Jonathan Chait’s latest Atlantic piece argues that the “pro‑Israel right” is moving the goal posts on antisemitism to discredit Israel’s critics. But like others making this claim, he sidesteps an escalating pattern: politicians and major news outlets spread incendiary, thinly sourced allegations—and, when challenged, quietly walk them back or double down. In doing so, they condition audiences to accept ever‑wilder claims as fact. Two recent cases Chait downplays make the point.
On July 30, 2025, Bernie Sanders condemned “the Netanyahu government’s extermination of Gaza” in the Senate. Chait argues that likening this charge to a blood libel—the medieval slander that Jews murder Christian children for ritual use—would require extraordinary evidence, partly because Sanders is Jewish. But “extermination” is itself an extraordinary allegation—one that flies in the face of the evidence. By failing to address the allegation’s credibility, Chait overlooks Exhibit A in the case that Sanders’s rhetoric resembles a blood libel.
On July 24, 2025, The New York Times ran a front-page photo of a skeletal child in Gaza as evidence of mass starvation. The paper did not disclose that the child had cerebral palsy—a fact that undercut the story the image told—as media watchdog Honest Reporting discovered. Chait dismisses this as a wartime error that newspapers sometimes make, yet the image’s front-page placement and caption, describing the child as “born healthy,” almost certainly passed through multiple layers of editorial review. No one noticed that the mother in the photo showed no signs of malnutrition. Once again, Chait applies one evidentiary standard to the Times and another to its critics.
On June 3, 2024, Sanders displayed similar photos of emaciated children on the Senate floor, citing only the news agencies that had published them—without providing the identifying details needed for independent verification. The omission drew no sustained pushback at the time, illustrating how easily such imagery could be presented without challenge. That uncritical reception may have encouraged the Times to assume its own high-impact child image would likewise escape close scrutiny.
The Times eventually issued a quiet correction for the cerebral palsy photo but has yet to retract another image from October 2024—one purporting to prove that Israel deliberately shot children in the head. Radiologists and ballistics experts quickly testified to the brain-scan images being fakes: the bullets were pristine, the surrounding tissue undamaged. Rather than retract, opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury doubled down, insisting the essay had been rigorously edited and that the paper possessed additional unpublished images too graphic to show. But if the originals were fake, undisclosed photos change nothing—and refusing to submit them to independent forensic review hardly allays concerns about the paper’s evidentiary standards and accountability.
Against this backdrop, Chait’s better move would be to acknowledge that these incidents were unlikely to be innocent mistakes, and that the Times—along with CNN, Al Jazeera, and the BBC—had taken a side in the conflict. The well-documented double standard was already an open secret. Chait could still contend that using inflammatory images to bolster allegations of starvation and genocide doesn’t invite comparison to a medieval blood libel. But that’s where the real debate begins.
The “genocide” refrain has a long and poisonous pedigree. It was a staple of Soviet anti-Israel propaganda and resurfaced in activist rhetoric during Israel’s 2014 war with Hamas. Not long after, Rutgers professor Jasbir Puar advanced an especially grotesque twist. While acknowledging that Israeli forces try to minimize civilian deaths, she floated a sinister rationale: that Israel deliberately maims rather than kills Palestinians to maintain control over the population—and to harvest their organs. Her 2017 book, The Right to Maim—which won the National Women’s Studies Association’s book prize in transnational feminism—lent an academic veneer to a baseless accusation.
Puar herself quietly described the organ-harvesting claim as “speculation,” but that did not deter a small contingent of Jewish academics (see here, here, and especially here) from defending it. In their view, Puar’s “agenda‑setting” postmodern critique of Israel was immune from charges of antisemitism. Its credibility seemed to be beside the point; the priority was to deny that it resembled a blood libel.
Among its defenders was Jewish Voice for Peace, whose “Deadly Exchange” campaign blamed U.S. police brutality on law‑enforcement training programs involving Israel — and, by extension, on the American Jewish organizations that facilitated the exchanges. During the George Floyd riots in 2020, JVP and allied groups circulated maps of Jewish institutions, framing them as complicit in Floyd’s death, as The Algemeiner reported. The pattern was clear: by normalizing these outlandish charges, they were methodically moving their audiences beyond the guardrails of reality and into the realm of mass psychology.
Chait might argue that the target here is the Jewish state, not Jewish people. But scapegoating has never honored such distinctions. As cultural theorist René Girard observed, once a group is cast as uniquely guilty, that guilt spreads to all associated with it, and their exclusion—or even destruction—is framed as the price of restoring harmony. The medieval blood libel did not stop with the accused; it sparked pogroms. Soviet propaganda blurred “Zionist” and “Jew,” resulting in show trials, purges, and mass deportations. On today’s campuses, portraying Israel as uniquely malevolent activates what Girard called “the scapegoating mechanism.” In this climate, the truth of an accusation matters less than its power to mobilize hostility, with each false charge adding fuel to the next.
Chait treats as “exceptional” the claim from Sanders’s critics that his accusation amounts to a blood libel, arguing it needs especially strong evidence because Sanders is Jewish. But history shows that being Jewish does not exempt someone from appearing on either side of the scapegoating dynamic. As Dara Horn observes, the Yevsektsiya—the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist Party—played a leading role in suppressing Jewish religious and cultural life, persecuting Soviet Jewry before ultimately sharing its fate.
As recently as September 2023, Puar’s book was required reading for incoming Princeton students—a glimpse into a much larger project of reshaping American higher education. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs have played an even greater role. Tabia Lee’s experience as a DEI director shows how these programs can create a permission structure for hostility toward Jews by placing them on the “oppressor” side of the oppressor–oppressed binary. Her account is hardly unusual; other insiders have described the same pattern of casting Jews as privileged oppressors. Harvard’s recent 300‑page antisemitism report shows how deeply this mindset has seeped into campus life. In a recent federal ruling on events at UCLA, Judge Mark C. Scarsi wrote: “…In 2024, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith…”
Chait warns that shifting the definition will make it harder to fight antisemitism on the left. Yet in doing so, he is protecting the authority of the gatekeepers who ignored antisemitism as it coursed through our institutions—and who remain as certain as ever that they alone can discern its true boundaries.
Seth Shabo teaches philosophy and explores the disconnect between media narratives and reality in his Substack, The New Dispensation: Essays in Unauthorized Sense-Making.
Image: Public domain.