There are a lot of issues in the news these days that I want to write about. I want to write about the undermining of traditional American foreign policy and economic policy. I want to write about the attacks on the separation of powers and the need for Congress to find its backbone. I want to write about the attacks on American higher education and on the idea of America as a nation of immigrants. I want to write about the necessity of an independent bar. I’ve got an essay going called “The Antifederalists Were Right.” But I find I cannot focus on these really important issues, because another issue occupies all of the psychic space I have to devote to politics. There is a moral, civic, and public safety emergency in the United States today: antisemitism that corrodes everything it touches and that puts all American Jews at risk.

I am not going to catalogue the most serious incidents of antisemitic violence in recent days, because you know them already. Arson at the home of Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor during Passover. The murder on a Washington DC street two people attending an AJC event aimed at peacemaking. The burning alive of Jews, including a Holocaust survivor, silently marching to raise awareness of the hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza. All three antisemitic attacks were apparently motivated by a wish to “free Palestine,” or to use the words from college protests that one of the attackers apparently used, to “free, free Palestine,” or “globalize the intifada.”

Nor will I feel the need to try to persuade you, if you are not already persuaded, that these attacks were indeed antisemitic attacks instead of “mere anti-Zionist” protests, political violence justified by opposition to the policies of the Israeli government, etc. We know antisemitism when we see it.

Nor will I explain to you the antisemitism that inheres in any rhetorical or legal equation of the Holocaust, the pre-planned mass murder of two-thirds of Europe’s millions of Jews with the aim of destroying the Jews as a people, with the tragedy in Gaza. The authorities in Gaza started a war with the October 7 atrocities in Israel, a Jewish state in which about one-fifth of the population is Palestinian. The Israelis have been fighting in Gaza, where 2% or 3% of the population, civilians and fighters, have been killed, and where their de facto government’s war strategy is to increase their own civilian casualties in order to win a strategic victory abroad. An equation of the two tragedies is a classic case of Holocaust inversion—an expression of the world’s, and to be frank, many supporters of the Palestinians’, resentment that someone once captured in the pithy phrase, “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” What Holocaust inversion does is to give people a kind of permission to unleash violence against Jews anywhere in the world, including here in America.

Nor am I sorry for focusing on the troubles of the Jews rather than on other people’s troubles or other injustices. If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, when? The Jewish people have learned lessons from past eruptions of antisemitism. One, of course, is that the safety of the Jews in a hostile world requires a strong Jewish state. But another is that we cannot let ourselves be gaslighted into denying or downplaying what we see happening in the country and the world. I never really knew what gaslighting meant or what it felt like, until now.

Those are some thoughts about my Jewish reaction to resurgent antisemitism. What about everyone else? I hope everyone treats the issue with the seriousness it deserves. Your Jewish friends and neighbors, who for years have had to worry about their physical safety every time they gather together or appear as Jews in public, need you! There are lots of ways to help, but if you want to help but don’t know what to do, I would encourage you to have a look at the AJC’s website, which has some ideas for concrete advocacy anyone can do, or to search online for resources in your own community about combating antisemitism.

In particular, I hope that people who think of themselves as advocates for the Palestinians take a moment to ask themselves: if I am chanting the same slogans that seemingly motivate others to deadly antisemitic violence, should I undertake some self-reflection about my understanding of the world or the ideological company I am keeping? If not now, when?