In Response to Antisemitism, Outrage Is Not Enough

T he war that began with Hamas’s savage attack on Israeli civilians last month has reached American shores in the form of a massive wave of antisemitic hatred. Even before the immediate shock of the terrorist group’s brutal surprise attack had worn off, college campuses were raging with anger not at the attackers but at the unbearable provocation of Israel’s existence, and the intolerable gall of its determination to secure its people. By the time the Israeli response began in earnest, large swaths of the broader elite culture had overcome whatever pangs of sympathy they might have felt for Hamas’s victims and fallen back into a familiar lazy narrative of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which treats the notion of a Jewish state as illegitimate, and in the process cannot help but justify the subjection of Jewish Americans to rank intimidation, if not worse.

This is not a new dynamic, of course. Antisemitism has been rising in America for much of this century. There has been a meaningful uptick in right-wing antisemitism, which generally regards the Jews in the ways the fringe right views people it hates: as outsiders or interlopers — think of the torch-bearing marchers in Charlottesville in 2017 chanting “Jews will not replace us!” But there has been a downright massive surge in left-wing antisemitism, which regards the Jews in the ways the fringe left views people it hates: as oppressors or colonizers. The subject of this mode of antisemitism has frequently been Israel, but its object has been American Jews. And because it has been increasingly embraced by progressive activists, this version of the world’s oldest hatred has been increasingly influential in some of our country’s core educational, professional, and political institutions.

Many Jewish college students over the past two decades could tell you stories of encountering this form of wrathful bigotry, as could pretty much anybody with a recognizably Jewish name and any sort of public profile. I’ve got 15 years’ worth of stories myself. But the past month has seen such left-wing antisemitism reach entirely new heights, on campus and off. Jewish students have faced threats of violence in universities across the country, and in some primary and secondary schools. Jewish communities around the nation have been warned to urgently beef up security. Late last month, FBI director Christopher Wray told a Senate committee that antisemitism is reaching “historic levels” in the United States.

The fact that this threat presents itself largely from the left flank of left-dominated institutions makes it particularly difficult to formally combat. Leaders of these institutions are uncomfortable standing up to activists who present themselves as advancing progressive priorities, and so end up offering mealymouthed responses to outrageous bigotry. This has happened in many elite universities. It has even happened in Congress, where, for instance, so far only a few brave Democratic backbenchers have responded firmly to Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan who has endorsed, deployed, and defended antisemitic rhetoric in recent days.

But the problem goes well beyond rhetoric, and therefore calls for more than indignation at the unwillingness of leaders of key institutions to stand up to bigotry. Such failures of leadership are outrageous, yes, and some of what is required in response to this fall’s wave of antisemitism is righteous outrage. But stopping with outrage at deplorable rhetoric that goes unanswered risks giving the impression that the problem to be addressed is something like a one-sided debate, and therefore that talk is all that’s required to take it on — or that the question on the table now is all about the boundaries of free speech.

The students left to cower in their dorms at Cornell or the New Jersey residents vaguely warned by federal officials to “take all security precautions to protect your community” last weekend could tell you that the problem is not speech but hateful intimidation. The boundaries between the two are not unexplored in our laws. They can sometimes be vague, and in those instances, some balance must be sought between rights of expression and the imperative of physical security. But they are often not vague at all. The states and the federal government have statutes in place to protect Americans subjected to terror tactics and hate crimes. Yet antisemitism can sometimes fall between the cracks of such laws, and of their enforcement.

This is in part because, as noted above, contemporary left-wing antisemitism so often treats Israel as its subject but American Jews as its object. Concerns about it are frequently dismissed because its practitioners insist they are criticizing a foreign government, not fellow Americans. Yet their criticism is not a policy argument but a denial of Israel’s right to exist on the basis of its Jewish character, and they themselves plainly behave as though that message should have implications for Jews in America. If you were to say that every nation in the world is legitimate except the one that’s full of Armenians, you would obviously be saying something about Armenians in America, too. And if you were to direct that argument aggressively toward Armenian Americans going about their lives or were to use that argument to single out Armenians for exclusion or intimidation where they live or work (let alone as a reason to kill them where they congregate), we would have to say that you were just holding out their connection to Armenia as a reason to terrorize them. In this respect, anti-Zionism is not about geopolitics; it is about Jews. It is generally easy to distinguish from criticism of the particular actions of any Israeli government, and all the more so when it is attached to the intimidation of particular Americans on the basis of their Jewish identity.

