In Boulder, Colo. Michael Ciaglo for The New York Times
By Jonathan Weisman
I’m an editor based in Chicago and the author of a book about being Jewish in the age of Trump.
Three times in as many months, people who claim to fight for Palestinian rights have attacked Jews on American soil.
Sunday’s Molotov cocktail assault in Boulder followed the killing in May of two young Israeli embassy aides in Washington, D.C., and the April firebombing of the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg, Pa., where Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family were celebrating Passover.
This is what a resurgence of violent antisemitism looks like.
The attacks were also acts of anti-Zionism — a clear response to the war in Gaza. There is a useful distinction between the clear bigotry of Jew hatred and the political and historical debate over Zionism — the support for a Jewish state. But, partly in response to the Oct. 7 war, the categories are collapsing. Salvos against Israel are colliding with longstanding prejudice, sometimes with deadly effect.
Today’s newsletter is about that collision.
The collapse
It is a moment of despair for advocates for Palestinian rights. Many are desperate: More than 50,000 have died in Gaza, and much of the territory has been razed.
The Trump administration appears to believe any defense of Palestinian lives is evidence of Jew hatred. (As my colleague Tyler Pager put it last night, the president has lots to say about antisemitism and little to say about Jews.) It has used pro-Palestinian speech as a pretext for assaults on higher education, science funding, foreign students and immigrants.
But attacks on Jews for the actions of an Israeli government a world away are collective punishment, and collective punishment is bigotry. This was not even a question when Muslims in America were attacked as retribution for the murderous actions of Al Qaeda on 9/11.
What resistance, though, is permissible? For a story I wrote last year about when garden-variety criticism of Israel spills into antisemitism, I had fraught conversations with non-Jews and Jews, many of whom have felt frightened since Oct. 7, 2023. On campus and at protests, they hear the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” for instance. Intifada is the Arabic word for “uprising,” and the term used to describe the often violent Palestinian resistance movements of the early 2000s and late 1980s.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, which for a century has been patrolling the dark worlds of bigotry, told me “there is no debate”: In his view, opposition to a Jewish State in the land of Jewish ancestry is antisemitism.
A protest against Benjamin Netanyahu outside the U.S. Capitol last year. Eric Lee/The New York Times
But there is debate. Zionism has always been a political idea, debated fiercely by Jews from the start. Increasingly, young Jews on the left say they are skeptical. Are they antisemites?
That debate aside, the violent antisemitism of the right, which manifested six and a half years ago in the slaughter at a Pittsburgh synagogue, has now been joined by antisemitic violence on the left. In 2018, while I was on tour to promote my book about being Jewish in America, a woman in Orlando who identified herself as a “threat analyst” told me I was right to focus on the antisemitism of the right. Bigots on that end of the political spectrum were armed and already killing people.
But, she said, I had given the antisemitism of the left short shrift, isolating it largely to Europe, in distinct pockets where Islamic extremism was thriving along with anti-Israel sentiment. Such antisemites were on the periphery of the “threat matrix” in the United States, she allowed, but they were moving to the center.
Many acts of extremism since then — including the attacks this year — show they have now arrived.
The Colorado attack
Federal officials charged Soliman with a hate crime. They said he had planned for a year.
Visa overstays like Soliman’s are common: More than 40 percent of the undocumented immigrants in the U.S. arrived with a visa and then stayed unlawfully, according to one estimate.
The man accused of Sunday’s assault is Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian immigrant who arrived on a tourist visa before applying for asylum. Most likely, the Trump administration will supercharge its search for would-be terrorists among those carrying the cause of Palestinian rights, especially among the foreign-born. Yesterday, Trump called the attack “yet another example of why we must keep our Borders SECURE, and deport Illegal, Anti-American Radicals from our Homeland.”
Trump’s focus on antisemitism is also not without merit. American Jews watch attacks like those in recent months with alarm — and say they no longer feel safe in a nation where they have found freedom and acceptance for centuries.
At the same time, antisemitic incidents and civil debate over Israel’s conduct in Gaza can be two different things. Anti-Zionist arguments are not, as some Jewish civil rights groups have argued, inherently bigoted positions promoted only by supporters of Hamas. Sometimes, that’s just politics.
The man accused of Sunday’s assault is Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian immigrant who arrived on a tourist visa before applying for asylum. Most likely, the Trump administration will supercharge its search for would-be terrorists among those carrying the cause of Palestinian rights, especially among the foreign-born. Yesterday, Trump called the attack “yet another example of why we must keep our Borders SECURE, and deport Illegal, Anti-American Radicals from our Homeland.”
Trump’s focus on antisemitism is also not without merit. American Jews watch attacks like those in recent months with alarm — and say they no longer feel safe in a nation where they have found freedom and acceptance for centuries.
At the same time, antisemitic incidents and civil debate over Israel’s conduct in Gaza can be two different things. Anti-Zionist arguments are not, as some Jewish civil rights groups have argued, inherently bigoted positions promoted only by supporters of Hamas. Sometimes, that’s just politics.