What Happened Today: December 18, 2023

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The Big Story

Since Oct. 7, poll after poll has revealed that younger Americans are more skeptical of Israel and more hostile to Jews than their elders. Earlier this month, for instance, an Economist/YouGov poll found that 28% Americans under the age of 30 agreed that “Jews have too much power in America” (compared to 16% of Americans as a whole), while 23% agreed that “the Holocaust has been exaggerated” (compared to 9% of Americans overall). Now a new poll from Harvard/Harris offers some even more alarming numbers on Gen Z attitudes toward Jews—and in the process sheds some light on the sources of anti-Jewish sentiment among young Americans. 

The survey, conducted Dec. 13 and 14 among 2,000 registered voters, found that more than two-thirds of Americans aged 18-24 believe that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors.” Seventy-nine percent said they supported the ideology that “white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed and as a result should be favored today at universities and for employment.” Sixty percent said the Oct. 7 attack could be “justified by the grievances of Palestinians.” And asked whether they support Israel or Hamas in the current conflict, the 18-24s split 50-50. 

The numbers are eye-popping and for that reason invite some caution. Writing in Reason, pollster Ilya Somin flags several potential issues with survey wording and notes that polling from before the current war has shown that Jews have the highest favorability ratings among Americans of any religious group, with only 6% of Americans reporting an unfavorable view of Jews. That said, as Will Saletan and others have pointed out, the numbers are consistent with other recent findings showing higher levels of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment among young people, and any potential issues with the survey wording didn’t seem to affect older Americans to nearly the same degree: The poll found that 81% of Americans support Israel over Hamas, 73% reject the idea that “Jews are oppressors,” and 65% disagree with the statement about whites being oppressors. 

But even if the numbers are exaggerated, they are still suggestive as to why young Americans consistently report more hostility to Jews and Israel. Note the close association between agreement with the claim that whites are oppressors and the claim that Jews are oppressors. Those under the age of 25 have grown up in a world where combating “white supremacy” and “deconstructing whiteness” are the height of morality. Many of today’s student radicals have expressed horror at the accusation that they are antisemitic, and they’re probably not lying, in that they would condemn far-right attacks on Jews as Jews—i.e., as oppressed minorities. But attacking Jews because they’re white oppressors? That fits with everything they’ve ever been taught. No wonder they seem confused that this time, their elders haven’t been applauding. 

Read the survey results here: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/HHP_Dec23_KeyResults.pdf 

IN THE BACK PAGES: A former DoJ Nazi hunter on how Jewish communal institutions helped to mainstream the new antisemitism

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The Rest

→A staffer for Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) who recently yelled “Free Palestine!” at a Republican congressman has been fired after video emerged of him having sex in the Senate Judiciary Room. The graphic video, which shows Cardin legislative aide Aidan Maese-Czeropski in what we’ll euphemistically call a compromising position with another man, was published by The Daily Caller on Friday, after Maese-Czeropski shared it in a group chat. Maese-Czeropski denied it was him, sort of, posting on LinkedIn that he had been “attacked for who I love” and would never “disrespect my workplace,” but Cardin was apparently unconvinced, firing Maese-Czeropski on Saturday. Could it be a case of mistaken identity? Probably not. Andy Ngo reported Sunday that Maese-Czeropski had posted a nude photo of himself inside the hearing room to his own Instagram account, accompanied by text that read in part, “In this very room … Aidan got some thick German sausage & a jager sauce finish,” apparently in reference to the penis of the video’s German co-star, who was tagged in the post. Ngo further reported that Maese-Czeropski had uploaded pornographic images of himself on various internet forums, including X and Reddit, where he posted under the name “Barebacktwinkslut.” On Friday, GOP Rep. Max Miller, who is Jewish, confirmed that Maese-Czeropski was the staffer who shouted “Free Palestine!” at him during an interview with NBC. 

→Delegations from Iran and Saudi Arabia met in Beijing on Friday for the first meeting of the Tripartite joint committee, the latest step in a Chinese-brokered diplomatic thaw between the two Middle Eastern rivals, inaugurated by the Beijing Agreement in March. Tablet contributor Michael Doran explains what it means:

The Chinese have made much deeper inroads into the Middle East than most analysts and the administration care to admit—or, to be more precise, the inroads are by now well known, but they are more ominous for the U.S. than is generally recognized. 

