Antisemitism Explodes on the Right, Watchdogs Blame the Left (but the Left has problems too)

The Anti-Antisemitism industry is myopically focused on the Left -- while some on the Left are starting to sound like the Right.

This week, I published two long articles on antisemitism. In the Forward, I wrote an analysis of how Jewish Establishment organizations minimize antisemitism on the Right while exaggerating it on the Left. And in The UnPopulist, I wrote about how progressives can fight both the Right’s weaponization of antisemitism and the actual antisemitism that does arise on the Left.

I conceived of the two articles as a pair, and am combining them here into one, for my readers and subscribers. If you’re one of them, thank you for enabling this work to continue and please consider upgrading if you can.

An Institutional Failure

America’s antisemitism watchdogs are committing institutional malpractice.

While antisemitism explodes on the right, including throughout the Donald Trump administration and popular right-wing online spaces, anti-antisemitism organizations are disproportionally focusing on left-wing anti-Zionists and Muslim politicians, minimizing if not ignoring white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and Christian nationalists — many of whom are active in Republican political circles.

And now, with the release of the latest batch of Epstein files and the start of the Iran war, what was already an epidemic has become a plague. As the Forward’s Arno Rosenfeld has discussed at length, the incoherent rationales for the war have led many to the conclusion (mostly incorrect, in my view, though not without some basis) that America has been pushed into fighting Israel’s war — a view that slides quickly into antisemitic conspiracy theories on both the right and the left, as well as antisemitic ”revenge” attacks by Islamists, Muslims and other Arabs, like the attempted murders at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, last week.

Our communal institutions are failing us. Antisemitism can be found all across the political spectrum, yet as the ADL convenes its annual “Never is Now” conference today, its agenda and newsfeed are disproportionately focused on the left. Our community needs to engage in some serious soul-searching. And change course.

Almost two-thirds of young conservatives hold antisemitic views

It is shocking to learn how pervasive antisemitic views are among young conservatives, including many working for the government.

A November 2025 study by the conservative Manhattan Institute (not some left-wing organization) found that “nearly 4 in 10 in the current GOP (2024 Trump voters plus registered Republicans) believe the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe. Younger men are especially likely to hold this view (54% of men under 50 vs. 39% of women under 50).” (Interestingly, 77% of Hispanic GOP voters held this view, compared with 30% of white GOP voters.)

In another poll, 64% of young conservatives aged 18-34 agreed with at least one antisemitic statement in a survey. That is absolutely astonishing.

Here’s an even more chilling story. Also last November, Rod Dreher, the post-liberal, far-right conservative thinker, reported on a trip to Washington, D.C. (meeting with Viktor Orban and JD Vance, discussing “the survival of Christianity in Europe”), in his Substack newsletter. After meeting with a number of conservatives in the Trump administration, Dreher wrote:

The claim that I first floated in this space last week, quoting a DC insider who said that in his estimation, “between 30 and 40 percent” of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes — that’s true. Was confirmed multiple times by Zoomers who live in that world…. Even young Christians — especially trad Catholics, I learned — are neck-deep in antisemitism. They even use it as a litmus test of who can and can’t join their informal social groups.

Dreher speculated that a number of factors caused this phenomenon, including the losses of economic opportunity, trust in institutions and “common culture.” He continued:

The issue of antisemitism on the young right is much deeper than I had guessed… [A] lot of this is reaction to how Jewish organizations like the ADL have policed speech critical of Israel, and of anything to do with Jews, so heavily over the decades that they have caused intense resentment among the Gentile Zoomercons. One man told me that for as long as he has been in politics, any criticism of Israel got you tagged as an antisemite, and that was a potential career-killer. So his generation has come to hate that, and to cease caring about the opinions of Jews.

Again, Dreher is not hostile to the right; he is part of it. But what he sees within his own movement shocks him. And this was before the Iran war. Dreher concludes:

The Groyper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement, in that it really has infiltrated young conservative Washington networks to a significant degree…. Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it. This is evil.

I encourage you to read the whole post. I disagree with almost all of Dreher’s ideological positions, but his serious confrontation with this crisis is a model of honest reflection. I would also recommend reading the work of journalist John Ganz, who has written powerfully of the nihilistic, antisemitic Groyper phenomenon and its significance within the GOP.

To be sure, there is antisemitism on the left as well. But there is absolutely no analogue to the scope of right-wing antisemitism and its proximity to power. Here are a few specific examples.

