Surging Antisemitism Threatens Jews and America
Repackaged as “antizionism,” an ancient hatred poses a fundamental danger to us all.
In Santa Monica, California, last week, a Jewish couple was attacked by a man with a vicious dog and a baseball bat. Several weeks ago, synagogues and homes were vandalized with swastikas in New York City, and then a mob hostile to the Jewish state of Israel clashed with Jews outside a synagogue in Brooklyn. As disturbing as those incidents were, they paled in comparison to the fiery attack on a Michigan synagogue in April, the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers last May, and other violent crimes.
You are reading The Rattler from J.D. Tuccille and Reason. Get more of J.D.'s commentary on government overreach and threats to everyday liberty.
An Explosion of Antisemitism
These incidents come against a backdrop of revived antisemitism or—to give it its proper name—Jew-hatred around the world. In the United States, re-mainstreaming of Jew-hatred began among popular influencers like far-left Hasan Piker and far-right Nick Fuentes but is now spreading among regular Americans.
Few officeholders are as openly bigoted as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who constantly voices anti-Jewish and anti-Israel statements before walking them back. Increasingly, though, Jewish lawmakers complain of an "explosion of antisemitism" directed at them by the public, as recently reported by Axios's Andrew Solender. It's likely to get worse.
In April, Pew Research polling revealed that "60% of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53% last year," particularly among Democrats and younger Americans.
Examining the Fall 2025 Yale Youth poll, Samuel J. Abrams and Steven M. Cohen of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) found that "respondents who opposed Israel's existence were far more likely to agree that Jews in the United States are more loyal to Israel than to America — a claim with a long and poisonous history. They were far more likely to support boycotting Jewish American-owned businesses in response to the war in Gaza, a form of collective punishment aimed explicitly at Jews as Jews. And they were far more likely to agree that Jews have too much power in American society, one of the most enduring antisemitic canards."
Antizionism Is Just Repackaged Hatred of Jews
Some of the revived animus against Jews is open and explicit, but much of it is barely camouflaged as "antizionism," implying hostility to Israel and not to all Jews. Apologists for this tactic point to a recent poll finding that only a minority of American Jews identify themselves as Zionist which, they claim, means attacking Israel isn't bigotry. But the same poll finds that 88 percent of Jews "believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state," which is the definition of Zionism. As "Zionist" has become a slur, Jews have backed away from the word, but not from support for the world's sole majority-Jewish country and home for almost half of all Jews that it represents.
Or, as AEI's Abrams and Cohen concluded, "the claim that anti-Israel activism bears no relationship to antisemitism is no longer merely unconvincing. It is empirically false."
Attacking Zionists really is a proxy for attacking Jews, as if we couldn't guess that from the violence and vandalism directed at synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses. While every government is subject to criticism for its conduct, reframing hatred of Jews as exaggerated concern about the existence of a foreign state is a convenient way to tailor an ancient hatred for modern sensibilities.
"If we think about the core libels of antizionism today—colonizer, apartheid, and genocide—they're really just the inverse values of the moral codes of our time," says anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein. "They're not necessarily talking about Jews having big noses or controlling the banks. Some do, but they don't have to. So they say, 'Well, it's not antisemitic,' and their intuition is somewhat justified as long as we're associating antisemitism only with its older forms." He points out that "antisemitism" originated as a self-identifying term among Jew-haters meant to convert ancient bigotry into a racialized 19th-century ideology; the term "antizionism" again reinvents the same bigotry for the 21st century. That reframing has deep roots in efforts by totalitarian governments to reshape morality.
Totalitarian Roots and Foreign Funding
In an April report, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) examined how totalitarians engage in "an inversion of morality, reframing tyranny as justice and evil as righteous action" to influence public opinion. "We focus in part on anti-Israel ideology, which played a central role in earlier anti-Western propaganda systems, including Soviet and Nazi campaigns, because the same narratives have reemerged today under the banner of antizionism. Appealing to the idea of universal human rights for its legitimacy, the current antizionist ideology presents itself as morally principled and anti-oppressive."
Many modern mouthpieces for Jew-hatred don't even disguise their totalitarian connections. Hasan Piker endorses communism and says, "China is probably the closest, I would say, to an example that we should follow." Nick Fuentes manages to simultaneously praise both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, reinforcing the fact that there's little point in differentiating among brands of totalitarianism.
Ironically, researchers find that much funding for antizionist (and anti-American) groups in the U.S. comes from Qatar and from a network linked to the Chinese Communist Party that's managed by Neville Singham, a wealthy socialist who made his money in the U.S. and then moved to Shanghai. So much for arguments by bigots who allege that Jews have divided loyalties between Israel and the U.S. At least Israel, like America, has open debate and elections. China and Qatar do not.
Revived Jew-Hatred Threatens American Individualism and Liberty
The reemergence of Jew-hatred is worrying for Jews, their friends, and their families, for obvious reasons. But revived collectivist animus toward a group should concern everybody. Historically, Jews have been an easy target for bigots, who change only the rhetoric they use to justify their actions. But once one group is vilified, it's easy to extend collective hatred to other groups that can be singled out for ill treatment. The bigotry that threatens Jews undermines the whole individualist liberal order.
Enemies of the United States recognize the threat. Western societies, as NCRI pointed out in April, are based on "principles and liberties enshrined by pluralistic, liberal democracies; among them, freedom of speech, equality under the law, tolerance of difference, individual rights and freedoms, the rule of law, and free, fair, and regular elections in a representative democracy." Reviving collective hatred and framing it as a righteous movement undermines the philosophical foundations of our freedom.
By whatever name, Jew-hatred is back. It's a threat to Jews, but it's also a danger to a liberal society and the values that underlie the free, individualistic American way of life.
