I Spent My Life Anticipating Trump’s “War on Antisemitism”

Zionism upholds the core belief of classical antisemites: that Jews are a collective body with a singular political agenda.

When Jake Klein, The Black Sheep’s co-founder and lead editor, wrote for The Black Sheep last winter about the sharp contradiction between opposing identity politics and supporting Zionism (Jewish identity politics), he was describing a conflict that has defined my whole adult life and vocation.

In 2011, while still in my twenties, my first book was published on the forgotten midcentury Reform Jewish anti-Zionists—nominally a biography of Elmer Berger, the highly polarizing long-time leader of their organization, the American Council for Judaism. After my third book was published a little over a year ago (an excerpt of which ran on this Substack), I’ve also now edited a primary source reader on the American Council for Judaism, being released this month by De Gruyter.

I was raised a minimally observant Conservative Jew, but I managed before knowing almost anything about American Jewish history to intuit that I would have liked to be a Reform Jew in the era before the Holocaust and Israel redefined everything. Indeed, the definitive statement of Reform Jewish belief, published in 1885, was quite clear:

We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.

In other words, it was possible to be a proud Jew and reject the first principle of Zionism—that the Jewish people is a political collective that should be taken for granted as having any “national” or group rights—as a fundamental category error. Moreover, not only was adopting this view considered essential to Jewish emancipation in the 19^th century, but contrary to the labeling of critics of Zionism as “self-hating Jews,” it was Zionism that upheld the core belief of classical antisemites; that the Jews are a collective body with a singular political agenda.

Far more importantly, this issue is at the heart of the Trump administration's war on what it portrays as “campus antisemitism”—the suspension of the Bill of Rights in the lawless arrests of Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Badar Khan Suri in the name of equity and inclusion for a small number of hard right Jewish nationalists. In September 2010, awaiting the publication of my first book, I read the architect of this campaign, Kenneth Marcus, lay out his deeply disturbing vision for civil rights law in Commentary magazine. While early Obama-era racial optimism was still very much in the air, Marcus considered it a scandal that the Justice Department Office of Civil Rights “has been reluctant to suggest that Jews are members of a biologically or nationally distinct group.”

Yet, unfortunately, it’s hard to think of any group more ill-equipped to combat this new authoritarianism racializing the Jewish people than the pro-Palestine movement in America, whose arguments often rely on an intellectually lazy paradigm of opposing “settler colonialism,” or worse on baroque, direct appeals to blood and soil.

It has been especially striking over the last year just how much the midcentury political scientist Richard Hofstadter’s “projection principle” vis-à-vis American Zionism is evident in its Palestinian nemesis: the conviction of being “a people – one people” expressed through a mix of grade school-level pedantic kitsch and simulated drill indoctrination in a militant foreign nationalism.

Most of all, there has been a scandalous lack of interest by the pro-Palestine Left in what Zionism even is—in knowing their enemy. This has been revealing of no one more than the more thoughtful element around the leftist magazine Jewish Currents, particularly given that milieu’s major “Know Your Enemy” conceit toward the American right. It’s hard not to conclude that they complacently fall back on the “settler colonialism” paradigm precisely to evade what knowing their enemy would reveal about themselves. The roots of what we now call identity politics can be found in American Zionism, particularly the Progressive Era ideologue Horace Kallen. Indeed Labor Zionism, the dominant ideology behind the foundation of the State of Israel, owed a large debt to Lenin that David Ben-Gurion acknowledged. That revolutionary ethos of Zionism, in short, is exactly what the “settler colonialism” narrative misses.

Through many years of political isolation before the October 7^th massacres, my early discovery of a lost, humane Jewish anti-Zionism seemed only to have left me feeling helpless from reproaching both sides of the culture war. But now that great contradiction in our political culture surrounding identity politics – the shameless Jewish exception – has reached a more dramatic climax in the second Trump administration than could have ever been imagined, there is unrivaled ground on which to prove that a principled defense of the liberal third way is possible.

