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After I stopped an attack on the subway, the victim and I bonded over Katz’s pastrami sandwiches

(New York Jewish Week) — You definitely don’t want to have what she was having at that moment.

It was December, on a Friday. I was in the tunnel that leads to the subway that runs beneath the American Museum of Natural History on West 81st St. Walking just ahead of me were two women, chatting with each other. I didn’t know them, but I watched as a man, disheveled and bearded, wearing a black knit cap with a sparkly “NYC” on it, came from the other direction. He veered a little too close to the taller of the two. Suddenly, he shifted and grabbed her from behind.

I often wondered what I would do in this situation. Standing only steps away, I no longer had to wonder. After a moment’s hesitation, I sprang into action, grabbing the man and pulling him off her. Then the woman, her friend and I hightailed it through the turnstiles. All in a New York minute.

The woman said she was OK, just worried her attacker would hurt other women. I called 911 but the operator could only speak in subway platforms, not quite grasping it occurred under the museum. How could a visitor be expected to explain the location? And why was there no attendant or police patrol in one of New York’s most visited neighborhoods? I happen to be getting a PhD in tourism studies at Purdue University, but it’s a no-brainer how bad that is for visitors and locals alike.

The 20th Precinct and Transit District 1 responding officers were polite but seemed focused on whether the attack was sexual. Later, the woman would tell me she sensed they thought nothing actually happened, despite a clear crime. “I don’t know,” she said, “one moment I’m walking in the subway and the next someone grabs me from behind. But I wind up OK, so there’s no problem?” 

They nabbed the guy, holding him against the tiled wall in the very place the attack occurred. One officer said something like, “He has no ID, no nothing. He’s babbling to himself and doesn’t seem to know where he is.” A sense of pity rose in all of us. The woman did not want to press charges. Even the police were sympathetic, expressing how helping the mentally ill is beyond their capacity. The consensus seemed to be that they would take him somewhere for mental help.

As we waited for the train — mine to Washington Heights, the women’s to Queens — we realized we all had just come from the New-York Historical Society’s “I’ll Have What She’s Having” exhibit on Jewish delis, named for the iconic Katz’s Delicatessen scene in the 1989 film “When Harry Met Sally.” We laughed about what struck us as an ironic way to spend a Friday Shabbat evening days before Hanukkah.

Still perhaps cautious of our surroundings, we shared thoughts about the exhibit. For instance, the surprising amount of Los Angeles material and the signage explaining terms someone Jewish or from New York might take for granted — like mohel or mikvah — and Yiddish words that have long entered the local vernacular, no matter your religion.

The woman who was attacked didn’t want to be identified here, saying “I don’t want people to Google me and this is the first thing they see” — something I understand, having myself been a crime victim in 2014. Later, she texted to say she arrived home safely, adding that, despite the attack, she was “grateful to live in New York, because you restore my faith that people are there for each other.” I don’t think of myself as a mensch or hero. I just did what had to be done. And, like I said, I had a moment’s hesitation.

The situation called for dinner plans. A Jewish deli, of course, considering the circumstances. And it had to be Katz’s.

I arrived at the deli, laden down with a few free Chabad menorahs I picked up along the way after coming from the Union Square Holiday Market. I almost rushed past her standing outside the restaurant, worried about being late. We encountered a chaotic, noisy scene inside, and I realized I had not been there since before the pandemic. A man behind us in the haphazard line, there for the first time, nervously wanted advice. Have what we’re having, I suggested: pastrami on rye with mustard. No cheese, a kosher nod in this place long without such restrictions.

If fate’s bad luck brought us together, serendipity now ruled. Our sandwich maker looked familiar, and I realized he appeared in a video at the deli exhibit. As Esteban pushed our sandwiches over the glass divider, the famous table from the fake orgasm scene in “When Harry Met Sally” suddenly emptied, a family bundling up to leave. I ran to grab it, even mid-sentence talking with Esteban about the exhibit.

