It was inevitable that the growing American passions for bigotry, scapegoating, conspiracy, delusion, and blood libels would revert to their original form: antisemitism. When I interviewed Lonnie Natasir, the then-Midwest Director of the Anti-Defamation League in 2017, he said that “antisemitism is the bellwether of society.”
“Where there is antisemitism,” he continued, “you can be sure there is going to be racism, homophobia, and all the rest […] We cannot begin to normalize or tolerate any of this behavior. If we do, our society is in trouble.”
Natasir’s warning was urgent nine years ago when white supremacist crackpots chanted the ancient hatred for Jews at the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Now, it is quaint. The relationship between antisemitism and our society has moved far beyond quiet tolerance, which was insidious enough, to outright celebration. Not far removed from an era of exquisite sensitivity over racial stereotypes, prejudicial tropes, and implicit bias, the most animated elements of mainstream discourse feature full-throated raving about a global conspiracy of sexual trafficking at the hands of “Zionist donors,” “AIPAC-funded politicians,” the “Epstein Class,” and often in its most abbreviated iteration, mere “Zionists.”
As the obligatory disclaimer goes, criticism of Israel and its government is fair game, including its violent response to the October 7, 2023. Many of the leading critics of the Israeli government are, in fact, Israeli. But we are now way beyond ordinary political debate. Consider for a moment that it has become common in New York for protestors to gather outside of synagogues and Jewish organizations and businesses, chanting that Israel “kills children” at worshipers. It is the equivalent of someone angry with the policies of the African Union staging a demonstration outside a Black church in Chicago.
“Zionist” as an epithet, a sneaky smuggle-through-customs trick of saying “Jew” without saying “Jew,” mirrors the neo-Nazi nomenclature of the 1970s and ‘80s. Back then, violent supremacists hosted hate rallies and plotted terrorist attacks to fight “ZOG,” meaning “Zionist Occupied Government.” Now the progressive left is likeliest to utter “Zionist” or “Zionism” as a slur, not only denigrating the vast majority of Jews (90 percent of American Jews, for example, believe Israel has a right to exist), along with their allies, but also delineating a paranoid worldview that spans from the first documented pogrom of 38 CE in Alexandria to the mass shooting of Jews at a Hanukah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach in December. When anti-Zionists harass patrons of Israeli restaurants rather than, say, the Israeli consulate, it tells you what you need to know about today’s version of the Charlottesville crowd.
David Hirsh, the director and CEO of the London Center for the Study of Antisemitism, wrote in 2021 that “the people who are hostile to Zionism have given the word a meaning that reflects their own hostility.” Defined by its enemies, “Zionism” is the “enemy of all democratic values” and synonymous with “racism.” It is also a totalizing theory that seeks to explain misfortune or injustice. Zionists are responsible for everything from police brutality in the United States to global poverty. The functional definition emanates from hostility and also creates hostility.
The danger, of course, is escalating at home. A recent report indicates that, in 2025, physical assaults against American Jews reached their highest levels since 1979. Hate crimes include murders near the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., a Molotov cocktail attack at a rally for Israeli hostages in Colorado, and a stabbing of a Jewish man in New York. In March, an armed man driving a vehicle full of explosives deliberately crashed into Temple Israel, a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, attempting to murder congregants and others, including the children attending classes in the resident Jewish school.
In keeping with the dark surrealism, since antisemitism has been growing since October 7, there is a bizarre and pathological pattern in progressive media. More than the human rights violations of ICE, the assault on voting rights and election integrity, Donald Trump’s war on health care access, and state government hostility against transgender citizens, popular leftist commentators speak with the most frequency and excitement about Israel, AIPAC, and the omnipresence of Zionist influence. Jennifer Welch, Medhi Hasan, Drop Site, and The Majority Report with Sam Seder are obvious examples.
Still, like any purity movement, its adherents learn their dance steps from the most fashionable extremist in the room: Hasan Piker. It is regrettable to devote more words to Piker, the manosphere streamer from a wealthy family, who has said that he would “vote for Hamas over Israel one thousand times,” laughed at voters who showed sympathy for Israeli hostages, claimed that America “deserved 9/11,” and declares allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party while wearing expensive, gaudy jewelry and hawking merch on his website. For good measure, he disciplines his dog with a shock collar.