Beijing’s ambitions in the Middle East are limitless, due to energy security concerns and general desire to supplant the U.S. globally. But also, their desire to build a Sinocentric global economic subsystem leads them to covet dollar investments from the Gulf in their high-tech sector. The Chinese are managing Saudi-Iranian tensions with aplomb. They have associated themselves with the most disruptive and threatening state in the Middle East, namely, Iran, and are leveraging that connection to push America’s allies in Beijing’s direction—as evidenced by the increasingly close relations between China and our Gulf allies.

The Biden administration has not woken up to the threat. The administration came into office believing that it could separate Iran from the great power competition with China and Russia. The effort to return to the JCPOA, it believed, would park Iran. The way forward is to tackle the Iranian threat more directly—with a credible military threat. What American allies want from the U.S. is our hard power. It’s the only thing for which the Chinese cannot offer a substitute. If the Biden administration or its successor does not treat Iran as Reagan did, we may eventually find ourselves with a China-dominated Middle East. The only way to build credibility is to begin taking military action and sponsoring it by others, especially Israel. 

→Israeli forces uncovered a tunnel network estimated to be 2.5 miles long and ten feet wide running under northern Gaza and ending in a tunnel opening in the Jabalia area less than an eighth of a mile from the Erez border crossing into Israel, the IDF announced over the weekend. The construction of the tunnels, comprising what appears to be the largest network discovered by the IDF since the start of the war, was overseen by Muhammad Sinwar, the deputy and brother of Hamas’ leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar, according to Israeli military sources who released a video showing Muhammad Sinwar driving a car through one of the tunnels in the system. The underground network was outfitted with electricity, sewage, and ventilation, and its strategic purpose , according to Northern Gaza Brigade commander Col. Haim Cohen, was, “to permit a motorized raid on residents of [Israeli] Gaza border communities.”

→Speaking of the Hamas tunnel network, one might wonder how exactly the supposedly destitute leaders of Gaza were able to undertake such a massive and expensive engineering project. The answer, offered in our thread of the day from Israeli writer and former Knesset member Einat Wilf, is that international community’s “aid money”—billions of it pumped into Gaza over the past decade—was being used not to feed Palestinians but to fund the war making machinery of a terrorist group.

→A storm hit New York on Monday, leading to flooding and the loss of power for some 450,000 people across the northeast. It appears that New York City has already experienced the worst of the storm, but it’s expected to continue moving through the northeast Monday night, dumping another six inches of rain throughout the region on its way toward Canada.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Arise and Rebuild, by Hillel Kuttler

Two months after the Hamas attack, many of Kibbutz Be’eri’s young adults have returned home, with an eye toward the future

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Jewish Voices for Hate

Understanding the mistake we made by welcoming anti-Israel voices into the ‘Jewish tent’

By Joel K. Greenberg

My family and I used to be members at a Conservative synagogue. It seemed like a good match for us. We celebrated many family milestones there, and became friends with a number of families and other congregants, including a prominent judge.

But 20 years ago, something strange happened. The rabbi invited several Jewish speakers to address the congregation, from the pulpit, about the "boycott, divestment, and sanctions" (BDS) movement against Israel—namely, in favor of BDS. The rabbi argued that “the Jewish tent” was, or ought to be, large enough to accommodate all reasonable opinions, and he believed this was one.

I, on the other hand, was horrified. As a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations, I came face-to-face with the foot soldiers of Nazi Germany and its “master plan” to exterminate European Jews. These men and women had been taught to think of Jews not as human, but as vermin. When I deposed them in the 1980s, four decades after they committed their heinous acts, they still clung to that view—giving me a valuable lesson in the longevity of hateful ideologies, and cautioning me against being at all tolerant of anyone whose views single out and spread lies about the Jewish people.

But one didn’t need that experience to understand what was wrong with what we were hearing from that pulpit. Regardless of the pseudo-sophisticated ideas and academic language these speakers couched their talk in, underneath it all was clearly a position that would result in the destruction of Israel—and the displacement, or worse, of its more than 7 million Jews. And that wasn’t merely another argument competing in the free and unfettered marketplace of ideas; it was a call for annihilating the world’s sole Jewish state and depriving the Jews, and Jews alone, of the dignity of self-determination and the right to an indigenous homeland. This, I believed, was a dangerous idea with potentially disastrous consequences, and no Jewish space had any business tolerating, let alone promoting, it.

