It was on a sunny Shabbat afternoon recently that my son and I were walking home from synagogue. The walk is a few miles long and takes a good fifty minutes, but it always provides the opportunity for reflection and conversation. As we took our normal shortcut through a park where my brothers and I used to play as children, we were verbally accosted by a convertible full of local college kids shouting antisemitic taunts as they drove by with the top down. When we emerged on the other side of the park, the same car happened to be driving down the street and greeted us with another torrent of epithets. And after they drove past and we turned the corner, we were again accosted, this time by a couple in a pickup truck who slowed down to hurl a few more insults our way.
Three such incidents in one walk made for a dubious trifecta indeed.
This wasn’t the first time in my life I’d been on the receiving end of such vitriol. It happened frequently when my brothers and I were growing up and got us into quite a few scuffles.
But when we were kids being goaded into fights, our reactions were about defending ourselves and our honor. Our childhood aggressors may have been antisemitic, but they were not hiding their hatred behind geopolitical rationalizations or academic pretensions. Nor were their actions excused by politicians or minimized by progressives seeking to insulate political bedfellows from claims of prejudice by laying blame exclusively on right-wing bigots. I neither knew nor cared about the partisan beliefs of the antisemitic bullies I encountered as a kid and there was nothing political about their hatred.
Moreover, when my grandmother would put everything in perspective by telling me stories about surviving the pogroms in the Ukraine or about relatives I never knew being killed during the Holocaust, I figured there were worse things in life than getting or giving an occasional black eye.
Our experience that Shabbat, however, was different from the events of my childhood; and our antagonists that day were neither neo-Nazis nor white supremacists. They were college students in one vehicle and identity group members in the other – demographics that liberals are reluctant to accuse of bigotry. They were not spouting reactionary propaganda, but they targeted us simply because we looked like a couple of Jews walking home from shul.
Though similar incidents are occurring with increasing frequency in cities and towns across the US, just yesterday in LA, the liberal Jewish establishment rarely acknowledges that virulent antisemitism can come from immigrants, minority communities, or political progressives; and this willful blindness signals a failure of communal responsibility.
The fact that antisemitism has many diverse faces was illustrated by the college students who jeered at us from their car. American universities are overwhelmingly liberal, but they nonetheless have become bastions of hateful intolerance, where Jewish students are subjected to insult and injury in unprecedented numbers.
Whereas liberals automatically blame conservatives or white supremacists for such abuse, anti-Jewish incitement on North American college campuses does not come from the political right. It is instead facilitated by progressive faculty who vilify Israel, disparage traditional Judaism, deny Jewish history, and promote moral travesties like the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (“BDS”) movement and Israel Apartheid Week.
-It comes from professors who preach leftist politics, disparage Jewish national claims, and characterize acts of Jewish assertiveness as “microaggressions.”
-It comes from faculty who discourage the free exchange of ideas, suppress dissenting speech, and blame Jews for bringing violence upon themselves.
-And it comes from BDS-related groups that are allowed free rein to harass Jewish students without fear of consequence.
If our communal organizations were honest, they would admit that the political right has little if any presence on US college campuses. And yet, Jewish students cannot freely walk around many of them without looking over their shoulders or trying to avoid looking “too Jewish,” as if they were living in Germany in the 1930s.
And now it has spilled over to the streets. Antisemitism today often comes from Islamist or identity communities without reproach from woke liberals who claim to be guardians against hate. Unfortunately, the consequences can be devastating. Within the last two years there was a deadly shooting massacre at a kosher market in Jersey City, a machete attack against Hanukkah revelers in Monsey, NY, and more recently, the stabbing of a Hasidic family in Manhattan during Chol Hamoed Pesach. The last ten days of Israel's protective war against Hamas terrorists have given rise to more antisemitic incidents.
These violent hate-crimes were perpetrated not by right-wingers or white supremacists, but by members of minority communities – some (as in Jersey City) with reported ties to antisemitic hate groups.
Nevertheless, progressive advocates refuse to acknowledge that antisemitism is a feature of many diverse cultures, ideologies, and political persuasions. They are so vested in blaming the right (which certainly has a history of Jew-hatred) and protecting the left that any other narrative makes them uncomfortable.
It is certainly true that the intellectual progenitors of Nazi racial theory, like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, author of “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,” were virulent antisemites. But so were the early luminaries of European liberalism, including Voltaire, Baron d’Holbach, Diderot, and Montesquieu. The reality is that antisemitism was part of the cultural landscape in the Christian and Arab-Muslim worlds for centuries without limitation to any particular social, economic, or political class.
By failing to acknowledge this vital fact – and by revising history to show virtue where there is none – the liberal establishment has signaled that antisemitism will be ignored or misattributed when it comes from “enlightened” progressives or select identity communities.
And the proof is in the silence. Where were the voices of Jewish progressives when BLM rioters attacked Jewish neighborhoods in Los Angeles and elsewhere? They were mute, even when protest leaders and mobs stoked anti-Jewish fervor and chanted classical antisemitic canards. Where is their outrage now when progressive members of Congress spew vile slurs and stereotypes?
Despite the disdain foisted on conservatives by the left, the Republican Party is not controlled by the extreme right, and white supremacists are not part of the conservative mainstream. In contrast, by refusing to censure progressives who spout antisemitic drivel, the Democratic Party has become a haven for haters who support BDS, demonize Israel, and trumpet blood libels and conspiracy theories reminiscent of “the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Moral corruption abounds when Jewish Democrats refuse to chastise a White House that has BDS advocates and Israel-apartheid mythicists serving in positions of power and influence. Or when they overlook the appointment of a departmental bureaucrat with a history of validating antisemitic propaganda and Holocaust denial.
My shtetl-born grandmother may not have approved of fighting as a reflexive response to conflict, but she also knew there were things worth defending and never advocated shame or cowardice as acceptable alternatives. She survived Eastern European ghetto life and Cossack massacres – by luck, resourcefulness, and understanding who the enemy was. What my son and I experienced that Shabbat certainly paled by comparison. However, it illustrated a new kind of danger – the inability of many Jewish communal leaders to understand the moment, to do the right thing.
The hard truth is that neither right nor left has a monopoly on antisemitism, and minorities aren’t immune from its seductive grasp simply because of some affinity projected on them by Jewish liberals. Perhaps it’s time for those who claim the mantle of communal leadership to look inside themselves and discover what prevents them from acknowledging this reality. Or maybe they should just step aside and defer to those who truly get it.
Matthew M. Hausman is a trial attorney and writer who lives and works in Connecticut. A former journalist, Mr. Hausman continues to write on a variety of topics, including science, health and medicine, Jewish issues and foreign affairs, and has been a legal affairs columnist for a number of publications.
