The Privilege of Surprise

By Abe Greenwald

I wasn’t particularly shocked by the eruption of left-wing Jew-hatred after October 7, 2023. Appalled and sickened, but not shocked. I’d been watching the activist left for years and had come to understand that anti-Semitism was laced into all its pet causes to varying extents. Black Lives Matter issued anti-Israel statements years before the war in Gaza, and the group Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT!) was founded in San Francisco in 2001. Jew-hatred is an organic element of any movement whose aim is to tear it all down. The unfailing anti-Semitism of the hard left has deep roots. As Jonah Goldberg explained in COMMENTARY a few years back, for Marx and Engels, “the capitalist ruling classes, whether or not they claim to be Jewish, are nonetheless Jewish in spirit.” 

After the BLM riots of 2020, it was clear that the social justice mob was on a seek-and-destroy mission, scanning the horizon for justifications to raze all that the classically liberal West and, specifically, the United States had built up. When the riots subsided and liberals began to distance themselves from the radical positions they’d sampled in the heat of the moment, the real radicals found themselves in need of a new cause. It would come courtesy of Hamas, and this time it would be undiluted. Finally, they’d get to advance the cause of plain old Jew-hatred. 

Many liberal Jews were stupefied by this turn of events. But those whose politics track with mine—that is, other politically conservative American Jews—were, like me, unsurprised (while being similarly furious) about it all. And, in truth, I was deeply annoyed that liberals didn’t see it coming.

I recall this because, by contrast, I am in a mild state of shock over the right’s nominally internecine battle over anti-Semitism. And my fellow Jewish conservatives seem comparably taken by surprise. There is, of course, a long history of right-wing anti-Semitism in this country. But, unlike today’s Squad-hyping liberal establishment, the right’s leaders faced up to their own side’s anti-Semitic problem decades ago. The organized Jew-haters had been severed off from modern American conservatism as established by William F. Buckley Jr. in the early 1960s.

To be clear, I’m not shocked that the online “right” now features anti-Semitic influencers with millions of viewers. Nor was I blindsided by the edge peddlers, such as Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who exposed the lunatics to a wider audience. All those players have been making their moves out in the open for a while. 

What caught me off guard was that there was any significant portion of the conservative establishment that was willing to reintegrate the Jew-haters into the mainstream right. While I remain heartened by the overwhelming pushback on Heritage president Kevin Roberts’s attempt to clear the way for the new Birchers, it’s obvious that I’ve had a delayed and sustained shock reaction to the fact that Roberts even tried—and that he had any support or assistance in this effort. 

And now, I’ll snap out of it. Because the lesson here is that if you’re a Jew, you must learn never to be surprised by anti-Semitism. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Israel, Europe, or the U.S., or whether you’re on the right or left. You cannot afford to be shocked by the appearance of Jew-hatred because once it arises, you’re in a fight for your existence and have much hard work to do. This country has bestowed many luxuries on its Jews. Being caught off guard is one we can no longer afford. 

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.