How The Organized Jewish Community Has Fueled Antisemitism
Sid Shniad
How The Organized Jewish Community Has Fueled Antisemitism
And they will keep doing it.
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I keep thinking about how the Jewish establishment — with its fixation on Israel above all else — has fueled the current explosion of antisemitism on the right. The right has always been obsessed with the “loyalty” question. Think McCarthyism.
Before Gaza, MAGA— following Trump — fixated on what it saw as the disloyalty of immigrants, documented and undocumented alike.
That was always nonsense. No Americans are more loyal to this country than those who chose it, political and economic refugees who came here because they believed in it. They picked America; the rest of us just happened to be born here.
That used to be true of Jews, too. We were raised to believe America was the safest home we’d ever known. But that began to change in the last half-century, when the organized Jewish world decided, for whatever reason, that Israel — not America — was our true homeland despite 1900 years off elsewhere.
What’s striking is how late this notion emerged: roughly 25 years after Israel’s founding, nearly three decades after the Holocaust.
I remember the time before. I went to Hebrew school in the 1950s and early 1960s. Israel was mentioned, and its founding celebrated, but the focus was on us — on being American Jews and on Jewish contributions to this country. Our library shelves were filled with biographies of great Jewish Americans, not Israeli generals or prime ministers.
So what changed in the 1970s? The turning point was the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The war left Israel with staggering costs — and a new dependency on Washington.
Between 1949 and 1973, U.S. aid to Israel averaged about $122 million a year — $3.1 billion total over 24 years. After 1973, Israel and its advocates pushed for an increase to $2.2 billion annually. What began as a one-off emergency soon became the new normal.
Today, the baseline is $3.8 billion a year, plus whatever “supplemental” Congress decides to tack on — like the extra $16.3 billion approved after the Hamas conflict in 2024. (Aid figures come from Mitchell Bard’s Jewish Virtual Library).
The scale is mind-blowing. Aid has jumped from millions to tens of billions — all sustained by the myth that Israel is perpetually on the verge of annihilation. The so-called “existential threat.” Two hundred nuclear warheads and somehow always one step from extinction.
This way of thinking — Jews defined by fear, Israel defined by peril — was born after 1973, out of the lobby’s hunger for money and political leverage. The formula was simple: convince American Jews that Israel’s survival depended on endless U.S. aid, then reward or punish politicians accordingly.
Here’s the irony. Before that shift, the image of Israel was one of strength. Israelis were tough, independent, heroic. Exodus — the best piece of Zionist propaganda ever made — cast Paul Newman as the new Jew: handsome, brave, unstoppable. That image made sense in the wake of the Holocaust; it was the opposite of Jewish victimhood, and it was based on reality.
But by the late 1970s, Israel needed money more than pride. So the Paul Newman Jew—and his female counterparts—though still prevalent in the IDF and on Tel Aviv beaches, had to go. Out went confidence, in came fear. And from that moment on, the organized Jewish establishment has kept American Jews afraid — afraid enough to conflate loyalty to Israel with loyalty to our own survival.
Once the Jewish establishment re-engineered American Jewish identity around Israel, the rest of the story was predictable. You can’t spend fifty years insisting that your true home is somewhere else—and that US Jews and Israelis are one people— and then be shocked when the always paranoid right starts to believe you. The “We Are One” narrative, cooked up for fundraising and political leverage, eventually did what propaganda always does — it took on a life of its own.
Coincident with the Gaza genocide — though not caused by it — the American right has now split into two camps. On one side, the right-wing Jewish social media personalities: Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, Alan Dershowitz, Dennis Prager, Josh Hammer.
They’re loud, angry, and absolutely unwavering in their defense of Israel, no matter what Israel does.
On the other side is the mainstream MAGA universe: Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Laura Ingraham, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and the rest of the neo-fascist underbelly now fully mainstreamed. So mainstreamed that the New York Times has dubbed neo-Nazi Fuentes as the successor to Charlie Kirk.
It didn’t have to be this way. The right’s hostility to Israel isn’t born of compassion for Palestinians or disgust at the Gaza genocide— those are liberal concerns. What enrages the right is the perception of divided loyalty. They see the same “We Are One With Israel” proclamations from the ADL, AIPAC, and their chorus of pundits, and they react exactly as they did to Jews in the McCarthy era — with suspicion and contempt.
The pattern isn’t new. When Obama refused to veto a mild UN resolution on Israeli settlements in 2016 — a resolution consistent with official U.S. policy — the entire pro-Israel machine turned on him as if he’d suddenly morphed into an antisemite. Even Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi who despises Obama, has said that was the moment he turned against Israel. He couldn’t believe a “foreign lobby,” as he put it, could marshal that kind of power against a sitting U.S. president beloved by American Jews — for not putting Israel first.
And that’s the irony. In trying to prove that loyalty to Israel was the essence of Jewish identity, the Jewish establishment guaranteed that the right would start questioning Jewish loyalty to America. They built the very narrative that antisemites thrive on.
Meanwhile, the same communal “leaders” who hyperventilate about Zohran Mamdani or Ilhan Omar as supposedly inspiring antisemitic violence are silent about the one man who actually has and does: Donald Trump.
From the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh to the attempted murder of Governor Josh Shapiro and his family at Passover, and dozens of incidents in between, the perpetrators have been steeped in Trump’s racist, conspiratorial rhetoric. Yet AIPAC and the ADL have little to say about the indisputable fact that Donald Trump is the greatest threat to Jewish survival in America in our history. What is wrong with these people? Is it Stockholm Syndrome?
Maybe they cannot acknowledge it because to do so would mean admitting the truth: the surge of antisemitism in America isn’t coming from pro-Palestinian activists or from the left. It’s coming from the political movement the Jewish establishment empowered — the one whose loyalty it courted, financed, and excused for years in exchange for Israel’s endless aid packages and “bipartisan” cover. It’s the AIPAC equivalent of Israel building up Hamas to counter the Palestinian Authority and being rewarded with October 7th.
They built the monster. Now it’s turning on them.
It’s also turning on us because, if there is anything the right hates more than “dual loyalty” Jews, it is the vast majority of Jews (75%) who are Democrats. liberal and progressive. How ironic, and potentially tragic, that Jewish outliers and renegades — conservatives, Republicans, rightwing Israel Firsters — could well bring the wrath and violence of the violent right down on all of us.