Trump Doesn’t Give a Damn about Jews

The pervasiveness and intensity of antisemitism on American campuses, unearthed by the war in Gaza, surprised us. It is not that we were oblivious to the existence of antisemitism. We heard “Jews will not replace us” chants in Charlottesville, Va., and saw the massacre of Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue, in Pittsburgh. Yet, despite being on the faculty of American colleges for many years, we underestimated how deeply entrenched antisemitism is among the presumably progressive academic left. We failed to anticipate the simplistic zeal with which some of our colleagues were willing to demonize Zionism, and its Jewish supporters, as a uniquely evil force in the contemporary global order. Instead, we learned that, as Jewish faculty members, while we are hated for not being white enough by white supremacists, we were seen as “white-settler colonialists” by progressive fundamentalists.