“Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned. He’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.” So said President Donald Trump on March 12. The president had taken it upon himself to assert authority as to who is Jewish, and to say that Chuck Schumer, specifically, is not (the president also called Schumer Palestinian last summer and even alleged that he was a member of Hamas).
In fact, Schumer is not only Jewish, but the highest-ranking elected Jewish official in American history. His Jewishness is the subject of his new book (written with Josh Molofsky), “Antisemitism in America: A Warning.” Where the senator once felt his identity could be “worn lightly,” he writes that he now feels it is his “duty to alert our country to the rising tide of antisemitism” in this “personal and political history of the Jewish people in America through my eyes, informed by my experiences.”
The personal parts of the book are quite moving. One never doubts that Schumer (in whose D.C. office, in the interest of full disclosure, I was an unpaid intern in the summer of 2009) is deeply perturbed about antisemitism and what he clearly feels is his responsibility as a Jewish person holding prominent public office.
(The book is being released just as Schumer is facing widespread criticism for his support of the GOP funding bill. Some in-person events to promote the book, including one in Washington, have been postponed in the face of planned protests.)
There are parts that are funny, too: Schumer writes of learning how to chant in Hebrew for his bar mitzvah but not understanding what any of the words signify. “To this day, I can read Hebrew, but I have no earthly idea what it means,” he writes, before adding, “Part of being Jewish is not always knowing what everything means.” Shortly thereafter, reflecting on his bar mitzvah celebration, he writes, “Some have described Judaism as an ongoing argument with God. But my experience as a thirteen-year-old taught me that it also involved arguing with a lot of other Jews over trivialities.” I laughed and thought “amen.”
The book is weaker, though, when it is less personal, especially when Schumer turns his hand to analysis of history and present politics. Schumer’s understanding of antisemitism is that it is a unique hatred, one that has appeared in cycles across history, and that it can come from left and right alike. None of this is wrong, exactly, though some would probably contest Schumer’s assertion that “Antisemitism just is. Has been. Will always be.”
But Schumer seems to think that talking about antisemitism in tandem with other hatreds diminishes its importance. “It need not be compared in scale or severity to other hatreds. … Antisemitism is worthy of concern and attention in its own right,” he writes. The problem is that looking at antisemitism in isolation risks missing how it feeds off other hatreds and also how the genuine threat of it can be used by those in power to divide the Jewish community both internally and from other minorities, by, say, using it as a reason to chill free speech around Israel.
Schumer’s omissions are especially evident in his analysis of antisemitism on the left. The subject clearly pains him: The protests at Harvard against Israel’s war in Gaza following Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, remind him of anti-Vietnam War protests at the university when he was a student there in the 1960s and ’70s. Those on the political left are his natural political allies and friends, and he worries that they do not care about antisemitism enough. He writes that “one of the many important reasons I decided to write this book” was “to warn my friends on the left. Be careful. Do not let passion overwhelm your better instincts.” He is worried about “how to deal with those who are not inclined to listen to the other side because their righteousness is absolute,” and about how “protest or speech motivated by righteous anger can tip over into accusations that cast too wide a net of blame and use language that becomes a permission structure for, and often evolves into, antisemitism.”
Some examples that Schumer gives are clear-cut. One Columbia student reported that he was wearing a yarmulke while getting a kosher meal and was approached by a student who told him “F— the Jews” — this is obviously antisemitic harassment.
But other examples Schumer offers are more ambiguous: For example, he brings up the use of the term “genocide”: “To the vast majority of Jewish-Americans, the accusation of genocide” against Israel “is the most painful, cruel, unfair, and vicious. I feel that unfairness quite strongly, not only because I believe it does not describe what is happening in Gaza but because of the history of my own family.” He writes of the specific weight of the term in Jewish history, of how those who use it overlook the cruelty of Hamas, and he suggests that those who insist on using it are holding Israel to a double standard. Where are the protesters against Syria, or China? “Why only Israel?” “To most Jews,” he writes, “it stings of the double standard — that only the Jewish state is singled out for this particularly noxious term.” He hopes that more people consider the weight of the word and gravity of the charge. “It creates the impression that Israel is monstrous, and therefore Jewish supporters of Israel might be monsters, too. Antisemitism, once again, could lie just around the bend.”
