Harvard was additionally the place the place Schumer first noticed left-wing antisemitism in motion — utilizing the cloak of anti-Zionism, because it typically does right now. At a 1970 campus speech by the Israeli overseas minister, Abba Eban, college students within the gallery unfurled a banner that learn, Combat Zionist Imperialism. Schumer’s ebook remembers Eban’s reply:
“I’m speaking to you up there within the gallery,” Eban stated. “Each time a folks get their statehood, you applaud it. There’s just one folks, once they achieve statehood, who you don’t applaud, you condemn it — and that’s the Jewish folks.” 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 ebook devotes loads of area to exposing leftist antisemitism, together with calling out congressional colleagues like Consultant Ilhan Omar of Minnesota for antisemitic outbursts. He additionally calls out campus anti-Israel demonstrators, like a protester at a U.C.L.A. 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 goes to be day-after-day for you.”
Does Schumer fear that his get together is tilting in an anti-Israel path — one that can, 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 biggest bundle of assist to Israel ever, I solely misplaced three Democrats,” together with Bernie Sanders, an impartial who caucuses with the Democrats.
However he additionally warned that “the best hazard to Israel, long-term, is when you lose half of America” — the liberal half. On one in every of Netanyahu’s earlier visits to the USA, Schumer informed me he urged the prime minister to “go on Rachel Maddow and never simply Sean Hannity.” Netanyahu ignored the recommendation, and Schumer, in a Senate speech, later referred to as for new elections to switch him, for which he stays “fiercely proud.” It confirmed Democrats, he stated, that it’s doable to oppose Netanyahu whereas championing the Jewish state.
“My job,” he informed me, “is to maintain the left pro-Israel.”
Then there’s right-wing antisemitism. Simply as some anti-Israel demonstrators use the phrase “Zionist” as an alternative to Jew, corners of the appropriate have additionally had their own coded antisemitic language, like “neocons” or “globalists.”
