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Irving would stay on the phone for twenty minutes after his grandson walked away. The boy was four. He’d wander off mid-FaceTime, the way four-year-olds do, gone to find a toy or a snack or nothing at all, and the phone would sit there pointed at an empty room. Irving waited. He knew the boy would come back, and he wanted to be there when he did.

I learned that on Friday, at his funeral. Irving was my best friend’s father. You go to a funeral for the living, and I went for my friend. I did not expect to leave thinking about how we treat each other. I left thinking about almost nothing else.

The rabbi talked about a question the rabbis have been turning over for two thousand years. How do you want to be remembered?

There’s a passage in Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, where a teacher sends his students out with one assignment. Go find the good path, the one a person should hold onto for life. They come back with answers. A good eye. A good friend. A good neighbor. One says it’s seeing how things end before you begin them. Good answers, all of them. Then the last student, Elazar ben Arach, says the good path is a good heart. And the teacher stops the room. That’s the one, he says. His answer holds all of yours inside it.

The classical commentators explain why. The heart is the engine. The good eye, the good neighbor, the rest of it, none of it runs without a good heart underneath. Get the heart right, and the rest follows. Get it wrong, and nothing else counts for much.

Irving had it right.

In Judaism, we say the soul is a candle. “The soul of a person is the candle of G-d,” from Proverbs, and it’s why we light a small flame when someone dies and let it burn. The candle goes out eventually. The flame doesn’t, not really. By then, it’s already lit other things.

Irving spent his life making sure nothing went dark. He was a writer, in the way ordinary people are writers. He kept journals. He wrote down the moments the rest of us let slip past and lose forever. And he’d text his son passages from years earlier, things he’d recorded when they happened, sometimes in a private code only the two of them could read.

A man who spent decades refusing to let memory disappear is now the one being remembered. He fought, forgetting his whole life, and he handed his son the flame in a language only they shared.

There’s a custom at a Jewish burial. You don’t lower the casket and walk off. Each person takes the shovel and places earth into the grave with their own hands. In many communities, you don’t pass the shovel hand-to-hand. You set it back in the dirt for the next person to lift, so you never hand your grief to someone else to carry.

We call burying the dead chesed shel emet. The truest kindness. True because the person you do it for can never thank you, never repay you, never even know. You do it for nothing.

Irving’s life was full of that kind of kindness. When his granddaughter couldn’t get the hang of a bike, he didn’t just sign her up for lessons. He taught her himself. He couldn’t stand to see anything wasted, food most of all, but really anything. To a fault, his family said, smiling as they said it. He was still madly in love with his wife after all those years, the kind of love people quietly stop believing in until they see it up close.

A man who couldn’t bear to throw away a scrap of food.

If the truest kindness is the one you give to someone who can never repay you, then the cheapest cruelty is the one you aim at someone who never did a thing to you.

We are doing a lot of the cheap things right now. Not to strangers across the world. To people closer than that.

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Antisemitism is climbing in this country. Plenty of it is right where you’d expect. The torches in Charlottesville, the “globalist” wink, the open antisemites who keep getting handed microphones and follower counts. That’s real, and it’s deadly, and I’ve never been quiet about it.

But the kind that unsettles me lately doesn’t come with a tiki torch. It shows up in rooms full of decent people who would be horrified to be called bigots. Their anger about the war is often real, and plenty of it is fair. The trouble is what rides in underneath it, an old idea about Jews that sounded true enough to share without a second look. They aren’t monsters. They’re good people who picked up something ugly without checking what it was.

You’ve seen Wicked. Half the country has, twice. You remember the Wizard, the charming fraud at the center of Oz, and the quiet thing he admits about how power really works. “The best way to bring folks together,” he says, “is to give them a real good enemy.”

You wept for Elphaba. The green girl was turned into a villain because it was useful to somebody. You sat in that theater, and you knew exactly who the bad guy was, and it wasn’t her.

You can criticize the Israeli government. I do, often. It has earned plenty of criticism, and there is nothing antisemitic about saying so out loud. Palestinians are human beings with every ounce of dignity you and I have, and their suffering is real.

Honest criticism isn’t the thing that scares me. The slide is. When “the Israeli government” becomes “the Israelis,” and “the Israelis” becomes “the Jews.” When an argument about policy turns into an old, old story about hidden money and secret loyalties and a people who can’t quite be trusted. That story is centuries older than the state of Israel. It has killed a lot of people like him. And every time it comes back, it shows up wearing the costume of whatever the moment is angry about.

That’s the Wizard’s trick. Somebody hands you a really good enemy, your heart goes a little colder, and you never quite notice the moment it happened.

You don’t get to write your own eulogy. Irving didn’t write his. His family wrote it, in the way they talked about him, in a grandson who will grow up knowing his grandfather waited on the line for him every single time.

But you’re writing yours right now. Today, in what you repeat and what you refuse to pass along, in whether you stop to check the ugly thing or just hit share because it matched how you already felt.

A good heart, or a good enemy. You’re choosing one. We all are.

I’ll tell you where I am. I’m tired. A lot of us are. Two and a half years of explaining, of biting my tongue at dinner tables, of watching people I love repeat things that would have embarrassed them a few years ago. Sometimes I told myself it was exhaustion. Sometimes, if I’m honest, it was that I wanted everyone to still like me. Some mornings I’m scared in a quiet, ordinary way I never used to be. The easy thing, the thing my gut keeps reaching for, is to stop answering the phone.

Irving didn’t. Not even when the boy walked away, leaving him talking to an empty room. He waited because he knew the kid would come back, and he wanted to be there when he did.

That’s what a good heart looks like when you slow down to see it. Not grand. He just refused to give up on people.

A lot of good people have wandered off the line lately. They picked up a story that turned someone into an enemy, never checked it, and walked away from the better part of themselves without knowing they’d done it.

I’m not ready to hang up on them. I don’t think Irving would be either.

May his memory be a blessing.

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A few weeks ago, a bathroom at Stafford High School in Virginia was vandalized with swastikas, references to Adolf Hitler, and the words Kill the Jews. Lyrics from a Nazi marching song. A dated threat of school violence. I’ve written about how the adults in charge responded. This piece is about something different.

It’s about the kid who wrote it.

Whoever that kid is, he has almost certainly sat through a Holocaust lesson. Probably more than one. Virginia has required Holocaust education in its public schools since 2009. He’s been told the number six million. He’s seen the photographs. He’s heard the word upstander. And then he walked into a bathroom and drew a swastika.

So something is missing. And we should be able to ask what.

There’s a line from Deuteronomy that most Jewish parents have heard at some point. V’shinantam l’vanecha. “And you shall teach them diligently to your children.” The Hebrew verb is shinantam. Its root means to sharpen. Like a blade. The Sages read it this way: teaching a child isn’t pouring water into a vessel. It’s sharpening an edge. Making the child’s understanding sharp enough to cut through what they will encounter in the world.

We’ve been pouring. We haven’t been sharpening.

Every Jewish community knows the choreography that follows an incident like the one at Stafford. The statement of concern. The survivor speaker. The field trip to the museum. The renewed call for more Holocaust education. None of it is wrong. The people doing it care. The survivors who still travel to schools at eighty and ninety years old are doing holy work. The teachers carrying these lessons into classrooms where they’ve never met a Jewish student are doing their best with what they’ve been given.

But the bathroom walls keep getting written on. And we should be able to notice that, and ask what else we need, without anyone accusing us of dishonoring the dead.

So let me say what I actually think. Holocaust education is necessary. It is not sufficient. And the gap between what we teach and what kids are absorbing about Jews in 2026 is large enough to fit a swastika through.

Dara Horn made this argument better than I can in a 2023 Atlantic essay that I’d encourage anyone in this conversation to read. The part that matters most for what's happening in Virginia is this.

In most American schools, students meet Jews for the first time on the way to a mass grave. They learn Jewish history as a single chapter that begins around 1933 and ends in 1945. They learn that antisemitism is something that happened, in a faraway country, to people who looked normal, who paid their taxes, who were just like everyone else, until suddenly they weren’t. They learn that the lesson of the Holocaust is to be kind and not to be a bystander. And they learn, by absence, that anything short of six million doesn’t really count.

