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 this moment. At a 1970 campus speech by the Israeli overseas minister, Abba Eban, college students within the gallery unfurled a banner that learn, Struggle Zionist Imperialism. Schumer’s e book remembers Eban’s reply:
“I’m speaking to you up there within the gallery,” Eban stated. “Each time a individuals get their statehood, you applaud it. There’s just one individuals, once they acquire statehood, who you don’t applaud, you condemn it — and that’s the Jewish individuals.” The double commonplace — whether or not it was about who might work in what occupation 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 e book devotes loads of house 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 on daily basis for you.”
Does Schumer fear that his social gathering is tilting in an anti-Israel route — one that may, 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 unbiased who caucuses with the Democrats.
However he additionally warned that “the best hazard to Israel, long-term, is in case you lose half of America” — the liberal half. On considered one of Netanyahu’s earlier visits to the USA, Schumer advised 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 known as for new elections to switch him, for which he stays “fiercely proud.” It confirmed Democrats, he stated, that it’s attainable to oppose Netanyahu whereas championing the Jewish state.
“My job,” he advised 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 choice to Jew, corners of the precise have additionally had their very own coded antisemitic language, like “neocons” or “globalists.”
