A Generation of Antisemites

The tsunami of antisemitism unleashed in America by the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist atrocities 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 have been more direct. On Sunday, 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., it is an annual tradition to publicly light a sand-sculpted menorah; this year the menorah was knocked down and a large black swastika placed atop the wreckage. During an anti-Israel demonstration in New Haven, Conn., a man wearing a keffiyeh climbed the 30-foot-tall 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 to Jews and the Jewish state among young Americans.

Antisemitism is surging on college campuses, where reports of Jewish students being taunted, threatened, cursed, and assaulted continue without letup. 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 before the Hamas-Israel war began to just 39 percent now.

In the latest Harris poll, a detailed survey of more than 2,000 registered voters conducted jointly 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, that belief was rejected as "a false ideology" by 73 percent. In the same survey, 60 percent of 18-to-24-year-old respondents believed that Hamas's "killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of another 250 civilians can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians." Just 40 percent said no. Among every older cohort, a majority of respondents said the Hamas atrocities could not be justified.

A slight majority of the Gen Z respondents said that the "long-term answer" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is for Israel to be "ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians."

While the Harvard/Harris poll found that in the aggregate, 81 percent of American voters surveyed support Israel in its confrontation with Hamas, among voters younger than 25, support was evenly split between the two. Similarly, a slight majority of the Gen Z respondents, 51 percent, said that 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 is decisively repudiated.

To be fair, this is just one poll. It likely has a higher-than-normal margin of error, and some of these findings are at variance with the answers given by Gen Z respondents to other questions.

Nevertheless, these are shocking results. They bespeak a badly warped moral compass among the nation's youngest adults — those just leaving high school and of college age. Smearing "Jews as a class" as oppressors and calling for the world's lone Jewish country to "be ended" and delivered to its enemy is nothing less than antisemitism. And as has so often been the case with noxious beliefs, it has proliferated so readily among young people precisely because they have been indoctrinated to think that way.

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 "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." A few days ago, the Massachusetts Teachers Association adopted a resolution demanding an end to US support for Israel and excoriating what it called "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 far more likely to hold antisemitic views as young adults.

This article originally appeared in the Boston Globe.