The data shows it. A 2020 survey by the Claims Conference of American millennials and Gen Z found that 11 percent believe Jews caused the Holocaust. In New York, which has mandated Holocaust education since the 1990s, the number climbs to 19 percent. Nearly one in five young adults in the state with the longest-running Holocaust education mandate in America believes the Jews brought it on themselves. The curriculum did not prevent that. The curriculum and that belief have been coexisting for thirty years.

Virginia is no better. The state has required Holocaust education since 2009, and 11 percent of young adults here believe the same thing as the national average. The mandate did not move the needle.

That’s not a case for less Holocaust education. That’s a case for more of what we’ve been leaving out.

There’s another part of this that the curriculum can’t reach at all, and that every parent in America already knows in their bones.

The kid in the Stafford bathroom didn’t draw a swastika because he read Night. He drew it because his phone taught him to.

He spends six hours a day inside an algorithm that has learned, with extraordinary precision, what makes him angry, what makes him laugh, and which combinations of the two will keep him watching. That algorithm has a curriculum, too. It runs every day. It is winning. The blood libel doesn’t arrive in his life as a medieval woodcut. It arrives as a meme. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion don't arrive as a hundred-year-old Russian forgery. They arrive as a forty-second video about who really owns the banks. The Holocaust doesn’t arrive as Anne Frank’s diary. It arrives as a joke.

Forty-five minutes of Holocaust education a year is not a counterweight to six hours a day of engineered contempt. We’re bringing a textbook to a screen fight. Pretending one more mandate, one more survivor visit, one more field trip will close the gap is how we got here.

So what would actually work? Four additions. Not replacements. Additions.

Teach about Jewish identity before teaching about Jewish death. Not as a faith to be practiced or believed. As a people to be understood. There’s a wide space between those two things, and it’s where actual education happens. Schools already teach about Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity this way, as part of world history and culture. Jews deserve the same treatment, and we are an easier case than most, because Jewish identity isn’t only a religion. It’s a peoplehood, a history, a language tradition, a three-thousand-year argument about how to live. A child who has met a living Jewish idea, the questions asked at a Passover Seder, the argument culture of the Talmud, the persistence of a people that refused to disappear, will recognize the lie when the algorithm comes for them. A child who has only ever met Jews on the way to the gas chamber will not.

Teach antisemitism as a present-tense subject, not just a historical one. The blood libel didn’t end in the Middle Ages. It became they harvest organs. The puppet-master conspiracy didn’t end with the Protocols. It became the Zionists control everything. The money-grubbing stereotype didn’t end in 1939. It became they profit from oppression. Same lie. New wrapper. And it shows up in a new form every generation, including ours. Kids need to recognize the shape of it when it shows up in their feed. The feed isn’t waiting for permission slips.

Teach what’s happening now alongside what happened then. The Holocaust didn’t end antisemitism. The 2018 Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, the 2022 hostage-taking at a Texas synagogue, and the persistent antisemitic incidents in our own state. These belong in the same conversation as Auschwitz, because they are connected, and our kids deserve teachers who can connect them.

Talk about Jewish particularity instead of running from it. The lesson isn’t that we’re all the same. The lesson is that a free society is one that can live with difference. Jews have been the test case for whether any society can do that for three thousand years. The test is happening right now, in middle school hallways and on phones designed by adults who should know better.

None of this means schools should do less Holocaust education. The opposite. Virginia law does not require less than I’m asking for. It requires more than we are doing. Section 22.1-208.02 of the Virginia Code, enacted in 2020, directs schools to teach about anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of dehumanizing injustice, alongside the historical underpinnings of how “lower levels of hate, ridicule, and dehumanization” lead to larger violence. The statute is on the books. The classroom is somewhere else. The bathroom wall lives in the gap between the two.

This isn’t only about Jewish kids. A school system that can only teach a Jewish child by burying her can’t teach pluralism to anyone. A democracy that can’t teach its kids to recognize the oldest lie in the Western world won’t be able to teach them to recognize the new ones either.

It has also failed every other kid in the building who needed the school to model what it looks like to take difference seriously.

Somewhere in Stafford, a Jewish girl walked past that bathroom wall on the way to class. She doesn’t need a moment of silence. She doesn’t need another assembly. She needs the kids around her to know she exists. Not as a chapter that ended in 1945. As a person. As a neighbor. As a Jew.

V’shinantam l’vanecha. You shall sharpen them.

That’s the work, and we should finally do all of it.

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Somewhere in Stafford this weekend, a Jewish kid is sitting at her kitchen table. She knows what was written on the bathroom wall at Stafford High School on May 5. She knows the words. Swastikas. References to Adolf Hitler. “Kill the Jews.” Lyrics from a Nazi marching song. A dated threat of school violence.

She is watching the adults around her to see if they can say what it is.

That is what this is about. Naming. Whether the people responsible for her school can bring themselves to use the word for what happened in it.

There is a line from Pirkei Avot, a foundational text of Jewish ethics, that has been with me this week. “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to neglect it.” (Rabbi Tarfon, 2:16)

The work of ending antisemitism is older and bigger than any one of us. We will not finish it. The piece of it that belongs to us is still ours to do. And the first piece, the one that has to happen before any other, is the piece we have been talking about all week. Naming.

Abraham Foxman, who spent fifty years of his life asking American institutions to name antisemitism by name, died on May 10. Two days later, the Stafford County School Board met for the first time since May 5. The body Foxman would have hoped most to hear from had a test in front of it. The test was the one he had spent half a century giving.

Only some of the people on that dais passed it.

Before I tell you who, a piece of the bigger picture worth holding. The ADL released its annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents this month. It recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2025. That is down from 2024’s all-time record of 9,354, but it is still five times higher than it was a decade ago. The ADL’s own framing of the current moment is that the Jewish community faces an unprecedented threat environment, and the ADL is not a group that reaches for that word lightly. K-12 schools are part of that picture. The audit recorded 825 antisemitic incidents at non-Jewish K-12 schools in 2025, almost identical to 2024’s 860. The bathroom wall at Stafford High School on May 5 is one of those incidents. This is the climate. Every adult in a position of public trust right now is making choices inside it, whether they admit it or not. Choices that name antisemitism push back on the climate. Choices that amplify it feed the climate. There is no neutral.

On Tuesday night, three people on the dais addressed what had happened. They had had a week to think about it. They sat in the same room. They said three different things.

Superintendent Dr. Daniel Smith named it. He opened by saying the May 5 incident involved “antisemitic graffiti.” He said, “antisemitism in any form is unacceptable.” He acknowledged the fear and pain within the Jewish community and took the feedback on communications seriously. Thank you, Dr. Smith. That is what doing the job looks like.

Dr. Smith, May 12. This is what doing the job looks like.

Board member Shannon Fingerholz named it. The symbols, she said, were “very clearly antisemitic.” On her own. Not folded into a list.

Shannon Fingerholz, May 12. Named, not listed.

Board member Josh Regan spoke directly to Jewish students who were scared and not in the room. He told them they mattered, that he heard them, and that he personally condemned antisemitism. Saying that out loud to scared kids matters. I want to give him credit for it.

The Chair of the School Board, Elizabeth Brandon Warner, spoke first. She referenced what she called “a recent incident at one of our high schools” and said it served as “a painful reminder that hate and intolerance have no place in our schools or community.” She did not say what the incident was. She did not say which school. She listed racism, antisemitism, anti-LGBTQ attacks, Islamophobia, and threats directed toward religious or ethnic groups, and she moved on. She then noted that “privacy laws prevent discussion of specific students or disciplinary matters.”

She is right that privacy laws prevent discussion of specific students. They do. Nothing in those laws prevented her from saying what was on the bathroom wall. Smith named what was on the wall. Fingerhotz named what was on the wall. Neither of them identified a student. The graffiti is what was written. The disciplinary matter is who wrote it. Those are different things, and the Chair knows it.

