The Passing of an Illusion

For America, the lessons of 10/7/2023 and after are dire

Kristallnacht in America: the future of “our democracy”

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I spent much of 10/7/2024 considering how I might mark the first anniversary of 10/7/2023. Though several possibilities occurred to me, it was the word, anniversary, that tripped me up. It seemed an inappropriate word, indeed the very worst word, to use in connection with that black day. I hit a mental roadblock. A sense of the inability of mere words to cope with such monstrous evil stifled me. But a seed had been planted, for I woke up the next morning and rolled out of bed with an idea—an unwelcome idea—germinating in my mind.

Though first and most grievously that monstrous evil descended on Israel and Jews around the world, its secondary effects are worthy of note. On 10/7/2023, most Americans were shocked and horrified by the news of the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel. But others were not. And while the bodies of the slaughtered still littered the landscape, the first outbursts of antisemitic celebration and rage broke out on university campuses across the country.

Right from the beginning, the demonstrators’ message was clear: The orgy of massacre and rape perpetrated by Hamas was justified because it was an act of liberation. As for the Jews, they were alien interlopers, settler colonialists, White oppressors who got what was coming. And the Jewish state they’d founded in 1948 was a fascist, apartheid hellhole that must and would be destroyed. “Palestine” would be freed, “from the river to the sea.”

America, of course, has never been immune from the virus of antisemitism. In many small ways and some big ones, Jews have faced discrimination in this country. As I noted in an article on antisemitism in America, published here in December 2022:

Prior to World War II, Jews in America faced considerable discrimination in education, housing, the professions, and social life. Many colleges and universities, for example, limited their enrollment of Jews—on the perverse argument that too many Jewish students on campus would incite antisemitism. Worse, there was sporadic violence.  One terrible incident was the lynching of Leo Frank. Frank, a 29-year-old factory superintendent, had been convicted and sentenced to death in 1913 for the murder of a young woman in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1915, however, the Governor of Georgia commuted Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment, citing the overt antisemitism displayed during his trial. The ensuing public outcry focused on Frank’s Jewish identity, culminating in his abduction from prison and lynching by an angry mob.

But despite this, American Jews have prospered mightily, and their distinguished role in our national epic has been all out of proportion to their numbers. It’s fair, I think, to say that in America, antisemitism sounded in a minor key. Or there was a time when I thought it was fair to say that. The past year has led me to question my earlier view.

Antisemites in America have traditionally been portrayed as right-wingers and populists. This was no doubt true in days gone by—but now the script has been flipped. In the Thirties an exemplar of antisemitism was Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest and populist demagogue. Forty to fifty years later it was Pat Buchanan, the founding father of national conservatism. But in 2024, an exemplar of antisemitism is more likely to be a university president, faculty member or student; a journalist; a progressive Democratic politician; or a leftist intellectual like Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Coates has been in the news lately on account of the publication of The Message, a collection of essays of which the last, “The Gigantic Dream,” takes up half the book. Let’s just say that it’s an embarrassingly crude antisemitic tract. Coates, who is black and made his name writing postmodern claptrap about race in America, applies the same tools of postmodern analysis to the long-running conflict between the Arabs and the Jews. His conclusions are…well, they’re claptrap too. For instance, he asserts that the Jews aspired to restore their “national honor” after the humiliation of the Holocaust, and thought they could do so by beating up on the poor Palestinian Arabs. That’s what the 1948 Independence War was all about: White settler colonialist Jews oppressing indigenous Brown people.

I mention Coates because despite his ignorant and vile bigotry, he’s a celebrated figure on the progressive Left. Recently he was interviewed by CBS Mornings co-anchor, Tony Dokoupil, who was under the mistaken impression that his job as a journalist was to ask some probing questions about his guest’s take on Israel and the Jews. And for this, he was “hung out to dry,” as Bari Weiss and Oliver Wiseman noted in a pair of articles for The Free Press. Dokoupil was lambasted by CBS top management for failing to meet the network’s “editorial standards”—which apparently mandate the coddling of antisemites.

CBS’s treatment of Dokoupil exhibits in microcosm the characteristic behavior of our elites since 10/7/2023: if not outright antisemitic hate, then manifest toleration of antisemites and terrorist supporters, accompanied by deep hostility to Israel, the world’s only Jewish state. (Incidentally, there are numerous Arab states.) All this is graphic evidence of widespread intellectual and moral corruption. The rot goes much deeper than I suspected prior to the Hamas pogrom, and it’s concentrated on the broad Left.

Just about every group on the progressive Left is “anti-Zionist”—which means antisemitic. Examples are the Democratic Socialists of America, Black Lives Matter, Within Our Lifetime, Students for Justice in Palestine, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (No, I didn’t make it up). Many of these groups piously declare that they have nothing against Jews per se, but their actions belie their words. For instance, harassing and assaulting Jewish students and Jewish organizations on American university campuses can hardly be justified as a protest against the actions of the Israeli government. Israel is merely the excuse for antisemitism.

“Anti-Zionism” and “antiracism” = antisemitism. That’s the lesson of 10/7 and after.

Are there antisemites on the broad Right? Of course there are—but since 10/7 have you once seen a MAGA hat in a photo or video of an antisemitic street demonstration? How many Trump supporters have been caught tearing down hostage posters? How many Republicans have pronounced themselves “exhilarated” by the massacre committed by Hamas on that day? How many conservatives have been caught waving the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah? No, the horrifying upsurge of antisemitism in America over the past year has been a phenomenon of the Left.

It’s been said that 10/7 was a wake-up call for Jews, a warning that they can depend only on themselves alone, a reminder of why Israel was founded. Well, it’s also been a wake-up call for America. We hear a lot from Democrats and progressives about the dire necessity of defending “our democracy” against the menace of Trump the American Hitler. Are they serious, though? How can they possibly make that argument when on their own side of national politics, mobs waving the flags of terrorist organizations are assaulting and harassing Jews on the streets of our cities and on the campuses of our universities, and calling for genocide “from the river to the sea”?

The truth is that the Democratic Party and the broad Left harbor both numerous antisemites and those who tolerate them. I call the latter group antisemitic adjacent. That well describes Vice President Kamala Harris, whose hostility to Israel is no secret, and whose attitude toward Jews in general is equivocal. When it came to the selection of a running mate, Harris heeded the Dearborn veto, passing over the popular Democratic governor of an important swing state in favor of the dud governor of an irrelevant blue state. The former, you see, is a Jew, and the terrorist-hugging antisemites of Dearborn, Michigan, wouldn’t have liked that. Prior to his defenestration, President Joe Biden adopted the same attitude: He sucked up to the Jew haters for fear of losing Michigan’s Muslim-American vote.

All this I’ve observed with dismay. And when I see or hear the term, our democracy, I can only wonder what it’s supposed to mean. For liberal democracy is surely not possible in a country where the world’s oldest form of bigotry, humanity’s ur-hatred, is allowed to flourish. Yet flourish it does in contemporary America, and the very people and institutions that should be our defense against its spread have been irreparably corrupted by it.

The America I’ve known all my life seems to be passing away. And its successor seems likely to be some kind of illiberal people’s democracy in which division, bigotry, and hate are institutionalized with postmodern features. That’s the lesson I’ve drawn from October 7, 2023, and its aftermath.