You are a blue-state liberal Jewish American. You shower, dress and prepare your organic coffee in a kitchen cleaned by a woman who doesn’t speak English, and settle down with the New York Times.
Before you start the Wordle, the headline of an opinion column catches your eye. It’s written by Nicholas D. Kristof, a Pulitzer-winning Times columnist and eminent humanitarian. In Israel, you read, the sexual torture and rape of Palestinians, children included, is “standard operating procedure” at all levels of society. They even train dogs to rape prisoners.
Another day, another blood libel from America’s “paper of record”.
The Times is famous for a multilayered editorial and fact-checking process that endows every writer’s prose with the consistency of cold porridge. It doesn’t run shocking stories without corroboration by accident. It reheats pro-Hamas handouts by political design.
None of Kristof’s sources are corroborated. There are no photos or video testimonies. He recites personal allegations from Arab prisoners without mentioning that their social media shows their extremist motivations. He repeats propaganda from the corrupt UN Human Rights Council and a Geneva-based group called Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
In 2007, the Israeli group NGO Monitor told a parliamentary select committee that Euro-Med was one of several EU-funded groups that “actively oppose official EU policy and regularly refer euphemistically to terrorism.” Euro-Med withholds all information on the sources of its funding.
In 2024, Euro-Med claimed without verification that Israel “trains dogs to rape prisoners”.
Kristof withheld all of these facts about Euro-Med from his article.
As a liberal, you would rather drink corn syrup than read conservative media. You do not realise how badly the Times has failed you. You are unlikely to hear the Israeli foreign ministry accusing the Times of publishing “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press”, an “unfathomable inversion of reality” and “an endless stream of baseless lies”.
As a Jewish liberal, you cannot help but conclude that Israel is a potential liability. It’s a bad look for your career. It goes against your principles of social justice.
Everywhere you look, Israel is a wedge issue. Everything about Israel, the faraway country that you never did get around to visiting, rebounds onto American Jews. Even in the Democratic Party, which your family has voted for since the days of FDR.
The prestigious university that you attended and then donated to for decades now hosts pro-Hamas speakers and anti-Israel student encampments. Your children returned from the same university and told you that Jews excelled in America by becoming exemplary whites and capitalists, that Israel is a “settler colonial” outpost of American empire, and that they are “antizionists”.
Every time you look on social media, you see horrific images from Gaza and are told that Israel committed “genocide”. Not one Democratic Party leader contradicts this, so it must be true.
In April, Gavin Newsom, who currently leads the field for the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee, said that Israel was “sort of an apartheid state”. Newsom reversed a couple of days later. He said he was citing a hypothetical from the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
A few days later, another potential Democratic nominee, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, suggested that Benjmain Netanyahu had “bullied” Donald Trump into launching a war on Iran. “America should never be led around by another nation,” Shapiro said.
Your antenna trembled when you read that. It sounded like a conspiracy theory from Czarist Russia or Nazi Germany. It reminded you of the fuss in 2019 when the Times ran a cartoon alongside a Tom Friedman column that showed a blind Trump, wearing the black suit and kippah of a frum Jew, following the lead of Netanyahu, who was drawn as a dog wearing a Star of David collar.
The weird thing was, that column was about immigration and the Southern border. What did all that have to do with Jews? Anyway, the Times apologised and promised to do better.
Meanwhile in Michigan, state Democrats' nominated a candidate for the University of Michigan’s board who shares social media posts praising Hezbollah as martyrs and calling Israelis “demons” who “lie, cheat, steal, murder and blackmail.”
In DC, the majority of Senate Democrats backed a motion to block arms sales to Israel on humanitarian grounds.
You were one of the seven in every ten Jewish Americans who voted Democratic in the 2024 presidential elections. As a liberal, there is a one in three chance that you believe Donald Trump is a Russian plant. You don’t know any conservatives, but the odds are much shorter that you know that Republicans are racists.
You’re about to escape into the Wordle when a Times op-ed from the previous day catches your eye. It’s by Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey congressman: “I’m a Democrat. My party has a double standard on antisemitism.”
Why, Gottheimer asked, did Senate Democrats focus on Israel, not on other American clients such as Saudi Arabia or Turkey? For a “small but vocal and growing segment of the political left”, opposition to Israel is a “new litmus test.”
Why, Gottheimer asked, did Democrats criticise Republicans who promote racist memes about Jews but give bigots like Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes a free pass?
You know who Piker is. The Times profiled him in April and called him a “progressive mind in a MAGA body.” So he can’t be all bad, even if he calls Orthodox Jews “inbred” and Israel a “fascist settler colonial apartheid state”.
You know who Fuentes is, too. When the Times profiled him, they picked a high-contrast black-and-white fashion plate that made him look like one of Ernst Rohm’s sidekicks.
You can see the double standard, but you’re not sure what to judge it against. You can feel the vice tightening, but you don’t want to look into how the media and the academy oiled the ratchet, or why the Democrats are cranking it tighter.
As you are a Jewish liberal, you do not know that Ruth Wisse explained all this nearly a decade ago. Antisemitism and antizionism, she wrote, are “the organisation of politics against the Jews”.
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