What she gave the room was a vague reference, a generalized list, and a procedural shield she did not need. That is the Board’s voice, because the Chair speaks for the Board.

A vague reference and a name are not the same thing. A vague reference says something unfortunate happened. A name says this happened at this school to these kids.

The kid at the kitchen table can tell the difference. So can her parents. So can I.

So the question is why.

On March 9, 2026, the Anti-Defamation League’s Washington office, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, and AJC Global issued a joint public statement about a Facebook post Warner had shared. The three organizations wrote that the post promoted “textbook antisemitic tropes with a long history of inspiring real-world hatred and violence against Jewish people.” They wrote that Jewish students, families, and staff in Stafford County “deserve to know that their school board leader does not traffic in hate and conspiracy theories that target them.”

That was March 9. Today is May 15. Sixty-seven days.

Warner has not retracted the post. She has not apologized. In the comments under the post itself, she engaged with another commenter and doubled down, citing “newly released U.S. Justice Department documents” and “independent investigations” to argue there was a documented blackmail network leveraging geopolitical interests. The Chair of a school board, in her own words, was working to substantiate the trope three Jewish civil rights organizations had just told her was textbook antisemitism.

Here is what the post said, and why it matters. The trope was that the President of the United States is being blackmailed by a foreign government, and that is why American foreign policy is what it is. Strip the names, and you have one of the oldest claims in the catalog. That Jews secretly run governments through hidden means. That what looks like American policy is really Jewish manipulation of it. That claim has a body count.

There are real disagreements to have about the war in Iran. There are real disagreements to have about Benjamin Netanyahu and about the Israeli government’s conduct. People have those disagreements every day, in plain language, without reaching for anything close to what Warner posted.

She reached for that one.

The full sequence in two minutes. The list. The post. The condemnation. The silence.

And then on Tuesday night, before she gave the room a vague reference and a list, she said this to her colleagues:

Social media “can both inspire and amplify hateful rhetoric while extending the reach of harmful messages far beyond a single incident.”

She was right. She was also describing herself.

That is the room the kid is watching. A Chair who has been silent for sixty-seven days about her own conduct, lecturing her colleagues about reach, hiding behind a privacy law that does not apply to the question of whether she can name what was written on a wall. Inside the climate, the ADL has called unprecedented.

The standard is not waiting for her to find it. Smith named it from the dais. Fingerholz named it from the dais. The Stafford County Democratic Committee, the local Democratic Party organization for the county, adopted a resolution on May 9 that condemned the May 5 graffiti by name, rejected “antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish power, control, or influence,” and affirmed that public officials “bear a particular responsibility to use their public platforms to reject, not amplify, antisemitism.”

The community standard, in writing.

Reject, not amplify.

That is the standard. It is not a Jewish standard. It is the standard the community has set in writing and applied to every elected official the county has.

The kid at the kitchen table may not know who Foxman was. She does not need to. She knows the test. She has been watching the adults take it all week, and she can already tell you who passed it and who did not.

The walls of that bathroom will be cleaned. That part is weather, and weather gets cleaned up. What stays after the paint dries is the climate. She does not have to ask anyone what the climate is. She is in it.

Maynard, Massachusetts, named theirs this week after a similar incident at one of its schools. Their school district named it. Stafford’s School Board still hasn’t. Their Chair still hasn’t apologized for what she posted in March.

The weather will keep happening. The climate is the choice the adults make.

Reject, not amplify. That is the work. The Chair has had sixty-seven days to start. She has not.

The kid is watching.

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TL;DR

• Ian Buruma calls it "preposterous" to say campuses are hotbeds of antisemitism. The data proves otherwise.

• "Institutional" doesn't mean a policy banning Jews—it means systemic failure when bias-response teams, administrators, and faculty look away.

• Buruma provides academic cover for antisemitism by reframing it as activism, blaming Jews for the "blur," and romanticizing anti-Zionism as liberation.

• This isn't neutral history. It's a political project that minimizes Jewish vulnerability to fit a narrative.

• Antisemitism isn't just hatred of Jews—it's institutional failure made visible. When universities can't protect one minority from harassment, they're advertising their inability to protect any minority.

Antisemitism isn't an abstract concept. It's lived. It's daily. It's mezuzot ripped off dorm doors, students harassed online, Jewish voices shouted down in lecture halls.

That's why Ian Buruma's new New Yorker essay stunned me. In it, he writes that it's "preposterous" to call American universities hotbeds of antisemitism. Preposterous.

Here's the contradiction: he admits antisemitism mutates with history. But when it mutates into anti-Zionism on campus, into litmus tests, harassment, and exclusions, he shrugs.

The word he chose, preposterous, isn't just dismissive. It's dangerous. Because when you convince the public that Jewish fear is made up, Jewish safety becomes collateral damage in the culture war.

Look, I have my own criticisms of Israeli government policy. The occupation is real. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is real. Both Palestinians and Jews deserve safety and dignity. None of that justifies what’s happening to Jewish students on American campuses. We can hold multiple truths at once.

The Evidence Is Overwhelming

Let's start with the evidence.

• ADL 2024 audit: 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the U.S.—a 5% increase over 2023 and the highest since tracking began.

• On campuses: 1,694 antisemitic incidents in 2024—84% higher than the year before.

• Hillel International: 2,334 antisemitic incidents reported in the 2024–25 academic year—26% higher than the previous year and nearly tenfold compared to 2022–23.

• FBI 2024 hate-crime stats: Anti-Jewish incidents made up ~69% of all religion-based hate crimes—for a community that's just 2% of the U.S. population.

This isn't conjecture. It's data. It blows up Buruma's "preposterous" line on sight.

How Institutions Actually Fail

Buruma's dodge is definitional. He treats "institutional antisemitism" as if it means some official university policy banning Jews. That's not how institutions work.

"Institutional" means systemic failure.

• Bias-response teams rush to condemn racist slurs or Islamophobic harassment, but when a Columbia student protest leader is caught on video saying "Zionists don't deserve to live," the university only banned him after national outrage—while Jewish students reported they do not feel physically or emotionally safe in encampments where their identity was questioned.

• At Harvard, antisemitic stickers, including one with a swastika replacing the Star of David, were plastered near the Hillel center and Harvard Square. Harvard police and Cambridge PD opened investigations. That's not metaphor or "spirited debate." That's threatening imagery targeting Jewish students in their physical environment.

• Student clubs would never get away with excluding LGBTQ+ students, but some feel comfortable writing bylaws that say "no Zionists allowed," which, for the majority of Jews for whom connection to Israel is part of their identity, means barring Jews based on who they are.

• Administrators who rightly condemn "go back where you came from" when it's directed at immigrants look away when Jewish students are told to "go back to Poland."

• Faculty who would never tolerate Holocaust denial from the right wink at students comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.

• Jewish professors face professional retaliation, job offers withdrawn, tenure denied, speaking invitations canceled, not for their scholarship, but for being identifiably Jewish in a climate where that’s become suspect.

If any other minority were told they couldn't participate in student life unless they disavowed part of who they are, we'd call it institutional discrimination. When it's Jews, suddenly it's just "activism."

That's the double standard. That's institutional antisemitism.

Antisemitism's New Clothes

Buruma barely touches the central trick: antisemitism's ability to rebrand.

Today, it often wears the mask of anti-Zionism. "Zionist" becomes code for Jew. Stars of David are crossed with swastikas. Posters show Anne Frank in a kaffiyeh. Slogans like "from the river to the sea" are shouted not as abstract calls but directly at Jewish students.

Classical antisemitic imagery gets recycled too—the blood libel becomes "baby killers," the money-grubbing stereotype becomes "they profit from oppression," the puppet-master conspiracy becomes "Zionist lobby controls everything." Old hatred in activist packaging.

That's not a spirited debate about Israeli policy. That's hate in new clothes.

And Buruma waves it off as "placards" or "rhetorical excess." As if students living inside this storm should treat it like bad décor.

