The first time I heard then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York deliver his favorite line was on a cloudless November day in 2023 in Washington, D.C. Some hundred thousand people had gathered at the National Mall to … well, I’m not sure what we were there to do. Perhaps show support, or something like that, for Israel and world Jewry in the aftermath of a very difficult month. Hamas and some other Gazans had inflicted wounds on our collective psyche in their attack a month prior. Lowlifes and agitators salted those wounds by organizing on campuses and city streets to chant and wave and vandalize and remind the Jews that we had not completely escaped history. Apparently some people, many more than we realized, still thrilled to Jewish suffering. So we rallied.
Sen. Schumer vowed that he would not stand idly by as such forces of evil grew emboldened. He told us in the crowd that, true to his name, he considered being our shomer, Hebrew for “guardian,” his highest obligation. I knew this was his go-to quip for Jewish audiences. Still, I joined the tepid applause.
“My ancestors were the watchers on the walls of a Jewish ghetto in Eastern Europe, there to alert the community to danger,” writes Schumer in Antisemitism in America: A Warning, his book published in March. “I believe it is my duty,” his nominal destiny, even, “to alert our country to the rising tide of antisemitism.” A few pages later, Schumer admits that he can sound out Hebrew words but has no idea what those words mean; Shomer may be the exception that proves the rule. But that only puts a finer point on the book’s failure to achieve its own aims: If this is Schumer’s attempt at a memoir of being a Jew in politics, it’s not that bad. But if this book is what Schumer thinks being a guardian entails, his problem isn’t that he doesn’t understand Hebrew. It’s that he doesn’t understand English.
Antisemitism in America reinforces the feeling one gets after spending enough time around Jewish public figures that it’s rallies and speeches all the way down. We think the words—the speeches, chants, songs, and books—have a kind of cosmic effect. If we just repeat our truisms about how antisemitism is bad but criticism of Israel is good, we can speak harmonious pluralism into existence. Let there be enlightenment!
Politicians, especially senior ones like Schumer, have other tools at their disposal. They have the power of policy, party, and pulpit to do any number of things about antisemites. Antisemitism may be a devil that never dies, but antisemites, the individuals who bring that bigotry into the world, are not so resistant to policy choices. They tend to cluster on campuses and in activist groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which help organize the street marches that so often turn destructive.
Yet when the federal government began pressuring universities to rid themselves of those antisemites or face consequences, Schumer reportedly told Columbia University’s leadership to lay low because their “political problems are really only among Republicans.” Schumer denies saying that, but his actions speak louder than any gotcha quote. When the Trump administration threatened Harvard University for its documented failure to deal with antisemitism, Schumer was the first signatory on a letter of Jewish senators “extremely troubled and disturbed” by the administration’s use of “a real crisis as a pretext to attack people and institutions who do not agree with you.”
The easiest way to remove antisemitism from the country is to remove antisemites from the American mainstream whenever possible. The Trump administration moved to do that by, among other things, deporting aliens who use the privilege of an American visa to harass Jews, destroy property, and promote Hamas propaganda. That is the least the government can do to prove it does not tolerate antisemitism. Yet Schumer concluded the letter by challenging the Trump administration’s supposed effort to deport such people “based solely on their expressed views and speech.” He did not acknowledge that the most prominent target of the deportation effort had engaged in a host of unlawful activity aside from his speech, much less take the opportunity to support deporting those who engaged in antisemitic conduct. With a tangible, legal, sensible policy solution staring him in the face, Schumer equivocated and went back to promoting his book warning Americans that antisemitism was a major problem.
At best, then, the book is Schumer’s idea of how to use his pulpit. He writes that Americans should be more sensitive to “expressions of bigotry.” Chief among these, in the Jewish context, are “from the river to the sea,” which Schumer repeatedly denounces as an expression of unwitting alliance with Hamas and its eliminationism, and “globalize the intifada.” To Schumer, these “cross the line” from acceptable to unacceptable ways to talk about Israel. He condemns the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for promoting anti-Israel rallies on October 8, 2023, and recalls how he invited its leadership to discuss why that was inappropriate. “What began as an earnest attempt to bridge a divide ended on a note of quiet resignation,” Schumer sighs. “To this day, I hope they came away with a better understanding of the deep roots of antisemitism and why Jews need a homeland of their own.” That strategy, now replicated at book length, fails, and Schumer knows it. “They have continued on their path,” meaning demonstrating in front of Schumer’s apartment, “and I have continued on mine.”
The two paths have subsequently converged. DSA darling Zohran Mamdani, who founded Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin College (a clause that breaks the progressivism meter), won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in June. Mamdani advocates boycotts against Israel, rapped about his “love” for Hamas’s convicted funders, was named as a leader of anti-Israel DSA actions in a statement calling for demonstrations on October 7 (“DSA is steadfast in expressing our solidarity with Palestine,” the statement began), and considers “globalize the intifada” an expression of the “desperate desire for equality and equal rights in in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” (He has reportedly since said that he will “discourage” others from using the phrase.)
