I had already interviewed Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic chief, for his new e book, “Antisemitism in America: A Warning,” when President Donald Trump accused him of being “a Palestinian” who was “not Jewish anymore.” A couple of days later, Schumer determined to postpone his e book tour after becoming a member of Republicans to help a stopgap spending invoice to keep away from a authorities shutdown — one that will have performed straight into Trump’s palms. Livid progressives have been threatening an illustration at each cease.
Derided by the MAGA proper and yelled at by the far left? Exterior of Katz’s Delicatessen, it’s onerous to think about a extra Jewish place to be.
As Schumer advised it in his modest New York Metropolis residence over gluten-free cookies (and disquisitions about digestive points), he’s been in that place most of his grownup life. The son of an exterminator, he went to Harvard College within the fall of 1967 and shortly acquired concerned in anti-war politics. However by no means as a scholar radical.
“I didn’t like the left taking over buildings,” he advised me, including he believed in working via the system, not in opposition to it. Scholar militants “didn’t want to debate; they wanted to call people names.”
The left’s antisemitism
Harvard was additionally the place the place Schumer first noticed left-wing antisemitism in motion — utilizing the cloak of anti-Zionism, because it usually does as we speak. At a 1970 campus speech by Israeli Overseas Minister Abba Eban, college students within the gallery unfurled a banner that learn: Struggle Zionist Imperialism. Schumer’s e book recollects Eban’s reply:
“I am talking to you up there in the gallery,” Eban stated. “Every time a people get their statehood, you applaud it. There’s only one people, when they gain statehood, who you don’t applaud, you condemn it — and that is the Jewish people.” The double normal — whether or not it was about who might work in what career or transfer to Moscow within the Czarist empire, or who might have a state — was the essence of antisemitism.
It’s notable, and politically gutsy, that Schumer’s e book devotes loads of house to exposing leftist antisemitism, together with calling out congressional colleagues like Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota for antisemitic outbursts. He additionally calls out campus anti-Israel demonstrators, like a protester at a UCLA rally screaming, “Beat that fucking Jew” subsequent to a piñata bearing the likeness of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, or a masked thug at Columbia telling Jewish college students that “the seventh of October is going to be every day for you.”
Does Schumer fear that his social gathering is tilting in an anti-Israel path — one that may, at its edges, additionally tilt into antisemitism? “My caucus is overwhelmingly pro-Israel,” he insisted to me, noting that when the Senate final yr voted for “the largest package of aid to Israel ever, I only lost three Democrats,” together with Bernie Sanders, an impartial who caucuses with the Democrats.
However he additionally warned that “the greatest danger to Israel, long term, is if you lose half of America” — the liberal half. On certainly one of Netanyahu’s earlier visits to the US, Schumer advised me he urged the prime minister to “go on Rachel Maddow and not just Sean Hannity.” Netanyahu ignored the recommendation, and Schumer, in a Senate speech, later referred to as for brand new elections to switch him, for which he stays “fiercely proud.” It confirmed Democrats, he stated, that it’s attainable to oppose Netanyahu whereas championing the Jewish state.
“My job,” he advised me, “is to keep the left pro-Israel.”
‘A light sleeper’
Then there’s right-wing antisemitism. Simply as some anti-Israel demonstrators use the phrase “Zionist” as an alternative choice to Jew, corners of the best have additionally had their very own coded antisemitic language, like “neocons” or “globalists.”
Trump’s dig at Schumer’s Jewishness was of a bit. “There’s a long and dark history of non-Jewish people trying to decide who gets to be Jewish,” Schumer advised me in a current follow-up dialog. “Maybe President Trump should spend less time trafficking in bigotry and focus more on rooting the antisemites out of his administration.” That would come with folks just like the Pentagon deputy press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, whose obsessions embrace relitigating Leo Frank’s 1915 lynching in Georgia, or Amer Ghalib, a Michigan mayor who’s Trump’s selection as ambassador to Kuwait and who seems to have preferred a Fb put up referring to Jews as “monkeys.”
That has occurred earlier than: In France within the Eighteen Nineties in the course of the Dreyfus affair, in Germany within the Twenties within the run-up to the Third Reich. May it occur right here? Schumer insists he wrote his e book with a “nervousness rather than a pessimism,” as a result of the roots of America’s heat towards Jews run deep. However as he additionally factors out, citing Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien, “antisemitism is a light sleeper.”
After I talked about to some mates that I had learn and preferred Schumer’s e book and was going to jot down a column about it, they kvetched that the New York Democrat had allow them to down on one situation or one other. Then once more, the place as we speak is the sitting Republican senator, consultant or governor prepared to name out the bigotries on his personal aspect? Did Senate Majority Chief John Thune defend his colleague within the face of the president’s slander?
A great Jew stands up for his folks whatever the value and whatever the politics of it. On this, Schumer has acquitted himself bravely.
Bret Stephens is a New York Instances columnist.
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