In the past six months since the horrific events of Oct. 7, American Jewry has been forced to confront some harsh and painful truths.
After decades of unprecedented success and unparalleled influence, ranging from Hollywood on the West Coast to the halls of power on the Eastern seaboard, a certain overconfidence had settled in, with many Jews firmly convinced that America was immune to the vagaries of Diaspora Jewish history.
Sure, German Jews in the 20th century, Spanish Jews in the 15th century, and a host of others down through the ages had become comfortably and prominently ensconced in their respective societies, seemingly immune to ruin. Until they weren’t.
But America, many believed, was different. It simply could not, would not, happen here, especially since Jews have given so much to American society.
Yet now, what was once deemed unthinkable is no longer so.
The openness with which antisemitism is now expressed, and even tolerated, cannot be ignored, if only because there are daily reminders of it, whether on college campuses or during pro-Hamas protests in the streets of major cities.
And while the surge of Jew-hatred has been gaining increasing attention, there is one salient aspect of it that warrants an accounting.
Indeed, for the past few years, the Biden administration, the mainstream media, and even some Jewish organizations were peddling the assertion that the gravest danger to American Jews, and American society as a whole, came from the extreme Right.
But if recent events have taught us anything, that idea has proven to be a fallacy. While there is no doubt that American Jews must be on guard against neo-Nazis and other such purveyors of hate, the violence and vitriol of the woke and so-called progressive Left clearly pose a more potent, widespread and dangerous threat.
The crowds praising the intifada, the professors hailing the Hamas “resistance,” and the youth calling for Zionists to be killed are overwhelmingly card-carrying members of the American Left. And they far outnumber the right-wing extremists who hate Jews.
The Left is more antisemitic than the Right
FOR YEARS, many of us have been warning about the rising tide of anti-Zionism and antisemitism among the American Left, but it was politically expedient for Democrats and their supporters instead to focus on the Right.
And in doing so, they committed a grave mistake. Only it wasn’t a sin of omission, it was one of commission.
For example, on May 13, 2023, during a commencement address at Howard University in Washington, President Joe Biden declared white supremacy to be “the single most dangerous terrorist threat in our homeland,” adding that, “I say this wherever I go.”
A year prior to that, on May 1, 2022, Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, told the organization’s National Leadership Summit that it was “extremists from the white supremacists and alt-right ilk” who “continue to pose the greatest threat to the homeland in terms of violent domestic extremism.”
Those claims have not aged very well.
When Columbia University decided last week to cancel all in-person classes on campus and move them to Zoom, or when the University of Southern California called off its graduation ceremony, it was not out of fear of skinheads or would-be Aryans.
And when people have been filmed tearing down posters of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, they aren’t wearing armbands with swastikas.
The fact is that the loudest and most virulent voices of antisemitism are coming straight from the self-proclaimed progressives, who hurl the modern-day equivalent of medieval blood libels against Israel and harass and intimidate Jewish college students.
Consider for a moment the uproar that took place in August 2017, when a group of over 100 neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and various other loons marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
In recent months, we have witnessed the equivalent of dozens of Charlottesvilles, only this time the participants are from the extreme Left.
By any measure, this should serve as a wake-up call to liberal American Jews, who for far too long have cast their lot with the Democratic Party, even as it drifted into a swamp of woke extremism.
And it requires groups such as the ADL to admit that they misled the public for years by overlooking, or failing to see, the seeds of hate that were sprouting on the far Left.
There is a tectonic shift taking place in American society, and it clearly does not bode well for Jews. How to grapple with this phenomenon is something that will require a great deal of strategizing in the months and years to come.
But the first step is to acknowledge the stark reality staring us all in the face: that the antisemitic progressive Left, and not Donald Trump or the KKK, is what truly endangers American Jewry.
The writer served as deputy communications director under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.