• Kingsley Wilson has served as the Department of Defense press secretary since May 2025. Less than a year prior, she replied to an ADL post commemorating the lynching of Leo Frank that “Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl,” a noxious lie that circulates in the antisemitic underbelly of the internet — strong evidence that she spends a lot of time in such spaces. Last March, Rep. Ritchie Torres wrote to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth demanding Wilson’s firing, describing her social media posts as a “minefield of antisemitic rhetoric, white nationalist conspiracies, and pro-Kremlin propaganda.” Instead, Hegseth promoted her.

• Paul Ingrassia, currently acting general counsel of the General Services Administration, had been tapped to lead the Office of General Counsel until Politico exposed comments he made in a group chat, including “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.” On the social platform X (the post has since been deleted), Ingrassia called Fuentes “a real dissident of authoritarianism.”

• Other examples are the often-nameless staffers running the social media accounts of the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and other departments. As has now been well documented, these accounts routinely post images and slogans taken from neo-Nazi and white supremacist communities like “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage” posted by the Department of Justice, “We’ll Have Our Home Again” posted by DHS, variations of “Which Way Western Man?” (referring to a 1978 book claiming a conspiracy by “World Jewry” against the “Western Man”) and many posts (too many to be coincidence) exactly 14 words long, a probable reference to David Lane’s white supremacist “Fourteen Words” slogan. (The ADL has a database of such references online.) These are both dog whistles to the extreme right and evidence that these staffers are swimming in the ultranationalist swamp.

• And then there are the Young Republican group chats, which somehow keep turning up across the country filled with abject racism, sexism, homophobia and antisemitism. For example, a pile of Telegram chats among Young Republican leaders in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont (once again obtained by Politico) included, among hundreds of lines of abject racism, posts like “I was about to say you’re giving national [leaders] to [sic] much credit and expecting the Jew to be honest” and various jokes about gas chambers.

And that’s not even including Elon Musk, whatever his statements or hand gestures may mean.

To be clear, there are many Jewish voices on the right who have spoken out, including Laura Loomer and Ben Shapiro. So has Trump, who after all has many Jews in his family (even as he often traffics in antisemitic stereotypes about money). But they haven’t made the problem go away, and it’s not at all clear that they even represent the Republican majority anymore. What happens after Trump leaves the political stage?

Meanwhile, other Republican leaders have explicitly rejected calls to isolate or condemn the antisemites. Shapiro, for example, has called out Megyn Kelly for refusing to condemn Fuentes and Owens. And when conservative pundit Scott Jennings asked Vance, “Does the conservative movement need to warehouse anybody out there espousing antisemitism in any way?” he replied, “No it doesn’t, Scott.” While Vance did also say, “I think we need to reject all forms of ethnic hatred, whether it’s antisemitism, anti-Black hatred, anti-white hatred,” that is a toothless statement if he refuses to take any action against those who express it.

So, they remain in office. Carlson, meanwhile, remains welcome at leading conservative institutions like Turning Point USA and the Heritage Foundation, despite a long torrent of antisemitic rhetoric, most recently blaming Chabad Lubavitch for the Iran war, which would be merely ludicrous were it not also exceedingly dangerous. (For good measure, Carlson has recently platformed not only Holocaust deniers but 9/11 “Truthers” who say that Israel was behind the terrorist attacks.)

Antisemitism is intrinsic to right-wing nationalism and culture

This isn’t just a matter of a few bad apples. This is a massive, systemic trend. It is part of the rise of ethno-nationalism, Christian nationalism, National Conservatism and the triumph of Pat Buchanan-style America First politics. Despite the efforts of people like Loomer and Shapiro, and prominent Jewish NatCons like Yoram Hazony, it is impossible to somehow surgically remove antisemitism from that politics while leaving the anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, and racist strands in place — as Hazony appears to have recently found out. (“I’ve been pretty amazed by the depth of the slander of Jews as a people that there’s been online the last year and a half,” he said at this year’s NatCon conference. “I didn’t think it would happen on the right. I was mistaken.”)

Antisemitism is not incidental to the nationalistic worldview that is ascendent in the Republican Party; it is essential to it. As Ilya Somin recently wrote in The UnPopulist :

Nationalism doesn’t just historically correlate with bigotry — it consistently drives antisemitism and other racial and ethnic prejudices. Indeed, nationalism intensifies preexisting antisemitic impulses. To the degree that today’s conservatives decide to embrace — or even just make peace with — nationalism and dispense with the universalist liberal principles of the American Founding, they will find it difficult to impossible to stem the spread of antisemitism in their midst.

