In an interview that is reported in yesterday’s Politico Mr. Doug Emhoff comments upon the current upsurge of antisemitism in America, and there he makes the following point: 

The tenor of some of the protests over Israel’s response to the Hamas’ attacks that killed 1,400 have shocked him, he said. He believes Americans are dispensing with distinctions between being critical of Israeli politics and Jewish people. “There seems to be a conflation of not being able to separate the actions of the Israeli government and Jewish people and taking out feelings that they have about the actions of the Israeli government on all Jews, irrespective of how those Jews may also feel about the actions of the Israeli government.”

I think that Mr. Emhoff is right. Many who are angry about the behavior of the Israeli regime thoughtlessly lump non-Israeli Jews as well as leftist Israelis together with the coalition of neo-fascists and religious reactionaries in the Israeli government that is so relentlessly bombing Gaza.

However, I would suggest that the conflation of which Mr. Emhoff complains is among very many unreflective Americans quite predictable. The majority of American Jews are supporters, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, of the state of Israel. Consider this report from the Pew Research Center: 

Israel, the world’s only Jewish-majority country, is a subject of special concern to many Jews in the United States. Caring about Israel is “essential” to what being Jewish means to 45% of U.S. Jewish adults, and an additional 37% say it is “important, but not essential,”‘ according to a new Pew Research Center survey that was fielded from Nov. 19, 2019, to June 3, 2020 – well before the latest surge of violence in the region. Just 16% of U.S. Jewish adults say that caring about Israel is “not important” to their Jewish identity.

This conflation of Jews in America with Jews in Israel and with the Israeli state is fostered by the Israeli government that relies on the American Jewish community for political and financial support. It is fostered also by Israel’s strenuously anti-American enemies. It is fostered as well by the many Americans who have become armed “settlers” on the West Bank. The The Times of Israel and other sources say: “Approximately 60,000 US Jews, out of the 170,000 in Israel, live in West Bank, study shows.”

These factors combine to incline very many in the U.S. to identify American Jews with the Israeli state, and turn the closer-to-home American Jews into the objects of naive, popular hostility: “If you can’t be with the ones you hate, hate the ones you’re with.”

I would make the additional point that some of the anonymous antisemitic outrages that are reported in the U.S. may not flow from the perpetrators’ specific hate for Jews, but from their generalized hate that focuses on whoever is in the news. The Trump years have shown that the number of not institutionalized insane in the United States, like the number of crypto-criminals, is far greater than we once supposed.