There’s a fascinating detail in a Semafor scoop on President Trump’s legal battles. Trump has declared the influential law firm of Paul Weiss persona non grata, in retaliation for the participation of some of the firm’s lawyers in Jan. 6 prosecutions and the president’s own case in New York. In order to smooth things out with the president, Ben Smith reports, Brad Karp, the firm’s chairman proposed “helping the White House respond to alleged instances of antisemitism that came out of the wave of campus protests last year.”
I’m not sure we in the Jewish community have fully processed the extent to which the battle against domestic anti-Semitism has come to dominate our political and cultural discourse. There have certainly been periods during which anti-Semitism itself was as prominently featured in the public square as it is today, and there have been periods when the battle against anti-Semitism globally was consistently a front-page story. But in the United States, there has never been a moment quite like this one, in which how to fight American anti-Semitism is a thread connecting numerous otherwise-disparate debates over national policy.
Obviously a landscape dominated by this subject will have pitfalls galore. But we should not kid ourselves: There has likely never been an opportunity like the one the Jewish community has right now. It is unprecedented to be in a political status quo in which politically influential legal figures believe the best path to the president’s good graces is to join the battle against Jew-hate in mainstream institutions.
A Jewish tendency, which I share, is to scan the road ahead for bandits and goblins. That’s fine, but there is a risk of going overboard. American Jews sometimes fall into the same trap that snared the biblical corps of spies sent by Moses to scout the Land of Israel before the nation’s arrival. They exaggerated the dangers ahead and concluded it would be better not to make the attempt at all.
Suspicion of Trump’s motives is not nearly a good-enough reason to sit out this fight; it is the pretense of those looking for an excuse for inaction. Anyone capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time is also capable of calling out anti-Semitism in Trump’s circle—whether from Tucker Carlson or the blood libelist recently hired to an important post within the Pentagon—while encouraging the departments of Justice and Education to punish the serial violators of Jewish civil rights.
As-a-Jews aside—that is, other than the Beinartian mascots of self-loathing—most American Jews are embracing the fight. That is because they know two things: One, that the explosion of anti-Semitism since 10/7, and the particularly sadistic nature of its bloodlust, won’t go away on its own, and may not go away at all. Two, that the community has no allies among the mainstream political “rights” groups, almost all of which are on the left ideologically. There are one or two libertarian-leaning free-speech groups that concentrate entirely on government censorship and thus would not notice if campus Hamasniks set a Jewish student on fire in front of them.
The Jews have allies here, but they are individual allies. It is outrageous that when activist groups march in defense of campus Hamasniks who have been punished and do so by co-opting the language of Holocaust victims. “First they came for the” anti-Zionists, we are told. The implication is that if the process isn’t stopped, “they” will come for the Jews, too. The proper response to such people is: They already came for the Jews, you imbeciles; you were there too.
After Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish organizations that had worked tirelessly to help other groups were abandoned in their own time of need. It wasn’t until Congress stepped in—Virginia Foxx, Elise Stefanik, with the bipartisan buy-in of folks like Ritchie Torres in the House and John Fetterman in the Senate—that the tide began to turn. Now the Justice Department wants in on the action.
Had there been one iota of institutional decency among the universities, it never would have gone this far. But now it has—because of the failures, deliberate or out of neglect, of everyone complaining that it has gotten to this point. And now it’s a matter of national concern.
It has never in American history been easier to make your voice heard on the subject of anti-Semitism. It has also, unfortunately, never been more important to do so.
