The tsunami of antisemitism unleashed in America by the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel has not abated. If anything, it is gaining strength.
This past weekend, bomb threats were emailed to hundreds of synagogues and Jewish institutions nationwide. According to the Secure Community Network, which coordinates security arrangements for Jewish organizations, 199 bomb threats were reported in a 24-hour span. Many of the threats were timed to force synagogues to evacuate during Sabbath services. Attacks on other synagogues were more direct. On Sunday, for example, an assailant yelling “Gas the Jews!” sprayed foul-smelling liquid on people exiting the Kesher Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C. In Albany, N.Y., a few days earlier, a man shouting “Free Palestine” fired gunshots at Temple Israel while dozens of children were attending preschool inside.
During the recent Hanukkah festival, large public menorahs in numerous cities were vandalized or destroyed. In Oakland, Calif., an 11-foot-tall menorah was smashed and thrown into a lake; “Free Palestine” was spray-painted in Arabic where the menorah had stood. In Juno Beach, Fla., where there is an annual tradition to publicly light a sand-sculpted menorah, this year’s menorah was demolished and a swastika placed atop the wreckage. During an anti-Israel demonstration in New Haven, Conn., a man wearing a keffiyeh climbed the giant menorah installed near the Yale campus and draped it with a Palestinian flag.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, who testified on Oct. 31 that the United States was experiencing “historic” levels of antisemitism, told the Senate Judiciary Committee this month that the crisis is worsening. Wray said his agency has opened 60 percent more hate crimes investigations since Oct. 7 than before then. “The biggest chunk of those,” he confirmed, “are threats against the Jewish community.”
But no development has been more alarming than the evidence of overflowing hostility toward Jews and the Jewish state among young Americans.
Antisemitism is surging on college campuses, where Jewish students are being taunted, threatened, and assaulted. The Anti-Defamation League reported on Nov. 29 that 73 percent of Jewish college students surveyed said they experienced or witnessed antisemitic incidents since the start of the school year. The ADL survey, which polled nearly 3,100 students, found that the share of Jewish students saying they feel comfortable with their Jewish identity being publicly known has plummeted since October, from 64 percent to 39 percent.
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In the latest Harris poll, a detailed survey of more than 2,000 registered voters conducted with the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard, two-thirds of Gen Z Americans, those between 18 and 24, said that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors.” Among all respondents, by contrast, 73 percent rejected that belief as “a false ideology.” In the same survey, 60 percent of 18-to-24-year-old respondents agreed that Hamas’s “killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of another 250 civilians can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians.” Among every older cohort, a majority of respondents said there was no justification for the Hamas atrocities.
In the aggregate, the Harvard/Harris poll found, 81 percent of American voters surveyed support Israel in its confrontation with Hamas. Among voters younger than 25, however, support was evenly split. Similarly, a narrow majority of the Gen Z respondents, 51 percent, said the “long-term answer” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is for Israel to be “ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.” In all the older age groups, that view was decisively repudiated.
To be fair, this is just one poll. It likely has a higher-than-normal margin of error and some of its findings are at variance with answers given by Gen Z respondents to other questions.
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Nevertheless, these are shocking results. They bespeak a badly warped moral compass among the nation’s youngest adults — those just leaving high school and in their early 20s. Smearing “Jews as a class” as oppressors and calling for the world’s only Jewish country to “be ended” and delivered to its enemy is rank antisemitism. And as has so often been the case with noxious beliefs, antisemitism has proliferated so readily among young people precisely because they have been indoctrinated to believe it.
In recent years, teachers and administrators in many communities have actively inculcated a left-wing narrative of “oppressor vs. oppressed” and embraced a mission to challenge “white privilege” and “decolonize” their teaching. Some school districts and college classrooms single out Israel for denunciation and promote poisonous lessons on “Palestinian dispossession of lands/identity/culture through Zionist settler colonialism.” The Massachusetts Teachers Association this month adopted a resolution demanding an end to US support for Israel and excoriating “the Netanyahu government’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people.” It is hardly surprising that students exposed to such virulent attitudes in their formative years are more likely to hold antisemitic views as young adults.
It has long been clear to those willing to look that antisemitism was spreading among the young. Oct. 7 and its aftermath didn’t create the current flood of anti-Jewish ugliness; they merely revealed it. Now it is spreading openly. Like any plague, it will cause considerable suffering and will not be easy to suppress.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jeff.jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on X @jeff_jacoby. To subscribe to Arguable, his weekly newsletter, visit globe.com/arguable.
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