Schumer had an opportunity to use his standing within the Democratic Party to marginalize a person who appears to stand for everything Schumer used his pulpit to warn against. Here is what he posted on social media:
“I have known @ZohranKMamdani since we worked together to provide debt relief for thousands of beleaguered taxi drivers & fought to stop a fracked gas plant in Astoria. He ran an impressive campaign that connected with New Yorkers about affordability, fairness, & opportunity. I spoke with @ZohranKMamdani this morning and am looking forward to getting together soon.”
That Schumer should let political tailwinds guide him is not surprising. In his book, he dabbles in the ascendant respectable-progressive talking point about Israel’s bad behavior—that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is mishandling the Palestinian issue for his own political gain—even as he admits that he knows Bibi and doesn’t think that narrative is right. And he still can’t quite bring himself to acknowledge that the progressive left has a major anti-Western problem that often manifests as anti-Israel extremism—and that it’s not new.
Schumer attended Harvard in the early 1970s. He recounts in Antisemitism in America an incident in which members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) interrupted a lecture from Israel’s foreign minister, Abba Eban, that was meant to combat “growing anti-Israel sentiment among some of the leftist students.” SDS held a banner: “Fight Zionist Imperialism.” Eban shut them down with a powerful quip about how they believed in self-determination for all people except the Jews. They were not simple critics of Israel’s government; they had imbibed the Soviet worldview so deeply that they were opposed to Israel’s very existence, which they saw as an extension of American “imperialism.”
SDS splintered and aged. Its most radical members became terrorists and then college professors. But the movement it stood for lives on. Now there is a constellation of groups, from DSA to SJP, and many more in between, that openly advocate destroying—that is, removing Jewish sovereignty from—Israel, and then similarly “decolonizing” the United States. Very little has actually changed, except perhaps that the positions SDS championed are arguably more popular among young progressives now than they ever were. If Schumer was opposed to them then and opposes them now, one must ask: in what conceivable way has he succeeded as a self-professed guardian of American Jews? Why, 50 years since he entered politics, has he failed to move the American left away from anti-Zionist anti-Americanism even an inch? How much has he even tried?
It’s no mystery. Schumer’s career, like that of most prominent American Jews, has been defined by fecklessness. His idea of guardianship is words, words, words—a speech here, a book there, but never a move that would risk alienating a Democratic constituency.
I’m no great fan of the man, clearly, but I don’t hold him responsible for taking this approach. My main feeling when reading Antisemitism in America was pity for its author. I think he is being genuine when he vows to be guardian of the Jews, but is so stuck in the paradigm of American Jewish politics (and yes, high on his own ego) that he doesn’t see how pathetically it comes off.
Rather than condemn such weakness, American Jews should be asking why Schumer is the most successful politician we have, to date, produced. He is truly our representative, our leader. That’s not a credit to Schumer. It’s an indictment of us, who are quite like him.
What I mean can be summed up in that passage about Schumer being able to read Hebrew without knowing what it means. That is a perfect symbol of American Jews’ “investment” in their future: surface-level engagement with the Jewish tradition, totally devoid of substance, concerned with the continuity of our people without being quite sure why. We go to rallies and write books and fund entire charitable complexes in exactly the same spirit. Meaningful political engagement and real leadership will come when American Jews begin to take themselves seriously, rather than for granted, as a political bloc.
But political blocs have distinct interests. Without being able to say that certain views, policies, and approaches to political life are in American Jews’ shared interests—and others are not—we will only have more Schumers. “I can read Hebrew, but I have no earthly idea what it means,” is bad. “Part of being Jewish is not always knowing what everything means,” the justification that follows, is worse. If Jewishness is so thin that ignorance of its basic building blocks can somehow be spun as a virtue—that such a sentence can make it to print without its author hiding his head in a bag—there is no such thing as a Jewish value, a Jewish interest, or even the use of “Jewish” as a modifier with any meaning. Yet Jews, like most overwhelmingly liberal religious denominations in America, fear alienating anyone, and we refuse to delineate the outer bounds of our tent. We celebrate our Schumers just as we celebrate the Jewish spirit of activism, whether it is against or indifferent to the oft-demanded slaughter and subjugation of 7 million of our fellow Jews in Israel. The emptiness of our rallies, our acceptance of the notion that shows of solidarity are adequate replacements for taking control of our own fate, the security and satisfaction we take in the drivel of powerful individuals who claim to have our backs—it all testifies to a curious comfort with mediocrity at the expense of living fully American and fully Jewish lives.
That’s not Chuck Schumer’s fault. It’s ours. As long as we Jews are reluctant to say that our tradition requires us to narrow the set of what may be considered our “values” and interests, we will fail to produce guardians worthy of the name.