In addition to his podcast clout, the Piker effect reverberates throughout the mainstream. The New York Times has made him the subject of a fawning profile, signal-boosted him on its podcasts, and run an embarrassing Ezra Klein apologia for his long rap sheet against decency violations. No clever “six degrees of separation” mapping is required to assert the significance of Piker’s popularity. If you are praising a man who refers to Hamas as a “resistance group” comparable to American slave revolts, you are inches away from excusing Hamas yourself.
Antisemitism is also moving from the media into Democratic politics. Piker first campaigned with Zohran Mamdani, and he has more recently appeared with the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. In recent weeks, Mamdani vetoed a bill, over the objection of every Jewish organization in New York City, that would have required the NYPD to develop a plan to ensure the safety of Jewish schools against increasingly aggressive anti-Israel protestors. Despite releasing a brief, written condemnation, he’s also had a blasé response to a wave of antisemitic graffiti vandalism of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses in Queens.
Tensions in New York are escalating with Mayor Mamdani’s announcement that he would not participate in the city’s annual Israel Day Parade, making him the first mayor in 60 years who will not attend. During a recent press conference, he explained that while he vows to keep every New Yorker “safe,” he is merely keeping a campaign promise to boycott the parade. “I’ve made my views on the Israeli government clear,” he said. Given that the parade, according to its organizers, is a gathering to show support for the state of Israel, and that Mamdani has accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide,” his abstention is understandable. It is jarring, however, that the mayor of the city with the largest population of Jews outside of Israel, who has written rap songs in tribute to financiers of Hamas and refuses to condemn the phrase, “globalize the intifada,” has political beliefs that would make strange and contradictory his attendance at an anodyne event in favor of the world’s only Jewish state. (Jessica Tisch, the New York City police commissioner, who is the grand marshal of today’s parade, said at a press conference standing next to the mayor that she would proudly march in its ranks, adding that the mayor made his decision, and she hers.) It is noteworthy that Mamdani has not issued similar pledges to stay home during events celebrating countries with conflicts over land partitions and accusations of colonialism, such as Ireland and India. Mamdani led the Chinese New Year parade, but failed even to mention the heinous human rights record of the CCP.
Meanwhile, El-Sayed has claimed that Israel and Hamas are “equally evil,” while accepting donations from Al-Awda/PRRC. This group promotes absurd anti-Israel conspiracy theories and organizes rallies in favor of Hamas. Another disturbing story out of Michigan is the election to the University of Michigan Board of Regents of Amir Makled, an attorney who has promoted a Candace Owens statement referring to Jews as “demons,” and applauded both the Iranian regime and Hezbollah.
Applause for terrorist organizations that murder Jews is becoming oddly familiar. Recent revelations from his internet history indicate that the putative Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, Graham Platner, previously said that he was impressed by the military tactics of Hamas on October 7. “I dig it,” he wrote on Reddit at the time. Just as a matter of military history, the 10/7 pogrom, aimed primarily at civilians, did little to diminish the Israel Defense Forces but brought about the decimation of Hamas’s military abilities. Platner, of course, went through most of his adult life with a Nazi Totenkopf tattooed on his chest. Despite claiming he did not know the symbol’s history, which a former campaign staffer disputes, he has since sat for a lengthy interview with a neo-Nazi podcaster. Doing his best impersonation of Hulk Hogan in the 1980s, with a permanent scowl and a gravelly voice, Platner has a penchant for dropping references to the “Epstein Class,” “AIPAC,” the “powers that be” that “control everything.”
Moving to the opposite coast, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber recently had to apologize after including the antisemitic statements of a gubernatorial candidate in the official voter guide her office sent to residents. Among those statements is a warning that Israel intends to “suitcase nuke” the United States.
These examples join with others, from the mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, giving Piker a tour of the city, to Representative Ro Khanna advancing the deranged notion that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent, which adds up to a major problem for the Democratic Party. The effects of the same hallucinogenic drug appear at work in the hysteria over the allegedly almighty AIPAC. As a lobby, it does not even rank in the top 15 in any leading category of spending or influence. Yet, unlike the Chamber of Commerce, General Motors, and other lobbyist organizations that far outspend AIPAC and go unmentioned in mainstream discourse, it is the only PAC that Democratic candidates for office, including leading California gubernatorial candidates, will discuss. (We’ll get to the Republicans in a moment.)
