Recently, my wife and I attended a comedy fundraiser. It should have been a simple night out with friends, but I began running scenarios in my head that I didn’t want to. What if a comedian takes a swing at Israel? What if Jews become the punchline? What if the room laughs? And if all of that does happen, what do I do?

Do I challenge it and risk being labeled a humorless Jew? Do I sit there and absorb it? Walk out and let it pass unchallenged? Create a scene and become the story?

Unfortunately, the sad fact is, Jewish Australians have learned to scan rooms.

Briefly, after the Bondi Beach terrorist attack on December 14, 2025, it felt as though the country finally grasped what Jewish Australians were trying to explain for months: Antisemitism here was no longer confined to fringe cranks and anonymous accounts. It had become a real-world threat with real world consequences.

Then, the moment passed.

What remained was not only grief, but a changed environment. The sharp edge of hostility towards Jews did not begin with Bondi and it has not disappeared since. This year taught Jewish Australians that what used to be occasional, awkward, or fringe can become mainstream quickly. The unacceptable becomes plausible, then familiar, then routine.

That is the real story here, and it is bigger than one comedy show.

This is not about asking Australia to agree with Jews all the time. It is about whether Jewish Australians can participate in civic life without bracing for the moment when our identity becomes a target.

When a minority community starts adjusting ordinary life around the possibility of humiliation or hostility, social cohesion is already fraying.

Comedy, music, and art do not exist in a moral vacuum. They shape what audiences believe is acceptable to say in public, and about whom. The problem is when Israel becomes a proxy for Jews in the room, and the moment when Zionist becomes code for something darker — the moment when collective blame is normalized.

So what do we do with this reality?

Australia needs to move from sympathy to standards.

That starts with leadership willing to draw lines in plain language and defend them consistently. Statements and moments of unity matter, but they do not automatically change the day-to-day environment. Standards do when they are adopted, communicated, and enforced by the institutions that control public spaces.

Venues, festivals, universities, unions, publishers, and broadcasters should have clear codes that distinguish robust debate from targeting people for their identity. If organizations can write policies about harassment and discrimination, they can write policies about demonization and scapegoating. And when those lines are crossed, the response must be immediate and unambiguous — not a carefully managed statement, not a quiet explanation that it was misunderstood, and not a shrug that it is just comedy.

Allies matter. Many Australians do not intervene because they are unsure of what they are seeing or don’t want to make things worse. We need to make intervention normal, not heroic. A calm, simple sentence said early changes a room. “That is not accurate.” “That crosses a line.” “That is not acceptable here.”

Prejudice survives when bystanders outsource the response to the target.

We need to update how we talk about antisemitism. It cannot be treated solely as a chapter in European history, wheeled out at commemorations and then put away. Contemporary antisemitism is adaptive. It often presents as moral righteousness, as activism, as edgy critique, while recycling old conspiracies and collective blame in new packaging.

Jewish Australians must resist the understandable temptation to withdraw. Retreating from public life does not lower the temperature. It hands the public square to whoever is loudest. Participation is not naivete. It is a declaration of belonging. And belonging should be the default, not something Jews have to earn by staying silent.

The comedy night ended without incident. There was laughter and relief.

But relief is not the benchmark of a healthy society.

Confidence is.

The question is whether we are willing to sustain the clarity that came after the Bondi attack — after the headlines faded — and whether we are prepared to defend a simple proposition: that Jewish Australians can walk anywhere without worry.

If we cannot defend that, then the issue is not Jewish fear or worry. It is Australian tolerance for what has been allowed to become normal.

Wikipedia describes itself as “a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” guided by a “neutral point of view” and built on “verifiable, reliable sources.”

It aspires to collect and disseminate “the sum of all human knowledge.” That promise — open, collaborative, neutral — is what gives it authority. It is also what makes the erosion of that neutrality so consequential.

In many fields, Wikipedia muddles along imperfectly but credibly.

On Israel and Jewish history — and other politically charged flashpoints — the claim of neutrality collapses under scrutiny.

