(JNS) At a moment in history when Jews are facing an unprecedented wave of post-Holocaust antisemitism, some of the leading lights of the Diaspora have other priorities. That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from the decision by a number of prominent figures and organizations to boycott a conference being sponsored by the government of Israel.

The event is an effort to convene an international response to the surge of Jew-hatred that has swept across the globe since the Hamas attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Those who have pulled out of the conference, organized by Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Amichai Chikli, include Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League; Felix Klein, Germany’s antisemitism czar; Ephraim Mirvis, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom; and French Jewish author Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Their reason?

They won’t appear at the same event as members of what they term Europe’s “far-right” political parties such as France’s Rassemblement National, Hungary’s Fidesz Party or Spain’s Vox Party. Chikli’s critics feel that these parties are tainted by their association with the continent’s dark history of fascism and the Holocaust. The fact that they have all reconstituted themselves in recent years to deal with contemporary challenges and aligned themselves with Israel and against antisemitism is meaningless to them.

As much as these liberal and left-wing Jews are attacking Chikli for granting legitimacy to the new European right, their choice has little or nothing to do with the fight against antisemitism that is currently happening. Instead, it is just a reflection of how much of the traditional leadership of Jewish communities outside of Israel has prioritized partisan politics in their respective countries when they should be laser-focused on the struggle against Jew-hatred going on in the streets and on college campuses of the Diaspora.

Living in the past

It’s easy to see how the generation that came of age in the mid-20th century might instinctively draw back from conservatives, whether in the United States or Europe. Antisemitism on the left was far from unknown in that era, as even a cursory review of the actions of Joseph Stalin—the head of the totalitarian Soviet Union—reveals. But the primary threat to Jews then and in the previous century was from the right. It was the fascist right that perpetrated the Holocaust.

Even looking beyond the history of the events from 1933 to 1945 in Europe, throughout the Diaspora, it was invariably the political parties on the right that scapegoated or openly attacked Jews. Conservatives generally were at best neutral in this struggle while religious and right-leaning nationalist parties in Europe were almost always the ones who marginalized Jews or collaborated with the Nazis during the Shoah. Indeed, even in the United States, hostility to Jewish citizens was more likely to be found among religious believers than skeptics or liberals. Political liberals were far more likely to be among the defenders of Jewish rights than their political opponents.

We must honor the memory of those times, and never forget what led to the Holocaust and who it was that was responsible for the murder of 6 million Jews. But it is incumbent on those now alive to understand that the assumptions about antisemitism that were reasonable in the past no longer necessarily apply to the problems of the present.

The primary challenge to contemporary Jewish life comes from a different direction.

Antisemitism still exists on the right. The rise of a “woke right” in the United States in which a minority of conservative figures like media types Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, who either platform Jew-haters and Holocaust deniers or engage in it themselves, is deeply troubling.

A sea change on the right

Still, in 2025, the parties and leaders who are most likely to be ardent defenders of Israel and opposed to antisemitism in their own countries are on the right.

President Donald Trump is the best example of this trend.

He has not only been the most pro-Israel president since the modern-day Jewish state was born in 1948. Trump has also done more to combat antisemitism on college campuses than any of his predecessors. The war he is waging on institutions of higher learning that enabled or tolerated the hatred of Jews is essential to that struggle. The administration’s efforts to rid the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and other toxic leftist ideologies not just from higher education but other sectors of society has the potential to do a great deal to ensure the safety of American Jews. And it was his opponents who have largely embraced the doctrines of the “progressives” that are most associated with antisemitism today.

But to many political liberals, especially within the Jewish community, Trump remains anathema. That’s not only because of his policies they might oppose, but because they still assume that a conservative populist must be an antisemite, no matter what he says or does.

That might have been true in the 1930s or ’40s. But not these days, when the sector of the population is most likely to be antisemitic is on the political left or members of mainline liberal Protestant denominations.

That’s the same reason that many liberal Jews assume that evangelical and conservative Christians have to be hostile to them or Israel, even though the vast majority are not only pointedly philo-semitic but the most ardent American friends Israel has.

And that’s also why the two political parties in the United States have essentially exchanged identities when it comes to attitudes toward Israel and the Jews. Where once the Republicans were at best divided in their stance even before the advent of Trump, they have since become a virtual lockstep pro-Israel party, eager to display friendship to Jews. The Democrats have gone in the opposite direction as progressives who embrace intersectional and woke ideology have split the party on Israel and rendered it—as the stances of former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris showed—as, at best, neutral on the post-Oct. 7 surge of antisemitism.

Indeed, part of the problem is that Diaspora Jewish liberals are equally as disdainful of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and fellow Likud politicians like Chikli as they are of Trump, since the two governments are seen as political allies.

The situation in Europe is more complicated, but the same unwillingness to live in the present applies.

