Behind the Global Surge in Anti-Semitism Despite likely friction, relations between the U.S. and Israel have a strong foundation. By Walter Russell Mead
EXCERPT
The new anti-Zionism, however, is becoming entrenched among many American progressives. Depending on what policies Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet adopts, the Biden administration could be moving toward battles with the new Israeli government more bitter than those of the Obama years. And on campus and elsewhere, individual American Jews are being challenged to earn their way into progressive respectability by dissociating themselves from the Jewish state and the Jewish national movement.
But progressives’ anti-Semitism disguised as human rights activism is only one of the dangers confronting American Jews. Almost two-thirds of religious hate crimes reported in the U.S. are directed against a group representing 2.4% of the population. Race-baiting political agitators seek to mobilize this hatred to advance their careers.
Jew-hatred has always existed in America. Equally at home in trailer parks and country clubs, it tends to peak at moments of social and economic stress. Today’s genteel anti-Semitism among upper-middle-class BDS proponents and the less subtle Jew-hatred among radical black and white nationalists matches the classical pattern well. American populism also has a long history of anti-Semitic rhetoric. William Jennings Bryan’s most famous speech climaxed in an anti-Semitic dog whistle: “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Radio priest Father Charles Coughlin and others enlisted Jew-hatred in their populist appeals during the Great Depression.
At present, the political prospects of the Jew-haters look weak. Most Americans staunchly reject the politics of racial and religious hate. The danger is less that a demagogue will ride Jew-hatred into the White House than that ugly rhetoric will inspire ugly deeds and that anti-Jewish hate crimes, like other hate crimes in our discordant era, will become more common and more serious.
Anti-Semitism has a long history in America, but that isn’t the whole story. American Jews today enjoy greater equality, acceptance and opportunity than any group of diasporic Jews in the past 2,500 years. Overcoming ancient prejudice is what a healthy America does.
Arguments against anti-Semitism need to be made, and crimes of anti-Semitism must be vigilantly prosecuted. But the heart of the matter isn’t about winning the argument with Jew-haters. It is about making America work. Populist anti-Semitism exploded during the 1880s and early 1890s as economic difficulties rose. Positive leadership under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt brought better times. Similarly, decades of prosperity after World War II marginalized anti-Semitism in American life—and reduced many other forms of prejudice.
American Jews aren’t a foreign body in the U.S. They are an integral part of this ethnically and religiously diverse nation, and we stand or fall together.
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