Ep. 104: Don’t reject allies who oppose the red-green antisemitic alliance
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Hello, and welcome to Jonathan Tobin, dear. I'm JNS Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Tobin. Thanks for joining me for another discussion on the most pressing issues in the Jewish world. Like, subscribe, and give us good reviews when you listen to the show. Now let's get started. At a moment in history when Jews are facing an unprecedented wave of post-Holocaust anti-Semitism, some of the leading lights of the diaspora have othered priorities.

That's the only conclusion to be drawn from the decision by a number of prominent thinkers and organizations to boycott a conference being sponsored by the government of Israel. The event is an effort to convene an international response to the surge of Jew hatred that has swept across the globe since the Hamas attacks in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

Those who have pulled out of the conference, organized by Israel's Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, include Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, Felix Klein, Germany's anti-Semitism czar, Ephraim Mirvis, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, and French-Jewish author Bernard-Henri Lévy. Their reason?

They won't appear at the same event as members of what they term Europe's far-right political parties, such as France's Rassemblement National, Hungary's Fidesz Party, or Spain's Vox Party. Csiklis' critics feel that these parties are tainted by their association with the continent's dark history of fascism and the Holocaust.

The fact that they have all reconstituted themselves in recent years to deal with contemporary challenges and align themselves with Israel and against anti-Semitism is meaningless to them. As much as these liberal and left-wing Jews are attacking Chikli for granting legitimacy to the new European right, their choice has little or nothing to do with the fight against anti-Semitism that is currently happening.

Instead, it is just a reflection of how much of the traditional leadership of Jewish communities outside of Israel has prioritized partisan politics in their respective countries, when they should be laser-focused on the struggle against Jew hatred going on in the streets and on college campuses of the diaspora.

It's easy to see how the generation that came of age in the mid-20th century might instinctively draw back from conservatives, whether in the United States or Europe. Anti-Semitism on the left was far from unknown in that era, as even a cursory review of the actions of Joseph Stalin, the head of the totalitarian Soviet Union, reveals. But the primary threat to Jews then and in the previous century was from the right. It was the fascist right that perpetrated the Holocaust.

Even looking beyond the history of the events from 1933 to 1945 in Europe, throughout the diaspora, it was invariably the political parties on the right that scapegoated or openly attacked Jews. Conservatives generally were at best neutral in this struggle, while religious and right-leaning nationalist parties in Europe were almost always the ones who marginalized Jews or collaborated with the Nazis during the Shoah.

Indeed, even in the United States, hostility to Jewish citizens was more likely to be found among religious believers than skeptics or liberals. Political liberals were far more likely to be among the defenders of Jewish rights than their political opponents. We must honor the memory of those times and never forget what led to the Holocaust and who it was that was responsible for the murder of six million Jews.

But it is incumbent on those now alive to understand that the assumptions about anti-Semitism that were reasonable in the past no longer necessarily apply to the problems of the present. The primary challenge to contemporary Jewish life comes from a different direction.

Anti-Semitism still exists on the right. The rise of a woke right in the United States in which a minority of conservative figures, like media types Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, who either platform Jew haters and Holocaust deniers or engage in it themselves, is deeply troubling. Still, in 2025, the parties and leaders who are most likely to be ardent defenders of Israel and opposed to anti-Semitism in their own countries are on the right.

President Donald Trump is the best example of this trend. He has not only been the most pro-Israel president since the modern-day Jewish state was born in 1948, Trump has also done more to combat anti-Semitism on college campuses than any of his predecessors. The war he is waging on institutions of higher learning that enabled or tolerated the hatred of Jews is essential to that struggle.

The administration's efforts to rid the woke catechism of diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, and other toxic leftist ideologies, not just from higher education but other sectors of society, has the potential to do a great deal to ensure the safety of American Jews. And it was his opponents who have largely embraced the doctrines of the progressives that are most associated with anti-Semitism today.

But to many political liberals, especially within the Jewish community, Trump remains anathema. That's not only because of his policies they might oppose, but because they still assume that a conservative populist must be an anti-Semite, no matter what he says or does.

That might have been true in the 1930s or 40s, but not these days, when the sector of the population that is most likely to be anti-Semitic is on the political left or members of mainline Protestant denominations. That's the same reason that many liberal Jews that assume that evangelical and conservative Christians

to be hostile to them or Israel, even though the vast majority are not only pointedly philo-Semitic, but the most ardent American friends that Israel has. And that's also why the two political parties in the United States have essentially exchanged identities when it comes to attitudes towards Israel and the Jews.

where once the Republicans were best divided in their stance, even before the advent of Trump, they have since become a virtual lockstep pro-Israel party, eager to display friendship to Jews.

The Democrats have gone in the opposite direction as progressives who embrace intersectional and woke ideology have split the party on Israel and rendered it, as the stances of former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris showed, as at best neutral on the post-October 7th surge of anti-Semitism.

