How will the administration deal witH IT?
When Arab-Israeli journalist Yoseph Haddad spoke at a downtown Chicago synagogue a day after the presidential election, dozens of pro-Hamas demonstrators showed up. Masked or wearing kaffiyehs, most screamed outside the Loop shul, but a couple got inside under false names, disrupting the event and vandalizing property. Shouted down by the audience, they were hauled out by police.
This followed an attack by a pair of masked men earlier that day on two Jewish students at DePaul University, about five miles away. And it came after an attempted murder of a Jewish man, shot on Oct. 26 on his way to synagogue West Rogers Park, about 11 miles away.
Meanwhile, on Election Day, a neo-Nazi endorsed Donald J. Trump for president. As Rolling Stone reported, Chris Hood, the founder of the neo-Nazi group NSC-131 called on fellow fascists in the swing states to vote for Trump.
So, might we expect to see stepped up antisemitic incidents over the coming four years? Recall that Trump flirted with white extremism two years ago by dining with the rapper Ye and prominent white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at his Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, as Vox noted.
And remember that during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, protesters carried a Confederate flag into the US Capitol, erected a gallows and noose on the lawn, and that at least one rioter sported a “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie. Proud Boys brandished “6 Million Wasn’t Enough” T-shirts and an Israeli reporter was singled out and harassed by protestors, according to AP News. White nationalists recorded a live stream and offered a “Shoutout to Germany” for their 10,000 viewers.
Of course, Trump has long done a weird dance with such supremacists. He repeatedly denounced antisemitism and he has a Jewish daughter and grandchildren. But he also has praised Hitler and criticized American Jews for not showing enough gratitude for his support of Israel.
It’s likely that Trump’s stances on immigrants and others hated by supremacists emboldened them. Antisemitic incidents and hate crimes rose 12% from 1,879 in 2018 to 2,107 in 2019, where the highest previous number was in 1994, according to Reuters. These included fatal shootings at a California Synagogue and a New Jersey kosher grocery store, as well as the stabbing of a rabbi in his New York home.
To be sure, antisemitism exploded during the Joe Biden term, mainly as a reaction to the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and Israel. Hillel recorded 1,834 antisemitic incidents on campuses in the 2023-24 school year, up from 180 in 2019-20 and 254 the following year. A study by Brandeis academics found that antisemitism was “far more prevalent” on campuses last year than in 2016, when they first examined the phenomenon. “The ongoing Israel-Hamas war is clearly a major driver of the sharp increase in antisemitic hostility on campus,” they reported.
And the Anti-Defamation League counted 8,873 incidents nationwide last year. This was sharply up from the roughly 2,000 recorded each year during Trump’s first term. Such incidents have continued.
As the ADL reported, on Oct. 13, a speaker named Tarek Bazzi at an anti-Israel rally in Dearborn, Michigan, said: “We’re not here to condemn the killing of innocent civilians on both sides. We’re not here to chant empty slogans, because when we say ‘Free Palestine,’ and when we say ‘From the river to the sea,’ we understand what that means….The only hope that Palestine has is its armed resistance…If you’re pro-Palestine, then you’re pro-armed resistance.”
Four days before, at a rally in New York City, the crowd cheered after a speaker mentioned that 5,000 rockets had been fired at Israel. An attendee displayed his phone to onlookers with an image of a swastika on it, and another held a sign celebrating the attack as a “Zionist nightmare.”
But can we expect things to get worse in coming years? As long as the Gaza War continues, this may be the case. But much will turn on how the White House and campus administrators respond.
“Trump and extremists’ unabated use of xenophobic antisemitic tropes without an immediate and unequivocal condemnation from a bipartisan group of leaders across the U.S. will likely lead to more violence and hatred toward the American Jewish community,” former ambassador Norman Eisen and former USAID administrator Jonathan Katz warned in a September piece in Newsweek in which they said Trump was fueling antisemitism in his campaign. “A 2024 American Jewish Committee survey found that 93 percent of Jews think that antisemitism is a problem, with 56 percent calling it a ‘serious’ problem.”
They pointed to efforts in Washington to combat the problem. They praised the Biden-Harris National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, and pressed for the bipartisan Countering Antisemitism Act. But they said such national efforts must be coupled with state and local action, including by governors and mayors, across the U.S., who should adopt policies in line with the White House led strategy to counter antisemitism.
While collegiate bans on encampments protesting the Gaza War have limited the more vocal antisemitic events on campuses, incidents have continued, as recorded by the AMCHA Initiative:
At Harvard the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine held a silent protest inside a library in October, during which students sat with signs that demonized Israel with such phrases as, “No normalcy during genocide,” “Harvard divest from death,” and “Israel bombed a hospital, again.” Meanwhile, the university restored the PSC as an official student group after a five-month suspension.
At Drexel in Philadelphia, a helicopter dropped leaflets that demonized Israel, stating, “This is how Israel gives evacuation orders. Imagine this paper telling you to pack up your family and leave your life behind. This is what terrorist Israel does when you stay at the hospital where you are being treated.” At Columbia, a faculty and staff group called for a boycott of local businesses with ties to Israel on Instagram, including a map of businesses to boycott indicated with red inverted triangles, a symbol of Hamas’s targets.
For Halloween, a student at Binghamton University dressed up as Yahya Sinwar, the dead leader of Hamas. The student and posted a picture on Instagram alongside the caption, “this was my costume last night.”
Some academics have stood out for their viciousness against Israel. At an Oct. 15 rally in New York, CUNY professor Danny Shaw shouted, “Zionism is a trap. Go back to your true history. Go back to Yiddish land …. This is not Israel versus Hamas. This is a Zionist extermination campaign that began in 1948.”
Republicans in recent months criticized campuses that they said didn’t act against antisemitism, often angering free-speech advocates. Whether legislative efforts will continue or grow remains to be seen.
If incidents multiply, it’s likely that the Trump Administration will face demands to act anew against antisemitism. Given Trump’s dalliances with supremacists, can or will it do so?
