Antisemitism In America

Where in your own life do you notice the line between intense disagreement and dehumanization starting to blur? In Antisemitism in America, Senator Chuck Schumer argues that the way America now talks about—and acts on—its anger is waking an old hatred. He contends that antisemitism is not just a Jewish problem; it’s a stress test for American democracy. When societies grow anxious, fragmented, or tribal, hatred of Jews resurges first and spreads fastest. If you want to know whether your democracy is in trouble, watch how it treats its Jews.

The Core Claim

Schumer’s central claim is both historical and urgent: antisemitism is a “light sleeper,” always ready to awaken when social conditions destabilize, political leaders wink at conspiratorial thinking, and technology amplifies grievance. Today’s mix—post-9/11 uncertainty, the 2008 financial crisis hangover, social media radicalization, campus polarization, and the Israel–Hamas war after October 7—has created the most dangerous American climate for Jews in generations. Citing FBI data and ADL tallies, he notes Jews make up roughly 2 percent of the U.S. population but are the targets in the majority of religion-based hate crimes. That’s the smoke; the book explains the fire.

What the Book Covers

First, you get a crisp definition of antisemitism as hatred of a people—religion, culture, and lineage—instead of a theological disagreement. It’s why Jews have been attacked as capitalists and communists, godless and too devout, weak and tyrannical, sometimes all at once. Then Schumer explores Jewish identity as lived experience—a peoplehood more than a creed—using stories from his family’s Brooklyn table (Friday Night Dinner, not always called Shabbat), a Bar Mitzvah overshadowed by JFK’s assassination, and his grandfather’s journey from a union hall to running a tiny extermination business. These vignettes anchor a core insight: to understand antisemitism, you must understand what it means to be Jewish in all its layers.

You will then walk through the long arc—from Pharaoh and Purim to ghettos, expulsions, and the Holocaust—showing how antisemitism follows a recurring cycle: toleration, scapegoating, exclusion, and too often, violence. That cycle, Schumer argues, now echoes in the United States. He charts our own history: immigration quotas of the 1920s, the St. Louis turned away in 1939, midcentury discrimination at clubs and firms, and the late-20th-century “Golden Age” when Jews rose in culture and public life—only to see a new surge since Charlottesville and the Tree of Life massacre, spiking dramatically after October 7, 2023.

How We Got Here

A central engine, Schumer argues, is technology. He traces a throughline from the printing press fueling medieval blood libels, to the yellow press around the Dreyfus Affair, to Nazi Germany’s state-run radio, and Father Coughlin’s broadcasts in America. Today’s accelerants—platform algorithms, anonymity, scale, and fragmented realities—supercharge anti-Jewish memes and conspiracies. Pair that with social dislocation (think Émile Durkheim’s “anomie,” updated by Jonathan Haidt’s work on social media and youth anxiety), and you get a public primed to scapegoat. When pressures spike, the “other” becomes the outlet—and Jews have historically been cast in that role.

Right, Left, and Israel

Schumer is blunt: antisemitism today arises on the right and the left, though it takes different forms. On the far right: blood-and-soil nationalism, white power nostalgia, Great Replacement theory, George Soros obsession, QAnon recycling of medieval blood libels, and violent lone-wolf attacks. He recounts being targeted as the “Big Jew” by January 6 rioters. On the left: rage at power, systems, and empire sometimes crosses into dehumanizing rhetoric and harassment of Jews, especially on campuses, where chants (“from the river to the sea,” “by any means necessary,” “globalize the intifada”) often ignore that many Jews hear them as calls for their erasure or harm. Schumer describes his own attempts to dialogue with movement leaders and the sobering distance he encountered.

Because Israel is inseparable from most Jews’ sense of peoplehood and safety—especially post-Holocaust—debates about Israel frequently morph into hostility toward Jews in America. Schumer threads a nuanced line: you can criticize Israeli policy (he has), push for minimizing civilian harm in Gaza, and still insist on Israel’s right to exist and defend itself. The boundary he draws, echoing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s examples, is when critique becomes: double standards, erasure of Jewish self-determination, Nazi comparisons, or collective blame of Jews for Israel’s actions.