The problem is not criticism. Democratic states invite criticism. The problem is structural asymmetry: highly motivated ideological editors, operating fluently within Wikipedia’s rules, steadily tilt the terrain while insisting it remains level.

The recent episode involving Nas Daily and its creator, Nuseir Yassin, offered a public glimpse into how this works.

In a Facebook video, Yassin — who has more than 70 million followers — described how a small group of anonymous editors reshaped his Wikipedia biography after he became more vocal in condemning Hamas and advocating peace with Israel.

Because he is an Israeli Arab increasingly viewed as “too positive on Israel,” edits were inserted reframing an otherwise positive biography in a sharply negative light. Attempts to revise what he characterized as inaccuracies were reverted. The page was eventually locked with the disputed edits intact. What prevailed was not neutral adjudication but persistence — who could marshal citations that satisfied Wikipedia’s sourcing hierarchy and outlast opponents in procedural trench warfare?

If a globally recognized public figure can watch his biography bend in real time, what chance does a small state with barely one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population have when the same machinery turns against it?

Spend time on major entries — Zionism, Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Apartheid, Gaza genocide accusation — and a pattern emerges.

Zionism, the modern national movement of the Jewish people, is framed primarily through the lens of European settler colonialism, despite the historical record that Jewish religious, linguistic, cultural, and legal traditions originated in the Land of Israel and that Jewish communities maintained a continuous presence there for millennia. The indigenous dimension is acknowledged but subordinated to colonial terminology as the dominant interpretive frame. 

The term “apartheid” appears not simply as an allegation advanced by bitterly biased activists, but in ways that blur the line between advocacy and adjudicated legal finding — even though no international court has determined that Israel constitutes an apartheid state, and the application of the 1973 Apartheid Convention remains disputed.

Strikingly, Wikipedia rarely situates the term within a regional context where gender-based legal discrimination, religious supremacy, and criminalization of apostasy are codified in the laws of multiple Arab states

Across much of the Middle East, women inherit half of what men inherit under formal legal systems, religious minorities face structural discrimination, and conversion away from Islam can carry legal penalties. In Wikipedia, this entrenched hierarchy seldom anchors discussions of “apartheid.” The label is reserved almost exclusively for the region’s lone Jewish state.

Most jarring is the treatment of “genocide.” The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such.

That specific intent requirement is central. Allegations that Israel’s war against Hamas constitutes genocide hinge on proving an intent to destroy Palestinian Arabs as a group. Israel’s conduct during the war — including advance warnings to civilians, establishment of humanitarian corridors, facilitation of aid deliveries, and coordination of a 2024 polio vaccination campaign reaching more than one million Gazans — certainly complicates (really, eviscerates) any claim of group-destruction intent. Yet across Wikipedia entries, “genocide” often appears less as a contested legal allegation and more as an emerging consensus. The definitional threshold recedes, activist language advances.

Other examples are more granular but telling. On the Zionism page, the movement’s 19th-century articulation by Theodor Herzl as Jewish self-determination in a historic homeland is juxtaposed with colonial analogies implying foreign implantation, despite the First Zionist Congress (1897) explicitly defining its aim as establishing a home for the Jewish people in Eretz-Israel.

On the Hamas Charter entry, the organization’s 1988 covenant — which calls for Israel’s destruction and invokes many antisemitic conspiracy tropes — is summarized, but its eliminationist doctrine is softened by emphasis on a 2017 political document that did not recognize Israel’s legitimacy and that Hamas leaders have not treated as superseding their foundational objective.

This is not accidental drift. Research on Wikipedia governance shows how a relatively small number of highly active editors can dominate contentious areas. Policies emphasizing consensus and “reliable sourcing” can be navigated — and exploited — by organized activists. Advocacy NGOs are cited as authoritative. Broader context is dismissed as “undue weight.” Editors who resist face procedural attrition. Over time, ideological stamina begins to resemble institutional authority.

Conflicts are fought with narratives as much as weapons.