Look, there's legitimate debate about Israeli policy. Students should be able to criticize settlement expansion, question military tactics, and advocate for Palestinian rights. The problem isn't political disagreement—it's when "Zionist" becomes a slur hurled at any Jewish student, when criticism turns into harassment, when political positions become purity tests for participation in campus life. The distinction matters, but it's not theoretical. Jewish students and faculty know the difference between policy debate and personal targeting.

Buruma's Reframe Project

Buruma's essay isn't just about campuses. It's a whole reframing project:

• Antisemitism is contingent, not eternal.

• After 1967, Jews themselves tied antisemitism to Israel.

• Israel has now gone ethnonationalist, aligned with the global right.

• Therefore, anti-Zionism is mostly political speech, not hate.

It sounds tidy. But it's disingenuous.

This framing erases lived reality. It shifts blame onto Jews for "conflating" Israel with antisemitism, while excusing activists who weaponize "Zionist" as a slur.

And here's the irony: Buruma warns that antisemitism is being weaponized by the right, true, while doing the very same thing from the left: minimizing it to fit his politics.

He's not restoring clarity. He's providing academic cover for erasure.

Buruma's Playbook: Six Moves to Minimize Harm

1. Blaming Jews for the blur. Buruma argues Jews themselves fused Israel and antisemitism after 1967. That's sleight of hand—shifting responsibility from people chanting "Zionist pigs" to Jews for supposedly conflating their own safety with Israel. It's blame disguised as history.

2. Universalism is good, Zionism is bad. He praises Jews as historic defenders of liberal democracy while casting modern Israel as having aligned with the ethno-nationalist, blood-and-soil politics that once threatened Jews. That erases the liberal Zionist tradition that sought both Jewish safety and justice for others. The message is clear: Jews are welcome only when they disappear into someone else's cause.

3. Minimizing Holocaust inversion. He notes Holocaust comparisons, Jews-as-Nazis, Anne Frank in a kaffiyeh, are "too easily drawn" or "self-righteous." But he stops short of calling them antisemitic. Treating one of the most vicious delegitimizations of Jews as mere rhetorical excess normalizes it.

4. Outsourcing the sting to Jewish critics. Buruma leans heavily on Israeli critics like David Grossman to deliver his harshest charges about Israeli actions. When you want to make damning accusations while maintaining intellectual distance, quote the “good” Jews who agree with you. It gives your argument a kosher stamp while you avoid direct accountability for the claims.

5. Flipping the Dreyfus script. He casts 19th-century Jews as defenders of democracy against nationalist reactionaries, then argues today's Israel looks more like the reactionaries. That isn't history. It's a morality play that recasts Jews as oppressors instead of victims.

6. Casting anti-Zionists as heirs to Jewish resistance. He closes with Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist, framed as part of the universalist, liberation tradition Jews once embraced. Translation: anti-Zionists aren't antisemites, they're the true carriers of Jewish morality. Jewish identity is noble only when it rejects Zionism.

A Troubling Pattern

This isn't the first time Buruma has framed harm as "overreach." In 2018, as editor of the New York Review of Books, he published an essay by Jian Ghomeshi, a broadcaster accused by more than 20 women of sexual assault. The backlash wasn't only about the piece, but about Buruma's defense: that he was giving a controversial voice a platform, that the outcry felt like a climate of denunciation. He was forced out after the uproar.

The common thread? When speech or conduct targets vulnerable people, women in the Ghomeshi case, Jews in this one, Buruma's instinct is to guard against what he sees as moral panic rather than grapple with the harm itself.

That doesn't mean he shares the hostility of those he's writing about. But it does mean he has a blind spot: a tendency to minimize the lived experience of the harmed in order to elevate the perspective of the one doing the harming.

And when the subject is antisemitism on campus, that blind spot doesn't just miss the point. It distorts the entire conversation.

Why It Matters

Because antisemitism isn't just about Jews. It's about whether institutions live up to their democratic promises.

A campus that allows harassment of one minority group under the cover of "politics" will fail others, too. A democracy that normalizes conspiracy theories about Jews erodes protections for everyone.

If we take pluralism and equality seriously, we can't treat antisemitism as the exception to the rule.

What's Actually Preposterous

So let's talk about what's really preposterous.

Preposterous is Jewish students hiding their identity to stay safe.

Preposterous is that mezuzot are ripped off dorm doors.

Preposterous is a 321% spike in campus incidents dismissed as "contentious politics."

Preposterous is that administrators are too timid to name antisemitism even when it stares them in the face.

Preposterous is waving off fear because it complicates a narrative.

Antisemitism isn't just hatred of Jews—it's institutional failure made visible. When universities can't protect one minority from harassment, they're advertising their inability to protect any minority. When Buruma calls Jewish fears "preposterous," he's turning off the smoke detector while the building burns.

When we talk about antisemitism on American campuses, we get caricatures instead of clarity. Professors are painted as radical ideologues poisoning students’ minds. Jewish faculty dismissed as imagining threats that don’t exist. Two recent surveys cut through some of that noise. They’re asking fundamentally different questions. And if we’re serious about facts instead of talking points, both studies matter.

Here’s what they actually show.

Neither caricature is true. The data’s more complicated—and more damning.

The Big Picture Survey

The first study surveyed over 2,300 faculty at 146 research universities—the R1 schools where most Jewish students attend. The researchers wanted to map faculty politics and see how contentious issues actually get taught.

The headline numbers: 72% of faculty identify as liberal, but that doesn’t mean lockstep uniformity. Faculty showed overwhelming agreement on climate change (a crisis requiring immediate action) and Trump (a threat to democracy). Consensus on some topics didn’t translate across the board. On certain social and cultural issues, faculty were split, revealing a wider range of perspectives than stereotypes suggest.

On antisemitism specifically, 3% of non-Jewish faculty expressed positions denying Israel’s right to exist, itself a form of antisemitism, and 7% endorsed classic antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and loyalty. Most professors said they never even discussed Israel-Palestine in class. When they did, the majority claimed they’d present multiple perspectives.

The researchers were honest about limitations. Nine percent response rate. Excluded community colleges and liberal arts schools. Attitudes are self-description, not lived experience, and they don’t capture the reality of how antisemitism operates.

The Jewish Faculty Survey

Now compare that to the second study. The Anti-Defamation League and Academic Engagement Network surveyed 209 Jewish faculty members through their own networks. Not representative, but the findings cut deep.

73% said they’d witnessed antisemitic activities or statements from faculty, administrators, or staff. Nearly 60% reported derogatory anti-Israel remarks in personal conversations. A third heard anti-Jewish comments directly. Over a third felt compelled to hide their Jewish or Zionist identity from colleagues.

But it’s the stories that matter: professors being boycotted, doxxed, excluded from committees, denied collaborations. Students dropping classes after learning their instructor is Jewish. Faculty members describe hostile work environments where colleagues refuse to speak to them because they support Israel’s right to exist.

While this represents one of the more extreme cases documented, it illustrates the kind of hostile work environment some Jewish faculty face:

My chair is pro-Hamas (explicitly so) and has turned our department into an encampment, full of ‘river to the sea’ slogans… When I and a few other Jewish faculty objected, the chair organized about 50 people to verbally attack us.

This isn’t a debate club spat. It’s careers and reputations on the line—workplace consequences, not ideology.

Why the Gap?

So why does one study show antisemitism as marginal while the other shows it as pervasive?

Because they’re measuring different things.

The R1 survey captures attitudes across a broad pool, but with poor response rates and a lack of focus on outcomes. The ADL/AEN survey captures the voices of those directly targeted, but with a self-selected sample likely to include people who’ve been harmed.

Neither is perfect. The first risks undercounting, the second risks overcounting. But together they reveal something crucial: antisemitism may not reflect majority faculty opinion, but for those experiencing it, it’s widespread, legitimized by institutional inaction, and professionally devastating.

Even if it’s not the majority view, indifference turns a fringe into a force.