Why It Matters to You

If you care about pluralism, this is your fight. Schumer argues that antisemitism imperils national security and corrodes democratic trust. He urges leaders to police their own movements—Republicans to name and shame far-right conspiracists; Democrats to call out antisemitic rhetoric cloaked in social justice. He also champions education: about Jewish life, the Holocaust, and how to spot the specific moves antisemitism makes (David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism; Dara Horn’s essays; Simon Schama’s histories are frequent touchstones). The actionable message: learn the history, challenge the tropes, defend free debate without dehumanization, and refuse to normalize the “little” slights that often precede big harms.

Signal to watch

“When a society starts to turn on its Jews, other hatreds quickly follow.” The canary dies first.

Across the book, Schumer plays the role his name implies: shomer, a guardian on the wall. His warning is clear and accessible: understand what antisemitism is, where it’s showing up now, how technology magnifies it, why Israel is central to Jewish identity, and what practical steps leaders and citizens can take to stop the slide. If you want a field guide to spotting and resisting an old hatred in a new age, this is it.

Schumer argues you can’t fight antisemitism until you name it correctly. It is not a theological quarrel or a policy dispute; it is hatred of Jews as a people—their religion, culture, lineage, and imagined power. The German agitator Wilhelm Marr coined “antisemitism” in 1879 to give a pseudo-scientific gloss to raw bigotry; he even launched a “League of Antisemites” to make anti-Jewish politics respectable. The modern term masks an ancient impulse.

Beyond Religion: A People, Not Just a Faith

Antisemitism targets Jews whether or not they’re observant. Schumer underscores this with his own family: his grandfather doubted God but was no less Jewish to antisemites. That’s why Jews are attacked as capitalists in one era and communists in the next; too rich or too poor; too clannish or not loyal enough. The details shift; the core is constant—belief that Jews are a dangerous “other” to be excluded, controlled, or punished.

Timeless, Borderless, and Contradictory

Schumer leans on historians (David Nirenberg, Paul Johnson, Simon Schama) to show antisemitism’s continuity across empires and centuries. It thrives in contradiction: Jews are accused of inventing the plague because fewer Jews die (due to ritual hygiene) and then of spreading it; of both hoarding money and seducing governments into socialism; of being rootless cosmopolitans and ethno-nationalists. The contradictions aren’t a bug; they’re the point: hatred seeks a target, then invents reasons.

The Double-Standard Move

One reliable tell, Schumer says, is a double standard. In medieval Europe, guilds and cities barred Jews from professions and residency while praising their own civic virtues. Today, the move shows up as demanding from Israel (the world’s only Jewish state) conditions we don’t demand from others—or treating any Jew as a stand-in for Israel’s actions. Both recycle an old move: exceptionalizing Jews for special restriction or blame.

Why Definitions Matter for You

If you see antisemitism only as swastikas, you’ll miss subtler versions spreading online and offline. That matters for everyday life: a class where Jewish students are told “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” a deli boycotted because its owner is Israeli-American, or a synagogue blocked during prayers. These aren’t “mere politics”; they treat Jews as uniquely illegitimate. The simple practice: ask whether a claim would make sense applied to any other group or nation. If not, you’re likely looking at antisemitism—not policy critique.

Field check

Would this criticism still hold if you swapped out “Jew” or “Israel” for any other minority or state? If not, you’ve spotted a double standard—the hallmark of antisemitism.

(Context: The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition—which the U.S. State Department uses as guidance—similarly highlights double standards, Nazi comparisons, denial of Jewish self-determination, and collective blame.)

