Bluesky

For several years now, Jewish communal leaders and institutions have been warning of a precipitous rise in antisemitism in the United States—and for several years, I’ve been skeptical. Much of what has been labeled “antisemitism” is actually just energetic opposition to Israel in response to its apartheid regime in the West Bank and its ongoing genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League and thus the ostensible leading authority on what constitutes antisemitism, has made crystal clear that he regards anti-Zionism and antisemitism as indistinguishable; on his watch, the ADL has cheered the Trump administration’s crackdown on Palestine activism on college campuses, the biggest wave of federal repression against academic speech since the McCarthy era. Other alleged authorities—from Joe Biden’s former antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to CBS News’s Bari Weiss—have consistently asserted that waving a Palestinian flag while chanting “from the river to the sea” is the functional equivalent of an antisemitic hate crime.

I’ve certainly encountered my share of antisemitic invective on the internet, and I’ve been horrified by incidents like the fatal 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the 2018 Tree of Life massacre, in which a white supremacist murdered 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue. But at no point in my 42 years have I felt seriously threatened or discriminated against as a Jew in the United States. I find the idea that federal agents could arrest Mahmoud Khalil and detain him without trial for more than three months—causing him to miss the birth of his first child—to be incalculably more disturbing than anything Khalil ever said about Israel on the Columbia campus (which I don’t find disturbing at all), and my attitude toward the many Jewish leaders who disagree is best described as contempt.

But in recent months, it’s become difficult to deny that overt antisemitism is spiking, albeit not in the way Jewish communal leaders have been warning. A signal moment came last October, when Tucker Carlson hosted the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who has praised Adolf Hitler and condemned “global Jewry,” for a friendly interview. Though Carlson faced considerable backlash from across the political spectrum, he stuck to his guns, and his profile has only grown, as have those of other unambiguously antisemitic right-wing influencers like Candace Owens and Dan Bilzerian. Carlson’s fans include a substantial portion of the MAGA right, which shares both his hostility to Israel and to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war with Iran. He’s also earned occasional props from some on the left who, while sometimes acknowledging Carlson’s more problematic positions, also credit him with a willingness to hold Israel accountable in a way that is all but absent on mainstream TV news.

Two much-circulated Carlson interviews earlier this year—with US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee in February and with the editor-in-chief of The Economist in March—drew conditional praise from influential progressives like Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan and former Bernie Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss. Both credited Carlson with posing tough questions about Israel that rarely get asked on TV. And they’re not wrong. CNN’s lead anchors, for instance, include Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, both of whom are unapologetic Zionists and both of whom consider that ideological stance to be consistent with their positioning as neutral and objective reporters.The pro-Israel orientation of much mainstream media has been obvious for years, long before it emerged that Bari Weiss might become Bash and Tapper’s boss.

But even as Carlson raises legitimate and well-articulated criticisms of Israeli violence and lawlessness, he sprinkles his commentary with talking points that mingle barely disguised white-supremacy with a winking antisemitism. In an Economist interview, Carlson said: “I’m in no sense a Zionist. I don’t want any country to be destroyed at all, and I don’t want people to die, particularly ones who committed no crime, because I don’t believe in killing innocents, period”—which is a laudable statement any left-wing anti-Zionist might endorse verbatim. But he immediately followed up with: “That’s the basis of Western civilization. Eastern civilization, it’s a whole different view. They believe in collective punishment, I don’t.” Besides being vague (What is “Eastern civilization”? Does it include Israel, which is often and reasonably cast by its critics as a European-derived settler society, and if so, is the implication that Jews are “Eastern”?) and flatly inaccurate (collective punishment has been practiced countless times by Western societies), Carlson clearly intends to signal to ideological racists that his anti-Zionism is compatible with their twisted worldview.

Fuentes, meanwhile, has gone further, explicitly linking “organized Jewry” with Israel and its hypnotic control of American conservatism, to the point of sending white Christian men to die in its wars. “My problem with Trump is not that he’s Hitler,” Fuentes has said. “My problem with Trump is that he is not Hitler.” Fuentes effectively endorses violence against Jews writ large, using the rhetoric of anti-Zionism while collapsing any distinction between Zionism and Judaism.

Elite media’s failure to cover Israel objectively and air progressive anti-Zionist viewpoints has left a wide lane open for bad faith demagogues like Carlson and Fuentes to exploit, as have the myriad failures of the Democratic leadership. As the world’s major human rights groups have one by one validated what anyone with access to social media can see with their own eyes—that Israel has spent the better part of three years indiscriminately slaughtering the Palestinians of Gaza—establishment forces that refuse to acknowledge the same reality have undermined their own credibility. It’s no wonder that so many people are now open to viewpoints that were once considered fringe, and in some cases for good reason.

But it is also impossible to reckon with the growing influence of the antisemitic right without considering how the bulk of Jewish institutions have themselves have insisted that Judaism and Zionism are synonymous. In mainstream Jewish denominations and organizations, Zionist hegemony is near total. Park East Synagogue, the large Modern Orthodox congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, hosts events selling parcels of illegally occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank, and when activists gather outside to protest, the Democratic governor of New York tries to criminalize their speech while branding it as antisemitic. This unapologetic embrace of Israel is by no means limited to Orthodox Jews; both the Conservative and the Reform movements are committed to Zionism at the highest levels, which means the vast majority of synagogues in America are actively engaged in the Zionist project. Temple Israel in suburban Michigan, the largest Reform synagogue in the country, has the flag of Israel in its logo and markets an event on its website where congregants can register to stay in a 5-star hotel in Tel Aviv and mingle with IDF soldiers; and while absolutely none of this justifies the attack on it in March, it’s also impossible to justify on its own terms.

The awkward truth is that no one is more responsible for conflating Israel and Zionism with Jews and Judaism than Jewish leaders themselves. For decades, mainstream Jewish institutions have insisted that to be Jewish is to support Israel and to criticize Israel is to attack Jews. Now, in 2026, Israel is widely and accurately seen as committing crimes against humanity in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and southern Lebanon, not to mention as having dragged the US into an illegal and strategically inept war against Iran that has driven up fuel and food costs worldwide. None of this excuses violence against Jewish civilians or their places of worship. But it does make both much likelier. And by treating left-wing Palestine activists as no different than literal Nazis like Fuentes, Jewish leaders have cheapened the very concept of antisemitism and created space for the real thing to flourish.

“Anti-Zionism is rising as a response to what Israel is doing. It will simply not be possible to treat it as a marginal viewpoint that can be shamed or shunned into invisibility,” Ezra Klein, hardly a radical, recently opined in The New York Times. “If you keep telling people that if they oppose the Jewish state then they must hate the Jewish people, eventually, they will believe you.”

He’s right, and the corollary is that in backing Israel’s morally indefensible conduct, Jewish institutions have also directly made every Jew on earth less safe. That includes those of us who have argued tirelessly against Israel and Zionism, have warned of this exact danger, and have faced ostracism and alienation from our own communities for doing so. To paraphrase one of our ancient prophets in exile, all of us will reap the whirlwind.