December 20, 2023

A Generation of Antisemites

The share of Jewish students saying they are comfortable with their religious identity being publicly known has plummeted since Oct. 7 to just 39 percent.

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.

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.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.