On Wikipedia, narrative compression is visible. A Mideast century shaped by Ottoman collapse, British administration, the 1937 Peel Commission proposal, the 1947 UN Partition Plan and its rejection by Arab leadership, and multiple interstate wars is flattened into a morality tale with a single Jewish aggressor.

Meanwhile, uncomfortable chapters of Palestinian Arab political history receive less narrative gravity.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, met Adolf Hitler in Berlin in November 1941, lived in Germany during the war, broadcast pro-Nazi propaganda in Arabic, and recruited Muslims for Waffen-SS units in the Balkans. These ideological crosscurrents between European fascism and segments of Arab nationalist and later Islamist movements are historical facts. They are acknowledged on Wikipedia. But they are rarely treated as structurally significant.

Similarly, Hamas’ founding charter invokes hadiths about killing Jews and frames its struggle in explicitly religious and eliminationist terms. Those elements are central to understanding the conflict. Yet they occupy less narrative weight than allegations leveled against Israel.

Wikipedia’s defenders argue that it merely reflects “reliable sources.” But source designation itself is political.

Wikipedia considers outlets like Al Jazeera — funded by the Qatari state — generally reliable for news reporting, while treating some US outlets, including Fox News, as generally unreliable for factual claims outside opinion content. When advocacy organizations are elevated and contextual scholarship is marginalized, neutrality becomes branding rather than practice. Wikipedia does not invent accusations; it curates them. Curation is power.

The consequences extend far beyond one website. Wikipedia is often the first stop for students, journalists, diplomats, and policymakers. Artificial intelligence systems ingest its summaries as baseline knowledge. When framing tilts there, the tilt does not dissipate; it amplifies. 

History offers reminders. Medieval blood libels were recorded as fact before they became pretexts for violence. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion circulated as documentary evidence before it was exposed as fabrication. Both were dressed in the language of scholarship. Both hardened into assumed truth before they cracked.

Racist distortion rarely arrives announcing itself. It condenses quietly.

This is not a plea to shield Israel from criticism. It is a warning about structural asymmetry — and a call to stop treating Wikipedia as a neutral authority until it confronts and corrects its institutional failures. When Jewish indigeneity is minimized, when eliminationist ideologies are relegated to footnotes, and when grave legal terms are repurposed as political weapons, neutrality has already been compromised.

Neutrality is not a branding exercise. It is a discipline that requires enforcement, transparency, and accountability. If Wikipedia cannot uphold that discipline in politically charged domains, then universities, media outlets, policymakers, technology companies, and researchers should stop defaulting to it as an authoritative source.

Conventional wisdom is formed in real time on its pages. If those who value intellectual integrity continue to outsource their baseline knowledge to a system structurally vulnerable to ideological capture, they become complicit in the distortion. Wikipedia reform must precede Wikipedia reliance.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.

For more than a year now — indeed, well before October 7 2023 — American college and university campuses have been saturated with a familiar insistence: We don’t hate Jews. We just oppose Israel.

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, that claim has grown louder and more strident; but it did not originate there. What October 7 did was strip away any remaining ambiguity, transforming a rhetoric that had long circulated at the margins into something mainstream, unapologetic, and increasingly coercive.

The argument has been well-rehearsed and made nationwide. Protesters insist their calls for Israel’s elimination are purely political, rooted in moral concern for Palestinians, not hostility toward Jews.

To suggest otherwise, they argue, is to conflate critique with bigotry and to weaponize antisemitism as a shield against dissent. Jewish students, meanwhile, describe a very different reality. They experience not policy disagreement but negation: of peoplehood, of legitimacy, of belonging. They are told that the one collective expression of Jewish continuity in the modern world is uniquely immoral; that Jewish self-determination is inherently suspect; that Jews, alone among peoples, must justify their right to exist.

When Jewish students say this feels antisemitic, they are often met not with curiosity but with dismissal. They are told they are confused, hypersensitive, or acting in bad faith. Administrators, eager to avoid controversy, retreat into procedural language, insisting that what is unfolding is political speech — even when it spills into exclusion, intimidation, and collective punishment.