Indeed, part of the problem is that diaspora Jewish liberals are equally as disdainful of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and fellow Likud politicians like Chikli as they are of Trump, since the two governments are seen as political allies. The situation in Europe is more complicated, but the same unwillingness to live in the present applies. Antisemitism has always existed in the United States, though it was not a major political issue or official state policy.

In Europe, attitude towards Jews were a defining issue throughout the continent. Most right-wing parties can trace their origins to factions that were part of their nation's dark past with respect to the treatment of Jews at the Holocaust. People and political parties, however, do change. The reasons for this may not be because they have all suddenly fallen in love with the Jews.

The primary factor that caused people to change their minds is that in the 21st century, they understand that the threat to their nations isn't coming from the Jews. It's from the red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists. In the past, they may have seen Jews as outsiders who didn't fit into a blood-and-soil version of national identity. But today...

They rightly understand that the mass migration of Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa is fundamentally altering the character of many European nations for the worse. That is combined with the neo-Marxist efforts to discard the traditions of Western civilization as it redeemably racist, much like the left's war on America via critical race theory in the New York Times' 1619 Project.

This unlikely alliance of leftists and Islamists is producing a changing political landscape that could doom their national traditions and culture in places like Britain, France, Sweden, and other countries. It's also making them unsafe for Jews. Recognizing this fact makes them realists as opposed to racists or xenophobes.

And part of that realism is knowing that the Jews in the State of Israel are their national allies in an existential struggle for the future of Europe and the West. The evolution of these parties is a long process, and some, particularly like those in Germany and Austria, haven't completed that journey.

Despite its electoral success, the German AFD party remains tainted by the anti-Semitic attitude of some of its candidates for parliament and their nostalgia for the Nazi era. That's also true of Austria's Riedem party. That's why they weren't invited to the Jerusalem conference. If Chukly had chosen to invite them, then the boycotters would have had a leg to stand on.

Still, an argument can be made that encouraging people like AFD leader Alice Weidel, who is personally opposed to anti-Semitism and supports Israel, would do more to combat anti-Semitism in Germany than shunning her. Yet, Chick-fil-A wisely chose not to do so. That doesn't matter to diaspora liberals.

Other right-wing European parties have conclusively rejected their anti-Semitic past, as France's RN has done, even though that obligated its leader, Marie Le Pen, to eject her late father from the party. Her putative successor, Jordan Bardella, who may be its candidate to lead the country at the next presidential election, has no such association. Outspoken in opposing Jew hatred and supporting Israel, he will be at the anti-Semitism conference.

But he is just as unacceptable to many liberal Jews as open anti-Semites. The same is true for their attitudes towards Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is an ardent friend of Israel and his country's Jewish community.

Yet left-wingers not only routinely falsely accuse him of authoritarianism, but also of being associated with anti-Semitism, even though Jews in Budapest are far safer than they are in London, Paris, Amsterdam, or Stockholm, something that even Orban's domestic political opponents will concede. Those Jews who won't associate with them or members of their parties often identify with the parties of the European left or center.

Some, like Levi, a principled supporter of Israel but a man of the left, still cling to the idea that the right is not kosher. He fails to see that it is the political left, such as the La France Insoumise Party, or LFI, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, that is the current home of French anti-Semitism and the clear and present danger to their country and its Jewish population.

LFI combined with the support of French President Emmanuel Macron to defeat RN in parliamentary elections early this year, despite the right-wingers getting the most votes. Some argue that the new European right are not reliable allies or are squeamish about opposition to mass immigration, even when it transforms some countries into hostile environments for Jews. But this makes no sense.

That's especially true for liberal Jews who can now see that their former allies have abandoned them in the wake of October 7th and now, as many Democrats do, share or tolerate the views of the anti-Semitic intersectional left. American Jewish liberals may see their domestic concerns, such as support for legal abortion that's more important than Trump's backing of Israel and opposition to woke anti-Semitism.

Their European counterparts, who face an even more virulent and popular strain of Jew hatred, are even more misguided. But in the wake of the atrocities done by Hamas and Palestinians in Gaza, and the way that the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust encouraged and empowered anti-Semites everywhere, such attitudes are a luxury that Jews on either continent can no longer afford.

Former Soviet prisoner of Zion and Israeli political leader Natan Sharansky had it right when he posted on Facebook that he would attend the conference. He said, By standing aloof from Chikli and the anti-Semitism conference,

People like Greenblatt are gratifying their fellow political liberals, as well as those who are opposed to the Israeli government for reasons that have nothing to do with this issue. The same is true of European Jews, who prefer to hold on to the political alliances of the past that no longer serve their community's interests.

But they have a responsibility to unite with all people, no matter where they stand on the political spectrum or their nation's past, who are willing to support the Jews in a moment of unique peril. By shirking that duty in order to promote left-wing agendas, they're showing us what they consider it to be the most important. And it isn't the safety of the Jewish people.

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