Antisemitism is also an integral part of the right-wing internet. The most popular podcaster of all, Joe Rogan, recently hosted conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll, a vicious antisemite who, according to reporting in this publication, “wrote last year that the U.S. was ‘controlled by an international criminal organization that grew out of the Jewish mob and now hides in modern Zionism behind cries of “antisemitism”‘; claimed Jews control the media; and said that Israel had manipulated the Holocaust for its own gain.” (He also platformed Jake Shields, an MMA fighter-turned-far-right commentator who had said the previous month when he was on the show that Jews control America.)

And Rogan is just the tip of the spear. Andrew Tate routinely spouts antisemitic rhetoric with no corollary anywhere on the left. Influencer Nick Shirley just posted supportively of an antisemitic video by fellow influencer Tyler Oliveira. Right-wing conspiratorial antisemitism is taken for granted in the looksmaxxing and incel worlds. The great replacement theory (“Jews will not replace us!”) is routinely embraced on right-wing news media channels. Unambiguous, full-throated right-wing antisemitism is just part of the vibe.

But the ADL has been too busy worrying about Zohran Mamdani’s wife’s political views.

Why is this happening?

Why, with an entire Jewish communal infrastructure dedicated to fighting antisemitism, are we failing to focus on the most troubling manifestations of the crisis? Why are our legacy organizations getting it so wrong?

There are several answers to those questions.

The first is obvious: Hard-line pro-Israel donors have distorted organizational priorities, directing resources and attention to what offends them personally, rather than what poses the greatest threat to Jewish safety. Their motivations may be sincere; clearly many organizational leaders are sincerely dismayed by anti-Zionism, and due to their own emotional connections to Israel and Zionism, they may sincerely experience it as antisemitism. But now, much of the Jewish establishment has concluded that harsh criticisms of Israel, and certainly anti-Zionist ones, are not wrongheaded political views but expressions of antisemitic bigotry. And that has warped organizational priorities and resource allocation decisions.

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Antisemitism has been confusing for 2,500 years

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Again, it’s not that antisemitism does not exist on the anti-Zionist left; it does, as we’ll explore in a moment. And of course, there is antisemitic violence perpetrated by anti-Zionists motivated by animus toward the State of Israel; we have seen that this week. But the overwhelming majority of that violence is committed by Islamists and terrorists, not campus protesters or obnoxious writers, artists and publishers. Yet the Jewish establishment continues to paint with a broad brush, lumping together activists with principled objections to Zionism (as they understand or misunderstand it) with murderers and bigots targeting Jews with violence. There is no left-wing equivalent of the world Dreher describes, or the candidacy of James Fishback in Florida, or the popularity of Joe Rogan. And, love him or hate him, Mayor Zohran Mamdani repeatedly, vociferously condemns antisemitism even as he holds views on Israel that are well to the left of many American Jews.

Second, obviously, many of the leading donors to Jewish establishment organizations are either Republicans themselves, or so strongly supportive of the Netanyahu government that they would prefer to trade the American Jewish birthright for the porridge of Greater Israel. Yes, they might concede, right-wing antisemitism is a problem, but plenty of Republicans are against it and the benefits of aligning with the Trump regime — for Israel, for their conservative moral values, or for their own pocketbooks — outweigh the costs.

Whether that is correct or not is impossible to say. But I would suggest, broadly speaking, that ethno-nationalism rarely turns out well for the Jews. The neocons and fiscal conservatives are not in charge anymore, and the MAGA movement’s nationalist-antisemitic monster cannot be contained once it is unleashed. I fear that today’s coddlers of the party’s antisemitic wing will, one day, look as misguided as those who minimized the threat of nationalists in the past.

It’s also clear that some Jewish leaders (mostly Boomers or Generation Xers) are often simply clueless about online culture. They seem not to even know the language. They may now know what a groyper is. But how about goyslop? Agartha? “Noticing”? 14:88? Have these donors ever been on Discord? Scrolled through TikTok? Watched Joe Rogan? Seen what happens to your YouTube feed when you watch a single video featuring conspiratorial content or a manosphere influencer?

Antisemitism is everywhere online, abetted by social media algorithms that are somehow immune to regulation. And if you don’t believe that matters, consider how Gamergate, Pepe the Frog, QAnon, and other online content moved into the mainstream and helped put Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Now imagine that happening with a figure who is closer to Fuentes or Fishback than Trump.

