Anti-Semitism Is Becoming Mainstream

Hypocrisy is not an altogether bad thing. So long as our society has hypocrites, we have not totally lost our moral bearings. The hypocrite pretends to be good because the hypocrite believes that society admires good and condemns wrong. It’s time to worry when the hypocrite disappears—because that is the moment when wrongdoing has acquired impunity.

Yesterday, a man crashed his car into a synagogue and preschool in West Bloomfield, Michigan. He was armed and may have intended to slaughter the children at the school. Vigilant security officers shot him dead before he could complete his crime.

Since Hamas’s October 7 terror attacks on Israel—and the ensuing war in Gaza and other countries bordering Israel—anti-Jewish terror has spread worldwide. Two Israeli-embassy staffers targeted and murdered in Washington, D.C. Twelve people injured by a Molotov cocktail hurled at a free-the-hostages rally in Boulder, Colorado. Two killed during a terror attack on a synagogue in Manchester, England. The Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre in Australia, the deadliest terror attack in that country’s history. All of these just in 2025.

These killings—and dozens of other attempts and near misses in many countries—have disgusted decent people and embarrassed even many who hold otherwise anti-Jewish views.

They are also expressions of something harder to process: the explosive growth of anti-Jewish sentiment as a broadly accepted part of modern culture.

Almost half of Republican voters younger than 50 believe that the Holocaust did not happen as historians describe, according to a recent study by the Manhattan Institute. One-quarter of that cohort openly expresses anti-Jewish views; another 30 percent don’t reject openly anti-Semitic individuals.

[Read: ‘The more I’m around young people, the more panicked I am’]

A 2024 University of Maryland poll found that 7 percent of under-35s of all parties would not vote for a Jewish candidate for office.

A Yale poll of American youth this past fall found that voters under 30 were roughly twice as likely to say that Jews had a negative effect on America than voters in general. More than 40 percent of 18-to-22-year-olds agreed with at least one of a series of anti-Semitic statements read to them by the pollsters.

These are hard data outcroppings from a seething sea of online hate. Every TikToker, Twitch streamer, YouTuber, podcaster, and X account has recognized that a sure way to spike engagement is either to espouse anti-Jewish views yourself, or platform those who do. There’s debate about whether this is an organic product of the mysterious inner workings of algorithms—or deliberately designed by the programmers of TikTok and X. There’s no debate that it’s happening, and that it’s transforming consumers.

A large constituency wants to depict at least some of this transformation as a perhaps regrettable but surely understandable reaction to Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Young people see horrifying images on their phones and are duly horrified. If anti-Semitism is on the rise, it must be Israel’s fault. Certain things they see are indeed alarming. But among the flaws in this theory are these awkward facts: Some of the worst images purportedly from Gaza are actually from the Syrian civil war, recycled under false pretenses—and many people seem to become upset by the atrocities only when they are blamed on Israel. Many other images prove to be either wholly faked or misleadingly presented: A Hamas rocket, for example, strikes a Gaza hospital and is maliciously described (and credulously accepted) as an Israeli strike instead.

But the larger problem is that there’s no shortage of horrifying images of atrocities committed elsewhere in the world, including the Iranian regime’s massacre of protesters, or by Hamas against Israelis, including intentional harm to children and sexual abuse of women and girls. Many of these images were shared in real time by Hamas itself. Why did some upsetting images spread anti-Israel attitudes, when other upsetting images failed to rally viewers to Israel’s cause? For some Israel critics, the identification of Israel with “us,” the advanced Western world, imposes a stricter moral standard than is required of “them,” the poor non-West. It would be nice to believe that the human mind builds from evidence to belief, but the sad truth is that we human beings are highly adept at selecting evidence to corroborate the beliefs we wish to hold. Many Americans—many more than before—wish to hold anti-Israel and anti-Jewish beliefs. They select their evidence accordingly, even wantonly false evidence.  

[Yair Rosenberg: What J. D. Vance—and many others—miss about anti-Semitism]

When anti-Israel narratives of “genocide” and “apartheid” are followed by anti-Jewish terrorism on U.S. soil, many propagators of those narratives—especially those in or seeking elective office—hasten to repudiate the violence. “Who says A, must say B” goes an old quote often attributed to Vladimir Lenin. But not everyone can look B in the face when B shows up. And of course even fewer wish to be blamed for B no matter how strenuously they were warned that it was coming when they began their exploration of the alphabet of anti-Semitism.

Still, this particular hypocrisy should be welcomed. It offers a place to start from as we work our way back to decency and tolerance. If the Jewish state is the source of world evil—meriting its eradication from the “river to the sea”—then it’s just a matter of statistics that, sooner or later, somebody will decide to begin the eradicating against easier targets closer to home. The project of encouraging anti-Zionism without fomenting anti-Semitism is reminiscent of many other attempts to separate marginalized groups from their aspirations to equality: anti-feminism without misogyny, anti-desegregation without racism. It’s not theoretically impossible, it just doesn’t happen very often or very naturally in the real world. The anti-Zionist project of ending Israel’s existence as a Jewish state implies killing, subjugating, or re-exiling more than half of the world’s Jewish population. There’s no nice way to accomplish that goal. Animosity toward Jews will accompany almost every effort to try—and almost every effort to justify the trying.

Anti-Jewish feeling—whether white nationalist, Islamist, or left-progressive—is not always violent, but it’s always a resource for violence. Holocaust denial is not a theory about history. Holocaust inversion is not an opinion about the present. Both are justifications for yearned-for crimes in the future. In Australia, that future arrived during Hanukkah. In Michigan, it nearly struck yesterday.

In this polarized country, anti-Jewish feeling is one sentiment that reaches across lines of party and ideology. Republicans and Democrats, left and right—both are being subverted by anti-Semitism within. Republicans and conservatives have, to date, moved more decisively to confront it. Democrats and liberals have tended to take the view that their anti-Semites are vile neo-Nazis, whereas our anti-Semites bring exciting new energy to our party! Perhaps Republicans and conservatives have done more to treat their disease because their case is more advanced. But after yesterday, there’s no denying it: The pandemic is raging everywhere on these shores, and if we’re not all working together on containment and a cure, the virus will claim many more victims—both those whose bodies are destroyed by bullets and those whose minds are devoured by prejudice and hate.