Until recently, this dispute has rested largely on moral intuition and lived experience. Those matter. But they are no longer all we have. New survey evidence now allows us to examine empirically whether the claim at the heart of contemporary campus activism — that opposition to Israel is distinct from hostility toward Jews — actually holds up.

It does not.

The Fall 2025 Yale Youth Poll — a nationally weighted survey of 3,426 American voters with a substantial oversample of young adults — offers one of the most comprehensive recent snapshots of attitudes toward Israel, Zionism, Jews, and antisemitism in the United States.

Unlike many polls that isolate these questions, the Yale survey (graciously shared with us) places them side by side. That design allows us to see whether views about Israel track systematically with views about Jews.

Using a secondary analysis of the dataset and excluding the small number of Jewish respondents to avoid conflating in-group and out-group attitudes, we examined the relationship between opposition to Israel’s existence and well-established measures of antisemitism (see Hersh and Royden’s research on antisemitic attitudes).

The results are not subtle. They are consistent, patterned, and deeply unsettling.

The central dividing line in our analysis is a simple question: Do you believe Israel should exist as a Jewish state?

Among non-Jewish respondents, 41 percent said yes, 24 percent said no, and 35 percent were unsure. Those who deny Israel’s right to exist are not merely critics of Israeli policy. They are rejecting the legitimacy of Jewish national self-determination itself — a position that now sits at the center of much campus activism.

The crucial question is what else accompanies that belief.

The answer, according to the data, is a dramatically higher likelihood of endorsing classic antisemitic tropes.

Respondents who opposed Israel’s existence were far more likely to agree that Jews in the United States are more loyal to Israel than to America — a claim with a long and poisonous history. They were far more likely to support boycotting Jewish American-owned businesses in response to the war in Gaza, a form of collective punishment aimed explicitly at Jews as Jews. And they were far more likely to agree that Jews have too much power in American society, one of the most enduring antisemitic canards.

None of these differences was marginal. On each measure, the gap between those who deny Israel’s legitimacy and those who affirm it was large — often approaching or exceeding a two-to-one ratio. When these questions were combined into a single index of antisemitic attitudes, a standard social-scientific technique that increases reliability, the pattern sharpened further. Roughly 30 percent of respondents who opposed Israel’s existence scored high on this antisemitism index, compared with about 10 percent of those who supported Israel’s legitimacy.

That is not coincidence. It is structure.

The pattern deepens when we turn to how respondents understand Zionism itself. The Yale survey asked whether Zionism should be characterized in each of three ways: as the forcible displacement of Palestinians to maintain a Jewish majority; as the creation of a state in which Jews have more rights than others; or as a form of racism and apartheid.

Among those who denied Israel’s right to exist, roughly a third endorsed each of these descriptions. Among those who affirmed Israel’s legitimacy, fewer than one in eight did.

Again and again, the ratio hovered around three to one.

This matters because Zionism is not a fringe ideology, nor merely a modern political movement. For most Jews — religious and secular, progressive and conservative — it is the affirmation that Jews are a people, not only a faith, with a continuous historical, cultural, and spiritual relationship to the Land of Israel and a right to collective self-determination there.

That belief is woven into Jewish liturgy, ritual, and memory: in daily prayers oriented toward Jerusalem; in the Passover declaration “Next year in Jerusalem”; in millennia of legal, poetic, and communal life structured around return, restoration, and continuity.

To insist that Zionism is inherently racist or immoral is therefore not simply to criticize a particular Israeli government or policy choice. It is to deny the legitimacy of a core expression of Jewish peoplehood, one that long predates the modern nation-state and that, for many Jews, sits at the intersection of faith, history, and survival, and it explains why Jews so often experience “anti-Zionism” not as political disagreement but as a negation of who they are.

At this point, the conceptual distinction between opposing Israel and opposing Jews begins to collapse — not because of rhetoric, but because of logic.