To understand antisemitism, Schumer says you need to understand Jewishness as it’s actually lived—something richer than a set of rituals. He offers a Brooklyn childhood filled with Friday Night Dinners (not always called Shabbat), Ebinger’s blackout cake, loud loving arguments about baseball and elections, and a sense that “we rise and fall together.” It’s religion, yes—but also peoplehood, story, food, humor, and an inherited lens on vulnerability and endurance.

Family Stories That Carry Identity

You meet Schumer’s great-grandfather in Chortkiv, a scholar who took “be fruitful and multiply” to heart (eighteen children). You meet his grandfather Jack, an agnostic who fell in love with ideas at a Lower East Side labor hall, read Spinoza, organized workers, and then ran a tiny exterminating company. You hear how a Bar Mitzvah collided with JFK’s assassination and a stormy quarrel about 75-cent after-dinner drinks. These details matter: they show how Jewishness sits in ordinary life, not as an ideological banner.

Many Ways of Being Jewish

Schumer insists there’s no single Jewish template. There are Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Ethiopian Jews; secular, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Haredi; socialist kibbutzniks and Wall Street capitalists; Zionists and anti-Zionists; and yes, the joke that two Jews produce three opinions. The consistent thread is peoplehood—why a French Jew and an Iranian Jew might feel immediate kinship: shared history and how the world has treated them.

Heroes, Pride, and Bruises

Identity is nourished by pride and pressure. Schumer recalls how Sandy Koufax refusing to pitch on Yom Kippur—“Zeus in the Jewish pantheon”—expanded what Jews believed they could be in America. At the same time, neighborhood priests who preached that “Jews killed Jesus,” or a motorist screaming “you f---ing Jew” at his father, made clear that acceptance was incomplete. The community asked of every event, half-jokingly, “Is it good for the Jews?” It was humor—and historical muscle memory.

Why This Helps You Read the Moment

When you grasp Jewishness as peoplehood—woven of culture, memory, diversity, and vulnerability—you see why certain campus chants or social media memes strike Jews as existential rather than merely political. You also see why calling any Jew a “Zionist” as an epithet, or boycotting a random Jewish deli, doesn’t read as critique of a policy; it reads as a denial of belonging. Understanding identity is the first deescalation step.

(Context: Schumer’s emphasis on peoplehood aligns with classic sociological accounts and with modern histories like Simon Schama’s The Story of the Jews, which treats Judaism as a civilization carried through time as much as a creed.)

Schumer lays out a repeating pattern: Jews are tolerated and sometimes celebrated; a crisis hits; elites or demagogues cast Jews as the problem; exclusion hardens; violence follows. This is the throughline from Pharaoh’s Egypt to Haman’s Persia; from Antiochus’ desecration of the Temple (Hanukkah’s origin) to medieval expulsions and the Holocaust. Jewish holidays encode the memory: “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.” The feasting masks a lesson: vigilance.

How The Pattern Works

Acceptance breeds presence; presence plus crisis breeds scapegoating. In England, Jews lived alongside Christians until Edward I expelled them in 1290—after seizing Jewish property. In Spain, centuries of convivencia ended in forced conversion and expulsion in 1492—right as Converso financiers helped launch Columbus. In Germany, a cultured, modern, and patriotic Jewry served in World War I—only to be blamed for defeat, reparations, and inflation, then targeted for annihilation within a decade of Hitler’s rise.

Why Contradictions Don’t Matter to Hate

Schumer invokes David Nirenberg’s finding: societies long defined themselves against “the Jew,” projecting whatever they despised—elitism or backwardness, capitalism or communism—onto Jews. Jean-Paul Sartre’s line, “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him,” fits the record. The content of the charge is flexible; the function is fixed: unify a majority by blaming a minority.

Why It Feels So Immediate to Jews

Schumer’s family story stitches past to present. In 1941 in Chortkiv (present-day Ukraine), Nazis assembled dozens of his relatives—from infants to elders—on the family porch. When his great-grandmother refused to go, they machine-gunned them all as the town watched. That’s why, at Yad Vashem’s Children’s Memorial, mirrors multiply five small flames into an infinity of lost lives. For Jews, “history” isn’t abstract; it’s the name behind a cousin, a street, a recipe.