Where the Lines Are

Reasonable people can debate Israeli policy. But denying Israel’s right to exist isn’t policy critique—it’s erasure. For Jewish faculty, that’s lived as antisemitism.

When criticism slides into holding Jews collectively responsible for government decisions, or systematically excluding Jewish faculty from academic life, that’s antisemitism. And both surveys, in their different ways, document what happens when that line gets crossed.

The Real Stakes

Both studies dropped after October 7, 2023, amid war in Gaza, surging antisemitic incidents, and federal investigations into universities. That timing matters.

Here’s where we hold two truths simultaneously. What’s happening to Jewish faculty and students on campuses is real, documented, and deeply troubling. Jewish academics are documenting real workplace harm. That’s not debatable.

Pretending it’s all in their heads isn’t just insulting—it’s dangerous.

At the same time, politicians on the right aren’t pushing this out of concern for Jewish safety. They’re weaponizing it to weaken universities, chill speech, and advance their culture war agenda. Using Jewish pain as a political cudgel makes protecting Jews harder, not easier. When antisemitism becomes a partisan talking point, Jewish safety gets sacrificed to political theater.

We can’t let cynical overreach define this conversation. Jewish faculty deserve protection based on facts, not political opportunism.

What the Data Shows

Faculty aren’t just bystanders. The ADL/AEN survey shows they can be direct sources of antisemitism—not just passive observers of student-driven problems. That challenges assumptions about where campus antisemitism originates. Faculty aren’t neutral referees. Sometimes, they’re the ones throwing the punches.

The real scandal isn’t that some faculty hold antisemitic views. It’s that institutions consistently fail to address them when they cross into harassment and discrimination.

And when Jewish faculty feel compelled to hide their identity or avoid specific topics, the result is self-censorship that weakens academic discourse. Over time, that erodes not just Jewish safety but academic freedom itself.

Jewish faculty aren’t asking for protection from ideas. They’re asking for protection from harassment. That’s not censorship. That’s basic accountability.

The Bottom Line

These surveys don’t capture antisemitism’s full scope, but they show how toxic and destructive it becomes when it takes root. Even if most faculty aren’t antisemitic, the minority who are, combined with institutional indifference, can poison entire academic environments.

This isn’t about shutting down Israel criticism. It’s about ensuring Jewish faculty can do their jobs without facing harassment, exclusion, and career sabotage.

The data from both studies point to the same conclusion: we need honest reckoning, not ideological posturing. Faculty aren’t all indoctrinators. Jewish faculty are documenting real workplace harm. And until universities address how even small pockets of antisemitism can warp academic environments, we’ll keep debating statistics while the people living this reality remain exposed and unsupported.

Because at the end of the day, safety in the classroom isn’t about left or right. It’s about whether Jewish faculty get the same dignity, freedom, and fairness as everyone else.

Every tradition has a season of reckoning. In Judaism, it's Selichot, midnight prayers asking for forgiveness. This year, it's not only about repentance. It's about survival, persistence, and being seen.

Selichot is supposed to be quiet. Midnight prayers. Ancient poems. A community whispering forgiveness into the dark.

It's usually the Jewish warm-up before the New Year. A season to turn inward, to name where we've stumbled, to begin the climb toward repair.

But this year, it doesn't feel like preparation. It feels like a mirror shoved in our faces.

What Selichot Usually Is

The word Selichot means "forgivenesses." For centuries, Jews have gathered at night to chant the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, words describing G-d as compassionate, patient, overflowing with kindness.

The ritual is about humility. About saying: we've all missed the mark. We all need another chance.

Traditionally, Selichot is inward. What did I get wrong this year? Who do I owe an apology to? How do I repair the cracks in my own life?

But in 2025, it's impossible to keep it only inward.

Forgiveness in a Year of Anguish

How do you chant poems of mercy when 48 hostages are still trapped underground? When Jewish families still wake up every morning in grief, waiting for a call that doesn't come?

How do you whisper forgiveness when antisemitism has exploded—when Jewish safety gets treated like just another talking point in someone's political fight?

How do you pray for repair when not everyone we hoped would stand with us did?

Selichot asks for forgiveness. This year forces us to hold forgiveness and anguish, grief that sometimes feels like rage, at the same time. That's not a contradiction. That's what it means to live Jewishly in 2025. And it's also the heart of teshuvah, not pretending the world isn't broken, but asking how we return, how we repair, even in the middle of the mess.

The Night Watchers

One of the most haunting parts of Selichot is the timing. Traditionally, the first Selichot service is held late at night, often close to midnight, to set the tone of the season. After that, Selichot is often recited in the early mornings, though customs vary. (In many Reform and Conservative congregations today, Selichot takes the form of a Saturday night service with prayers, study, and reflection, sometimes earlier in the evening.)

But this year, Jews are already living like the night watchers. Awake, scrolling for hostage updates. Awake, bracing for the next antisemitic headline. Awake, wondering who will still be standing with us when it matters.

Being awake at night isn't just fear. It's persistence. It's the refusal to go numb. It's proof that even in the dark, we keep showing up. This is what resilience looks like in practice: communities refusing to be erased, insisting on dignity, doing the work of repair even when the world feels broken.

Selichot as Protest

Here's the part outsiders often miss: Selichot isn't only apology. It's also protest.

The liturgical poems don't just confess sins—they demand action. They say: G-d, see us. Hear us. Do something.

That's what Jews are doing this year, too. Families of hostages refusing to stay quiet. Students pushing back against hate on campus. Communities insisting on safety without apology.

Selichot isn't a whisper into the void. It's a cry into the dark, and a refusal to be ignored.

What Forgiveness Really Means

Forgiveness doesn't mean forgetting. It doesn't mean excusing Hamas. It doesn't mean shrugging off political leaders who treat Jewish safety as negotiable. It doesn't mean reconciling with those who remember Jews only when it serves their agenda.

Forgiveness means carrying grief without letting it hollow us out. It means keeping the door cracked open to healing, not because others deserve it, but because we do.

That's the challenge of teshuvah: not erasing the pain, but wrestling with it, and still insisting on return.

The Mirror

This year, Selichot isn't just about opening the gates of repentance. It's about opening a window into Jewish reality.

We're walking into the holiest season of our calendar carrying more than personal sins. We're carrying the hostages, the headlines, the betrayals, the rising tide of hate.

Selichot doesn't erase that. It names it. It says: we're still here. We're still speaking. We're still awake.

And maybe that's the point, not prayer as escape, but as endurance. Not ritual as retreat, but as a way to keep showing up when the world would rather we fade into silence. That's teshuvah, too: returning again and again, to each other, to the work, to the future we refuse to abandon.

This year, Selichot teaches us that leadership isn’t about having easy answers—it’s about staying present to complexity, holding both grief and hope, and refusing to let pain make us smaller.

Listen to the article:

Labor Day and the Gut Check

Labor Day has always carried special meaning for Democrats. Union parades, picnics, speeches about hardworking families, it’s part of the party’s DNA. But rituals aren’t the same as relationships. Over the years, the bond between Democrats and workers has been tested. Especially among people who keep this country running but never see politics running for them. That’s the gut check this holiday demands: if we call ourselves the party of labor, how do we make sure today’s workers still see themselves in us?

The Bond Isn’t Automatic

For a long time, Democrats didn’t have to prove they were the party of workers. It was just understood. Union halls, factory towns, teachers, nurses, and firefighters—that was the backbone. But today, that bond can’t be taken for granted. In too many places, the people who open the stores, drive the buses, and care for our kids wonder if politics even sees them.

Republicans wrap themselves in hard hats and slogans, then sell workers out in the fine print. Everyone knows it. The real question is whether Democrats will fight as hard for workers as corporations fight against them. To fight that hard, we have to see workers where they really are, not in the mills of the past, but in the workplaces of today.

Work Looks Different Now

The jobs holding this country together don’t look like they used to. It’s not just factory floors and punch clocks—it’s baristas organizing coffee shops, warehouse workers pushing back against grueling shifts, nurses walking the picket line after back-to-back shifts, and teachers scraping to buy supplies for their classrooms. If we want to be the party of labor, we can’t just honor yesterday’s struggles. We’ve got to show up for today’s fights, side by side, not once a year, but every single day.

