The New Antisemitism and Neo-McCarthyism

In contemporary discourse, “McCarthyism” describes a period of extreme anti-Left repression driven by the U.S. Right in the 1950s. Mobilizing Cold War anxieties, figures like Senator Joseph McCarthy led a series of congressional public hearings designed to root out suspected Communist infiltrators in government, media, Hollywood, the labor movement, and other settings. A climate of conspiratorial panic swept civil society, leading to the firing and blacklisting of hundreds of progressive activists and LGBTQ people and the silencing of thousands more, as well as the breakup of multiracial coalitions and the weakening of labor and other justice movements. LGBTQ people suffered a drastic psychological, economic and social toll, and a generation of activists were terrorized and driven underground. The “old McCarthyism” of the 1950s was also deeply antisemitic. Legislators played on deep-rooted associations between Jews and Communism that animated the Nazi genocide one decade earlier. Jews were disproportionately targeted by anti-Communist blacklists and purges in entertainment, education, labor and elsewhere.

Today’s neo-McCarthyism is rooted in the lineage of its predecessor, from figures like Roy Cohn who spanned both eras (serving as a prominent McCarthyist prosecutor during the 1950s and a mentor to Donald Trump in subsequent decades), to shared ideologies of paranoid conspiracism, and shared tactics of anti-Left persecution. One new, and key tool in the neo-McCarthyist arsenal: cynical antisemitism allegations against protestors. Defenders of the state of Israel’s war insist that Palestine advocacy represents a unique and pernicious form of antisemitism, and that this advocacy must be repressed to protect the safety of Jewish communities from hostile Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim protesters, Leftists, and BIPOC-led justice movements. These arguments fan the flames of rising anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim bigotry, as well as racism, in order to further demonize these already marginalized groups as enemies of civil society and Western civilization. To be sure, there has been a rise in antisemitism in the U.S. since October 7^th—including incidents of vandalism and graffiti targeting Jewish institutions, and harassment and assault targeting Jewish individuals—but no reliable data indicates that this has come primarily from organized protest movements. Protests are predominantly driven by intersectional justice demands and not anti-Jewish animus, as evidenced by robust Jewish participation across campuses and cities. 

These fearmongering campaigns are actually making Jews less safe: isolating Jews from potential allies, in service of an anti-democratic agenda that is inimical to the thriving of Jews and other marginalized groups. These fearmongers aren’t interested in a responsible, grounded assessment of the threat to Jews. Instead, they aim to suppress the movement’s central demand: an end to the State of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and longstanding oppression of Palestinians through economic divestment and dismantling the apartheid state. Much like other right-wing moral panics targeting ”Critical Race Theory” in schools, ”antifa” on the streets, “terrorists” at the border, and trans people everywhere, the campus antisemitism moral panic serves to marginalize and delegitimize vital BIPOC-led justice movements, justifying authoritarian repression in response. Through laws, policies, doxing, firing, censorship, and other attacks, authoritarians hope that cultivating a culture of repression will foster a broad chilling effect on activism, leaving many afraid to speak out. This chilling effect then creates the context for further state and institutional sanctions. It’s essential for progressives to block these escalating threats to free speech and the right to protest, as we build movements resilient enough to withstand escalating authoritarianism.

Anatomy of Neo-McCarthyism

Since October 7, the epicenter of the neo-McCarthyist wave has been college campuses. Congressional leaders have summoned university presidents to inquisitorial hearings reminiscent of Senator McCarthy’s HUAC hearings in the 1950s, notably targeting women presidents of prestigious universities, and leading to the firing of former Harvard President Claudine Gay, a Black woman. Professors have been fired and disciplined, while students have been arrested and suspended, and student groups disbanded. Local police and state guard forces violently cleared protest encampments and building occupations, assaulting and arresting students and faculty with the blessing of campus administrators.

Commentators like ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt painted student protesters as terrorist cells and “Iranian proxies” and called for the National Guard to intervene, while legislators across the aisle made pilgrimages to Columbia to demand police and administrators “bring order to the chaos,” as Christian nationalist House Speaker Mike Johnson put it. Senator Tom Cotton, who called on then-President Trump to deploy the National Guard against Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, referred to the encampments as “little Gazas…disgusting cesspools of antisemitic hate, full of pro-Hamas sympathizers, fanatics and freaks.”

Statements like these from political leaders function as stochastic terrorism, granting symbolic license for vigilante mobs, shofar-blowing Christian nationalists, street-fighting Jewish Zionists and fascists, “White frat boys,” TPUSA provocateurs, neo-Nazis, and other far-right actors to harass and inflict violence upon the encampments. These attacks drew applause from authoritarian Right leaders.

