In November 2023 Rosalie Levinson, a law professor and former attorney who is also the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, spoke at the small university where I teach in Indiana. Just over a month after October 7, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, there were so many threats against her that armed security stood at both entrances to the auditorium. I would later learn from a colleague that a plainclothes police officer sat in the middle of the audience. It was a strange and troubling sight. In all my years of attending campus speeches, including from figures far more controversial than Levinson, I had never witnessed the need for a security detail.

Rather than an oddity, it was a sign of the antisemitic danger that has become pedestrian in American culture. Axios reports that synagogues across the US are not only increasing hired guards at services, but training their own members to act as volunteer security. The reason for their vigilance is obvious: antisemitism is on the rise, with attacks against Jews in the US at a 46-year high.  And while it is painful to admit, the reality is that it is not the ethnonationalist Right which has injected this ancient hatred into the modern mainstream but the progressive Left.

Progressive champions such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who in June likened Aipac to “monsters” who “move millions in dark money to…preserve their power”, seem to imply that Zionists control the American government. Others claim that Israelis are responsible for everything from police brutality to health care inequities.

Rhetoric toward Israel and its supporters, which according to a recent poll includes as many as 86% of American Jews, has become what political scientists call “eliminationist”. Zionists are not a partisan adversary fit for debate. To sections of the Left, they are a mortal enemy. It is hardly a surprise, then, that many people take it all too literally. And as hate crimes against Jews rise, Jewish organizations have no choice but to install additional cameras, harden doors, and, in the words of a security expert, keep a close eye on “what looks out of place”.

At the end of last month, Dana Nessel, Michigan’s Attorney General, explained that she can no longer attend the Democratic Party convention in her home state because she will face harassment and threats. Meanwhile, Nessel said, the Michigan Democratic Party is allowing “five people charged with antisemitic acts of vandalism” to attend the event with no restrictions. As stunning as the admission that a Jewish elected official cannot participate in a meeting of her own political party in her own state is that the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN all ignored the story. One could easily imagine that if South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, who is black, made a similar statement, it would dominate news everywhere.

The lethal inconsistency validates David Baddiel’s thesis that, in the words of his book, Jews Don’t Count. The heightened sensitivity towards bigotry does not extend to Jewish people, regardless of whether they are elected officials, campus speakers, or nameless worshippers.

There are now also increasing cases of protesters staging demonstrations outside of synagogues — a practice that Mamdani has refused to condemn. This exposes the lie that the progressive Left’s obsession with Israel merely turns on objections to Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies. Their behavior is the equivalent of a political group displaying its opposition to the agenda of the African Union with a rally outside a black church in Chicago.

This isn’t political debate. It is hatred, and nearly eight years after the Tree of Life shooting, and more recent attacks on Jews in New York, Colorado, and Michigan, it is only a matter of time before more people are killed.