Why This Matters to You

If you’re non-Jewish and the current anxiety feels overblown, this context helps. Jews are scanning for the early notes of an old symphony. When you hear calls to erase the only Jewish state, when you see mainstreaming of Nazi comparisons, when a synagogue’s doors are blocked, Jews don’t hear a hot take; they hear the overture to the same cycle. Knowing that helps you respond with solidarity before the pattern advances.

(Parallel reads: Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth and Deborah Lipstadt’s Antisemitism: Here and Now offer complementary frames for recognizing early markers and rhetorical slippage.)

The American story has swung between exclusion and embrace. Schumer revisits both. Early Sephardi refugees had to fight Peter Stuyvesant to settle in New Amsterdam. A century later, George Washington wrote that Jews should sit “under his own vine and fig tree… and none to make him afraid.” Yet the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act choked off Jewish immigration; in 1939, the St. Louis—nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees aboard—was turned away. Midcentury Jews faced club bans, job quotas, and open prejudice. Then came a striking mid-to-late 20th-century ascent into media, science, law, and politics—the “Golden Age.”

A Taste of Arrival

Schumer’s grandmother grabs Tip O’Neill’s elbow at his swearing-in and says, “Isn’t America a great country?”—because her son, an exterminator who never went to college, watched his son become a Congressman. He recalls a country where Ralph Lifshitz rebranded as Ralph Lauren, Seinfeld dominated TV, Elie Wiesel shaped moral debates, and Jewish boxers, comedians, and scholars were mainstream heroes. That normalcy felt like destiny.

The Turn After 9/11 and 2008

But the mood shifted. 9/11 birthed “Jews knew” conspiracies about Mossad. The 2008 crash revived caricatures of Jewish financiers and seeded the right’s fixation on George Soros as a puppetmaster. In 2017, tiki-torch marchers at Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us.” In 2018, a man murdered eleven Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The line from online conspiracy to offline bloodshed shortened.

October 7 and After

Nothing in Schumer’s lifetime shocked him like October 7. He met parents of hostages; he watched hours of raw footage. Within days, some U.S. rallies framed Hamas’s massacres as “resistance,” or blamed Israel “entirely.” Jewish businesses were boycotted, a Manhattan deli defaced with a swastika, a Queens teacher trapped in her office as students hunted her after seeing she’d attended a pro-Israel vigil. ADL counted nearly 3,300 anti-Jewish incidents in the three months after the attack—more than four times the prior year’s period.

Why It Feels Existential

For many Jews, America has been the great exception to history. Schumer asks whether it can remain so if leaders normalize conspiracies, campuses can’t protect Jewish students, and social media turns every rage into a pile-on. The answer depends on whether citizens will reassert the old promise Washington made and treat Jews as full members—not as avatars for a faraway war.

(Context: Franklin Foer’s essay “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending” offers a parallel periodization; both see 9/11 and 2008 as hinge points.)

Schumer’s most original throughline is technological: communications revolutions have repeatedly turbocharged antisemitism. The 15th-century printing press turned a local blood libel in Trent into a European cause célèbre. Yellow journalism amplified the Dreyfus Affair. Nazi radio—mass-produced “People’s Receivers”—brought daily dehumanization into German homes. Father Coughlin’s broadcasts piped Jew-blame to 30 million Americans. Today’s platforms scale that pattern beyond anything prior.

Why Social Media Is Different

Four features make it combustible: scale (billions of users), lack of editorial guardrails (no editors to kill lies), aggregation (isolated bigots find one another instantly), and anonymity (people say things with no social cost). Schumer points to X/Twitter’s post–October 7 explosion of antisemitic content, TikTok’s viral Holocaust denial, and the steady stream of AI-fabricated “Jewish power” memes seeded from fringe boards into mainstream feeds. The result: normalization through repetition.