When Jews are the only people denied the right to collective existence; when Jewish institutions are singled out for boycott in response to a foreign government’s actions; and when Jews are told that participation in civic or campus life requires renouncing a core element of their identity, what is being expressed is no longer ordinary political critique. It is group-based exclusion.

This asymmetry is crucial. No other people are told that their national self-determination is uniquely illegitimate. No other diaspora is routinely held responsible for the actions of a sovereign state. No other minority is asked to disavow its collective identity as a condition of moral acceptability. That these standards are applied almost exclusively to Jews is not incidental. It is the clearest indication that something other than universalist politics is at work.

In practice, contemporary anti-Israel activism functions less as a critique of a state than as an identity test imposed on Jews.

Perhaps most revealing, then, are the findings about what respondents refuse to recognize as antisemitism at all. The survey presented a series of scenarios and asked whether each constituted anti-Jewish prejudice. Respondents who opposed Israel’s existence were far more likely to say that comparing Israeli policies to Nazism is not antisemitic; that boycotting Jewish businesses over Gaza is not antisemitic; and that excluding a Jewish student from a campus group because of pro-Israel views is not antisemitic.

In effect, many of the same respondents who endorse antisemitic stereotypes also operate with a radically narrowed definition of antisemitism; one that excludes precisely the behaviors Jewish students most often encounter.

This helps explain the recurring impasse on campus. Jewish students say they are being targeted, excluded, and stigmatized. Activists respond that no antisemitism is present because the only antisemitism they are prepared to acknowledge is explicit hatred of Jews as individuals. Structural exclusion, collective punishment, and the denial of Jewish peoplehood simply do not count.

But antisemitism has never functioned that way. Historically, it has thrived not only on hatred but on moral rationalization: on the claim that Jews are uniquely dangerous, uniquely disloyal, uniquely powerful, or uniquely undeserving of the rights extended to others. What the Yale data reveals is that these patterns have not vanished. They have been reframed, normalized, and laundered through the language of anti-Zionism and moral certainty.

None of this means that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. That claim would be false and corrosive. Political disagreement with Israeli policy is legitimate and necessary, as it is with any democratic state. Nor do these findings suggest that every anti-Israel protester harbors conscious animus toward Jews.

But they do show, clearly and repeatedly, that opposition to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state is strongly associated with antisemitic beliefs, antisemitic policy preferences, and a refusal to recognize antisemitism when it occurs. That association is not accidental. It is not limited to a fringe. It is patterned, measurable, and far more pronounced than in the population at large.

Universities have been reluctant to confront this reality. Campus leaders have treated anti-Israel activism primarily as protected political speech, even when it veers into eliminationist rhetoric, exclusion, and collective punishment. They have assured Jewish students that their concerns are being heard, while declining to draw boundaries around conduct that would be unthinkable if directed at any other minority group.

The Yale data suggest that this posture is no longer tenable. A movement does not need to declare hatred in order to produce exclusion. Prejudice does not require self-awareness. When a set of beliefs repeatedly results in the stigmatization of a minority group, the denial of its collective legitimacy, and the narrowing of its access to civic life, intent becomes beside the point.

For Jewish students, this is not an abstract debate. It shapes who is welcomed, who is suspect, and who must renounce a central part of their identity to be included. It shapes whether Jewish attachment to Israel is treated as evidence of disloyalty, whether Jewish institutions are targeted for boycott, and whether Jewish students are told – implicitly or explicitly – that they do not belong unless they disavow their peoplehood.

The Fall 2025 Yale Youth Poll does not end the conversation. But it decisively changes it. The claim that anti-Israel activism bears no relationship to antisemitism is no longer merely unconvincing. It is empirically false.

Jewish students were not imagining what they were experiencing. They were perceiving a pattern — one rooted not only in politics, but in the denial of faith, peoplehood, and survival.

And once seen, it cannot responsibly be denied. 

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Steven M. Cohen is a public sociologist.