I grew up about five miles from Jake Klein in Maryland, and though several years older than Jake had friends who attended the same Jewish day school. At 16, having just begun community college on 9/11, I was already familiar with the prolific and fiery libertarian polemicist Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com, who railed against the neoconservatives at the heart of the post-9/11 war party, expounding at length on the neocons' roots in the Left, and in particular Trotskyism. Imagine my shock to learn from my father that not only were Raimondo’s claims about the Trotskyist inheritance of the neocons true, but that he had known many of the era’s neocons during his youth as an activist in the Young People’s Socialist League.

Inheriting the interests that accompanied my father’s political history, I soon began to recognize that so many of the New Deal-era “old right” figures Raimondo celebrated were really just Norman Thomas Socialists (i.e., the more idealistic side of liberal anti-Communism), setting me on a path that would ultimately culminate in my book on the history of the Socialist Party of America published in 2015. But it was more or less inevitable that this draw to what had been obscured about the largely Jewish vanguard of the anti-Communist left in the 1930s and 1940s, including many friends of my mother’s parents, would lead to probing their views on Israel and Zionism before the 1960s and thus to the subject of the American Council for Judaism.

I was active in the early years of Mondoweiss, a Jewish anti-Zionist blog that began in the left-liberal mainstream before adopting a more militant posture, and simultaneously active with an unaffiliated synagogue in Brooklyn, from which I had to part ways when… well, Jake wrote a book about the woke ideological trend it embraced. When I attended a Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) national conference in 2011, they were still rooted in the 1990s Bay Area activism typified by the late Rabbi Michael Lerner, a memorable critic of the purity spiral that tore apart the New Left (and one of the “six other guys” of Big Lebowski fame!).

It was possible to believe then that vintage late-Cold War “third-worldism” glorifying violent revolution in the Global South was a thing of the past, and that JVP were more or less normie liberals. But by mid-decade they were feteing the “black power”-era celebrity and unrepentant Stalinist Angela Davis, and it was just as disillusioning around the same time that the main complaint of the short-lived “Open Hillel” coalition, organized to liberalize that behemoth of Jewish campus life, seemed to be that the national Hillel leadership dared deprive them of the opportunity to hear from the sainted “gender theorist” Judith Butler.

In the wider zeitgeist, the mass echoing praise for Ta-Nehisi Coates in the summer of 2015 was my real soul-crushing turning point. Regarding Coates, I cannot improve on what I wrote in my third book published last year, The Strange Death of American Exceptionalism:

What Coates wrote in Between the World and Me is the sacred text of an atheist and materialist version (i.e., along the lines of Max Weber’s narrative of the Protestant ethic) of the theology of the Nation of Islam. Coates’ first article of faith is strikingly indistinguishable from the Nation of Islam; indeed if anything more literal. In a logical extension of passionately avowed atheism, Coates declares “the black body” to be “the holy vessel,” all that exists, his sacrament.

Coates does not believe in the mystical immutable evil of the white race, but his reformulation of the historic Nation of Islam belief owes an obvious debt to David Roediger: “However it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, ‘white people’ would cease to exist for want of reasons.” In other words, white people do not exist, only those led over the course of generations to believe themselves to be white. Some idealistic souls may still believe this is more or less true of all nationalisms, but Coates insists the black race is eternal across space-time.

The Coates cosmology, like that of the Nation of Islam before it, bears a curious resemblance to the mystical doctrine of Leo Pinsker, the first major popularizer of Zionism in the Russian Pale of Settlement. Pinsker believed the cause of anti-Semitism was the innate human fear of ghosts—that is, horror at the sight of the “ghost nation” of the Jews wandering the earth after 2,000 years of exile—and that therefore the cure to anti-Semitism was to restore the Jews to a “normal” existence as sovereign in the Land of Israel. (After publishing Between the World and Me, Coates would describe “whiteness” as an “amulet” bearing “eldritch energies”). Parallels with Jewish nationalism in Coates’ thought are especially striking. A long shadow can be traced to the speech of the Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann at the 1943 conference that effectively inaugurated the American Jewish establishment and Israel lobby:

“Whatever else we demand of the world tomorrow—equality of rights, protection of minorities, punishment of criminal—is not specifically Jewish. It is the application of the elementary principles of democracy to the Jewish people. There is one specific demand we have to make today, and this is the demand to end the anomalous position of the Jewish people and to allow us to live as a normal people.”

