Fighting antisemitism has become politically incorrect.
The theme that Jews are causing antisemitism by standing up against it continues.
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This is a guest essay written by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Over the past few weeks, attacks by terrorist mobs on synagogues were met with condemnations of Jewish community members for defending their institutions.
And efforts to crack down on campus antisemitism were met with a united front in defense of the antisemites not only by the Left, but by the Jewish liberal establishment.
“I’m appreciative of President Biden’s historic initiative on antisemitism and thankful to President Trump’s strong condemnation of antisemitism and his promise to bring back consequences to antisemitic behavior,” said Abe Foxman, the former longtime head of the Anti-Defamation League, to a crowd at at an event commemorating the Holocaust. “But as a survivor, my antenna quivered when I see books being banned, when I see people being abducted in the streets, when I see the government trying to dictate what universities should teach and whom they should teach.”
The Holocaust inversion that had become so commonplace in anti-Israel arguments was now taking center stage at the Washington, D.C. Holocaust museum at an event commemorating the Holocaust. And the man responsible had spent decades running the organization that was supposed to fight antisemitism, only to equate President Donald Trump’s actions against Hamas supporters with the Holocaust.
Fighting antisemitism or “anti-antisemitism” had become one of the few remaining Jewish reasons for the existence of a liberal Jewish establishment. Now that’s gone.
The liberal Jewish groups that had at best offered toothless condemnations of over a year of riots by Hamas supporters, including several assaults on synagogues, one on a Holocaust museum screening an October 7th documentary, and the harassment of Jews on college campuses nationwide, showed that they were not inept after all. Instead, the same groups that had stood by before quickly organized themselves into a movement to aggressively rally for the Hamas supporters attacking American Jews.
The Jewish Council on Public Affairs run by Amy Spitalnick, a former employee for the anti-Israel lobbyist organization J Street, took the lead in standing up for Mahmoud Khalil and other campus terror supporters who had led campaigns to intimidate Jews on campus.
And, while it was little surprise to see anti-Israel groups like J Street, Alex Soros’ Bend the Arc, Randi Weingarten’s New York Jewish Agenda, If Not Now, and the Nexus Project rally for the Hamas supporters, much of the liberal Jewish establishment soon joined them in rejecting Jews and siding with Hamas.
The Jewish Council for Public Affairs followed up its lobbying for the right of foreign nationals to make college campuses off limits to Jews by bringing together the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist rabbinic movements to sign a letter denouncing the Trump Administration for protecting Jewish students and faculty. Signatories to the call for Trump to stop fighting antisemitism included the Union for Reform Judaism and its subsidiary groups, the Conservative’s Rabbinical Assembly, and various “rabbinical” groups from the atheistic “Reconstructionist” movement.
The rabbinical organizations of every denomination except Orthodox Judaism stood with antisemites in betraying the Jews. So did their elected officials.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Senator Jacky Rosen, Senator Adam Schiff of California, and Senator Brian Schatz (the latter a serial anti-Israel activist) signed a letter attacking the Trump Administration for holding colleges and Hamas supporters accountable, and complaining that “revoking visas” was being done “based solely on their expressed views and speech, which the administration has identified as antisemitic.”
“Stop disgracefully weaponizing antisemitism to attack universities,” tweeted Schumer. The highest-level elected Jewish official had just mainstreamed claims by anti-Israel activists that Jews were just “weaponizing antisemitism.”
Halie Soifer, the head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America and a former foreign policy advisor to Kamala Harris, sent out a Passover letter comparing Trump to Pharaoh for detaining and deporting campus Hamas supporters.
“We also remain committed to freeing Americans from the oppression emanating from this White House,” wrote Soifer. “Legal residents and others are being illegally detained and, in some cases, deported without due process. Much of this is happening in our name, ostensibly to ‘fight antisemitism.’”
Jarrod Bernstein (Barack Obama’s liaison to the Jewish community) and Ilan Goldenberg (an anti-Israel activist picked by Kamala Harris as her liaison) also joined in the campaign to shield antisemites.
Alex Pascal, the “architect” of Joe Biden’s useless antisemitism strategy, warned that Jews would suffer a blowback from the Trump Administration’s efforts to fight antisemitism. An interview with Politico suggested that cracking down on colleges would “backfire and fuel antisemitism.”
