When Both Sides Feed the Monster: The Generational Crisis Over Israel and Antisemitism

When the Old Stories Stop Working

I am a white Christian woman living in Kentucky. So, when overt antisemitism appears in my real life, I sit up and pay attention. This week I heard from a friend who is struggling with a student expressing antisemitic rhetoric straight out of Nick Funtes’s greatest hits. I heard about an acquaintance expressing truly repulsive opinions about Jewish people during normal conversation in what I would call polite society.

Then, there was the antisemitic attack on Dave Portnoy in Mississippi this week and the question a dear friend in New York City has been asking of Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani. How will he prevent antisemitic attacks against Jewish New Yorkers? Not condemn. Prevent.

All of this was on my mind, as I listened to Jon Lovett and Tim Miller and Hasan Piker debate during their panel (ironically titled Are We Having Fun Yet?) at Crooked Con.

The conversation was about a lot of things - as conversations with Democrats always are. Everyone agreed that affordability was a winning message for both moderates and progressives but disagreed about moderating on social issues. Piker (and to a certain extent Symone Sanders Townsend) argued that some issues were about morality and any refusal to toe the progressive line was both a failure of values and communication strategy. Not surprisingly, this line of reasoning from Piker led to a conversation about Israel.

Here’s Piker:

For example, especially not in the broader populations understanding of this issue, but in mainstream media and in American politics, there’s a major division between how the population is receiving what Israel is doing and how our politicians are responding to it and how the media even responds to it. Anti-Zionism is a scary term or a scary word for a lot of media professionals in a way that like being anti-Israel is not necessarily scary at all for the average person. As a matter of fact, they are very anti-Israel now and there’s polling to reflect on that reality.

Piker is right about that polling, although I think the words “average person” are doing a lot of work there. To the average American Piker’s age and younger, that is true. As compared to other generations, Americans under 30 are more sympathetic to the Palestinian people, are opposed to American support of Israel, and less likely to say discrimination against Jewish people has increased since the war.

They are also five times as likely to be antisemitic.

As you can see, this generational gap holds across party identification. In recent weeks, the Republican Party has faced antisemitic texts coming from Young Republicans, a Trump nominee that claimed he had a “Nazi streak”, and Tucker Carlson’s mainstreaming Nick Fuentes (and the resulting fallout).

In fact, J.D. Vance at a recent TP USA forum found himself facing the same issue the guys at Crooked Con did - in a friendly space meant to celebrate ideological victories, a generational conflict over Israel and growing antisemitism reared it’s ugly head.

An audience member asked the Vice President:

I’m a Christian man, and I’m just confused why there’s this notion that we might owe Israel something or that they’re our greatest ally or that we have to support this multi-hundred-billion-dollar foreign-aid package to Israel,” asked a young man in a MAGA hat. “I’m just confused why this idea has come around, considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the persecution of ours.

Vance’s answer was as dissatisfying as Piker’s because they both act as if the only thing happening is people’s shifting support for Israel and ignore the attendant antisemitism.

On both sides, a rapidly shifting view of Israel comes hand in hand with blatant antisemitism. Young Republicans argue against our special relationship with Israel because they say America should come first. Young Democrats argue against our special relationship with Israel because they say Palestinian rights should come first. There is even a generational conflict inside the Jewish community itself with younger Jews more likely to describe themselves as anti-Zionist. And while few would argue that any critique of Netanyahu and his government is inherently antisemitic. Antisemitism is a hungry monster and seems to feed off even the most fair-minded critiques of Israel.

But if antisemitism is a hungry monster then I think it feeds off our special relationship with Israel - in particular how that relationship is changing. For most of my adult life, that relationship rested on an implicitly moral argument: The Holocaust was proof that the Jewish people needed their own state to assure their safety. Therefore, supporting Israel was fighting antisemitism and its persistent threat.

