Opinion - A modern golem: The ‘antisemitism' charge has run amok

Yahoo

18-05-2025

According to Jewish folklore, in the late 16th-century the Czech city of Prague was threatened with antisemitic attacks. In response, Chief Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel created an early Jewish superhero in the attic of what has become known as the Old-New Synagogue.
The story goes that the rabbi received a divine order in a dream: 'You shall create [a] Golem from clay and may the malicious anti-Semitic mob be destroyed.' So he fashioned a powerful giant creature called a golem 'out of clay from the banks of the Vltava River and brought it to life through rituals and Hebrew incantations,' per Kayla Green's 'The Golem in the Attic.'
At first, the Golem defended the ghetto's Jews, but, through the rabbi's oversight, the powerful creature ran amok and had to be destroyed.
Responding to the horrific Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks on Israel, large Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the Zionist Organization of America have unintentionally created a similar monster — which has similarly run amok.
Within the North American Jewish community, leaders such as ADL's Jonathan Greenblatt and the Zionist Organization for America's Mort Klein have successfully conflated any criticism — however justified — of Israel's Gaza and West Bank policy with antisemitism.
Through creative bookkeeping (as I have written previously) in calculating yearly totals of antisemitic incidents, the ADL counts as equal a trivial event — such as a social media slight — and the Tree of Life synagogue killings in Pittsburgh. The result is ginned up hysteria among American Jews and congressional opportunists.
Serious, worldwide antisemitism is real but is in 'sharp decline' according to a recent Tel Aviv University study, even including criticism of Israel.
By contrast, the ADL recently reported 9,354 U.S. antisemitic incidents in 2024, a 5 percent increase. The group attributed this to an 84 percent rise in campus incidents — but only by counting all pro-Palestinian protests in their tally.
Some Jewish leaders have attempted to tap the brakes on this dynamic of weaponizing antisemitism.
Last month, a murderous arsonist attacked Pennsylvania's governor's residence on the first night of Passover. But Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), likely sensing that those weaponizing antisemitism were about to pounce, tried to apply some much-needed perspective. In a New York Times opinion piece, Shapiro, who is Jewish, wrote that as the police investigation continued, 'people began to ascribe their own beliefs onto what they thought happened — and why.'
Efforts to stifle campus free speech have now become overreach, where any support for the Palestinian people — even peaceful, nondisruptive student protest among those who reject Hamas — is considered antisemitic.
In what some have termed 'the Palestinian exception,' universities have knuckled under to threats, banning peaceful, nonobstructive encampments. Such encampments had previously been permitted for protests against the Vietnam War, South African apartheid, the treatment of Soviet Jews, climate change and, yes, antisemitism.
'Finding a Palestinian flag or keffiyeh innately antisemitic makes no more sense than regarding an Israeli flag or Jewish star as innately Islamophobic,' Lucinda Rosenfeld wrote in the Jewish Daily Forward.
Yet Jewish student and faculty support for Israel's far-right Likud government and the Israeli military are not subject to such new campus restraints. Thus, a debate over disciplining disruptive campus conduct has devolved into the issue of speech content, clearly violating the First Amendment. And the intended chilling effect has emerged.
On May 14, New York University withheld the diploma of Logan Rozas, a student commencement speaker, for denouncing 'atrocities currently happening in Palestine.'
'In general, protest activity is way down this year as compared to last year,' Hillel International CEO Adam Lehman told Jewish Insider. In a significant downside, this has emboldened the Trump administration to attack universities for reasons well beyond antisemitism.
But in the wake of Harvard's rebuke to Trump's threats, the tide seems to be turning.
On April 23, addressing a Holocaust remembrance observance in Washington, Abe Foxman, who ran the ADL for decades, said, 'As a [Holocaust] survivor, my antenna quivers when I see books being banned, when I see people being abducted in the streets, when I see government trying to dictate what universities should teach and whom they should teach.'
On April 25, Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden administration's antisemitism envoy, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Trump administration's assault on campus antisemitism has 'gone way too far.'
Also on April 25, five Jewish U.S. senators, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, signed a joint letter to Trump that states, 'We are extremely troubled and disturbed by your broad and extra-legal attacks against universities and higher education institutions as well as members of their communities, which seem to go far beyond combating antisemitism, using what is a real crisis as a pretext to attack people and institutions who do not agree with you.'
On April 28, more than 550 North American rabbis and cantors published a joint letter, accusing the Trump administration of 'abusing' antisemitism 'to divide Jewish Americans.'
On May 1, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), speaking at a Jewish Democratic Council of America summit, said the antisemitism issue 'is being very cynically exploited as the administration seeks to erode civil liberties in the United States.'
Even the ADL's Greenblatt, who initially praised the government's attack on Harvard, now seems to be distancing himself from the monster he helped create.
In a Times of Israel column, he wrote, 'Any actions taken to address campus antisemitism — including the potential withholding of federal funding — must be grounded in clear evidence and conducted in a manner consistent with Title VI procedures and other laws.'
Following Greenblatt's column, the far-left Jewish Voice for Peace, whose chapters have been targets of university discipline for exercising their free speech, wondered, in an editorial, whether the ADL has really 'turned over a new leaf.'
Reliable figures are hard to obtain, but I estimate that about one-third of North American Jews, including many young people, support Palestinian rights, while opposing Hamas; support the existence of a Jewish State in Israel; but also oppose massive civilian casualties in Gaza and settler terrorism on the West Bank. I include myself in this cohort.
However, until now, the roar of a modern golem has drowned out their voices. This monster should be returned to the nation's attic.
Mark I. Pinsky is a Durham, N.C.-based journalist and author. He served as a civilian volunteer attached to the Israeli military in Sinai in 1967.
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