Of course, the ADL as an organization is aware of these phenomena; I’ve cited their own work several times in this article. But if you browse through the speakers at “Never is Now,” or peruse the ADL’s recent press releases, you will quickly see that the threat from the right is given far less prominence than the threat (real and perceived) from the left. The institutional knowledge is there, but the institutional priorities are disordered.

Worst of all, not only is the Antisemitism Industrial Complex failing to focus on the most dangerous forms of antisemitism, many of its efforts are making matters worse — including in the last few weeks.

First, by counting all anti-Zionist protests as antisemitic incidents, the ADL has destroyed its credibility as an objective monitor of antisemitism, making it much harder to track; we no longer have reliable data.

Second, by terrifying thousands, perhaps millions, of Jewish people — including many friends of mine — this emphasis on left-wing antisemitism obscures the more serious threats from white nationalists, Islamists, terrorists, and others who commit acts of violence.

And third, the Jewish establishment has imposed a hyperwoke regime of censorship in which statements in support of Palestinians, or in opposition to Israel, or in opposition to Israel’s role in the Iran war, are deemed to be bigotry that merits permanent cancellation. (I have experienced this myself as well.) As Dreher noted, this only makes matters worse, as both conservatives and progressives can see that political speech is being censored by Jewish elites with significant political power — which is exactly what their antisemitic conspiracy theories tell them.

Obviously, it is not the case that if the Jewish community were to do or say a certain thing, antisemitism would disappear. Bigotry never disappears. But the question is not a binary one of existence or non-existence, but one of scope, size and proximity to power. By way of analogy, racism will also probably never disappear, but when abject racism is espoused by government officials and leading cultural figures, that is measurably worse than when it is consigned to the margins. And that is precisely what has happened with antisemitism.

The anti-antisemitism world has become an echo chamber obsessed with left-wing anti-Zionism, while nationalist antisemitism is now widespread among young Republican activists and online influencers. I only hope our leaders change course before it is too late.

Rejecting Both Antisemitism and the Weaponization of Antisemitism

In light of all the above, it is understandable that progressives’ reflexive response to accusations of antisemitism is to dismiss them. But to do so would be a mistake. Antisemitism does exist on the left; ask any Jewish person active in progressive spaces. Moreover, the failure to condemn and root out real antisemitism strengthens nationalists, racists, and fascists: first by enabling them to defame and delegitimize progressive movements, and second by advancing their own nativist, antisemitic agenda. It is also a betrayal of progressive values.

What is needed is both a rejection of the Antisemitism Industrial Complex’s weaponization of antisemitism and of antisemitism itself.

This is easy enough in obvious cases—violence against innocent Jewish people, overtly antisemitic rhetoric, and so on. Last week’s attempted mass murder at a synagogue outside Detroit might have been politically motivated by the perpetrator’s own sense of personal loss—but targeting innocent Jewish people is still obviously antisemitic.

But often it’s not so easy. Is it antisemitic to protest a political (or semi-political) event at a synagogue? When do sharp, legitimate criticisms of Israel and Zionism cross the line into bigotry and bias?

Having written and worked on this subject for nearly 30 years, I intend to offer some provisional answers to these questions. I speak as a rabbi, journalist, American Jew, and longtime LGBTQ+ activist. I also still believe in what I call “pragmatic Zionism” based on the fact that two peoples occupy the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and that the most realistic, imperfect solution is two states for two peoples, equal rights for all Israeli citizens regardless of nationality, and a just peace recognizing the rights of all 16 million people in Israel/Palestine to self-determination, safety, and human dignity.

I also speak as someone witnessing profound mental health crisis within the American Jewish community. Nearly every American Jew I know, on every point along the ideological spectrum, is afraid, burned out, and deeply unsettled by the rise of antisemitism in America. Close friends of mine are afraid to “look Jewish” on the streets of New York City. I have personally faced antisemitic attacks since October 2023. None of this excuses the use of antisemitism to deflect criticism or attack others. But it is the emotional reality that underlies this conversation—and if you have Jewish friends, I promise you most are feeling it. We can do better.

When Anti-Zionism Becomes Antisemitic

AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Republican Party, and the Antisemitism Industrial Complex claim that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. They claim that to oppose Zionism is to say that, alone among all the nations in the world, only Jews should not have a state of their own. This, they say, is inherently antisemitic.

This is clearly false. Many anti-Zionists are non-bigoted—in fact, it’s their commitments to human dignity that underlie their anti-Zionism. Moreover, it is reasonable to evaluate Zionism by what it has wrought for Palestinians, not merely what it means in the abstract.

