I woke up on Monday morning to the news that Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Australia were killed—15 as I write—and more than 40 wounded by a father-and-son team of gunmen who festooned their car with homemade ISIS flags. The youngest victim was 10; the oldest an 87 year-old Holocaust survivor. The older gunman was killed, the son is in critical condition. Video clips of heroism are being shared; most of the heroes are dead.
What you may not know unless you partake of social media that is hospitable to Jews is that this has triggered a chain-reaction, Jewish groups canceling holiday events or beefing up public and private security, and individual Jews posting about their increasing fears at being Jewish in public given the rapid increase in antisemitic incidents this year. You many not have seen that posts expressing horror at these killings are frequently followed by long chains of comments, many blaming the victims. It was an Israeli false flag operation say some; Chabad, the Jewish group sponsoring the celebration, is too entwined with Israel and bears responsibility, say others. I quickly stopped reading them. My stomach couldn’t take it.
What you also may not know is that people like me, appalled at both the Hamas-led massacre, rapes, and kidnappings of October 7, 2023, and the Israeli government’s massive and cruel retaliation aimed at destroying the people and places of Gaza, are scared of the multi-directional Jew hatred that is being fomented by extreme segments of both the right and left in the US. When the MAGA regime uses antisemitism as a convenient club to beat universities and other institutions into line with its authoritarian aims, when the vicious antisemitism of the appalling Nick Fuentes is normalized by the likes of the egregious, opportunistic Tucker Carlson (whose podcast tops the popularity charts), when the outer fringes of anti-Israel activism have substituted the word “Zionist” for “Jew” to justify violence and hatred directed at people who have absolutely no engagement with or influence over Israel’s war, a new reality has dawned.
In my new book, The Intercessor, a character called Iz, a young man who is bicultural, half Okinawan and half Ashkenazi, is in grad school pursuing a double major in Asian and Jewish studies. His experiences parallel those that foreshadowed this new reality of ascendant antisemitism in my own life, when people attached to social justice causes I’d supported forever began to ostracize Jews from the U.S. left. I’m going to let Iz tell it. He’s speaking in 2024:
Then in 2023, halfway into my grad work, October 7th came, the paragliders flying into a concert and slaughtering a bunch of kids and kibbutzniks, and people went different kinds of crazy.
The first sign was when some people I knew were trashed for posting to social media on October 8th about friends and family they’d lost in Israel. October 8th! Before Israel even talked about retaliation. Some Asian Studies students retweeted academics celebrating the thrilling revolutionary violence of Hamas’ long-overdue vengeance for the Occupation. “Exhilarating” was the adjective of choice.
On November 3rd, less than a month later, the Association for Asian American Studies put out a statement that could have been assembled from a glossary provided by what David calls the paraglider left: genocide, Zionist settler colonialism, praising terrorism, yada, yada. Folks in Jewish Studies knew about my double major. They asked me what I was going to do about the statement. I made a few jokes about changing into my Superman outfit or mobilizing the Jewish space lasers, but nobody laughed. Everybody—all kinds of groups that had nothing to do with the region or foreign policy and had never issued such a thing before—had to put out a statement or find themselves on a list of Zionist enemies to be blackballed. At least in Jewish Studies, there was a range of opinion, from Israel can do no wrong to I’m going to put on my keffiyah and join the encampment. But when two conflicting opinions met, it
wasn’t any easier in that program than elsewhere on campus.
Let me be clear. The better part of a year into that war now, and there must be something wrong with me because I still have room in my heart and mind for all of the terrible suffering, the parents and children of hostages, the parents and children killed and displaced in Gaza, the people of Israel who seem unable to dislodge their corrupt and brutal leaders, the people of Gaza facing the same powerlessness. I’ll make it short: Hamas is evil, Netanyahu and his far-right racist buddies are evil, both are pursuing some idea of victory that makes massive death tolls easy to shrug off. Hamas, having spent decades of relief money on tunnels and arms, is happy to use its own people as human shields. Netanyahu is willing to mete out mass death and risk his own people to maintain his political power. It should have stopped a long time ago. The U.S. should have lined up on the side of peace and used everything in its power to stop it. Trump has proclaimed himself a presidential candidate and enough progressives are declaring their unwillingness to vote for Biden over Gaza that— added to the RFK bullshit and all that—he might actually win. What a nightmare.
This didn’t start on October 7th. Many Renewal Jews have been advocates for peace and justice in Israel-Palestine for years. For decades. Just like they’ve advocated for every campaign for racial, economic, and environmental justice supported by the so-called progressives who now tell us we don’t have the right to mourn. And maybe not the right to exist. In those circles, the price of admission for Jews, regardless of how long and hard they’d worked side by side in all kinds of movements, was to praise Hamas, step back, and swallow whatever was shoved down our throats. Obviously, I’m not one of those long-term activists who felt betrayed by so-called allies on October 8th. I’ve dabbled a bit here and there, showing up for Black Lives Matter, for Sunrise, for debt forgiveness and like that. But I’m 24, not 60. Shim and Eileen were gobsmacked, and so were a bunch of their friends. They felt duped, all those solidarity pledges down the toilet, suddenly realizing that “ally” actually meant flunky or even lackey.