A Frayed Public Square

Pair platform design with social fragmentation and you get something like Durkheim’s “anomie”: a breakdown in shared norms and belonging. The Surgeon General now calls loneliness an epidemic. Jonathan Haidt traces anxiety and self-harm spikes among teens to the “like/follow” era. Pew finds news diets splintered: Fox and MSNBC viewers inhabit different factual planets. In that soup, conspiracies feel like connection—and “the powerful Jew” remains a durable script.

A Practical Way Forward

Schumer isn’t naive about regulating speech in a First Amendment culture, but he argues platforms can enforce their own rules consistently, demote dehumanizing content, and dismantle bot/troll networks. Citizens can learn telltales: triple parentheses to “echo” Jews, “globalist” as dog whistle, AI images that staple Stars of David onto shadowy financiers. Schools and families can teach media literacy and Holocaust history together so kids spot pattern and context, not just pixels.

Practical check

Before sharing, ask: Does this post dehumanize a group, deny a people’s right to exist, or invoke hidden-hand conspiracies? If yes, don’t amplify.

(Context: See Sabine von Mering and Monika Hübscher’s Antisemitism on Social Media for complementary research; Maja Adena et al. document how Nazi radio exposure correlated with local antisemitic actions.)

Schumer distinguishes two right-wing streams. One is the old “genteel” WASP antisemitism—exclusion from clubs, firms, and neighborhoods. Humiliating and unjust, it rarely turned lethal and has receded. The other is virulent populist antisemitism—alt-right tribalism, Holocaust memes, and lone-wolf violence—that’s small in numbers but dangerous in ideas. He argues the latter is resurgent and too often winked at by political leaders.

Ethnonationalism and Conspiracy

The Charlottesville chant “Blood and soil” updated a Nazi slogan; “Jews will not replace us” welded the Great Replacement theory to American grievance. Obsession with George Soros reprised “international Jewry” tropes. QAnon repackaged medieval blood libels (elite child-blood harvesting) for the meme age. These claims don’t stay online. The Pittsburgh shooter targeted a synagogue because it partnered with HIAS to help refugees—he believed Jews were importing “invaders.”

January 6 Up Close

Schumer’s most personal chapter is January 6. As vice president–elect certification paused, a Capitol Police officer yanked his collar: “Senator, you’re in danger.” Down a hallway: “There’s the big Jew—let’s get him.” He was rushed back. On the floors and in the mob, Nazi symbols: a Camp Auschwitz hoodie, 6MWE (“Six million wasn’t enough”). He watched the Confederate flag paraded through the Capitol and later saw conservative backtracking. The point: when conspiracy, grievance, and leader indulgence mix, antisemitism surfaces fast.

Call-In From the Inside

Schumer urges conservatives to do what he asks liberals to do on their side: draw bright lines. Don’t launder “replacement” rhetoric into policy talk; don’t platform white identitarians; don’t shrug at antisemitic influencers. You can oppose illegal immigration or critique district attorneys without invoking Soros as sinister puppetmaster. Policing within one’s own tribe is the most effective antidote.

(Comparative note: Daniel Allington et al. find antisemitism strongly correlates with authoritarianism and belief in “malevolent global conspiracies”—a profile common in far-right environments.)

As a lifelong Democrat, Schumer finds this chapter the most painful: a movement rooted in human rights can, in moments of maximalist anger, slide into dehumanization. He distinguishes between forceful critique of Israeli policy—which he defends—and rhetoric or tactics that deny Jewish belonging or safety. He grounds his view in his own protest years at Harvard (1967–71) and the present campus climate.

Lessons From 1969

Schumer opposed the Vietnam War and organized for antiwar candidates. But when SDS/PLP tactics turned coercive—occupying buildings, harassing moderates—he saw blowback help elect “law and order” Richard Nixon. His lifelong takeaway: passion without persuasion backfires. He applied that lens to a 1970 campus protest of Israel’s Abba Eban; when radicals unfurled “Fight Zionist Imperialism,” Eban answered: you applaud every people’s statehood—except the Jews. That’s a double standard.

