US leaders have consistently condemned Jew-hating incidents. every decent American should join them
Most Jew are finding this Christmas season sobering, as pro-Palestinian rallies, often resounding with Jew-hating jeers, keep turning violent. Since Oct. 7, 70% of American Jews report feeling less safe than they once did.
Jews keep debating how to fight antisemitism. Yet, all Americans should confront this evil. Jew-hatred is not a Jewish disease – it’s a non-Jewish one.
Beyond violating American values, the bigots are lashing out at America’s most defining national symbols, from putting bloody hand prints on the White House gates to defacing Lincoln Memorial Plaza with “Free Gaza” grafitti. Why aren’t more Americans objecting?
Protesters waved posters with swastikas. They peddled Jew-hating stereotypes suggesting that Jewish money and power seduced President Biden, whom they branded “Genocide Joe.” And, as usual, fusing anti-Zionism with anti-Americanism, they shouted: “NYPD, KKK, IDF… they’re all the same.”
America has a long tradition of peaceful protest – this isn’t it. Who rips down posters of innocent people, babies, the elderly, kidnapped from their homes? Do we really want fellow citizens menaced by masked, aggressive, hooligans anytime we disagree with one another?
Americans should look at how these anti-Israel protesters are importing autocratic bullying into American democracy, normalizing it, and ask if this is the tone we seek in the public square.
Yet, when 290,000 people marched peacefully in Washington in November to support Israel and denounce antisemitism, fighting Jew-hatred looked like a Jewish concern. One former student emailed: “It was both empowering and extremely lonely – in that mostly Jews showed up.”
Traditionally, non-Jewish Americans showed up to fight Jew-hatred too. George Washington’s 1790 Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport said America’s government “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” It’s in America’s DNA – Europe’s religious persecutions were not welcome here.