Yes, it was touristy! But considering what we had encountered only days before, it was a relief to feel like a tourist in a crowd of tourists. There were locals too, of course, like a diminutive old couple, smiling and saying hello to select tables. We asked a gorgeous Greek tourist we at first thought was an influencer — her dress a one-of-a-kind, hair in flowing, pop queen curls — to snap our picture.

We talked for hours about jobs, travel, family, the men in our lives and how there is no city like New York, with its museums and culture and its ethnic and religious diversity. The ultimate way to say “to life,” l’chaim.

Crime impacts everyone differently, especially when it happens to you. Yet I also know the city is vastly safer than when I was young. At 54, I remember the  1970s, ’80s and ’90s, when murders peaked at something like six a day.

If I learned anything from the subway experience, it is that our time on earth is a gift more precious than anything we might unwrap on Hanukkah or Christmas. And if anyone saw us sitting at that famous Katz’s table wondering why we laughed so much, they should ask to have what we were having: a profound appreciation that, like the sandwiches in front of us, life is delicious and should be enjoyed in big portions, despite what fate throws at us.

Michael Luongo is a freelance travel writer and photographer, online writing instructor for UCLA, and a PhD student at Purdue University researching how conflict zones rebuild their tourism sectors. His bylines include the New York Times, CNN, The Forward, Bloomberg News, Gay City News and many other publications.


The post After I stopped an attack on the subway, the victim and I bonded over Katz’s pastrami sandwiches appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Israel says slain brother of Michigan synagogue attacker was a Hezbollah commander

(JTA) — The man who attacked a Michigan synagogue on Thursday was the brother of a Hezbollah commander who oversaw efforts to shoot rockets into Israel before being killed earlier this month, the Israel Defense Forces announced on Sunday.

The mayor of Ayman Ghazali’s city, Dearborn Heights, said in a statement following his attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, that members of Ghazali’s family had recently been killed “in an Israeli attack on their home in Lebanon.”

Israel is targeting Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy in Lebanon that attacked Israel in retaliation against the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, in a conflict that escalated on Monday into a ground operation. Ghazali’s family members were killed in a Hezbollah stronghold where Israel had recently warned civilians to evacuate.

But while images purporting to show Ghazali’s brother in Hezbollah garb circulated on social media almost instantly after attack, the IDF’s announcement marked the first official allegation tying him to the terror group.

“Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Muhammad Ghazali was responsible for managing weapons operations within a specialized branch of the Badr Unit. The unit is responsible for launching hundreds of rockets toward Israeli civilians throughout the war,” the IDF said in a statement on Sunday, adding, “Ibrahim was eliminated in an IAF strike on a Hezbollah military structure last week.”

An unnamed Hezbollah official denied the allegation to The New York Times.

The IDF’s statement did not suggest that Ayman Ghazali was affiliated with Hezbollah. The New York Times reported that he attended a memorial service for those killed in the strike, who included Ibrahim’s young children, at a Dearborn Heights mosque on March 8 that was attended by hundreds of people, many from the Ghazalis’ town.

Ghazali’s ties to Lebanon have prompted a sharp discourse about news coverage of the Michigan attack, with some alleging that focusing on his brother’s death, especially without any confirmation of his brother’s Hezbollah affiliation, runs the risk of suggesting that attacking a Jewish institution in the United States is an appropriate response to grief during wartime.

Dearborn Heights Mayor Mo Baydoun rejected that notion during a press conference alongside the local police chief on Friday.

“We do know that the individual had recently suffered a devastating and personal loss overseas due to an Israeli airstrike on his family’s home in Lebanon, leaving two children dead. The grief is real and it’s heartbreaking, but let me be clear: That is not an excuse,” Baydoun said. “There is never an excuse for violence, especially violence directed at a sacred space.”

Meanwhile over the weekend, authorities in Michigan said Ghazali had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after driving his fireworks-laden truck into Temple Israel. They had previously indicated that the synagogue’s security staff, which worked immediately to neutralize the threat, might have fired the fatal shot.