However, over the past few years, what I have witnessed is an Israeli government more than capable of defending itself with very little concern for the ways it is making the global population of Jews less safe, including my own beloved friends and neighbors. Plus, with this rising tide of violent anti-semitism, are Jews fleeing to Israel as a safe haven? No, they are not. Immigration into the country has declined in the past ten years. In fact, the Knesset reports it is emigration that poses a fundamental threat to Israel. More than 125,000 Israelis have left the country since 2023.

Here in the United States, I have witnessed leaders in both parties refuse to admit that the old consensus on Israel is over and persist in depending on that old story to prevent rising hatred and violence against Jewish Americans. So, back to my friend’s question, how do we prevent antisemitic attacks? How do we halt this growing tragedy of antisemitism when the old consensus is over and both critique of Israel and support of Israel act as accelerants?

While never an easy answer, the solution to dehumanization is always a simple one - humanization. Half of the world’s Jewish population lives in Israel and a little less than the other half lives in the United States. American Jews are as diverse as the rest of the country and the conspiracies that would flatten them into a caricature are a lie. Ben Shapiro and Representative Jamie Raskin have little in common ideologically but America is stronger because they live out their shared faith in such different ways.

And no matter our backgrounds, we must all embrace diversity of thought around Israel and the other most difficult issues of our time. I disagree vehemently with Piker on many of his policy proposals, but I was happy to hear a vigorous debate among Democrats.

There was only one comment by Piker that left me cold.

I hate Republicans. If you can unseat a Republican, it’s good. It’s good in my book. That was my anger and resentment with like the way that the Democrats were representing themselves during that campaign where it kind of felt like they didn’t hate Republicans too much. Whenever I hear Nancy Pelosi say, oh, we need a strong Republican party, I’m like, no, we don’t need a Republican party.

Piker’s philosophy is the philosophy of the young. The problem is you and, if I got rid of you, that would solve my problem. It’s no better than the talk of enemies on the right and it is all fertile ground for antisemitism. You can see how easily that approach results in violence. Hatred never stays within the boundaries we set. That is the lesson I learned growing up listening to Holocaust survivors. That eliminating immigrants or antivaxers or Hutus or Tutsis or transphobes or abortionists might be intoxicating but it is ultimately poisonous.

The moral framework that once united Americans in our approach to Israel has collapsed and we can no longer depend on that shared story to stave off growing antisemitism. What we can do is turn from the tribalism in our own lives that acts as much as an accelerant as our opinions on Israel. In a week filled with fearful news, I was encouraged to hear that Mayor-Elect Mamdani called Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, whose home was firebombed in an antisemitic attack earlier this year. These men hold very different opinions on Israel, but they are united in a humanizing politics that makes room to listen to those who disagree with them, moderate to persuade people to join them, and fight when the moment calls for it.

Because preventing antisemitism attacks is about removing the fuel on which they feed: silencing, tribalism, dehumanization. That will take leadership from both parties and it will require all of us to call it out as it appears in our everyday lives.

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This Week’s Low Stakes Controversy

In our outside of politics segment in “Why Is Health Insurance So Expensive?” Sarah and Beth discussed this CBC sketch about how sometimes we just want to fight¹ Which brought us to the classic: Returning Carts at the Grocery Store

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What We’re Reading this Week

• Sarah: The Monks in the Casino (

  Derek Thompson
  )

• Beth: We analyzed 47,000 ChatGPT conversations. Here’s what people really use it for. (The Washington Post)

• Alise: The Strength of the Few by James Islington

• Maggie: TRASHING: The Dark Side of Sisterhood (Ms | April 1976)

Next Week on Pantsuit Politics:

• We May Have Already Hit Peak Booze (Bloomberg | Gift Link)

• Is Moderate Drinking Okay? (The Atlantic | Gift Link)

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1. Which is part of why we started including this space in the newsletter. Let’s practice on things that are low stakes, so we can do better when the stakes get higher.