That said, it is worth understanding that most American Jews do indeed define “Zionism” as the movement for Jewish self-determination, not settler-colonialism or Jewish domination. They do not define it as requiring that Palestinian society be eradicated, hospitals in Gaza bombed, or settler thugs allowed to conduct pogroms in the West Bank. Of course, it is the official policy of the current Israeli government to do all of these. But to many American Jews that is the result of the Netanyahu regime, not “Zionism” itself. As such, many liberal Zionists and anti-Zionists are talking past one another.

One way forward has been proposed by the Nexus Project, an initiative which seeks to clarify when anti-Zionism crosses into antisemitism. I will address two of their conclusions here.

First, anti-Zionist rhetoric becomes antisemitic when it makes use of antisemitic motifs. Sometimes these are obvious, like these antisemitic caricatures at a pro-Palestine rally in Toronto this past weekend.

Source: B’nai Brith Canada

Other times, the motifs can be more subtle: for example, as the Nexus Project describes it, “characterizing Israel as being part of a sinister world conspiracy of Jewish control of the media, economy, government, or other financial, cultural, or societal institutions.”

Source: Murphy’s Law Substack

To take a recent example, observing that Benjamin Netanyahu and his American supporters have been pushing for war against Iran for decades is factually accurate. Claiming that America is merely his puppet, pushed into war by the “Israel Lobby” or a powerful Jewish conspiracy, is conspiratorial antisemitism.

Here is another example. Jeffrey Epstein well may have been working with the Mossad, though there are more signs he was working with Russia, and probably was working all sides. But this image (reposted by the Nexus Project) of Epstein and Netanyahu drinking the blood of dead children is antisemitic and draws directly from the Medieval blood libel.

Source: Nexus Project

This and other such images are no more neutral than racist caricatures; they exist in a lineage and have been used for centuries to attack Jews.

Here is a third example. When Trump invaded Venezuela, some on the left said Israel and Zionists were behind it, despite no non-circumstantial evidence and ample evidence of other motives. This is antisemitic conspiracy-mongering.

In all these cases, the process for avoiding antisemitic rhetoric and imagery is the same as that for avoiding racist stereotypes: learning what the offensive themes and images are and their history—and checking oneself before reaching for a particular metaphor, image, or symbol.

If nothing else, all of these uses of antisemitic motifs harm Palestinians as well as Jews, because they validate the worst claims of the right. As WBAI radio host and podcaster Rafael Shimunov put it: “Progressives claiming Israel’s behind Trump crimes in Venezuela seem to have little understanding of Western imperialism, are hitching a ride with the far right, and are handing right-wing Zionists clear examples of actual antisemitism that will be used against Palestinians.”

Targeting Jews

A second set of elements within the Nexus definition of antisemitism deals with the targeting of individual Jews. The definition defines as antisemitic:

holding individuals or institutions, because they are Jewish … culpable of real or imagined wrongdoing committed by Israel; us[ing] symbols and images that present all Jews as collectively guilty for the actions of the State of Israel; attack[ing] and/or physically harm[ing] a Jew because of her/his relationship to Israel; and convey[ing] intense hostility toward Jews who are connected to Israel in a way that intentionally or irresponsibly … provokes antisemitic violence.

Put another way: any time Jews are targeted as Jews, that is antisemitic. Individual Jews cannot be blamed for the actions of the state of Israel, even if the government of Israel asserts that it is acting on behalf of them. It is antisemitic to terrify, intimidate, or threaten Jewish people (who may or may not support the actions of the Israeli state), to vandalize their homes, or spit on them on college campuses. It is antisemitic to use the Jewish star as a symbol for Israel—the entire Israeli flag must be represented. It is antisemitic to unleash violence against Jews as revenge for the hideous acts of violence committed by Israel.

There are many “easy” cases of such targeting: a “Bring Them Home Now” vigil in Boulder firebombed because it was perceived to be pro-Israel (though in Israel, that slogan is used by anti-government protesters); multiple synagogue shootings in Toronto; the blockade of Jewish students in the Cooper Union library in New York, with protesters banging on doors.

But there are more subtle cases, too: Jews presumed to be Zionists and being driven out of arts organizations, or being required to not only disavow Zionism but dutifully raise their hands to acknowledge the genocide—a requirement not imposed on members of other groups (such as Christians who may be Christian Zionists, for example).

