Americans have no truck with the anti-Semitism of the elites

Since Hamas’s horrific assault on Israeli civilians on 7 October, we’ve been told again and again about a precipitous rise in anti-Semitism in the United States. Pundits, politicians, community leaders and influencers say that anti-Semitism has reached levels not seen in generations. The problem is, outside of elite circles, it’s just not true.

I don’t mean to disregard the footage you’ve seen with your own eyes. Viral social-media clips have shown protesters bullying Zionist students and chanting slogans from Hamas’s charter on college campuses, as well as the craven college administrators who have protected them. That all happened. But campus anti-Semitism is nothing new, and the fact that it has got louder and prouder is not proof that it’s spreading throughout the US – only that the elites are less cagey about it these days.

The truth is that outside of elite spaces like American universities, anti-Semitism is not spreading – not at all. Most Americans stand with Israel and are extremely protective of American Jews. Off-campus, you would struggle to find an American who would allow unchecked anti-Semitism. Campus anti-Semitism isn’t the tip of a deep anti-Semitic iceberg – it’s pretty much the whole damn iceberg.

Two recent examples – one on the left, the other on the right – brought this truth into sharp relief: the treatment of American Jews at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago and the treatment of America’s most prominent proponent of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, Candace Owens, in the right-wing mediasphere.

Let’s start with the DNC. Most people, myself included, were expecting anti-Israel messaging to feature prominently in Chicago last week. In the lead-up to the DNC, the presumptive presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, passed over Josh Shapiro, the extremely popular governor of Pennsylvania, a must-win state for her, as her pick for vice-presidential running mate. It was a nod to the anti-Israel wing of the party, especially the ‘Uncommitted’ movement, which had withheld votes from Joe Biden in Democratic primaries earlier this year over Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. These activists made it clear they would not tolerate Harris picking a Jewish running mate with a record of calling out campus anti-Semitism. The exclusion of Shapiro from the ticket – a man who, in the 2022 midterms, only lost the white working class in Pennsylvania by two points, compared with Joe Biden’s 23-point polling deficit among the same group – drove home the fact that the Democratic Party elites were more afraid of alienating the anti-Semitic wing of their party than supporters of Israel. It all portended ill for the DNC.

And yet, as the DNC wore on, it became clear that this was not an anti-Israel convention. Nor was there much overtly pro-Palestinian messaging, except in a carefully formulated phrase that conjoined the word ‘ceasefire’ with ‘bring the hostages home’ every single time. Even New York congresswoman and progressive standard-bearer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praised Harris for ‘working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bring the hostages home’. Keith Ellison, whose son is an Uncommitted delegate, said of Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, ‘When they say we need a ceasefire and an end to the innocent lives in Gaza and to bring hostages home, they’re listening, friends. They agree with us.’

Affixing the demand to return the hostages to the demand for a ceasefire is significant. It transforms it from a call for Israel to relinquish its right to eradicate Hamas and secure the return of its hostages – which include five American citizens – and brings it closer to the position of the Israeli negotiators and the Biden administration (namely, that a ceasefire would be possible if and when the hostages are returned).

Ellison wasn’t lying when he said Harris and Walz agreed with the Uncommitted movement on this front, at least with those present at the DNC. The Uncommitted delegates I spoke to were adamant that they supported the immediate release of the hostages. They also supported the parents of American-Israeli hostage Hersch Goldberg Polin being given a coveted speaking position at the DNC.

They weren’t the only ones. Hersch’s mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, had been warned by every person who briefed her to expect a lukewarm-to-negative reception from the audience at the DNC. Yet in a shocking twist, she and her husband, Jon Polin, took the stage to a minute-long standing ovation and chants of ‘Bring them home!’. Rachel was so caught off-guard by this that she put her head down on the lectern and wept. ‘To walk out to this embrace of support and love before we started to speak was just absolutely shocking, but in a good way’, she told reporters later.

The delegates did not sit down when she began to speak; they continued to stand, many with tears streaming down their faces as she spoke to them as a desperate mother whose son had been in Hamas captivity for over 300 days. Her entire address was received with awe and sympathy. Not a single other speaker at the DNC was met with such a reception.

Rachel and Jon weren’t the only visibly Jewish people to be treated with kindness. If you were following the convention on X, you probably saw the viral footage of a number of activists who located a meeting of Agudath Israel and began chanting about the demise of Zionism to the Orthodox Jews gathered there. It was appalling, especially given that President Biden had said that the pro-Palestine protesters ‘have a point’ in his Monday night address. But more common was the experience of two Hasidic Jews who were on my flight home, who said that everyone they interacted with was friendly, including the Uncommitted folks they spoke to. A Chabad Rabbi and his sons had a similarly positive experience.

Although Harris’s passing over of Josh Shapiro implied a degree of support to the Uncommitted movement, this seemed to evaporate over the course of the DNC. One got the feeling that the Democratic Party bigwigs were adapting in real time. We had all been told to expect 100,000 pro-Palestinian protesters to descend on Chicago and wreak havoc, but the actual numbers were closer to 5,000, with some of the demos having such paltry numbers that press outnumbered protesters. This seemed to fuel the DNC’s disregard of the Uncommitted delegates inside the United Center, who had been asking for a Palestinian to be allowed a two-minute speaking spot to deliver a set of tame, vetted remarks about the suffering of Gazans. At first, it seemed like the DNC might allow it, but as the week wore on and the protests fizzled, the answer became a solid No. This seemed to me to be a rather unforgivable snubbing of Palestinian Americans.

If a political convention is an informercial for a party, to the surprise of many, not least the Uncommitted delegates, the DNC’s informercial was one that gave a platform to the parents of an Israeli hostage but not to the pro-Palestinian wing of the party.

All of this led up to Harris’s own remarks on Gaza as she accepted the Democratic nomination, which were unambiguously pro-Israel:

‘Let me be clear: I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organisation called Hamas caused on 7 October, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival. At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realise their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.’

Not much to disagree with there.

Clearly, the bigwigs in the Democratic Party arrived at the conclusion that a failure to side with Israel and American Jews would lead enough swing-state voters to punish VP Harris in the election – which is, of course, true.

America will never be a country that allows anti-Semitism to spread. And if this was initially lost on the elites of the Democratic Party, whose milieu includes those sympathetic to the campus activists, when they were forced to look to the American mainstream for votes, the truth emerged.

Something similar is happening on the right in the steady implosion of erstwhile influencer Candace Owens. Once a star on the right for her acerbic criticism of the left’s identity politics, Owens has been in freefall since 7 October. She has gone from criticising Israel to being ‘anti-Zionist’ to spreading full-on anti-Semititic conspiracy theories. Her show has become a steady drumbeat of anti-Semitic lunacy. In recent weeks, she has claimed that Stalin was Jewish and dismissed Mengele’s experiments on Auschwitz prisoners as ‘propaganda’.

Owens’ rants betray a mind addled by the kind of obsession with Jews that plagued the dumbest and maddest people in history. But don’t mistake this for anti-Semitism spreading. Her descent has resulted in her total marginalisation on the right. Last month, her face was revealed on a poster for a fundraiser featuring Donald Jr and the Trump campaign logo – for all of six hours, until the Trump campaign made it clear she was not to attend. She is no longer invited to any mainstream Republican or Trump events, including in the America First world on the harder edges of the right. Judging by the comments on recent episodes of her show, her audience is no longer American but made up of the kind of global anti-Semites America stands apart from.

In short, America remains the most philosemitic country on Earth. The mainstream is still committed to the protection of Jews, rather than their persecution. This is still the Goldene Medina. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Batya Ungar-Sargon is a spiked columnist and author of Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.