Neo-McCarthyism has spread beyond campuses. Critics of Israel’s war have been fired from cultural institutions, law firms, and other places of employment, and high school teachers have been targeted by pressure campaigns and faced disciplinary repression as well. Prominent media outlets like The New York Times and CNN have adopted editorial policies designed to circumscribe criticism of Israel’s Gaza war. Rights-based advocacy groups like Palestine Legal have received skyrocketing reports of repression since October 7. Muslim groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations have reported a precipitous uptick in Islamophobia and anti-Arab bigotry, and Palestinian and Arab activists have been interrogated at their homes by the FBI.

The New ‘New Antisemitism’     

The equation of state of Israel-criticism with antisemitism used to further this neo-McCarthyist campaign didn’t appear overnight. The state of Israel’s defenders developed it in earnest after the 1967 Six Day War, as growing portions of the global Left lent solidarity and support to Palestinian liberation. To ward off criticism, they articulated what came to be called the “new antisemitism” thesis, taking its namesake from a 1974 book by ADL leaders Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein. While classical forms of antisemitism denigrated Jews as enemies of the Christian faithful or the master race, this new antisemitism, they argued, targets Jewish national self-determination in the state of Israel by disguising thinly-veiled tropes as political criticism. In the post-Holocaust era, they argued, the most pressing threat to Jews no longer came from the radical Right. Rather, the Western Left, Global South decolonial movements, and Islamists formed a new axis of antisemitism, holding the Jewish state in its crosshairs.

In the 21^st century, this charge escalated alongside the rise of the BDS movement. As divestment campaigns gained ground around the world, Israel advocates were unable to defend the state’s unjust policies on their own terms. Instead they advised deflecting the conversation onto questions of antisemitism, Jewish safety, and the need for “civil discourse.” For years, Palestine rights advocates have been dogged by the misleading charge that their work is fundamentally antisemitic, or creates an “unsafe climate” for Jews.

Defenders of the state of Israel soon devised a policy strategy, urging governments, universities, and other bodies to legislate against antisemitism using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, an unwieldy set of guidelines long used to equate a broad swathe of legitimate criticism of the state of Israel with antisemitism. IHRA has been adopted by over 1,000 institutions worldwide, ranging from state and local governments to NGOs, corporations, and more. Meanwhile, at least 38 U.S. states have passed legislation targeting boycotts for Palestinian rights, according to Palestine Legal. Other repressive actors, like Hindu nationalists and the oil and gun lobbies, have copied these strategies, pushing their own anti-boycott legislation or accusing critics of “Hinduphobia”.

Today’s neo-McCarthyist repression has been carried out in the name of anti-antisemitism, and it is also a smokescreen for the privatization and deconstruction of higher education. Politicians across the aisle outpace each other to proclaim their support for Jewish students. Media pundits insist campus clashes are “hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe.” The Congressional House Committee on Education and the Workforce has summoned university presidents to prove their commitment to anti-antisemitism, in highly-publicized show trials reminiscent of those carried out in the 1950s by Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee.

A range of initiatives stand to create a “federally constituted thought police,” religious studies professor Sam Brody wrote in a recent op-ed, that “would browbeat institutions into suppressing the academic freedoms of students and faculty until they conformed to conservative preferences.”^[1] Pro-Israel groups, along with MAGA-aligned outfits like Campus Reform, America First Legal, and Defense of Freedom Institute, are organizing pressure campaigns, and filing Title VI complaints and lawsuits against universities for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students. These pressure campaigns often explicitly go after DEI policies as well, a longstanding conservative culture war target.

Governors have even announced their own inquiries into antisemitism at state universities. Meanwhile, the chairs of multiple congressional committees have called on the Treasury Department to investigate the funding of a range of progressive groups and foundations. Bipartisan legislators and groups like the ADL have called for investigation of activist groups by alleging material support for terrorism, a charge used in recent years to justify draconian repression against a range of movements and communities. 

This moral panic is used not only to repress popular dissent against U.S. support for the state of Israel’s war on Gaza, but also to target vulnerable Arab and Muslim immigrant and refugee populations. It is also used to bolster the policing and surveillance arms of the security state. Before and since October 7, 2023, Rightists have used “fighting antisemitism” as a pretext to advance many aspects of their anti-democratic agenda, including but not limited to:

• Claiming Palestine protests exemplify the perils of diversity and the “browning of America” and clamoring for draconian mass deportations, border shutdowns and Muslim bans;
• Spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories that pro-Palestinian protesters, and progressive movements more broadly, are controlled by George Soros, “global elites” and other shadowy, subversive “outside agitators;”
• Demonizing progressives as diabolic, internal threats to the status quo that can only be purged from the body politic with force;
• Calling for increased funding for militarized policing and ”counter-extremism” programs based in the Department of Homeland Security, which have long been used to surveil Muslim and Arab communities;
• Bolstering longstanding attacks on public and higher education, benefiting neoliberal privatizers and Christian nationalists alike;
• Fomenting escalating war in the Middle East to fulfill the apocalyptic fantasies of Christian Zionists, driven by the interventionist ambitions of neoconservatives; and
• Riling up their base in the lead-up to election season. 