Here are all the distinctive traits of American identity politics that are now so disturbingly and rudely unambiguous: disdain, if not contempt, for “elementary principles of democracy” as inadequate for achieving justice, which somehow must contain principles bearing the innate character of the identity group in question, all expressed in the belligerent language of demands. The demands “to end the anomalous position” and “to allow us to live as a normal people” even bear a striking resemblance to current activism as therapy.

Indeed, there is no public intellectual in American history to whom Ta-Nehisi Coates bears a stronger resemblance than Norman Podhoretz—their writing defined by a narcissistic blend of chauvinist race-pride and self-important name dropping, delivered in five-digit word essays of pompous prose that have hypnotized a critical cohort of elite middlebrow minds into seeing world-historic profundity. The single most Coatesian essay by Podhoretz was undoubtedly “The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” his interminable 1986 narrative of frustration over limited success in attacking Gore Vidal as an anti-Semite.

Whereas Podhoretz, in the wake of the 1960s New Left, tapped into the demons of a rising generational cohort of American Jews—and the bitterness of many older, tragically misled Cold War liberals—to construct neoconservatism from the helm of Commentary, Coates’ great windfall was discovering that what his elite white audience in fact wanted to hear, in their highly analogous great disappointment with the course of the Obama presidency, was his black nationalist patrimony repackaged to suit their intellectual fashions.

With that Nahum Goldmann quote, I was very consciously channeling Irving Reichert, the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco who quoted it in his Yom Kippur sermon attacking the 1943 American Jewish Conference. Reichert’s sermon, whose lasting infamy in some quarters may have inspired the rabbi character in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, concluded thus:

I protest as a misleading and dangerous distortion of truth the implication that American Jews are fighting and dying, not so much to secure a just and lasting peace under the Four Freedoms for all men everywhere, not so much for love of America and devotion to it as their homeland, as for special rights and favors and privileges for Jews that go beyond “the elementary principles of democracy.” It is for you, on this solemn night when our actions are judged by God, to search your own hearts and souls on this crucial matter.

This direct attack on the very proposition at the heart of the Trump administration's “war on antisemitism” was not only a prophetic witness for the ages to the many and enormous crimes committed by the State of Israel over eight decades, but anticipated the two great afflictions that have defined 21^st century America: the “War for the Greater Middle East” enabled in no small measure by the Israel lobby, and whose follow-on effects prominently include accelerating the collapse of a common American identity and social fabric—“the disuniting of America.”

But the summer of Ta-Nehisi Coates was also the summer of Bernie Sanders, and I joined that good fight to retrieve the social democratic promise so many of us once associated with Barack Obama, when it was possible to believe that his first campaign was one to arrest the disuniting of America. But then, in the resurrection of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) the following year, I saw the political class welcome the rise of a new socialist movement in America that lacked a fundamental belief in freedom precisely because their “resistance” mania led them to forget what a fundamental belief in freedom even meant.

Against this backdrop, and steadfast to the honor and memory of the non-Communist old Jewish Left (that contrary to bad history on all sides had a better record of principled opposition to Zionism than the Communists), I beheld the reboot by young Jewish members of DSA in 2018 of the historically Communist publication Jewish Currents with complete and utter horror. Yet I mournfully seized on the comforting assumption that this was just the last gasp of secular American Jewish identity, like the last stand of Irish-American identity in the 90s. Back in 2013, when I was still in the late stage of breaking with my old synagogue, the momentous “Pew Report,” which effectively projected the demographic disappearance of non-Orthodox Jews in America, liberated me from believing there was ever any “what might have been.”

But five years later, my most decisive return to life after the pandemic came amidst a sudden burst of renewed intellectual interest in Judaism, though I’m doubtful I’ll ever belong to a synagogue again, still coming home to an affinity for vintage Jewish existentialism. I'm now in the later research stage of a history of Menorah Journal, a forgotten magazine in the first half of the 20^th -century of untold import to both Jewish and American intellectual history, for which I was awarded an American Jewish Archives fellowship that afforded me a blessed escape from the September 2024 election vibes in an enchanting old ruin on the banks of the Ohio.