Campus 2023–24

After October 7, many campuses saw solidarity events morph into vilification. A Columbia protest leader said “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” then added people should be “grateful” he wasn’t murdering them. Protesters blocked an Orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles; a New York subway agitator demanded “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist—this is your chance to get out.” A Brooklyn museum director’s home was vandalized and labeled “white-supremacist Zionist.” For Jews, these aren’t policy debates; they are targeted threats.

Chants That Cross the Line

Schumer parses disputed slogans. “From the river to the sea” includes the full land mass of Israel; Hamas’s charter and leaders read it as erasure. “By any means necessary” or “globalize the intifada” sound to many Jews like license for worldwide violence. He recounts a long meeting with leaders from left-aligned groups he’s worked with on local issues; they parted respectfully but with deep impasse—their moral focus on Gaza civilian deaths was real; his moral focus on Jewish survival was nonnegotiable.

The Ask to the Left

Progressives can push for a ceasefire, humanitarian aid, and Palestinian self-determination without demeaning or endangering Jews. That requires rejecting chants and tactics that target Jews as Jews, disciplining faculty or students who harass, and insisting that anti-racism includes Jews. As with the right, the most credible corrections come from inside the movement.

(Parallel case: The UK Labour Party’s antisemitism crisis under Jeremy Corbyn—documented by an independent watchdog—shows how quickly left antisemitism can metastasize when leaders equivocate.)

Why does Israel sit at the core of this moment? For many Jews, Israel isn’t an abstract foreign policy topic; it’s a guarantor of safety after millennia of statelessness and the trauma of the Shoah. Schumer recounts Truman’s recognition of Israel minutes after independence, the Six-Day War’s shock-and-pride, and his first sight of Jerusalem’s skyline. He also describes his complicated relationship with Prime Minister Netanyahu and his insistence on bipartisan U.S. support—strained by recent Israeli politics.

You Can Critique Policy

Schumer has criticized aspects of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, urged minimizing civilian harm, and supports a demilitarized two-state solution backed by pragmatic Arab partners (e.g., a Saudi-led reconstruction framework). Many American Jews share this posture: they back Israel’s right to exist and defend itself, want hostages freed and Hamas degraded, and also want Palestinian civilians protected and a path to peace restored.

When It Becomes Antisemitism

He uses the IHRA guideposts. It’s antisemitic to deny Jewish self-determination (“no Jewish state”), to apply double standards (unique demands of Israel not asked of others), to make Nazi comparisons, or to blame Jews collectively for Israel. Boycotting a random Jewish deli or vandalizing a synagogue because of Gaza isn’t solidarity; it’s bigotry. Calling Israel “genocidal” ignores the term’s legal meaning and the role of Hamas’s tactics (embedded in civilian areas, human shields, even leaders calling Gazan deaths “necessary sacrifices”).

Terms That Mislead

Labeling Israel a “settler-colonial state” flattens history: Jews are indigenous to the land, and post-1948 demographics include hundreds of thousands expelled or fleeing from Arab countries. The unresolved Palestinian displacement (the Nakba) is real and tragic—but erasing Jewish indigeneity or statehood isn’t a roadmap to peace; it’s a return to the zero-sum trap that has doomed prior rounds.

How You Talk About This Without Harm

• Be precise with terms. “War crimes,” “siege,” and “civilian harm” have meanings; “genocide” has a different one.
• Critique policy, not people. Don’t target Jewish institutions, businesses, or students.
• Reject dehumanizing chants. If the literal meaning implies erasure or violence, don’t use it.
• Name Hamas’s tactics. Acknowledge how they amplify civilian suffering.

(Context: Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1975 UN speech against “Zionism is racism” remains a model for exposing double standards while defending equal standards for all nations.)