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Your Jewish Friends are Not Okay Right Now

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And then there are the harder cases. For example, synagogues often host real estate fairs for congregants considering retiring or buying second homes in Israel. These fairs often, but not always, include settlements across the Green Line, areas that all but Israeli hardliners believe would legitimately belong in a future Palestinian state. Lately they have become a favorite target of protest: Are they political events meriting protest, or is protesting outside synagogues always antisemitic?

Perhaps the answer really depends on what is meant by “protest.” At a recent protest outside a synagogue in Queens, antisemitic slurs were shouted and attendees were verbally and physically harassed. The protest also included pro-Hamas shouts (the real kind, not the imagined right-wing variety). Was this protest really a targeted action against the real estate fair at the Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills, or was it, as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) suggested, an act of intimidation against the entire local community? Is there no meaningful distinction between opposing the sale of apartments in Efrat and chanting “we support Hamas”?

Source

That STFU in the above post, by the way, comes not from some troll but Mohammed El-Kurd, one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2021 and Palestine editor of The Nation.

For the record, January’s protest in Queens was met by a vicious, racist, Islamophobic, genocidal counter-protest by far-right Jews, which received far less media coverage. And while the anti-Zionists may have frightened some Jewish people in Queens, far-right Israeli Jews are committing horrifying acts of violence against Palestinians throughout the West Bank. Arguably, that should be de-normalized but when I am personally afraid to wear a kippa while walking down the street in Brooklyn—just as I’m afraid to hold my husband’s hand when we vacation in Florida—perhaps progressives should check themselves. Do we not see who we resemble, with whom we are “hitching a ride”? Do we really think that targeting Jewish people and Jewish institutions with ugly iconography, even when their actions are problematic, is the way to advance justice and liberation?

Jews are not even the right constituency to target. First, Christian Zionists and Christian nationalists are more numerous, more influential, and more extreme than are Jewish Zionists. Second, most Jews opposed Israel’s war in Gaza: according to a Washington Post poll conducted last October, 61% of American Jews said Israel has committed war crimes and about 4 in 10 said the country is guilty of genocide against the Palestinians. Yet we have been shunned by the coalitions of which we were once a part, thanks to the maximalist stance against Zionism as such, rather than against the subset of Zionists who support Israeli war crimes, the majority of whom are Christian. Even if it were appropriate to target Jews and Jewish institutions—which it is not—it is simply inaccurate to assume that all Jews are Zionists or that all Zionists support the war crimes in Gaza, the Occupation, or the Netanyahu regime. And it is unconscionable to tolerate the overt, unambiguous antisemitism present at many pro-Palestine actions.

I even wonder if the relentless targeting of Jews as Jews might call for a reexamination of some of the ambiguous rhetoric used in pro-Palestine circles. Clearly, for example, the phrase “Globalize the Intifada” can be interpreted to mean both “globalize the nonviolent struggle for Palestinian liberation” and “enact violence against Jews.” Might the actual targeting of Jews counsel more hesitation? I’m not saying the phrase is intentional dog whistling, like the right’s anti-immigrant and anti-trans rhetoric that has inspired stochastic terrorism against immigrants. I’m saying it is irresponsible—and disclaiming that responsibility is a form of disregard for the lives of Jewish people who are harmed by those acting on the “wrong” interpretation of ambiguous words.

A Dark Mirror

In my view, the destruction of Gaza ought to provoke rage in any human being who witnesses it. Anger is not only justified, but I would argue a necessary part of any moral response. Yet the same rage that motivates the moral conscience can also harm others if not wielded with care. Progressives know this about anger: how it energizes and how it destroys.

When we choose the strongest rhetoric, the most confrontational acts of protest, the most concentrated expressions of rage, and when the target of that hate is a vulnerable population already under attack from the right, this is not a wise use of anger. On the contrary, it betrays progressive commitments to protect the persecuted and the powerless.

For hundreds of years, antisemitism has been the handmaiden of ethnonationalism. And as ethnonationalism rises in a MAGAfied Republican Party and elsewhere in the world, Jews are once again being accused of engaging in global conspiracy, ritual murder, corrupting racial purity, and manipulating finance and the media. And when progressives start sounding like the Right, they are only helping the Right.

Progressive Jews, including Zionist ones, have long been part of coalitions working for social justice, from protesting ICE and marching with Black Lives Matter to a previous generation’s support for civil rights and LGBTQ equality. Most of us care deeply about the plight of Palestinians, and are outraged both by the Netanyahu government’s actions and the right’s weaponization of antisemitism to vilify the left. But we are trying to tell our allies something about the hostility, hatred, and condemnation we are experiencing. I hope that they can hear us.

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