The New American Worker

The American worker doesn’t look like a black-and-white photo from the 1950s. Today’s workforce is a mix of service, care, gig, and tech. It’s the delivery driver out in the rain, the childcare worker holding a classroom together, the nurse caring for patients long after the shift should’ve ended, the teacher stretching a paycheck, the line cook hustling behind a hot grill, the electrician keeping the lights on during a storm.

These are the frontline battles of labor today—long hours, families stretched thin, corporations dodging responsibility. And workers aren’t waiting. They’re writing a new playbook, one shift, one shop, one strike at a time.

That’s what Democrats need to lean into. Not the nostalgia of where labor was, but the reality of where it is. The fights that define tomorrow aren’t just in factories—they’re in warehouses, hospitals, classrooms, coffee shops, and kitchens. Everywhere, workers are rising and saying, “Enough.”

Why It Matters

When workers feel ignored, somebody else always fills the space. And right now, Republicans are trying hard to do it. They wrap themselves in “pro-worker” talk, but scratch the surface and it’s all for the bosses. Loud slogans up front, corporate favors in the fine print. They promise to stand with workers while pushing laws that weaken unions, strip protections, and hand billion-dollar companies the keys.

That’s why Democrats can’t just honor yesterday’s workers. We have to meet today’s workers on their shifts and in their struggles. If we don’t, the vacuum fills with culture wars that don’t pay the bills and populism that doesn’t hold up. Workers deserve more than blame. They deserve leaders who fight for their paychecks, their safety, their dignity.

The Democratic Party is strongest when it stands with working people. Not in the past tense, but right now, in the fights that matter.

A Path Forward

So what does it take to live up to that trust? Start with this: show up. In the warehouses. In the classrooms. On the shop floors. At the bargaining tables. Not just on Labor Day, but all year. Workers don’t need more talk. They need proof that when they fight, we’re in the fight too. Because what workers are really fighting for is freedom.

Labor is freedom. The freedom to come home safe from a shift. The freedom to take a sick day without risking your job. The freedom to spend time with family instead of juggling three paychecks. That’s what unions and worker power have always been about: dignity and control over your own life.

If Democrats want to be the party of labor, we have to prove it, every shift, every fight, every day. Because when workers see us with them, not just talking about them, that’s when the bond grows stronger. That’s when Labor Day stops being a tradition and starts being a promise.

The Closing Question

Labor Day isn’t just a holiday—it’s a mirror. It asks Democrats a question: Are we standing with workers, every day, where it counts?

Workers don’t need nostalgia. They don’t need speeches. They need leaders who see them, hear them, and fight beside them.

If Democrats rise to that, we don’t just honor the past, we shape the future. We strengthen the bond that has always made this party strongest: a partnership with the people who keep this country running. Safe workplaces. Fair wages. Real freedom. That’s the promise to carry past Labor Day, and into every day that follows.

The High Holidays are coming. A season of renewal. A season of reckoning.

And the question that always sits at the center: Have we done all we could to make the world better?

This year, that question feels heavier than ever.

Because the truth is, American Jewry is carrying pain we don’t even have words for. Our kids walk into schools and college campuses that no longer feel safe. Jewish parents, people who normally would speak up without hesitation, fall silent, afraid one wrong word will set someone off.

And meanwhile, the absurdity: Republicans accuse certain Jews of being antisemitic.

Progressive Democrats try to cancel those same Jews, forcing them out of leadership or influence. You can’t make it up.

This isn’t just nerves.

It’s the air we’re breathing. Antisemitism is roaring back, dressed up in politics and hashtags, turning Jews into everyone’s favorite scapegoat. And it leaves us on edge, conflicted, exhausted, staring down the Days of Awe, wondering: where do we go from here?

Inside our own community, it’s no easier.

Some of us lean right, yet we’re horrified by what’s happening in Israel, the politics, the policies, the rhetoric. Some of us lean left, yet we still yearn for the brightness and possibility of the Zionism our parents and grandparents believed in, that fragile dream that Jews could finally have a safe place to live, to call their own, and still be good neighbors.

And then there’s Gaza.

Part of the pain we carry into these High Holidays is witnessing the devastation. We grieve for Palestinian lives lost. We grieve knowing that whatever Israel does, right or wrong, will reflect on Jews worldwide. On us. It’s complicated because we know: The Jewish People are not to blame for the actions of the current Israeli government, yet the shadow of those actions still follows us into our classrooms, workplaces, and neighborhoods.

And then, layered on top of all this, are the contradictions we live with every day.

Progressive American Jews who love their Israeli cousins, even though those cousins might hold views they can’t stomach. Conservative Jews who can’t wrap their heads around why their American family feels so distant from Israel.

It’s messy. It’s layered. It’s the old Facebook relationship status: It’s Complicated.

And that’s the part outsiders never see. The inner arguments at our Shabbat tables. The hushed conversations after services. The quiet compromises just to stay in a relationship with one another. People think Jews are marching in lockstep, either pro-Israel hawks or antizionist radicals. The truth is far more tangled.

But tangled is harder to explain than a slogan. And in a world that thrives on slogans, our story doesn’t fit.

I keep thinking about South Africa. How simple it felt back then. Apartheid was brutal, obvious, and impossible to defend. People boycotted oranges, wine, or gold and felt righteous doing it. Moral clarity in a shopping cart.

Israel isn’t South Africa.

The parallels don’t hold, no matter how often the slogans get repeated. It’s not clean lines on a protest sign. When someone says “boycott Israel,” I want to ask: who are you really hurting?

Maybe it feels righteous in the moment, but the reality is Israeli innovation is everywhere.

The medicine in our hospitals. The tech in our phones. Even the app that maps your fastest route to the ER. And when SodaStream pulled its factory out of the West Bank under boycott pressure, hundreds of Palestinian workers lost their jobs overnight. That didn’t punish a government. It punished families trying to make rent.

None of this means Palestinians don’t deserve dignity, safety, and freedom; they absolutely do.

But flattening Israel into a South Africa analogy doesn’t get us any closer to that future. It only makes the story neat when the truth is anything but.

And Jews, we don’t get the shortcut of slogans. Our lives are already the uncomfortable questions.

Being Jewish in America right now is lonely.

On one side, we’re told we’re too white to be victims. On the other, we’re told we’re too foreign to fully belong. A convenient punching bag, no matter where you stand.

Antisemitism has always been a shape-shifter. It mutates. One generation calls us parasites.

The next calls us colonizers. Same lie, new outfit. Today, it shows up as antizionism, sometimes framed as a political critique, but too often recycling the same old tropes in new language.

And it’s seductive.

It wraps itself in the language of justice, of resistance, of human rights. People chant it at rallies without even realizing the history they’re carrying on their backs. They think they’re radical. Really, they’re recycling.

That’s what makes it so isolating.

You hear old slurs with new hashtags, and when you try to name it, people roll their eyes. Not everything is antisemitism, they say. As if we’re imagining it. As if centuries of trauma have made us paranoid instead of perceptive.

So Jews go quiet.

We swallow the hurt. We second-guess whether it’s even worth speaking up. Because we know: if we do, we’ll just be accused of crying wolf, or worse, of weaponizing our identity.

It’s exhausting. It’s lonely. And it’s exactly the opposite of what this season, these Days of Awe, is supposed to be about.

And so we come back to the question. Have we done all that we could to make the world better?

The truth is, Jews don’t have the luxury of easy answers.

We live in contradiction. We argue with ourselves. We wrestle with G-d. That’s the inheritance. That’s the burden.

The High Holidays don’t ask us to be perfect.

They ask us to be honest. To face the mess head-on. To admit the ways we’ve failed each other, the ways we’ve failed ourselves. And then to believe, despite it all, that renewal is still possible.

Maybe this year the reckoning isn’t just about personal sins.