I tried talking to other congregants. Most dismissed my concerns. Along with the few others who saw how disturbing this was, we approached the rabbi. We tried to explain that this wasn’t an issue of freedom of speech or free inquiry (or “viewpoint diversity,” as it came to be known), in part because these particular views were widely available to any member of the community who wanted to pursue them: They were then, and are even more so now, prevalent throughout academia, the arts, and the media. The speakers were free to spew venomous ideas in the public square; doing so inside synagogues was neither a right, nor a privilege that should be afforded.

It felt wrong to us for these noxious views to be platformed, and in a real sense validated, by the Jewish community—as Jewish communal ideas. The rabbi listened patiently, and said he understood our point of view. But he seemed to have the support, either overt or tacit, of enough of the congregation. The BDS lectures went on as scheduled.

In response, my family and I gave up our membership at that synagogue, and joined a different one.

Shortly after Oct. 7, I received an email from my friend the judge. Now he was the one who was concerned, this time about the amount of media attention devoted to groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, a self-proclaimed anti-Zionist organization that supports “Palestinian liberation” and that, while having very little moral outrage to spare for the Israeli victims of the massacre, has since staged several violent protests in support of Hamas’ Gaza—including disrupting highways, train stations, and bridges.

I asked him if he remembered when our rabbi believed that calling for the destruction of Israel from the synagogue pulpit was acceptable, and whether he understood that the synagogue had invited these poisonous ideas and organizations into our Jewish communal space—and in this way should be seen as, in fact, having participated in legitimizing them.

I am still waiting for an answer.

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These last few weeks, many American Jews seem to be having a rude awakening similar to the one my former friend, the judge, captured in his email. They’ve watched the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT testify before Congress and refuse to unequivocally state that calling for genocide of Jews violated the university's code of conduct, and they asked themselves how the campuses that hold themselves out as educating the next generation of leaders are instead becoming a breeding ground for antisemitism.

How, they suddenly wanted to know, did we get here?

There were many people and factors at play, including the rise of intersectionality and decolonization studies in academia; the embrace of wokism in media, arts, and culture projects; the infusion of cash from foreign nations, some with ties to terror groups, into all sorts of American organizations, including universities, and more.

However, the rabbis and Jewish organizations who at best stood silent and at worst gave a platform for people calling for the destruction of Israel also bear partial responsibility for today’s explosion of vile antisemitism. The same holds true for Jewish institutions that refused to recognize anti-Zionism as antisemitism.

Numerous Jewish organizations partnered with groups such as Black Lives Matter, which from its earliest days perpetuated the falsehood that Israel is an apartheid state. Others, like J Street, consistently hosted anti-Zionist speakers who advocated for boycotting Israel; last week, the organization “demanded” that Israel change its conduct in the war against Hamas.

If all Jewish organizations, rabbis, and community leaders had taken a stronger stand against the delegitimization of Israel—by condemning groups like JVP, IfNotNow, Bend the Arc, and other organizations that claim to be “Jewish” yet ignore history and promote anti-Israel vitriol—then perhaps such lies and disinformation would not have spread among some in our community, let alone in our country.

Today, the chickens have come home to roost. Young people are aligning with Hamas, and even Jewish students are comparing Hamas’ murderous attacks to the Jewish freedom fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Holocaust survivors, whose tormentors I helped to track down, have tragically lived to see young people, including their own descendants, tweeting—from the safety of some coffee shop in Brooklyn—Hamas propaganda against Israel. These young people didn’t simply absorb these dangerous ideas from the ether. In addition to hearing it at their universities and in the general interest media, some heard it in their synagogues and in their Jewish community centers and from Jewish organizations—so eager to appear fashionable and progressive that they legitimized people calling for their own destruction.

To reverse the growing movement to destroy the one and only Jewish state, the rabbis and Jewish leaders who allowed BDS and anti-Israelism into the “Jewish tent” must take responsibility for this misjudgment, and change course—with conviction and principle. We could not afford to make this mistake last time. We certainly cannot afford to do it again.