For instructional case studies in the consequences of permitting paranoia and prejudice to insinuate itself into a left-of-center party’s ranks, Democrats can consider the United Kingdom and recall Jeremy Corbyn’s management of Labor’s defeat in 2019, largely because of widespread accusations of antisemitism, the worst in the party’s history since 1935. They can also look more closely at their political rival.
It is a dangerous mistake to romanticize the pre-Trump Republican Party. From Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens,” the modern GOP has been willing to use racism as a political recruitment tool. The devolution from presidential nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney to Donald Trump is horrific all the same. It was, in part, due to party insiders deluding themselves into believing that they could pander to bigots and control an amoral megalomaniac like Trump.
The mob’s mania does not compromise, nor does concession placate it. Rahm Emanuel, Gavin Newsom, and other presidential contenders, who have recently attempted to throw bones to the growing “anti-Zionist” constituency, will regret it if Platner and El-Sayed become prominent members of the Senate Democratic Caucus this time next year, and Piker continues his rise. There is an intelligent debate to have over military aid to Israel and the Netanyahu regime. But as the history of antisemitism—or any hatred—suggests, policy change does not satiate the haters.
It is easy to imagine a 2028 Democratic presidential primary in which the leading candidates vie for the nomination by courting the Israel-obsessed activist base. Voters worried about the cost of living, affordable health care, and civil rights might find it bizarre that national politicians fixate on a small country thousands of miles away.
Beyond the electoral consequences of obsessing about Israel, there is the moral hazard and literal danger of creating onramps for antisemitism. Demonstrating the horseshoe theory in action, the right wing is a font of antisemitism, as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens articulate insanities with brazen honesty. Owens blames Jews for the transatlantic slave trade while Carlson hosts fraudulent historians to discuss how Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the villain of the Second World War.
Of course, all the antisemitic fervor is spreading under the modern-day folk tale that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza after the October 7 attack. Many Free Palestine movement protestors first leveled the accusation on October 8, before Israel had responded. Mamdani patiently waited until … October 13. Again, there are ample reasons to condemn the Netanyahu government, including its violent prosecution of the war in Gaza, its encouragement of war in Iran, and its shameful refusal to police the racist, violent settlers in the West Bank.
“Genocide,” however, is a real word with a real meaning, mainly the deliberate attempt to remove a racial, ethnic, religious, or national group from the face of the planet. It would not apply to a war with a relatively low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio, even under the circumstances of Hamas deeply insinuating itself into the civilian infrastructure. If Israel were intent on murdering every Palestinian, it certainly would not have administered over 1.1 million polio vaccines to Gazan children in 2024 and ’25. If Israel imposed genocidal policies on Gaza even before the war, as many anti-Israel critics claim, the population of the Gaza Strip would not have grown 450 percent since 1967. I don’t believe everyone who uses the genocide label against Israel is an antisemite; far from it, especially given the moonscape scenes from Gaza, but I believe they are wrong and start from wrong premises; still worse assumptions multiply, especially considering how easily they dovetail into the old-fashioned conspiracy theory of Jewish control of international events for malevolent purposes.
According to multiple polls, over 70 percent of Democrats believe the “genocide” myth. From that foundational lie, absurdities grow, most recently the allegation that Israelis train dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. This calumny is unfair to the Palestinians who have suffered real abuse in Israeli prisons and detention centers and they surely have. It recalls Jean-Paul Sartre’s instruction to “Never believe that antisemites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.”
I recently spoke to David Hirsh to ask him what warning he could offer Americans after watching antisemitism soar in the UK. He said, “They need to develop a lot of clarity about what antisemitism is […] and the main goal is to prevent those assumptions that one finds in extremist politics from gaining a foothold in the mainstream politics of democracy.”
If antisemitism is the “bellwether of society,” then we’re fast approaching disaster. Years ago, much of the Republican Party collapsed into a pile of bigotry and ignorance. It is not too late for Democrats to avoid the same fate.