Maybe it’s about how we’ve carried the weight of being Jewish in public. Did we retreat into silence? Did we flatten our story to make it palatable? Did we forget that complexity is part of the calling?

Because if all we do is respond with slogans or swallow our voices out of fear, then the world gets simpler, but it doesn’t get better.

So here’s the ask. As we enter this season, give your Jewish friends grace.

Grace for being conflicted. Grace for carrying grief, in Israel, in Gaza, in our own neighborhoods, in ways you can’t always see. Grace for not having the easy answers.

We’re walking into the holiest days of the year holding contradictions too heavy to set down. Don’t demand purity from us. See our humanity.

It was supposed to be a school board meeting, a night for Arlington officials to vote on student policy. Instead, it turned into something darker.

Before Winsome Sears spoke, a sign appeared outside, not just hostile, but echoing the ugly bigotry of Virginia’s Jim Crow past. That kind of language has no place in our Commonwealth.

Let’s be clear: that sign was wrong. Full stop. It targeted Sears in a way that was offensive and unacceptable. But condemning the sign does not mean ignoring the climate that allowed it to appear. And that climate is fueled by the politics of grievance Sears has chosen to run on, where hostility doesn’t whisper in the shadows but shows up in bold letters for everyone to see.

This is the politics of contempt, a strategy that teaches Virginians to fear their neighbors and see each other as enemies. And it leads to moments like Arlington, where hate doesn’t bother hiding anymore.

Sears has shown us what kind of campaign she’s running. It isn’t about roads, jobs, or schools.

It’s grievance politics, plain and simple. Teaching Virginians who to resent. Who not to trust. Who to turn against.

And when campaigns talk like that, people follow the cue. They feel emboldened to put hostility on display. That’s how contempt moves from the fringe into the mainstream.

This isn’t an accident. It’s escalation by design. Her campaign thrives on keeping Virginians angry and on edge. Tension isn’t treated as a problem to solve. It’s the fuel.

Now look at Abigail Spanberger. She’s running on something completely different: pragmatism, inclusion, competence.

She isn’t chasing culture wars. She’s talking about governing.

Spanberger talks about what actually matters day to day: health care families can afford, strong public schools, and an economy that reaches every community. While Sears turns school board meetings into political theater, Spanberger focuses on strengthening public schools so every child can thrive.

Where Sears casts politics as a battlefield, Spanberger treats it as public service. Sears thrives on distrust. Spanberger earns trust by doing the work.

At the end of the day, this election isn’t just about two candidates. It’s about two climates.

One climate, Sears’, feeds on division. It makes contempt acceptable, excuses hostility, and leaves Virginians less safe and less stable.

The other, Spanberger’s, is about solutions. It builds trust instead of tearing it down. It treats people with dignity instead of suspicion. It sees our schools as places of learning, our neighborhoods as places of belonging, and our Commonwealth as a place where families can thrive.

The Arlington meeting was a glimpse of where Sears would take us. The choice is whether that becomes Virginia’s future, or whether we demand something better.

Virginia has seen this before. We know exactly where it leads. And we are not going back.

TL;DR: The Real Stakes

Jewish students on campuses are being harassed, excluded, and made to feel unsafe. Antisemitism has evolved, just as racism, sexism, and homophobia have evolved, but it’s still prejudice. The IHRA definition doesn’t silence debate; it helps us name modern antisemitism when it crosses the line from policy critique into bigotry. Just as we use Title VI, Title IX, and civil rights law to protect other students without curbing free speech, we should do the same here. The danger isn’t naming antisemitism too broadly, it’s pretending it isn’t there.

The Lived Reality on Campus

In recent months, I’ve heard from Jewish students who tuck their Stars of David under their shirts before walking to class. Some say they avoid certain quads or dorms because they don’t want to be singled out as “Zionists.” Their parents ask me the same question over and over: Is my child safe on campus? That’s the real backdrop to this debate. Antisemitism isn’t abstract. It’s lived in fear, silence, and the choice between showing who you are and protecting yourself.

I’ve been following the debate about antisemitism on campus with both concern and frustration. Concern, because Jewish students are telling us they feel less safe than they have in decades. Frustration, because too often the conversation gets stuck in false choices: free speech versus safety, academic freedom versus accountability, criticism of Israel versus hatred of Jews.

As a Democrat who values both civil rights and civil liberties, I don’t think it has to be an either-or choice. Bigotry evolves. Racism once took the form of Jim Crow laws; today it often appears through coded language, voter suppression, or systemic inequities. Sexism once barred women from voting or owning property; today it shows up in subtler but still damaging patterns, like pay inequity or harassment dismissed as “jokes.” Homophobia once criminalized same-sex relationships; today, it surfaces in attempts to restrict marriage equality or roll back LGBTQ+ protections.

Antisemitism Evolves Too

Antisemitism, too, has changed. Antisemites in the Middle Ages demonized Jews as Christ-killers and spread blood libels. In the 20th century, conspiracy theories cast Jews as secretly controlling governments or finance. Today, antisemitism often manifests in denying Jews the same right to self-determination afforded to other peoples, or in singling out Israel as uniquely illegitimate in a way applied to no other nation. Recognizing these modern forms isn’t about silencing debate; it’s about seeing bigotry for what it is, even when it adapts its language. That’s where definitions like the one from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) can help: as tools to name antisemitism in its contemporary forms, not as gag orders to shut down speech.

IHRA defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” Questions often arise around the illustrative examples included with the definition. Some of these examples involve Israel, such as denying Jews the right to self-determination or holding all Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions. Some critics worry these examples could be misused to suppress legitimate debate. Yet IHRA explicitly states that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” In short, IHRA draws a crucial line: criticism of government actions is fair game, but denying Jews the right to self-determination, while affirming it for other peoples, crosses into bigotry.

Lessons from Civil Rights Law

And here’s the important part: we already know how to balance this. When crowds hurled racist chants at Black students or when attackers targeted Muslim students after 9/11, universities didn’t shrug and say “free speech,” they enforced Title VI. Nobody called that censorship, and nobody thought it prevented teaching about Jim Crow or Islam. The same principle should apply to antisemitism.

That’s precisely what we’ve seen on some campuses over the past two years. Protesters have told Jewish students walking past encampments to “go back to Poland.” Student groups have excluded Jews unless they disavow Israel, essentially imposing a litmus test on Jewish identity. Vandals have targeted Hillel and Chabad as if every Jew were synonymous with Israeli policy. None of this is about silencing political debate. It’s about ensuring students are free to learn and participate without being harassed or ostracized for who they are.

The IHRA definition doesn’t ban criticism of Israel, and it doesn’t demand conformity of thought. What it does is remind us that circumstances matter: criticism of Israeli policies is one thing, denying Jews the same rights as every other people, whether by saying Israel has no right to exist or by treating all Jews as guilty for its actions, is something else entirely. Of course, opposing Zionism in itself isn’t automatically antisemitic. But when opposition denies Jews the right to self-determination while granting it to every other people, or when it singles out Jews collectively for Israel’s policies, that crosses the line into bigotry. In short, the IHRA helps draw a crucial line: it’s okay to criticize particular actions of the government of Israel, but denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, in effect, denying Israel’s existence, crosses into bigotry.

Academic Freedom vs. Harassment

When people say IHRA endangers free speech, they overlook how we already handle other forms of bias on campus. Universities routinely enforce civil rights protections against racism, sexism, and Islamophobia, and they do it without shredding academic freedom. Nobody claims that banning racial slurs in the dorms prevents historians from teaching about Jim Crow. Title VI and Title IX exist to ensure equal access to education, not to police ideas. And Title VII provides the same in the workplace, protecting employees from harassment and discrimination while still safeguarding free expression. IHRA should be viewed through that same lens: a civil rights tool, not a speech code. It doesn’t give Jews special rights. It gives them the same rights other minorities already have: to learn, worship, and live without harassment.