Genocide is indeed a heavy term. But it is also a legal one, and that a state is Jewish does not mean that the term cannot apply. It is incredibly painful to think that Jews, with our history, could in any way repeat the crimes once committed against us, but that pain does not mean that it’s impossible, or that it’s inherently antisemitic to say so, or that the term should be off limits if the act is being committed by Jews. It is also worth noting that, while there are Jews who have said that the term is antisemitic or could lead to further antisemitism, there are also Jews who have said that what Israel has done in Gaza does indeed constitute a genocide: Aryeh Neier, whose family fled Nazi Germany when he was a child and who was heavily involved in the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, said last spring that he had reached that decision. I do not believe that he was motivated to do this by antisemitism. And if it is dangerous to suggest that Jews are supporting something monstrous, it is also, I think, dangerous to suggest that we cannot even countenance debating whether monstrous acts are being carried out. Arguing otherwise does a disservice to the reader: More nuance and context, not less, is needed in discussions around Israel, Zionism and its critics, and antisemitism.
This also speaks to a larger — to my mind, the largest — issue with the book, which is that the warning it offers struggles to live up to the moment in which it is being published. That is not only because Schumer speeds up — declaring this term or that to be antisemitic, full stop — when he could benefit from slowing down, unpacking the difference between a speaker’s intent and impact; exploring how the same term sometimes is and sometimes is not antisemitic; and examining how to crack down on antisemitic speech while protecting free speech, a right that’s historically been central to the ability of all minorities, including Jews, to participate in this country’s democratic process. It’s also because of the book’s more muted descriptions of antisemitism and its weaponization from the most powerful people in the country, who, at this juncture in American history happen to be on the political right.
Most of the book was, I am sure, written before Trump took office for his second term, though late updates were made (JD Vance, for example, is referred to as vice president), so it is not Schumer’s fault that some of the latest developments in antisemitism are not mentioned. Still, it is a bit confusing to read, of the person who sat in the Oval Office and said that Schumer is not Jewish, “Let me state unequivocally: I do not believe Donald Trump is an antisemite. But he all too frequently has created the feeling of safe harbor for far-right elements who unabashedly or in coded language express antisemitic sentiment.”
Whether Trump is or isn’t an antisemite is not the point. Over the past several years, Trump has personally defended participants of a neo-Nazi march; pushed conspiracy theories about Hungarian-born Jewish philanthropist George Soros flooding the country with migrants, manipulating protests and controlling the justice system; called on the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”; dined with outspoken antisemites; and repeatedly said that Jews who disagree with him are disloyal and should have our heads examined. Schumer is clearly aware of all of the above, as he does mention some of these incidents, making it all the more strange that he presents Trump as someone who unfortunately sometimes emboldens far-right elements, rather than embracing or at least articulating antisemitism himself. It wasn’t a far-right fringe figure who, speaking at an event on antisemitism, said that Jews would bear responsibility if Trump lost the election; it was Trump, personally, who chose to do that.
“What’s important to understand is why certain ideological movements on the right latch on to antisemitism and — inadvertently or by design — help spread it,” Schumer writes.
What is inadvertent about any of this? Since being sworn back into office, Trump has picked an FBI director who repeatedly appeared on an antisemitic commentator’s podcast; selected as his secretary of defense someone who belongs to a Christian nationalist church and has evoked the great replacement theory (the idea that elites, often Jewish, are trying to use immigration and demographic shifts to diminish White people’s societal influence); and has as his right-hand man Elon Musk, who spent Trump’s first weeks back in office boosting Germany’s far-right party. There are, as I write this, people in power who promote antisemitism in one breath and use it as a justification to crack down on civil liberties in the next.
“If antisemitism is allowed to gain a permanent foothold on the radical right … the potential exists for a right-leaning political party or leader to see antisemitism as a useful tactic to galvanize support and whip up populist fervor … their expression of antisemitism could become further normalized in society,” Schumer writes. If. What about when? And what if the answer to when is “right now?”
This book comes across as earnest and heartfelt. Reading it, however, made me realize that I didn’t want a warning on antisemitism. I wanted the highest-elected Jewish official in American history to meet a moment that has already arrived.
Emily Tamkin is a global affairs journalist and author of “The Influence of Soros” and “Bad Jews.”
By Chuck Schumer with Josh Molofsky
Grand Central. 234 pp. $28
A previous version of this review omitted Chuck Schumer’s first name on first reference. In addition, the review incorrectly said that some in-person events to promote Schumer’s book have been canceled because of protests. The events have been postponed. The review has been corrected.