The theme that Jews were causing antisemitism by standing up against it continued: “When Israel feels a completely free hand, and frankly, the encouragement of its greatest benefactor, to pursue extreme policies, that is going to boomerang in a very bad way on American Jews here in the United States,” warned Biden’s antisemitism architect. “Unfair and unjustified as it is, Israel’s actions have incited attacks on Jews worldwide.”
The message from Biden’s antisemitism architect was that Jews, in America and Israel, needed to stop standing up for themselves or they would face even worse antisemitism.
The Anti-Defamation League remained nearly alone in initially supporting Trump’s moves, before it bowed to pressure and then came out against them: “We can protect the civil liberties of Jewish students even as we preserve the civil liberties of those who protest, harass, or attack them,” wrote CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, officially changing the organization’s mission from protecting Jews against antisemitism, to protecting Jews and those who “harass or attack them.”
The Anti-Defamation League “is incredibly sensitive to the importance of allowing all views to be expressed,” claimed an organization founded to stop negative depictions of Jews. The views the Anti-Defamation League is now incredibly sensitive to are those views supporting Hamas and calling for the murder of Jews.
“You cannot arrest people or eject people from the country because they are bigoted or racist,” the head of an organization formally dedicated to fighting antisemitism insisted.
The liberal Jewish establishment failed to do anything to protect American Jews after October 7th. Those failures were not due to incompetence or a lack of will, but a willful refusal to confront its political allies. After over a year of excuses and empty condemnations, it quickly swung into action once someone finally started doing something about antisemitism — to protect the liberal Jewish establishment’s allies.
And those allies, the ones attacking Jews and supporting Hamas, are their priority, not Jews.
Liberal Jewish establishment groups claim that they are eager to fight antisemitism, but they oppose the actions being taken by the Trump Administration, like holding universities accountable, forcing them to sign consent decrees, cutting their funding if they don’t, and pulling the visas of those foreign nationals responsible for supporting Hamas and harassing Jews on campus.
So, how do they support fighting antisemitism? The Biden antisemitism strategy, praised by the former Anti-Defamation League head (whose architect, Alex Pascal, now publicly blames Jews for antisemitism), amounted to a lot of pages calling for holding more meetings and spreading awareness of the problem. There was little in the way of enforcement and no meaningful tangible actions. The liberal groups claimed that there was nothing that could be done except more meetings.
This was very different from the way that the Biden Administration, civil rights groups, and Jewish organizations responded to claims of “systemic racism.” If there had been a sustained effort to harass Black students tolerated by campus administrators, consent decrees, defunding, and arrests would have been the least of it. Liberals don’t oppose these measures out of some concern for the “due process” of foreign nationals, but because they support the perpetrators.
U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953 to 1961) invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807 and deployed troops to desegregate a school. The same liberals who believed that this was a pivotal moment in civil rights act like the federal government pulling the visas of a handful of Hamas supporters and demanding that universities protect Jewish students from harassment is the second coming of the Third Reich1.
Liberal Jewish establishment critics of the Trump Administration’s actions claim that, instead of fighting antisemitism, Jews should focus their efforts on unity with other minority groups and on upholding the rights of Hamas supporters in the name of upholding democracy. This is accompanied by dire warnings from the Jewish Democratic Council of America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs that Jews could be next after all the campus Hamas supporters are deported.
Never mind that Jews are not “next.” We’ve already been first. Jews are being told to accept being terrorized to protect the “democratic values” of those who want to kill us.
Fighting antisemitism has become politically incorrect in a liberal establishment that refuses to see any antisemites on the Left, and offers nothing to American Jews, except the opportunity to act as human shields for our own destroyers.
The Nazi regime in Germany from 1933 to 1945
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I am horrified, nauseous and disgusted DISGUSTED!!!! with the attitudes of Jews in the US. They literally make me sick with their whinging, pathetic attempts to embrace evil and make it palatable. I challenge any one of them to spend a week in Israel where there are rockets and missiles EVERY SINGLE DAY- and to have experienced terrorism EVERY SINGLE DAY in various parts of Israel for 75 years. Perhaps they would have liked to send themselves or their surviving ancestors to the gas chambers if they had a " do over" choice. After all HItler, Hamas, and other groups are only expressing their "views" right?
All of their comments remind me of a joke: 2 Jews were facing a firing squad. The commander of the squad asks them if there is any last requests. One of the Jews asks if he could have a last cigarette. The other Jew turns and says: Shlomo, don’t make trouble for us!