Underlying my pursuit of this new project was a once-in-a-lifetime breakthrough in the quest to know thyself, through a reacquaintance with Gershom Scholem, the great historian of Jewish mysticism. The thread through all my historical scholarship has been dismantling the shared postwar sacred story of Jewish and American nationalism—the quasi-biblical narrative of the Holocaust, American victory in WWII, and the founding of the State of Israel. Learning how absolutely nuts the teenage Scholem was in the antiwar fringe of WWI-era Berlin, not unlike myself in post-9/11 DC, led it to dawn on me:

If Scholem’s life’s work was to build a grand scholarly edifice from which to enact the primal Freudian desire to demolish everything his father’s generation believed in—the late 19^th century fusion of Jewish identity with German patriotism—such am I vis-à-vis the analogous late 20^th century American Jewish narrative. Elmer Berger said in his last years that his one regret was having never written his comprehensive, systematic critique of Zionism. But while he would have only written a dry political science textbook, my aim in writing a history of Menorah Journal, an important voice of the "cultural Zionist" vanguard that opposed the drive toward statehood, is to take a more rewarding historical approach – in effect, an intellectual history of American Zionism from roughly 1900 to 1960.

It goes without saying how grateful I am to have begun this new chapter of my life before the October 7 massacres—I shudder to think of the absolute despair I would have otherwise experienced through all that followed. When the brief ceasefire this past winter was announced, I made a point of looking back at Andrew Sullivan’s column in the immediate wake, which spoke eloquently to many things true at once, to remind myself why I had as much righteous anger as anyone toward Hamas and its apologists. Two months earlier, the New York Times published a thorough exposé on how legacy outfits from the Bush-era antiwar left were refashioned into a sprawling network of CCP propagandists, who were behind the major organized Gaza protests. Yet it was my historical understanding of what we were witnessing—the "Weatherman" stage of the whole phenomenon of “wokeness”—that allowed me to reach a sober and sensitive understanding of the protest movement’s true nature and the limits of its menace.

I never had any illusions about Israeli depravity, but I was sensitive to how the concept of “whiteness” had led to the use of “white” and its derivatives precisely as left-wing antisemites deploy derivatives of “Jewish”—as a superfluous and arbitrary descriptor that serves no other purpose than to ascribe unique and intrinsic wickedness to the subject, to a group based on their immutable characteristics. The recent Harvard “antisemitism report” cataloged a long list of appalling incidents of this kind. Yet one could hardly ask for a better case against the identity-first approach to fighting antisemitism (to say nothing of fighting for the humane values of the liberal arts against high intersectionalism) than going after scientific research and basic academic freedom through an (at best) ham-fisted application of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act against the vaguest insinuations about “an unsafe campus environment.”

The encampments in 2024 that began at Columbia were a grotesque insult to any disciplined campaign like those of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that could have effectively pushed for divestment from the Israeli war machine—though I recoil from any kind of cultural or even ordinary commercial boycott, and always found the BDS movement deeply unserious and thus the official American Jewish obsession with it downright silly.

But I am also, after all, a student of the American left, and such episodes are historically a necessary education from which their best and most principled minds emerge.

As the encampments were winding down, I attended “Dissident Dialogues,” where Jake Klein was a last-minute addition to their debate on Israel and Gaza. I texted him a review of my first book in hopes he might reference it to highlight the contradictions we both saw in this emerging anti-identity politics pro-Zionist movement. Indeed, I doubt the pro-Zionist audience of that debate could even articulate the Zionist first principles Jake and I have found kinship in striking at the root.

I had only briefly met Jake twice before at events of his old employer, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), whose emails throughout the 2021-22 hangover from the long hot summer of 2020 gave me the feeling of how it must have been receiving frequent literature from the American Council for Judaism in the 1950s—to have fallen all the way from having to plead in vain that racism is no substitute for Judaism to having to plead in vain that racism is no substitute for liberalism. Indeed, a key reason I so identify with Andrew Sullivan is his role as the gay Elmer Berger, one voice against many defending ordinary gays and lesbians from being forced into peoplehood with the T and the Q and the God knows what else.

