It’s coming from all sides now

At the risk of sounding alarmist, I think that it’s time to be clear about the increased risks of antisemitism that we all are facing now.

I know. I don’t want to read about it either, and I certainly don’t want to write about it. But it’s better to pay attention to threats than to be sandbagged by them.

We know that there is antisemitism on the left and the right. It’s been exacerbated on both sides by the war in Gaza. The idea that the massacre on October 7 could unleash Jew-hatred seems entirely illogical, but then logic has nothing to do with any of this. People around the world are enraged by what they see in Gaza. The fact that they’re not always seeing clearly, and that there are other situations around the world that should evoke similar rage — as Alexander Smukler pointed out in an interview I did with him last week, Russia is causing Ukrainians to die not only because of the missiles they drop on civilians, but because of the way they’ve knocked out the reactors that provide Ukrainian cities with heat and electricity. It’s maybe less dramatic to have a high-rise apartment building full of people who’ve purposely been frozen and starved to death but it seems worthy of note.

There is no public outrage over those deaths. Or over the deaths of the Iranians gunned down by their own government. (Yes, that’s different, because that’s all internal, but still.)

I was startled by a very well written, well researched, deeply felt story in the Atlantic a few weeks ago. It was by Adam Serwer, who is progressive, Black, and Jewish. He wrote with sympathy about the citizens who fought back against ICE. He established the credentials of everyone who overcame fear and self-doubt to help the immigrants. Everyone sounded impressive and virtuous. And then he wrote this:

“The next day, I drove around with another pair of commuters who went by ‘Judy’ and ‘Lime.’ Both told me they were anti-Zionist Jews who had been involved in pro-Palestinian and Black Lives Matter protests. Lime’s day job is with an abortion-rights organization, and Judy is a rabbi. ‘I did protective presence in the West Bank,’ Lime told me, referring to a form of protest in which activists try to deter settler violence by simply being present in Palestinian communities. ‘This is very similar.’”

Before you right-wingers get all self-righteous about the virtues of your side, look at what’s happening on the right. Candace Owens has one of the world’s most popular podcasts, and she is virulently antisemitic. So is Tucker Carlson, who is wildly popular. A December 29 story in the Times of Israel by Leon Kraiem, headlined “Study shows 2025 spike in anti-Israel, antisemitic rhetoric from Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens” includes this paragraph:

“[Owens] has also claimed that Jews were behind the transatlantic slave trade, and that ‘they believe they have a right to own us.’ She has called Israel an ‘occult nation,’ pointing as evidence to the Star of David on its flag (a ‘cultic…hexagram’), and has suggested Israel was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.”

That’s just the very tip of an Everest-size iceberg. Last week, we ran a JTA story about a Catholic influencer, Carrie Jean Boller, an overtly Zionist-loathing on-and-off member of the White House Religious Liberty Commission, tweeting “I would rather die than bend the knee to Israel.” (“I’m with her,” the Republican former member of Congress from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, tweeted in support.”)

This column is far too short, and the material is far too distasteful, to include any more of it.

But we are facing a new threat, and we should be aware of it. Jeffrey Epstein. Although most of the media I read — and that’s probably true for most of our readers — is too polite to say so, apparently the right-wing fever swamps are boiling with antisemitic glee. Epstein was Jewish. Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, the thoroughly corrupt Holocaust survivor and newspaper baron Robert Maxwell, also was Jewish. Many — far from all, far from most it seems, but many — of the men whose names have been released from the files are Jewish.

This has the potential to explode.

“Latest Epstein files release unleashes wave of antisemitic conspiracy theories on social media,” JTA’s Grace Gilson wrote. To understate, it is sobering reading.

I keep thinking about the mounds of snow that are melting now, finally, after three weeks on the street. They’re filthy; when they melt, they’ll leave filth behind. That feels like a graphic example of what we’re facing. Mounds of putrid pretend tolerance are melting, and now there’s a gross mess on the sidewalk.

Luckily, we Jews are resilient. We’ll clean it up. We always have. But wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t have to?

—JP

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