The planet is riddled with broken places where some people—Kurds, Tutsi, Cambodians, and too many others to count—have been singled out for destruction on account of identity or affiliation, and most of the world has watched in silence. The abolition of those countries has not been called for. People who share an aspect of identity with Israelis are deemed fair game for attack or annihilation, but no hunting season has been declared on the other identities tied to states responsible for war crimes.
There are multiple ethnostates on the planet (and MAGA would love the U.S. to become one of them), multiple countries that have killed many thousands to advance an idea of self-defense or national interest that has very little to do with either. The ordinary individuals identified with those states because their ancestors lived there or they share a linguistic, spiritual, or cultural heritage have not been boycotted, blackballed, or violently attacked for their identity.
It is impossible obtain precise figures, but the estimate that half a million Iraqis died because George Bush the younger concocted lies to justify that military venture to save his father’s reputation is right down the middle of the informed estimates available. That’s just one example of a death toll driven by the U.S. Individual Americans are generally safe walking their neighborhoods despite some having been taxpayers or even supporters of this carnage. I venture that most people would find it ridiculous to suggest that ordinary Americans should be held to account and subject to attack for this country’s foreign policy.
To achieve its imperialist objectives of destroying Ukraine as an independent nation, Russia has been murdering Ukranians at a rapid pace since 2022. Yet Russians and those who share Russian heritage who live in the U.S. or Australia or really anywhere are free to walk the streets without fear of a sniper or bomber attack despite sharing an identity with Putin and his ilk.
Jews, on the other hand, regardless of where we live or what we think or do are widely held to be responsible for not only the policies and actions of Israel but for all the evils of this world. Jews make up a fraction of one percent of global population—less than 2 percent of US population—estimated at a total world population of less than 16 million. The number of Jews on the planet, 80 or so years after the Holocaust, has still not reached its pre-WWII level. Most of the antisemitic lies deployed against Jews posit a kind of superhuman power, where this tiny fraction of humanity is able to attack, manipulate, and destroy the other 98 percent.
The crimes of Netanyahu’s government are not the actual reason that hatred of Jews is on the rise. The tremendous onslaught of Jew-hatred enabled by the internet has been the prime mover, multiplying the power of influencers who enrich themselves by offering the aggrieved not a solution to their very real problems but a very handy and popular scapegoat. For many, the Israel-Gaza war has provided a convenient cover story, something less tainted by vicious fantasies. It’s easier to get people to hate Jews when you equate that identity with Zionism and Zionism with unmitigated evil than it is to talk convincingly about Jewish space lasers or blood libel, drawing from the seemingly bottomless reservoir of hateful lies that preceded the state of Israel by centuries.
I have been heartbroken and appalled to see the cynical use the MAGA regime has made of antisemitism, purportedly to protect me but in fact making me feel far less safe. I have been heartbroken and appalled to see the horror the Netanyahu regime has unleashed on the people of Gaza. To see Jews canceling their public events, downplaying their identity out of fear, has frightened me. Sometimes I tell myself that having just published a Jewish novel will make me more vulnerable, even though the book is about building spiritual community to repair the world for everyone. I’ve been flooded with memories of a long list of incidents in my own life, starting with being chased home by the neighborhood Catholic school kids for killing Jesus, yet trying to calm down by telling myself this too shall pass.
I want to believe it, but when a non-Jewish friend asked me about the history of Jew hatred in this country, I saw anew how that history is not really known by those not directly affected by it. I could have started at almost any point in history, but the early twentieth century seemed apt. I named the huge 1939 German-American bund rally in Madison Square Garden. Henry Ford’s writing about “The International Jew, The World’s Problem.” Father Coughlin’s wildly popular antisemitic broadcasts. It’s not hard to draw a straight line from this twentieth century poison injected into the body politic to the neo-nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” while marching in Charlottesville in 2017, the whitewashing of Nick Fuentes by Tucker Carlson, or the many nauseating MAGA influencers who’ve joined the chorus.
Excellent organizations are spreading truth about this problem. It would be nice if they were supported by more other groups led by non-Jews, as in the end it’s as hard to see how Jews can alone defeat antisemitism anymore than Black people can defeat anti-Black racism without partners with access to people susceptible to racist beliefs. Here is a report from one of the best groups, Nexus, that stresses both fighting antisemitism and defending democracy, a necessary antidote.
Leonard Cohen with Sonny Rollins in 1989, “Who by Fire,” Cohen’s reworking of the Unetaneh Tokef prayer.