The shaky state of American Jewry

Sarah N. Stern | Dec 9, 2025

To describe the state of American Jewry after the warm spring of the 1950s through the early 1970s is akin to watching a shriveled brown leaf fluttering aimlessly in the wind in the midst of a cold and bitter winter.

At mid-century, the images of the Holocaust and its aftermath were still seared into the consciousness of the American public. Today, young students and even congressional staffers I meet on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., dismiss it as “ancient history.” The moral memory that once anchored U.S. society has been steadily eroding.

A major turning point came in 1979, when Edward Said revolutionized the study of the Middle East with Orientalism, a book that insisted that racism, sexism and Western views of the region all stem from a singular, malign “occidental narrative.” According to this doctrine, only a “native” of the region may legitimately speak—conveniently excluding the Jewish people who returned to their ancestral homeland after 2,000 years of dispersion, itself one of the great strategic and moral triumphs of the Zionist project.

We all remember the barbarity of Hamas and Palestinian terrorists that wreaked havoc in southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023: babies burned alive in ovens before their parents’ eyes; parents murdered or kidnapped in front of their children; children and infants slaughtered or dragged into Gaza; young women and even men at the Nova music festival raped by jihadists before being murdered or taken hostage. At least 1,200 human beings were butchered during that Black Shabbat, with another 251 dragged into Hamas’s terror tunnels.

Yet on that very day, Columbia University professor Joseph Massad took to The Electronic Intifada to express his “jubilation and awe.” He praised “the Palestinian resistance fighters” who stormed border checkpoints and “broke through Israel’s prison fence,” celebrating the “millions of jubilant Arabs” watching the atrocities unfold. On Oct. 15, Cornell University professor Russell Rickford publicly declared that Hamas had “challenged the monopoly of violence,” calling the massacre “exhilarating” and “energizing.”

This rhetoric is endemic to the more than 250 chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine in the United States and Canada. By Oct. 12—just days after the atrocities in Israel—National SJP held a nationwide “day of resistance,” distributing celebratory imagery of the very paragliders used to attack festival-goers at Nova. SJP itself was co-founded by University of California, Berkeley’s Hatem Bazian, now chair of the school’s department of “Islamophobic studies.”

What began in Middle Eastern Studies departments has metastasized across the humanities and social sciences, and is now filtering into elementary, middle and high schools, where anti-Jewish and anti-Israel indoctrination are becoming firmly entrenched.

A September 2025 report by Paul Zimmerman of the Defense of Freedom Institute documents how radical-left ideologies—fixated on dismantling supposedly racist Western institutions and combating “settler-colonialism”—have transformed America’s teacher unions. Once proud supporters of Israel, these unions now demand boycotts, divestment and sanctions against the world’s only Jewish state, even in the wake of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Union activists use their influence to saturate teacher trainings and curricular materials, beginning in preschool, with propaganda targeting Israel and “the Zionists.”

At a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on Sept. 10, Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) warned that this crisis extends well beyond institutions of higher learning. “Antisemitism is also a growing problem in our K-12 education system,” he noted. “At some schools in my home state, the environment is so hostile that Jewish children are withdrawing and transferring elsewhere. Even California’s own Department of Education has found ethnic-studies curricula to be antisemitic across multiple districts.’

Many students emerging from these environments lack critical thinking skills and simply repeat, parrot-like, the rhetoric of their teachers and professors. Meanwhile, the Qatar Foundation offers millions of dollars to K-12 teachers, complete with “supplemental guides” on Arabic culture and language, and funnels billions into American universities. Qatar’s “Education City” in Doha hosts satellite campuses of Arkansas State University, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, Northwestern University, Texas A&M, Virginia Commonwealth and Cornell’s Weill Medical College.

This is in addition to the billions directed to American think tanks and funneled through the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to influence U.S. policymakers.

Yet it would be dangerously incomplete to focus solely on the antisemitism emanating from the radical Left. In recent years, an unmistakable and deeply troubling current of antisemitism has also emerged on the right—sometimes overt, sometimes cloaked in coded language, and sometimes masquerading as mere “anti-elitism” or “anti-globalism.”

Far-right figures such as former Fox News host and current podcaster Tucker Carlson, once one of the most influential conservative media personalities in America, have dabbled in rhetoric that echoes classic antisemitic conspiracies. His repeated invocations of “replacement theory”—the idea that elites are deliberately replacing Americans with foreign populations—draw from the same ideological well that has historically targeted Jews as the imagined architects of demographic or cultural change. Though he does not always name Jews directly, the dog whistle is unmistakable to those who listen for it, including extremist groups who have publicly praised his commentary.

Even more explicit is Nick Fuentes, a self-declared white supremacist and Holocaust denier whose movement, which is thinly disguised under the banner of “Christian nationalism,” has gained traction among disaffected young men. Fuentes openly glorifies Adolf Hitler, denies the historical reality of the Holocaust and insists that America must be remade into a theocratic state that excludes Jews. It is a testament to the erosion of civic norms that such an openly bigoted figure has not been relegated to political obscurity, but instead has cultivated a following and even met with political figures who should have known better.

Then there is far-right political commentator Candace Owens, whose influential media presence brings a different but equally corrosive form of rhetoric into mainstream conservative spaces. While not a white supremacist herself, she has repeatedly adopted narratives that minimize antisemitism, trivialize the suffering of the Jewish people, or recast Jews as powerful “elites” oppressing others. Her recent statements excused or relativized antisemitic attacks; promoted conspiratorial thinking about Jewish influence; and portrayed Jewish communal institutions as hostile forces. And they have energized an online ecosystem that blends anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiment into a broader narrative of cultural grievance.

Finally, the rhetoric emanating from institutional leaders on the right cannot be ignored. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation—one of the most powerful conservative think tanks in America—has increasingly trafficked in the language of “civilizational conflict” and “globalist subversion,” frameworks historically weaponized against Jews. While Roberts does not invoke Jews explicitly, these narratives provide fertile ground for interpretation by extremists. And when mainstream conservative institutions flirt with such abstractions, they risk making bigoted ideas respectable and offering cover for those who interpret these metaphors as license to target Jews and other minorities.

What unites these figures is not a coherent ideology but a shared willingness to exploit fear, resentment, and cultural polarization—and in doing so, to normalize narratives that have historically placed Jews in the crosshairs. Antisemitism does not survive without oxygen. Today, it finds oxygen across the political spectrum. On the far left, it is framed as anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and “deconstructing power.” On the far right, it is wrapped in the language of nationalism, traditionalism and cultural defense.

Both currents feed the same ancient hatred. Both put American Jewry at risk. Both must be confronted with equal moral clarity. To be American entails standing up for our foundational principles. For American Jews, these principles are seriously at risk from the left and the right.