Stephens: Chuck Schumer isn’t Jewish like the Pope isn’t Catholic
I had already interviewed Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, for his new book, “Antisemitism in America: A Warning,” when President Donald Trump accused him of being “a Palestinian” who was “not Jewish anymore.” A few days later, Schumer decided to postpone his book tour after joining Republicans to support a stopgap spending bill to avoid a government shutdown — one that would have played straight into Trump’s hands. Furious progressives were threatening a demonstration at every stop.
Derided by the MAGA right and yelled at by the far left? Outside of Katz’s Delicatessen, it’s hard to imagine a more Jewish place to be.
As Schumer told it in his modest New York City apartment over gluten-free cookies (and disquisitions about digestive issues), he’s been in that place most of his adult life. The son of an exterminator, he went to Harvard University in the fall of 1967 and quickly got involved in anti-war politics. But never as a student radical.
“I didn’t like the left taking over buildings,” he told me, adding he believed in working through the system, not against it. Student militants “didn’t want to debate; they wanted to call people names.”
The left’s antisemitism
Harvard was also the place where Schumer first saw left-wing antisemitism in action — using the cloak of anti-Zionism, as it often does today. At a 1970 campus speech by Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, students in the gallery unfurled a banner that read: Fight Zionist Imperialism. Schumer’s book recalls Eban’s reply:
“I am talking to you up there in the gallery,” Eban said. “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 standard — whether it was about who could work in what profession or move to Moscow in the Czarist empire, or who could have a state — was the essence of antisemitism.
It’s notable, and politically gutsy, that Schumer’s book devotes plenty of space to exposing leftist antisemitism, including calling out congressional colleagues like Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota for antisemitic outbursts. He also calls out campus anti-Israel demonstrators, like a protester at a UCLA rally screaming, “Beat that fucking Jew” next to a piñata bearing the likeness of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, or a masked thug at Columbia telling Jewish students that “the seventh of October is going to be every day for you.”
Does Schumer worry that his party is tilting in an anti-Israel direction — one that will, at its edges, also tilt into antisemitism? “My caucus is overwhelmingly pro-Israel,” he insisted to me, noting that when the Senate last year voted for “the largest package of aid to Israel ever, I only lost three Democrats,” including Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
But he also warned that “the greatest danger to Israel, long term, is if you lose half of America” — the liberal half. On one of Netanyahu’s previous visits to the United States, Schumer told me he urged the prime minister to “go on Rachel Maddow and not just Sean Hannity.” Netanyahu ignored the advice, and Schumer, in a Senate speech, later called for new elections to replace him, for which he remains “fiercely proud.” It showed Democrats, he said, that it’s possible to oppose Netanyahu while championing the Jewish state.
“My job,” he told me, “is to keep the left pro-Israel.”
‘A light sleeper’
Then there’s right-wing antisemitism. Just as some anti-Israel demonstrators use the word “Zionist” as a substitute for Jew, corners of the right have also had their own coded antisemitic language, like “neocons” or “globalists.”
Trump’s dig at Schumer’s Jewishness was of a piece. “There’s a long and dark history of non-Jewish people trying to decide who gets to be Jewish,” Schumer told me in a recent follow-up conversation. “Maybe President Trump should spend less time trafficking in bigotry and focus more on rooting the antisemites out of his administration.” That would include people like the Pentagon deputy press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, whose obsessions include relitigating Leo Frank’s 1915 lynching in Georgia, or Amer Ghalib, a Michigan mayor who’s Trump’s choice as ambassador to Kuwait and who appears to have liked a Facebook post referring to Jews as “monkeys.”
Where does this leave American Jews today? “My worry as an American Jew,” Schumer told me, “is a pincer, from the right and left, who would cohabit in strange and dangerous ways.”That has happened before: In France in the 1890s during the Dreyfus affair, in Germany in the 1920s in the run-up to the Third Reich. Could it happen here? Schumer insists he wrote his book with a “nervousness rather than a pessimism,” because the roots of America’s warmth toward Jews run deep. But as he also points out, citing Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien, “antisemitism is a light sleeper.”
When I mentioned to some friends that I had read and liked Schumer’s book and was going to write a column about it, they kvetched that the New York Democrat had let them down on one issue or another. Then again, where today is the sitting Republican senator, representative or governor willing to call out the bigotries on his own side? Did Senate Majority Leader John Thune defend his colleague in the face of the president’s slander?
A good Jew stands up for his people regardless of the cost and regardless of the politics of it. On this, Schumer has acquitted himself bravely.
Bret Stephens is a New York Times columnist.