilaration about a Klan lynching, we would spring into action. We must do the same in response to pride and exhilaration at the murder and kidnapping of 1,500 Jews on October 7, 2023, or support for avowedly antisemitic groups like Hamas or Hezbollah. Or when we hear Jews demonized and excluded from the social justice table. Or when people deny that antisemitism or the Holocaust are real. Silence emboldens antisemites.
There are 1.3 million lawyers in America with the singular skill to present the case for truth and rebut lies. I used to think that arming people with facts and logic would be enough. But we suffer from misinformation gridlock. Holocaust survivors’ testimony to the lethal danger of antisemitism has and can continue to inform, educate, and empower small groups, but survivors are all but gone. However, Holocaust deniers can reach millions of people daily online.
I have wondered why we bother combating antisemitism at all. It is an intractable, invincible foe that thrives in any crevice. We seem to outgrow it, but it repeatedly rises with deadly force. Why fight it?
Because we bore witness to the life-altering effect it had on half of European Jewry who survived for five years running for their lives. Five years before that, they ignored the early signs of German antisemitism and indifference: angry marchers, broken glass and swastikas on Jewish-owned storefronts, anti-Jewish slogans and silent bystanders, found today in downtown San Francisco’s Market Street and on New York’s Broadway. Ignoring it is not the answer.
There’s no choice but to keep fighting, one community, one engagement at a time. This quest falls within Robert Browning’s observation, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp/or what’s a heaven for?” We might never succeed, but we must keep reaching for a future with neither antisemitism nor any other categorical hatred and discrimination.