Most of the figures formerly affiliated with FAIR that Jake called out as "hypocrites" last winter are not worth the bother. Douglas Murray is as creepy as he is pathetic. Jordan Peterson on a good day brought to mind historian Shlomo Sand’s description of the late Israel Shahak—“a tremendous moral force who just doesn’t know the material”—though Oliver Traldi’s “Clean Rooms and Dirtbags” has stood the test of time. Nothing could have been sadder at Dissident Dialogues than emotional trainwreck Ayaan Hirsi Ali needily tossing out a dirt cheap applause line about Queers for Palestine.

The figure worth a closer look is Bari Weiss.

I long recoiled from the typical online leftist view of her as an avaricious opportunist, and hear from more than one source that she’s simply out of her depth. I fell for her stated post-2020 mission to save the humanities, and even if The Free Press can still produce good journalism, their “March of Dimes looking for a new cause after polio” problem is only getting worse. Their non-response to the arrest without a warrant of Mahmoud Khalil destroyed any editorial integrity the publication once had, and I suspect a Daily Wire-level implosion and tell-all will not be long in coming.

The emotional investment I placed in Bari Weiss during and after 2020 was basically the same I placed in Tulsi Gabbard throughout Trump’s first term; I am consistently stunned to look back on just how invested I was before 2020 in the Left and the Democrats having the right answer to Trump. Not long ago, I reread her original mission statement from the summer of 2020, and had to look at it five times before realizing this was actually what I was looking for. A few short paragraphs stating the basic values of a free society were buried in an avalanche of Jewish special pleading, and the shock of recognition actually made me sick to my stomach.

Nevertheless, I must do justice to the whole arc. There is a lot, to be sure, that I now look back on with great bemusement of believing in June 2020 that we were actually on the brink of a Year Zero-level demolition of our nation’s cultural heritage. But in particular, what went down at the New York Times during the peak days of rage remains profoundly disturbing. Discussing it in real-time with my late mentor Ernest Evans, he immediately invoked La Prensa, the lone independent newspaper in 1980s Nicaragua suppressed in large part by the internal direct action of its regime-controlled union. A decade earlier, I had taken Ernie to meet Leonard Sussman, the guiding force behind my first book, to share stories of their common human rights work in that era. Half the conversation was about La Prensa. We have only just begun to reckon with how much this phenomenon of regime suppression was the whole story of the last decade.

The larger context was my at times hysterical anti-anti-Trumpism throughout his first term. As historian of the Socialist Party of America, how could I see it otherwise when the underlying premises of Russiagate were a carbon copy of the World War I classification of journalism and political speech as espionage if not treason, and the October 2020 Twitter suppression of the New York Post the clear 21^st century version of banning antiwar newspapers from the mail. But now, of course, the Trump “war on antisemitism” has outdone it all by actually bringing back Woodrow Wilson’s infamous “Palmer Raids.”

Alas, between general reconciliation to the blue tribe and tenuously reaching out to any glimmers of decency on the Jewish left, it can be easy to feel that, like the tragic early Jewish freethinker Uriel da Costa, I am resigned to be an ape among apes.

The apparent determination of wide swathes of non-Orthodox American Jews to die on the hill of the last decade’s abandonment of liberalism is discouraging to say the least, and the conceit to small-l liberalism typified by Bari Weiss is increasingly overshadowed by a bizarre Modern Orthodox Jewish brand of wokeness.

Yet in response to Trump’s “war on antisemitism,” there has been a heartening critical mass of individuals from both sides of the last decade’s divide to vindicate how, as a Jew, I feel impelled to hope that this can be the moment to recover a lost humane idealism, whose stalwarts in both the Jewish and American past I have had the privilege, through the vocation of historical scholarship, of seeking to give voice.

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For more from Jack Ross, read his essay “John Ganz Shares the MAGA Idea of the Left,” published today in Sublation Magazine.