Schumer Flips on Antisemitism

Israeli ambassador Abba Eban was greeted by an irritating sight when he rose to speak in Harvard University’s Sanders Hall on a chilly Tuesday evening in the autumn of 1970. A group of anti-­Israel extremists in the gallery had unfurled a banner denouncing “Zionist imperialists” and tried to shout Eban down when he began to speak.

Half a century later, another group of extremists, including Zohran Mamdani—now the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City—employed similar tactics in their own anti-Israel protests.

Senate minority leader Charles Schumer has cited Eban’s response to the Israel-haters as a transformative event in his own political life. Schumer’s very different response to the Israel-hater Mamdani reflects his own curious transformation.

Schumer, who in 1970 was a Harvard undergraduate, was in the audience the night Eban spoke. He was so moved by the ambassador’s rebuke of the radicals that he spoke about it at length in what was arguably the most important speech of his life, delivered on the senate floor in November 2023.

As Schumer rose to speak that day, anti-Israel protests, often mixing with blatant antisemitism, were erupting on college campuses and beyond. Schumer, who by then was the senate majority leader, was shocked at the refusal of many of his fellow-Democrats to acknowledge that antisemitism was coming from their own political camp.

The reality, Schumer told his visibly discomfited colleagues, was that the people expressing antisemitism after the October 7 massacres “are in many cases people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers.” He continued: “The vitriol against Israel in the wake of October 7th is all too often crossing a line into brazen and widespread antisemitism, the likes of which we haven’t seen for generations in this country—­if ever.”

Sen. Schumer then recalled with admiration the way Ambassador Eban responded to the hecklers in 1970. “Eban pointed his finger up at the protesters in the gallery, and with his Etonian inflection, he calmly but strongly delivered a statement I will never forget,” Schumer recalled.

Schumer then quoted Eban’s words: “I am talking to you up there in the gallery. Every time a people gets their statehood, you applaud it. The Nigerians, the Pakistanis, the Zambians, you applaud their getting statehood. There’s only one people, when they gain statehood, who you don’t applaud, you condemn it—­ and that is the Jewish people. We Jews are used to that. We have lived with a double standard through the centuries. There were always things the Jews couldn’t do. . . . Everyone could be a farmer, but not the Jew. Everyone could be a carpenter, but not the Jew. Everyone could move to Moscow, but not the Jew. And everyone can have their own state, but not the Jew. There is a word for that: antisemitism, and I accuse you in the gallery of it.”

The audience of more than 2,000 “broke into heavy applause,” The Harvard Crimson reported. Young Charles Schumer never forgot that moment. The episode helped shape Schumer’s subsequent career as a Democratic member of Congress who was known as a staunch supporter of Israel.

Zohran Mamdani carved a very different path in college, and then in politics. At Bowdoin College in Maine, he co-founded the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that calls Palestinian Arab terrorists “resistance fighters” and advocates replacing Israel with “Palestine.” SJP later was the primary organizer of the pro-Hamas campus rallies following the October 7 massacres.

In an op-ed for the Bowdoin student newspaper in January 2014, Mamdani referred to what he called “more than 60 years of Israeli colonial occupation of Palestine.” Note the number he used. In the view of Mamdani and his SJP friends, the very establishment of a tiny Jewish state 66 years earlier, in 1948, constituted an illegal “colonial occupation.” The existence of Israel—not a dispute over territories or settlements—is what they reject.

It’s not uncommon for college students to embrace radical causes. But usually they outgrow their youthful militancy after they graduate and enter the world beyond the Ivory Tower. Unfortunately, Zohran Mamdani never shed his extremism.

The day after the October 7 attacks, Mamdani wrote (on X) that Israel’s “occupation” was the real cause of what he called “the ongoing violence in Israel and Palestine.” During the weeks that followed, Mamdani posted dramatic accounts of his participation in various demonstrations accusing Israel of “genocide.” That was before even a single Israeli soldier had stepped foot in Gaza. For Mamdani and company, Israel’s very existence is an act of “genocide.”

The protests in which Mamdani participated were intended to make the lives of ordinary Americans miserable. Mamdani and his fellow-extremists blocked the entrance to the New York Stock Exchange, tried to shut down Grand Central Station, and were arrested for blocking traffic outside the home of a U.S. senator to protest his support for Israel’s existence. It was the home of Senator Charles Schumer.

Yet last week, Schumer responded to Mamdani’s primary victory by showering him with praise. Schumer boasted that he and Mamdani have “worked together” on some legislation, and he hailed Mamdani’s “impressive campaign that connected with New Yorkers.” He didn’t say a word about Mamdani’s obsessive hatred of the Jewish state—the very sentiment that Abba Eban had denounced as antisemitic.

To prove his loyalty to his party, and no doubt to fend off challenges from Mamdani supporters (such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), Sen. Schumer has chosen to join them rather than fight them. It’s a classic political move—cold, calculated, and contradicting everything Schumer said previously about the current sources of antisemitism.

Thus it would appear Charles Schumer has come full circle. After boldly chastising his fellow-Democrats for ignoring antisemitism on the left for political reasons, Schumer will now be remembered for doing exactly that.