Crucially, this neo-McCarthyist repression is also a bipartisan endeavor, unfolding under a Democratic presidency with heavy participation from centrists and many liberals. Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi have called for the FBI to investigate funding of Palestinian rights groups. Democratic legislators have worked alongside Republicans to advance legislation curbing free speech. Self-proclaimed liberals like Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt have urged deployment of the National Guard to clear student encampments. Liberal publications like The Atlantic have amplified the narrative that campuses are hotbeds of antisemitism. Though these liberal actors object to an authoritarian future, they do nothing to stop it by participating in its authoritarian project through the anti-antisemitism moral panic. In helping to advance repression against pro-Palestine protesters, they are expanding a repressive toolkit that the Right will readily deploy against a range of justice movements and, ultimately, against the very institutions of democracy that liberals claim to defend.

Weaponizing Jewish Safety Makes Jews Less Safe

This is not the first time we have seen people accumulate power by relying on pejorative labeling or even denying that certain groups have a right to exist. Like the old McCarthyism, today’s neo-McCarthyism mobilizes the rhetoric of conspiratorial counter-insurgency to combat progressive movements and bolster authoritarianism. But, in a dizzying inversion in today’s United States and elsewhere, neo-McCarthyism is pursued in the name of protecting Jews from antisemitism—and in truth it does nothing to keep Jews safe. Quite the opposite in fact. In many cases, neo-McCarthyism singles out progressive Jews for state repression.

When movements are perennially forced to rebuff these barbed accusations, it can foster a “boy who cries wolf” effect. Progressive ranks can then conclude that antisemitism is not worth taking seriously, while conspiracy theorists can falsely insist that “Jewish power” undergirds the oppressive status quo. This neo-McCarthyism also can bolster the conflation of the state of Israel with all Jews: a cornerstone of the Zionist narrative, which is itself deeply antisemitic. All this makes it harder for principled activists to conduct the rigorous political education and awareness-building needed to guard against any actual antisemitism that might appear in movement spaces.

Of course, some forms of anti-Zionism can mobilize antisemitism, intentionally or not, and there have been real incidents of what historian Peter Beinart calls “pro-Palestinian antisemitism” since October 7, including harassment and threats of violence against Jews, graffiti at synagogues and Jewish institutions, conspiracy theories spread on social media and White nationalist entryism at protests. With most accusations, however, state of Israel defenders misinterpret popular chants like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as intrinsic calls for genocide against Jews, or misleadingly portray heated, dueling rallies on campus quads as pogroms-in-waiting. Other times, observers would benefit from drawing careful distinctions between antisemitism on the one hand, and styles of maximalist decolonial politics that, even if morally or strategically objectionable, are not themselves motivated by anti-Jewish animus on the other. It is also important to distinguish between threats to Jewish safety, and the discomfort that accompanies exposure to views which challenge preconceived notions—a discomfort that is integral, not inimical to a healthy campus climate.

On a basic level, this Neo-McCarthyist assault endangers Jews because it endangers multiracial, pluralist democracy. Today’s campaigns to stifle free speech and debilitate progressive infrastructure play directly into the Far Right’s strategy to roll back democracy and cement authoritarian rule. Granting federal institutions new repressive powers to wield against marginalized communities and social movements sets a dangerous precedent for these measures to be utilized and expanded against any perceived threats to the State. American Jews and other marginalized groups have long recognized that free and open civil societies, bolstered by robust pluralist institutions, are necessary prerequisites to ensure communal safety and thriving. In the name of protecting Jews, today’s political establishment and Right is dead set on dismantling the very democratic system that generations of American Jews and other groups have worked hard to protect and improve.

In recent years, open antisemitism has leapt from the margins to the mainstream. Since October 7, for example, right-wing leaders like Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens have dropped their dogwhistles, and are openly railing against “Jewish dollars” funding “cultural Marxist ideas,” as well as “sinister” Jewish cabals suppressing dissent. While undergrads on campus quads hold relatively little power, these individuals fomenting antisemitism command agenda-shaping conservative institutions, and have influence in the highest halls of power.

When the antisemitic Right holds close its figural Jews as fetishized objects of protection, it helps isolate actual Jewish communities from the powerful relationships we could build to collectively challenge the White Christian nationalist, authoritarian, and anti-democratic forces that threaten all marginalized communities. Only by blocking the neo-McCarthyist onslaught can we reverse the authoritarian Right’s unprecedented assault on democracy, and begin to build a world where no group is disposable, and all may find safety.