That’s why the “academic freedom” critique rings hollow. IHRA doesn’t say “don’t teach” or “don’t write.” It says intent matters, that equating Israel to Nazi Germany is different when done in a scholarly analysis versus when spray-painted on a Hillel building. Just as universities know the difference between a biology class critiquing pseudoscience and a student group plastering racist flyers, IHRA clarifies the difference between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitic demonization. Far from undermining academic freedom, it actually protects it by drawing lines around harassment. Nothing in IHRA prevents a professor from teaching about nationalism, apartheid, or even genocide. It doesn’t dictate what can be taught; it clarifies the difference between scholarship and slurs.

At Columbia, some faculty worried IHRA would block them from teaching about genocide. But that misunderstands its purpose. IHRA doesn’t ban scholarship; it distinguishes between analysis and harassment, just as Title VI has long done. Professors can debate Israel’s policies as they do Rwanda or Bosnia. The question isn’t whether comparisons can be made, but whether they’re used as scholarship or weaponized as slurs. That’s not censorship; it’s academic rigor.

Misuse, Double Standards, and the Fundraising Trope

Trump, of course, misused IHRA. He cynically invoked Jewish safety while dining with Holocaust deniers and excusing neo-Nazis. That’s not protecting Jews, that’s exploiting them. But here’s the key: bad actors’ misuse of a tool doesn’t make the tool itself invalid. Civil rights frameworks such as Title IX, Title VI, and the Voting Rights Act have all been challenged, distorted, or weakened over time. Yet Democrats haven’t abandoned them; we’ve worked to refine, restore, and strengthen them because their core protections remain essential. Reasonable people can debate how best to apply IHRA. But throwing it out entirely because of Trump’s misuse hands the narrative over to him. IHRA should be treated the same way: not as a perfect answer, but as one tool we must use responsibly rather than discard.

Over 40 democracies, the European Union, and dozens of U.S. states across the political spectrum have adopted the IHRA definition. Clearly, world leaders see it as a valuable tool, not a fundraising ploy. That’s the example we should follow: careful, contextual, multipronged.

The New Yorker has hinted that Jewish organizations emphasize IHRA because it helps raise money. Yes, Jewish organizations raise money to fight antisemitism, just as every civil rights group must. That’s not evidence of manipulation, it’s evidence of mobilization. The NAACP, the Human Rights Campaign, and the ACLU raise funds to sustain their work. Nobody accuses them of fabricating racism, homophobia, or threats to civil liberties to “cash in.” Only when Jews organize against antisemitism does the implication surface that the fight itself is suspect, that we’re somehow profiting from prejudice. That isn’t just unfair, it leans on one of the oldest antisemitic tropes.

The reality is obvious: protesters harass Jewish students on campuses, vandals target synagogues, and agitators scapegoat Jews both online and in the streets. Organizations like ADL, Hillel, and Jewish Federations respond to that crisis; they don’t invent it. To accuse them of profiteering dismisses the lived experiences of Jews who feel unsafe, and it’s a standard no other minority would be subjected to.

The New Yorker suggests Jewish groups “shifted” antisemitism from the right to the left, weaponizing IHRA to silence Israel’s critics. But the data doesn’t back that up. Classic tropes about Jews as disloyal or secretly controlling finance remain far more common on the right. At the same time, campuses have seen a rise in rhetoric that targets Jewish identity through anti-Zionism. Both realities can be true. What has changed isn’t a partisan “shift,” but the forms antisemitism takes in different spaces, and IHRA’s value is that it recognizes both.

Critiques like these are part of a larger pattern: portraying Jewish self-advocacy as suspect while overlooking how antisemitism actually operates in real life.

Antisemitism in New Clothes

This brings me to one of the main criticisms raised in the New Yorker piece: that adopting the IHRA definition threatens academic freedom or chills debate about Israel. However, that confuses the role of a definition with the way institutions choose to enforce their policies. IHRA is not binding on anyone. It is not a gag order. It doesn’t tell professors what they can or cannot teach, nor does it dictate what students may or may not say. What it does is provide a framework to help universities and policymakers recognize when criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism, just as Title VI and other civil rights protections have long been used to distinguish between protected speech and harassment based on race, gender, or religion. Yes, there have been cases of overreach, but that reflects enforcement choices, not the definition itself. And history shows that universities already know how to balance civil rights protections with free inquiry; they’ve done it for decades. The idea that Jews alone should be denied this tool because it might inconvenience some faculty syllabi isn’t just unfair; it reinforces a double standard.

The New Yorker quotes Ben-Gurion to suggest Israel’s founders thought antisemitism would vanish once a Jewish state existed. In reality, they knew antisemitism was centuries old; what they believed was that sovereignty would finally give Jews the power to defend themselves when, inevitably, it resurfaced.

Nor is it true that linking antisemitism to Israel is some late invention. From the moment Israel was created, antisemites used it as a global conspiracy and blamed Jews collectively for its actions. Anti-Zionism has often served as one of antisemitism’s masks, not just in the 2000s, but from Israel’s founding onward.

Antisemitism has never been static. Religious myths gave way to racial pseudoscience, which morphed into conspiracy theories about Jewish control. After the Holocaust discredited that language, antisemitism didn’t disappear; it adapted. Today, it often takes shape in attacks on Zionism or Israel’s very right to exist, morphing classical stereotypes into a new vocabulary that resonates with contemporary politics. This doesn’t mean every criticism of Israeli policy is antisemitic, of course it isn’t. In fact, the IHRA definition itself makes clear that criticism of Israel, similar to that leveled against any other country, is not antisemitic. But when slogans erase Jewish peoplehood altogether, or when Israel is uniquely cast as a “racist endeavor” while other nations are not, it reflects the same old hatred in new clothes.

We see this on campuses and online, where “Zionist” is often hurled as a slur at Jewish students, or where chants like “From the river to the sea” are repeated. In theory, words can always be reinterpreted, but in practice, this phrase has overwhelmingly been used as a call for the erasure of Israel. That is why it lands as threatening to Jews: it denies their right to self-determination in their one and only homeland. Circumstances matter, but so does lived experience. Palestinians have a lived experience of displacement and occupation, and they deserve to express that pain. Recognizing it, however, does not mean denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, or erasing Israel from the map. Both truths can exist: empathy for Palestinians and safety for Jews. Just as we take seriously how other communities describe prejudice directed at them, we must take seriously Jewish students when they say these chants create an environment of exclusion and fear.

A Toolbox for the Future

History shows us that prejudice always adapts to the language of the time. Racism in America didn’t vanish after the civil rights movement; it shifted into coded rhetoric about “law and order” and “welfare dependency.” Sexism didn’t end with women’s suffrage; it adapted into subtler forms of exclusion in workplaces and politics. Homophobia didn’t disappear when same-sex marriage was legalized; it shifted into attacks framed around “religious liberty.” Prejudice is protean. Antisemitism is no different.

That doesn’t mean IHRA is the only answer. No single framework can carry the entire weight of this conversation. Fighting antisemitism in the 21st century requires a toolbox, not a single tool. IHRA is valuable because it shines a light on how antisemitism adapts and hides in political discourse. Still, other approaches can complement it, whether it’s Nexus, the Jerusalem Declaration, or campus-specific codes of conduct. The point is not to pit these frameworks against each other, but to recognize that they serve different purposes. Some are better suited for academic inquiry, while others are more suitable for policymaking, and still others for fostering campus cultures of respect and safety.

For Democrats in particular, this multipronged approach should feel familiar. We don’t fight racism with one statute or program; we use civil rights laws, education, community-building, and data collection. We don’t fight gender discrimination with one definition; we have Title IX, workplace protections, and cultural change. Antisemitism should be no different.

This brings me to this final point: IHRA is not the end of the conversation but the beginning. Fighting antisemitism requires vigilance, nuance, and humility. It requires listening to lived experiences while also holding fast to democratic principles. And it requires us to see antisemitism for what it is: not an abstract debate about definitions, but a lived reality for Jews across the world. The real danger is not that we name antisemitism too broadly, but that we fail to name it at all.

Because if history has taught us anything, it’s this: when antisemitism adapts, the worst mistake we can make is pretending it isn’t there.