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 the 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 Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota for antisemitic outbursts. He also calls out campus anti-Israel demonstrators, like a protester at a U.C.L.A. 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.”
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.”