Temple Israel held Shabbat services in multiple locations over the weekend, including at the Chaldean country club, Shenandoah, that welcomed children evacuated from its preschool and at a nearby Jewish country club, Tam-O-Shanter, where a bat mitzvah took place as planned. The synagogue announced on Sunday afternoon that extensive damage to the building meant it would be “closed to us for the immediate future.”

The post Israel says slain brother of Michigan synagogue attacker was a Hezbollah commander appeared first on The Forward.

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Amsterdam Jewish school bombed, in 2nd attack in days on Dutch Jewish institution

(JTA) — A blast late Friday outside a Jewish school in Amsterdam has Dutch police racing to safeguard Jewish institutions after two attacks  in two days.

As in a blast outside a synagogue in Rotterdam the day before, there were no injuries in the Amsterdam explosion, which caused damage to the school building’s outer wall.

“This is a cowardly act of aggression towards the Jewish community,” Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema said in a statement. “I understand the fear and anger of Jewish Amsterdammers. They are increasingly confronted with antisemitism, and that is unacceptable. A school must be a place where children can receive lessons safely. Amsterdam must be a place where Jews can live safely.”

Prime Minister Rob Wetten condemned the attack. “Terrible. In the Netherlands, there must be no place for antisemitism,” he said. “I understand the anger and fear and will quickly engage in talks with the Jewish community. They must always feel safe in our country.”

Calling the incident a “cowardly attack,” David Van Weel, the Dutch security minister, said in a statement, “Thanks to measures and alertness, greater damage has been prevented. The safety of Jewish institutions has our full attention.”

The same group that took credit for the Rotterdam incident as well as a synagogue attack last week in Belgium said in a video that it was responsible for the Amsterdam blast. The group, Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right, was previously unknown, but watchdogs say its tactics and statements bear hallmarks of affiliation with Iran’s global network of terrorist cells.

Iran has warned that it plans to retaliate across the globe against both U.S. and Israeli targets in response to the war initiated by the U.S. and Israel on Feb. 28. Jewish security watchdogs say “the most elevated and complex threat environment” in recent history has resulted.

Four teens were arrested following the Rotterdam blast but police in Amsterdam have not announced any arrests there, though Halsema noted that a suspect was captured on security cameras installed because Jewish sites in Amsterdam are “under permanent security.”

The school targeted, an Orthodox school of about 120 students founded in the 1970s amid an effort to restore Jewish life after the Holocaust, has a tall, thick security wall as well as bollards meant to prevent vehicles from coming close, according to photographs online. The school’s website says, “The Jewish education and the necessary security of the school are paid for from its own resources and subsidies.”

“Over the past two days, violent incidents have taken place at Jewish institutions. First in Rotterdam, now in Amsterdam. This has a huge impact, not only on the immediate surroundings but on the entire Jewish community, including colleagues,” Amsterdam Police Chief Janny Knol said in a statement. “As the police, we are on standby throughout the country and have scaled up significantly. We are working extremely hard to track down the perpetrators.”

The post Amsterdam Jewish school bombed, in 2nd attack in days on Dutch Jewish institution appeared first on The Forward.

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Antisemitism is exploding on the right but the Jewish establishment is focused on the left

America’s antisemitism watchdogs are committing institutional malpractice.

While antisemitism explodes on the right, including throughout the 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, or 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 is 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 org) found that “nearly four in ten 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:

[T]he 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 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 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?” (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 dogwhistles to the extreme right and evidence that these staffers are swimming in the ultra-nationalist 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 Vice President 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

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 newsletter:

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’ and 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.

How 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: hardline 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.

Again, it’s not that antisemitism does not exist on the anti-Zionist left: It does. 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. As 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 of our leaders (mostly Boomers or Gen-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 hyper-woke regime of censorship in which statements in support of Palestine, 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.

 

The post Antisemitism is exploding on the right but the Jewish establishment is focused on the left appeared first on The Forward.

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