Anti-Semitism on the Left and Right Brings U.S. Jews Together

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In the days prior to the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which took place in Washington this week, the progressive policy organization MoveOn urged Democratic presidential candidates to skip the event. Many, including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, said that they would.

The boycott was fictitious in some ways, as AIPAC does not typically invite candidates to speak in non-election years. Yet it attracted notice, mostly because it seemed to buttress complaints from liberals who argue that the leading U.S. pro-Israel lobby leans right and is not hospitable to Democrats and progressives.

Shortly thereafter, former President Barack Obama announced that he would host a reception for freshman House Democrats on Monday evening. The time slot was the same as that of AIPAC’s leadership reception, among its most important events of the year. Between MoveOn, Obama and AIPAC’s perennial critics, it seemed that the organization would be caught in the maelstrom of a divided American Jewish community, between those on the right who are loyal to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and those in the center and left who believe he needs to go. Memories of young people disrupting and protesting the conference in 2017 loomed large.

Matters, though, did not turn out that way. The Iran nuclear deal, once a source of bitter division among American Jews, was hardly discussed. Disagreements persist over Israel’s role in the occupation of the West Bank, the stalled Palestinian peace process, the Chief Rabbinate’s dismissive attitude to non-Orthodox Judaism and Netanyahu’s cozying up to racist parties. Yet those topics hardly created a ripple. Instead, there was one issue that loomed large, and on that issue, American Jews are united. That issue is U.S. anti-Semitism.

When AIPAC chief executive Howard Kohr addressed the convention on Sunday morning, he focused not on threats to Israel’s security, which is what regular AIPAC participants have long been used to hearing, but on threats to American Jews.

“Today, I want to talk to you about our mission and our rights as pro-Israel activists and as proud American citizens,” Kohr said. “Because today things are different. We are being challenged in a way that is new and far more aggressive.” By “we,” he did not mean Israel or AIPAC. He was talking about American Jews.

In a decade and a half of attending AIPAC policy conferences, I have virtually never heard U.S. anti-Semitism mentioned. AIPAC’s annual gathering has long been a celebration of its influence and commitment to Israel.

The focus on anti-Semitism did afford cover to Democrats who had elected to stay away. It gave candidate Harris, for example, a chance to buff her pro-Israel credentials without antagonizing progressives.

“Great to meet today in my office with California AIPAC leaders,” she tweeted, “to discuss the need for a strong U.S.-Israel alliance, the right of Israel to defend itself, and my commitment to combat anti-Semitism in our country and around the world.”

Anti-Semitism seems to have cooled even the passions of seasoned, professional observers of Jewish America. Batya Ungar-Sargon, who as an editor at the left-leaning Forward (which just weeks ago ran an article arguing that U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota should not be accused of anti-Semitism for castigating AIPAC) has disparaged AIPAC in years past. This week, she sang its praises:

There is just one place that I know of where people are determined to get over their differences and work together for a cause that’s bigger than their personal preferences. That place is AIPAC. And at a time when the United States has devolved into the most intense partisan divide in recent memory, AIPAC’s commitment to bipartisanship is nothing short of radical. AIPAC is the last vestige of a better America, a bipartisan America, an America that knows how to put aside its differences and get things done.

I gave a half-dozen presentations at the AIPAC conference on various subjects, but the questions I received were focused on one issue: What is going to happen to U.S. Jews? It’s a question hardly anyone ever asked at an AIPAC conference before, and seemed to reflect a sense that Jews need each other more than ever.

How this new development will play out, it is too early to say. And Omar, the Muslim congresswoman whose critique of U.S.-Israel ties has provoked charges of anti-Semitism and countercharges of Islamophobia, and who was hardly mentioned by name at AIPAC, is certainly not the only cause for American Jewish nervousness.

President Donald Trump ran a 2016 campaign that included familiarly coded warnings about the financial power of financier George Soros, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein. His comment while in the White House that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the 2017 white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, after marchers had chanted “Jews will not replace us,” was easy enough to read as an embrace of white supremacism and its anti-Semitic elements. The shootings a year later at a Pittsburgh synagogue illustrated again the power of the social media to put Jews and other minorities in the crosshairs of armed fanatics.

One thing the right and the left have in common is that they have both contributed to a growing discomfort among U.S. Jews, who nevertheless mostly believe that this wave will pass. What can’t be denied, though, is that the worry that was so evident at the AIPAC conference is not one that most Jews thought they would encounter in 21st-century America.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Daniel Gordis is senior vice president and Koret distinguished fellow at Shalem College in Jerusalem. Author of 11 books, his latest is "Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn."

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