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Let’s be clear about what antisemitism is—and what it’s not. It’s not merely a protest slogan, and it can’t always be waved away as “criticism of a government.” It’s an ancient, adaptable hatred that keeps finding new language for the same old accusation: that Jews are uniquely responsible for the world’s evils and therefore deserve to be excluded, persecuted, or eliminated. When the West allows that hatred to spread, it isn’t conducting some noble experiment in free speech. It’s abandoning its civic responsibilities, and history tells us that the bill eventually comes due in blood.
The latest example came from Ithaca, New York. At US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (DS-NY) “Students vs. Billionaires” town hall, roughly 2,000 people packed the room for what amounted to a midterm turnout rally. Before Ocasio-Cortez took the stage, Cornell Young Democratic Socialists of America co-chairs Mina Petrova and Zoe Reisman fired up the crowd by declaring “long live the student intifada” and leading a chant of “from the river to the sea.” Petrova also claimed that Cornell is controlled by trustees “profiting off of genocide and war.”
The U.S. House has already passed a resolution describing that chant as antisemitic, and Ocasio-Cortez voted against it. She then used the event to criticize the university for cracking down on protesters. None of this was incidental background noise. A sitting member of Congress walked onto a stage after organizers had treated eliminationist rhetoric as a crowd-pleasing opening act.
That scene exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of today’s far Left. The people who endlessly lecture everyone else about tolerance, inclusion, and “harm” suddenly discover a remarkable tolerance for antisemitism when it serves their politics.
DSA activists, far-left Democrat candidates, and members of the “coexist” crowd increasingly treat Jewish self-determination as the one identity claim that may be mocked, denied, or hunted. They welcome activists who recycle tropes about “money-hungry Jews,” display inverted red triangles, and compare Zionists to Nazis. They hesitate—or flatly refuse—to condemn calls to “globalize the intifada.”
Only when public outrage becomes impossible to ignore do some of them find their voices, and even then, the apology is usually weaker than the original chant. The familiar coexist bumper sticker was never much of a principle. It was a pose. When mobs gathered outside synagogues and took over campus quads, that pose collapsed into excuses, silence, and most often applause.
Campus life after October 7 made the pattern impossible to miss. Students for Justice in Palestine chapters and allied organizations blocked Jewish students from libraries and classrooms, smashed mezuzahs, and turned the word “Zionist” into a slur used to justify exclusion. Professors assigned material by terrorist spokesmen and canceled classes to support walkouts. Unions and student governments carried the politics of the encampments into official resolutions and policies.
And who bore the consequences? Not members of the Israeli cabinet. Not military commanders in Jerusalem. The immediate targets were Jewish students—and mostly American citizens—trying to cross an American campus, attend class, or enter a library. The far Left’s preferred excuse—that all of this is merely “anti-Zionism”—falls apart the moment it encounters those facts.
We shouldn’t pretend this is a new phenomenon. Antisemitism has always been a shapeshifter, changing its vocabulary while preserving its destination: exclusion and, ultimately, elimination.
In the ancient world, the charges were religious and civic. Jews were accused of misanthropy and ritual crimes because they wouldn’t worship the gods of the city. Medieval Christendom repackaged the hatred as accusations of deicide, well-poisoning, and blood libel; pogroms and expulsions followed. And the Enlightenment did not destroy the virus. It merely secularized it.
Nineteenth-century racial theorists replaced the charge of “Christ-killer” with fantasies about a biological conspiracy. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion then supplied a ready-made plot for anyone eager to believe in secret Jewish control. National Socialism fused racial pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and state power into industrialized murder. Six million dead Jews weren’t an accidental byproduct of wartime chaos. They were the intended destination of an idea that respectable society had pathetically allowed to fester.
The Soviet and postcolonial Left carried out the next mutation.
After Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan campaigns and the Doctors’ Plot, “Zionism” became a politically acceptable container for much of the old hatred. Jews were no longer described as a race to be liquidated; instead, they were recast as a “settler-colonial” enterprise whose very existence was supposedly racist. The United Nations’ 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution gave that formula international legitimacy, however temporary and disgraceful.
Twenty-first-century campus radicals and DSA chapters inherited the framework, added the fashionable vocabulary of intersectionality, and learned that accusations of uniquely Jewish bloodlust could still fill meeting halls, energize activists, and move primary voters. The method has barely changed. First, isolate one people. Then invert victim and aggressor. Finally, redefine Jewish self-defense as the original offense. The terminology sounds newer and more academic, but the machinery underneath it is painfully familiar.
History isn’t subtle about what tends to come next. Blood libels became pogroms. Racial theories became the Nuremberg Laws, and the Nuremberg Laws led to gas chambers.
An “anti-Zionism” that denies Jews the right of self-determination routinely granted to other peoples isn’t a fresh moral insight; it’s an old demand wearing new clothes. When socialist organizers lead 2,000 people in a “river-to-the-sea” chant at a congressional turnout rally, they aren’t presenting a workable peace proposal. They’re rehearsing a much older script. And when far-left Democrats and the self-congratulatory coexist chorus describe that rehearsal as justice, they aren’t merely confused bystanders. They’re making themselves useful to a dangerous cause.
Western societies that dismiss all of this as campus fashion aren’t enlightened or sophisticated. They are ignorant and reckless. Universities that substituted endless discussions of “context” for basic enforcement taught a generation of activists that Jewish safety is negotiable and the clothing of terrorists is fashionable. Political organizations that harvest this hatred for votes, donations, attention, and moral preening aren’t brave dissenters. They’re opportunists playing with a force they either don’t understand or don’t care to control.
A civilization that can no longer recognize the world’s oldest hatred when it appears wrapped in keffiyehs, embedded in DSA platforms, or disguised by academic jargon has already begun to forget why it built liberal institutions in the first place—and what happens when those institutions fail.
Allowing antisemitism to grow isn’t compassion, sophistication, or free inquiry. It’s gross irresponsibility and a dereliction of the most basic civic duty: protecting a minority that has served as the canary in the sociological coal mine in nearly every collapse of Western order. Those who fan the flames for political advantage—DSA organizers, far-left Democrat candidates, and members of the coexist crowd who excuse the chants, launder the tropes, and punish Jewish people for noticing—are the scum of the Earth.
That judgment is severe because the stakes are severe. They know, or certainly should know, where this road has led every time society has chosen euphemism over courage. The West can’t claim ignorance of the record. It’s seen the progression from slander to isolation, from isolation to persecution, and from persecution to slaughter.
If it willingly starts down that road again, it will have no excuse for the destination.
