The Left’s Antisemitism Framework Has Failed and Jews Are Paying the Price

In a recent essay for The Forward, Arno Rosenfeld offered a bleak conclusion: “key signals are pointing toward things getting worse for Jews, and antisemitic attitudes growing with few checks.” The argument was framed as realism—a sober reckoning with polarization, extremism, and cultural change. But beneath the tragic tone was a deeper claim: that rising antisemitism is something Jews must learn to endure rather than something institutions can meaningfully stop.

That conclusion is dangerously wrong. And it reveals precisely why the left’s approach to antisemitism has failed.

For more than a decade, American Jews were urged to respond to antisemitism primarily through empathy, dialogue, and endless benefit of the doubt. If hostility arose, the explanation was grievance or misunderstanding. If Jews felt targeted, they were encouraged to listen more carefully to the “context.” Enforcement, we were told, would escalate tensions; clarity would harden divisions; consequences would provoke backlash.

This framework was not neutral. It reflected a distinctive progressive moral logic—one that privileges intention over impact, ideology over lived experience, and narrative over rules.

That experiment has now collapsed.

Antisemitism is worse today not because Jews demanded too much, but because too many progressive institutions chose interpretation over enforcement, moral theory over civic equality, and political alignment over institutional responsibility making this failure structural and not accidental. 

Rather than treat antisemitism as a durable and historically adaptive form of prejudice, much of the left attempted to redefine it out of relevance. Jews were reclassified as “white.” Antisemitism was reframed as a secondary or derivative harm. Jewish vulnerability was acknowledged only insofar as it mirrored other categories of oppression. Hostility toward Jews was thus tolerated and increasingly rationalized as long as it arrived cloaked in the language of anti-Zionism, resistance, or critiques of “power.” When a hatred no longer fit the theory, it was no longer recognized as real.

This intellectual move had real-world consequences. It taught institutions that antisemitism is different from other forms of bias, that it is more debatable, more contextual, less urgent. It trained administrators to treat Jewish complaints as political disputes rather than civil-rights violations. And it signaled to activists that Jews are a legitimate exception to norms otherwise enforced with zeal.

The data make this unmistakable. According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in the United States have reached historic highs, driven overwhelmingly by harassment and intimidation. This is not fringe violence at the margins. It is routine hostility and has been normalized in schools, in public spaces, and in civic institutions. That pattern reflects not a failure of awareness, but a failure of authority.

Nowhere has that failure been more visible than on campus. Jewish students are told that chants denying Jewish self-determination are merely political speech and that targeting Jewish spaces is “contextual.” That harassment should be discussed rather than punished. Universities that aggressively enforce conduct codes for other protected groups suddenly discover an absolutist devotion to free expression when Jews are the targets.

This is not principled liberalism. It is selective enforcement.

Again, the evidence is clear. Surveys by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression show that Jewish students are among the groups most likely to self-censor, not because of formal bans, but because they reasonably fear social, academic and reputational retaliation. That is what a chilled climate looks like in practice: not censorship from above, but permission from below.

And here is the core truth that essays like Rosenfeld’s obscure: Antisemitism does not intensify because Jews defend themselves. It intensifies when institutions teach society that targeting Jews carries no cost.

None of this is unprecedented. American Jews have seen this pattern before.

In the mid-20th century, elite universities insisted that Jewish quotas no longer existed even as admissions criteria were quietly redesigned to limit Jewish enrollment. After the Six-Day War, Jewish activists were pushed out of the New Left, accused of Zionist loyalties incompatible with progressive politics. By the early 1970s, the movement had shed most of its earlier Jewish influence. In each case, institutions claimed neutrality while selectively enforcing norms in ways that disadvantaged Jews.

The lesson was not subtle then, and it is not subtle now: Antisemitism thrives when institutions insist they are powerless to act.

What makes the present moment especially troubling is that today’s institutions possess far more tools than their predecessors ever did. Universities have harassment standards, non-discrimination policies, and time-place-manner rules. Civic organizations have compliance regimes and professionalized enforcement structures. Media institutions shape elite norms and moral boundaries daily.

The failure we are witnessing is not one of capacity. It is one of will. And this is where essays like Rosenfeld’s become more than mistaken. They become enabling.

By presenting antisemitism as an unstoppable tide rather than the product of institutional choices, such arguments narrow the range of legitimate Jewish response. Assertiveness becomes “overreach”; enforcement becomes “escalation”; moral clarity becomes “conflation.” The only acceptable Jewish posture is anxious, restrained, endlessly self-questioning while the burden of adjustment falls almost entirely on Jews themselves.

That is not journalism holding power to account. It is accommodation and accommodation has never protected Jews.

Defenders of this posture often insist that enforcement risks backlash, that clarity inflames tensions, and that restraint is wisdom. But this is a counsel of managed decline. Backlash is not caused by rules; it is caused by inconsistency. Tension is not created by standards; it is created by selective indulgence. And restraint, when demanded only of Jews, is not wisdom; it is surrender.

Liberal societies do not survive on good intentions alone. They survive on neutral rules, applied consistently, especially when enforcement is uncomfortable. When those rules collapse, minorities are not protected by empathy. They are exposed.

Antisemitism is not inevitable. It is permitted.

And it will only recede when institutions—universities, nonprofits, media organizations, and yes, Jewish institutions themselves—recover the moral confidence to say, clearly and without apology, that targeting Jews is unacceptable, no matter who does it, and no matter the politics attached. That means treating “Zionists off campus” the same way they would treat any call to exclude a protected group such as Blacks or Muslims: as a violation of civil-rights and federal law, not a contribution to campus debate.

Hatred flourishes where boundaries are not enforced, and antisemitism will continue as long as institutions refuse to draw and defend clear moral and civic lines around the protection of the Jewish community.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.