America Currents


The New Antisemitism


Academia is fueling a growing wave of hatred toward Jews and Israel among young minorities.


A BY LISA SCHIFFREN


ntisemitism has always been with us. After the Holocaust, with most of Europe’s Jews dead,


the world got serious about addressing the two-millennia phenomenon. The Catholic Church and many American Evangelical churches set up active, functional relationships with Judaism, and some even changed their theology to accommodate the fact that Judaism continued to thrive, despite the fact that Christianity saw itself superseding God’s relationship with the Jews. All of the hard work religious leaders


did made a real difference, especially here in the U.S. Antisemitism receded into the background as Jews assimi- lated into post-war American culture. Now, things are changing. The new antisemitism doesn’t look


like the old one. What does it look like? Well, most of it comes in the guise


of anti-Zionism, which is rampant on the political left, where it is tied into current hard-left ideology like critical


race theory, ethnic studies, and the obsessive focus on race. Israel is seen as a colonial power,


an “apartheid state,” victimizing the Palestinians, who are, usefully, “peo- ple of color” in this narrative. As Lori Marcus, legal director of


The Deborah Project, which fights antisemitism in academia put it, “Isra- el is the new Jew. Hating the Jewish state is the new way of hating Jews. That’s the current trend. “There are marches against Isra-


el here and in Europe. There are no marches against countries that actu- ally practice slavery,” Marcus adds. And the locus of this trend is, as it


is for so many pernicious ideologies, academia. Our colleges and universi- ties, very much including the elite among them, are hotbeds of anti- Zionist antisemitism. According to the FBI, American


Jews are five times more likely than Muslims to be the victims of religious hate crimes — many of which have been incited by the anti-Israel propaganda spread by pro-Islamist groups like the


Muslim Students Association, Ameri- can Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. These organizations accuse Israel


of being occupiers and murderers in an apartheid state. When there is conflict between,


say, Israel and Gaza — always started by Gazans lobbing missiles at Israel — they accuse Israel of killing innocent women and children in large num- bers. They make their case relentless- ly, and the target audience of students and activists absorbs it. Increasingly, it gets physical. Dur-


ing the Gaza war in May 2021, incidents of antisemitic assault, harassment, and vandalism surged 150% across the U.S. over the same period in 2020. According to the Anti-Defamation


League there were 2,717 such actions that year, marking the highest rate of antisemitic incidents in 40 years. As with CRT and the transgen-


der movement, activists know that indoctrinating young people is the ticket to widespread political change. It’s not so hard to do that, given the astonishing ignorance of history, specifically including the Holocaust among millennials and Gen Z.


ANTI-ZIONISM “Israel is the new Jew. Hating the Jewish state is the new way of hating Jews. That’s the current trend,” says Lori Marcus, legal director of The Deborah Project, which fights antisemitism in academia.


JULY 2023 | NEWSMAX 37


RONEN TIVONY/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES / BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES


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