A leftist-Islamist alliance

Antisemitism has always existed in the United States, though it was not a major political issue or official state policy. In Europe, attitudes toward Jews were a defining issue throughout the continent. Most right-wing parties can trace their origins to factions that were part of their nations’ dark past with respect to the treatment of Jews or the Holocaust.

People and political parties, however, do change.

The reasons for this may not be because they have all suddenly fallen in love with the Jews. The primary factor that caused people to change their minds is that in the 21st century, they understand that the threat to their nations isn’t coming from the Jews. It’s from the red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists.

In the past, they may have seen Jews as outsiders who didn’t fit into a blood and soil version of national identity. But today, they rightly understand that the mass migration of Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa is fundamentally altering the character of many European nations for the worse. That is combined with neo-Marist efforts to discard the traditions of Western civilization as irredeemably racist, much like the left’s war on America via critical race theory and The New York Times’ “1619 Project.” This unlikely alliance of leftists and Islamists is producing a changing political landscape that could doom their national traditions and culture in places like Britain, France, Sweden and other countries. It’s also making them unsafe for Jews.

Recognizing this fact makes them realists as opposed to racists or xenophobes. And part of that realism is knowing that Jews and the State of Israel are their natural allies in an existential struggle for the future of Europe and the West.

The evolution of these parties is a long process. And some, particularly like those in Germany and Austria, haven’t completed that journey. Despite its electoral success, the German AfD Party remains tainted by the antisemitic attitude of some of its candidates for parliament and their nostalgia for the Nazi era. That’s also true of Austria’s Freedom Party.

That’s why they weren’t invited to the Jerusalem conference.

If Chikli had chosen to invite them, then the boycotters would have had a leg to stand on. Still, an argument can be made that encouraging people like AfD leader Alice Weidel, who has personally opposed antisemitism and supports Israel, would do more to combat antisemitism in Germany than shunning her.

Chikli wisely chose not to do so, but that didn’t matter to Diaspora liberals.

Other right-wing European parties have conclusively rejected their antisemitic past, as France’s RN has done, even though that obligated its leader, Marie Le Pen, to eject her late father from the party. Her putative successor, Jordan Bardella, who may be its candidate to lead the country at the next presidential election, has no such associations. Outspoken in opposing Jew-hatred and supporting Israel, he will be at the antisemitism conference. But he is just as unacceptable to many liberal Jews as open antisemites.

The same is true for their attitudes toward Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who is an ardent friend of Israel and his country’s Jewish community. Yet left-wingers not only routinely falsely accuse him of authoritarianism but also of being associated with antisemitism, even though Jews in Budapest are far safer than they are in London, Paris, Amsterdam or Stockholm—something that even his domestic political opponents will concede.

Those Jews who won’t associate with them or members of their parties often identify with the parties of the European left or center. Some, like Levy, a principled supporter of Israel but a man of the left, still cling to the idea that the right is not kosher.

He fails to see that it is the political left, such as the La France Insoumise Party (LFI), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, that is the current home of French antisemitism—and the clear and present danger to their country and its Jewish population. LFI combined with the supporters of French President Emanuel Macron to defeat RN in parliamentary elections earlier this year, despite the right-wingers getting the most votes.

A luxury Jews can no longer afford

Some argue that the new European right are not reliable allies or are squeamish about opposition to mass immigration, even when it transforms some countries into hostile environments for Jews.

This makes no sense. That’s especially true for liberal Jews who can now see that their former allies have abandoned them in the wake of Oct. 7, and now, as many Democrats do, share or tolerate the views of the antisemitic intersectional left.

American Jewish liberals may see their domestic concerns, such as support for legal abortion, as more important than Trump’s backing of Israel and opposition to woke antisemitism. Their European counterparts, who face an even more virulent and popular strain of Jew-hatred, are even more misguided.

But in the wake of the atrocities done by Hamas and Palestinians in Gaza—and the way that the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust encouraged and empowered antisemites everywhere—such attitudes are a luxury that Jews on either continent can no longer afford.

Former Soviet prisoner of Zion and Israeli political leader Natan Sharansky had it right when he posted on Facebook that he would attend the conference:

“For many years I’ve been stubborn and continue to insist even today that it’s important that the fight against anti-Semitism will include all political camps—from left to right.”

By standing aloof from Chikli and the antisemitism conference, people like Greenblatt are gratifying their fellow political liberals, as well as those who are opposed to the Israeli government, for reasons that have nothing to do with this issue. The same is true of European Jews who prefer to hold onto the political alliances of the past that no longer serve their community’s interests. But they have a responsibility to unite with all people—no matter where they stand on the political spectrum or their nation’s past—who are willing to support the Jews in a moment of unique peril.

By shirking that duty in order, they are showing us what they consider to be most important, and it isn’t the safety of the Jewish people.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.