The nature of that identity is sometimes another reason why antisemitism can fall through the cracks of American law. Judaism is a religious identity, but also an ethnic and cultural one. The relevant laws try to cover all those bases without naming names, but do not always succeed.

In both respects, today’s explosion of antisemitism needs to result not only in firm rhetorical responses but also in durable policy action that can offer greater protection to American Jews now and in the future. There are some useful models of what such action could involve, at the state and federal level. The most constructive may be the work of Virginia’s Commission to Combat Antisemitism, which was called together by Governor Glenn Youngkin early in his term. The commission was chaired by former acting U.S. attorney general (and my American Enterprise Institute colleague) Jeffrey Rosen, and produced its final report last December.

The report’s recommendations begin with the need for a clear and binding definition of antisemitism, and the commissioners proposed using the one developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, along with the IHRA’s contemporary examples of how that definition should be applied. The IHRA definition has been adopted into law by more than half the states in recent years (now including Virginia, in the wake of the commission’s recommendation). And in a 2019 Executive Order, Donald Trump instructed federal agencies to consider it in their enforcement practices — albeit in a non-binding way. But the Biden administration, in a strategy document published in May, backed off of even that commitment. As Tevi Troy put it in an important recent essay on this subject:

Adoption of the proper anti-Semitism definition has real world implications. Just to take one example, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is tasked with combatting anti-Semitism at educational institutions, but it has rarely brought forward a case on the issue. This is not due to an absence of anti-Semitic incidents but because OCR lacks a definition of the term. Former OCR official Kenneth Marcus put it this way in 2017: “OCR has no definition of anti-Semitism. Absent a definition, the office is stymied by anti-Semitism cases and is failing in its mission to protect Jewish students.”

The Virginia commission also called for clarifying the state’s hate-crime laws to include “ethnic identity” as a category and proposed several ways to improve data collection on antisemitic incidents, particularly in educational institutions, and the training of law-enforcement officials.

Some similar steps would make sense at the federal level, including a statutory definition of antisemitism and improved enforcement and data collection. Antisemitism does already show up very prominently in the hate-crimes data. As FBI Director Wray put it last month, “our statistics would indicate that for a group that represents only about 2.4% of the American public, [Jews] account for something like 60% of all religious-based hate crimes.” And that was before this latest explosion of intimidation and hate. But it’s clear that many serious antisemitic incidents slip through this system, and better awareness of the scope and nature of the challenge would be of serious practical value.

Such awareness would particularly help strengthen the enforcement of the relevant laws. And here, too, the ongoing barrage of antisemitic incidents has suggested the need for stronger measures. Some state officials, especially in Florida and Virginia, have begun to explore ways of enforcing existing laws against campus organizations and other nonprofits that facilitate antisemitism. These efforts are only beginning, but at both the state and federal levels, charting a path toward greater protections that also guards genuine political speech will require serious focus and attention.

These are only a few examples of potential legislative and enforcement priorities. We can be sure, unfortunately, that the coming weeks and months will reveal further needs and opportunities for action. But to rise to the occasion, lawmakers and law-enforcement officials need to grasp that what is required of them now is not merely rhetoric — even if speaking up would help too. They need to think not as outraged observers but as responsible actors, taking steps to protect the rights and safety of all Americans.

No set of policy actions will be a silver bullet. Antisemitism isn’t going anywhere. But precisely for that reason, the current wave of hate must be answered with durable legislative and enforcement measures that will be here next time too. Realism about the world’s oldest hatred counsels not fatalism but substantive, practical action.