There is a fascination I have with liberal Jews, of whom there are far too many. Few groups have experienced more systematic oppression than the Jewish people, and you would think that after a few thousand years of being singled out for pogroms, the current generation would have learned that you can’t appease the haters.
You would be wrong, although, to be fair, the impulse is similar to the AWFLs who go to racist grifters hoping to be absolved of the guilt of having been born. The difference here is that Jews have more direct experience with the consequences of their mistakes.
The archetypical case of liberal Jews misunderstanding their haters was Germany, where Reform Judaism was born, and Jewish integration into the larger society was most advanced before the Nazis took over. Jews, who were very well integrated and successful within German society, became the scapegoats when everything went to hell, and we all know the results.
The lesson for the Jews who emigrated to Israel post-war was well learned, but not so for American Jews, the second-largest home of the Jewish diaspora. American Jews, for the most part, never had the direct experience with violent antisemitism that the European Jews had, and apparently the lesson of the Holocaust didn’t take as well here as over there.
It’s not that American Jews haven’t experienced antisemitism; of course they have. It’s just that the form it took here was more along the lines of slights, quotas, and disdain, and rarely outright violence and open hate. There very much is a “it can’t happen here” vibe among a lot of American Jews.
@just_whatever I will post this at every opportunity when I see these IDIOTIC self-hating Jews, who will ALWAYS when on line to the gas chambers, ask “HOW DID THIS HAPPEN” https://t.co/V3281stNHa
— MontanaJoe (@MontanaJoeh6) November 6, 2026
Of course, Jews in Germany very much believed it couldn’t happen there either. After all, they were very successful in Germany and, it seemed, mostly blended in. They fought in World War I on Germany’s side, and worked mightily to fit in. And, of course, when the genie escaped the bottle, it mattered not at all.
Well, the antisemitism genie is out of the bottle here in America now, and a lot of liberal Jews who have been full-throated supporters of the Palestinian cause are discovering that their being lefty fellow travelers matters not a whit.
On Oct. 31, ‘Philly Bike On Your Left,’ a group that describes itself as an “anti-fascist, anti-Zionist social cycling collective,” posted a flyer announcing a boycott of what they described as “Zionist establishments” in the city’s Rittenhouse Square neighborhood.
The group plans to boycott the Philadelphia restaurants Mac Mart, K’Far Café, Huda, Goldie, Schlesinger’s, and Dizengoff on Nov. 8, 2026, in solidarity with the Palestinian community.
The planned boycott occurs on the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht, aka the “Night of Broken Glass,” an antisemitic riot against Jews in Germany, Austria, and Sudetenland that was coordinated by the Nazi Party on Nov. 9 and Nov. 10, 1938. During the attacks, thousands of Jewish businesses, homes, schools and synagogues were damaged. An estimated 1,000 to 2,000 Jews were killed in the attacks and an estimated 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.
The Philly Bike on Your Left group is labeling Jewish businesses “Zionist,” regardless of the actual politics of their owners, and demanding that they be shut down, not even just boycotted by supporters of Netanyahu, the war, or even Israel itself. And the Jewish supporters of Palestine are learning that “Zionist” is just another word for “Jew,” and Jews are not welcome here.
This is a common experience, and it goes far beyond this one event. You can find example after example of Jews who are down with the cause discovering that the cause is not down with them. Not only does Israel have no right to exist, but they don’t either.
The day before the Kristallnacht anniversary, three anti-Israel groups are organizing a boycott targeting Jewish-owned businesses in Philadelphia. The organizers: Philly Writers Against the War on Gaza, Philly Bike On Your Left, and Boycott CookNSolo. But this isn’t about Israel. Their targets include Jewish American-owned businesses, and their message is explicit: these businesses have “no place in our city.”
— Canary Mission (@canarymission) November 5, 2026
The day before the Kristallnacht anniversary, three anti-Israel groups are organizing a boycott targeting Jewish-owned businesses in Philadelphia.
The organizers: Philly Writers Against the War on Gaza, Philly Bike On Your Left, and Boycott CookNSolo.
But this isn’t about Israel. Their targets include Jewish American-owned businesses, and their message is explicit: these businesses have “no place in our city.”
There are many cases of far-left Jews who thought they had bought immunity from attacks from the left who discovered that their genetic backgrounds make them handy targets.
Antisemites at @BerkeleyLaw are targeting their professors. When Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Prof. Catherine Fisk invited 3Ls to dinner, students called for a boycott and then came to their home with a mic to protest. Now @sairasameerarao is spreading this video without context. https://t.co/mHILs5To8m
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) April 10, 2024
Consider left-wing professor Erwin Chemerinsky:
niversity of California, Berkeley, Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky has a storied record as a constitutional law scholar and an attorney willing to take on some of the hardest and most unpopular causes. In January 2002, he filed the first lawsuit on behalf of Guantánamo detainees, just days after the detention center opened. A few years later, he represented the family of Rachel Corrie—the young American woman who joined the International Solidarity Movement in support of Palestinian rights and was killed by Israeli Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip in 2003, shortly before her 24th birthday—in their lawsuit against Caterpillar, whose equipment was being used to demolish Palestinians’ houses in the Occupied Territories.
I first met Chemerinsky six or seven years ago, when we were both writing weekly columns for The Sacramento Bee on the Trump administration and its escalating assaults on the rule of law. We were also both, as a result of our writings, receiving death threats and other hate mail, on a fairly regular basis, from outraged denizens of the MAGA movement.
Recently, however, Chemerinsky and his wife, Catherine Fisk, also a UC Berkeley law professor, have become the target of an extraordinarily vitriolic and antisemitic campaign from some pro-Palestinian activists on campus and at the law school. Their offense? Not that Chemerinsky is pro-Netanyahu or that he’s spoken out in defense of the IDF’s actions on Gaza—he isn’t and he hasn’t, and in fact he told me this week that he abhors what Israel is doing in Gaza and opposes the blockade of food into the territory. But he has made statements in the past saying that he supports Israel’s right to exist.
For his troubles helping Palestinians and fighting the power, Chemerinsky became the target of a vicious campaign of vitriol. Flyers went up around campus; protesters crashed a dinner, shouting. It made national news, and Chemerinsky was honestly surprised that there are left-wing antisemites.
Berkeley alumni and students are continuing to protest outside the home of Erwin Chemerinsky and Catherine Fisk: https://t.co/pUOzRlvlMx
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) April 15, 2024
Or consider Joanna Chen, a far-left Israeli writer who spent time helping Palestinians get medical care, just as many of the October 7 victims did. She wrote about her struggles after October 7th in an essay published in a radical left-wing magazine; more than a dozen staff quit in disgust, and the magazine retracted her story.
The essay, titled “From the Edges of a Broken World,” provoked an uproar in the activist literary world. Over the weekend, more than a dozen of the publication’s staff resigned in protest — and Guernica removed the essay from its website.
“Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it,” the magazine said in a statement. “A more fulsome explanation will follow.”
Her crime was living in Israel.
You can find story after story with the same moral: antisemites don’t hate Jews for what they do or what they believe; they hate Jews.
It really doesn’t matter what reasons are provided this time for the hate, because the hatred is a constant and the reasons shift with the times.
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