The Wall Street Journal gets it.
Over there on the WSJ editorial page, the paper’s editors have penned a sharply observant piece headlined: “Chuck Schumer’s Mamdani Test: Will the New York Senator abandon his life-long convictions?”
In which New York’s U.S. senator — the Senate’s Democratic Leader, no less — is taken to task for playing cutesy with Zohran Mamdani, the Democrats’ recent and apparent choice for mayor of New York.
A recent arrival on the national stage, Mamdani has quickly been revealed not simply as a Communist/Socialist sympathizer but someone with a decided record of antisemitism.
Among other things, the WSJ noted: “Mr. Mamdani is a socialist who spoke as an Assemblyman of ‘seizing the means of production’ and blamed Israel, not Hamas, on Oct. 8, 2023.”
Even more to the point, the WSJ notes that Senator Schumer has recently authored a book with this title: Antisemitism in America: A Warning.
As it happens, I bought the Schumer book when it came out — before Mamdani was even on the political horizon. And obviously, Schumer wrote his book well before Mamdani was nominated by his fellow New York Democrats.
The fact of Mamdani’s rise after the Schumer book appeared ironically makes Schumer’s book even more relevant, with a look back at exactly what Schumer had to say before he was suddenly confronted with an antisemitic mayoral nominee from his own hometown, seriously relevant indeed.
With that in mind, follow along as I note here some of what Schumer has had to say about antisemitism — all of it pre-Mamdani. For example, Schumer writes:
- “For the first time in my life, widespread antisemitism is a serious problem in America, and it’s getting worse.”
- “I believe it is my duty to alert our country to the rising tide of antisemitism, to clarify how it can be identified and how it can be stopped.”
- “In other words, antisemitism is a long-enduring form of racism, one of the world’s oldest and most powerful types …. To some antisemitism almost defies explanation. But the best explanation is the simplest one.”
- “Antisemitism means hating Jewish people and all things Jewish.”
- “Antisemitism just is. Has been. Will always be.”
Schumer rolls on. And yes, some readers will roll their eyes at a senator going on and on as United States senators of all stripes are prone to do.
But it is notable that the senator reserves an entire chapter headlined “Antisemitism on the Left.” Notable because, in fact, whereas once upon a time there was a significant portion of America’s Jewish population that gravitated to the Democrat Party and the Left, in today’s world both the Democrats and the larger world of the American Left have been infiltrated by significant antisemitism.
Schumer notes that he is a Harvard graduate. And in his campus career as a student, he participated in the demonstrations of the day that protested the late-1960s liberal causes of the day — Vietnam, etc.
Yet now, years after graduating from Harvard, now a U.S. senator, Schumer was picking up in the post-October 7 period of violence in Gaza that the virulent antisemitism that had suddenly burst on the scene had in fact become a real problem inside his own party and inside his old alma mater at Harvard.
Schumer notes that the anti-Israel protests at Harvard were now “becoming indistinguishable from the vilest antisemitic crowds.” He recalls how “a woman screamed at a group of Jews and non-Jews gathered on campus for an outdoor candle-lighting ceremony for Hanukkah that the Holocaust was fake. The Hanukkah menorah that’s been kindled and displayed on Harvard Yard during the winter holiday for nearly twenty-five years had to be taken indoors each night to protect it from vandalism.”
He goes on to express his concern that the growing “rise of antisemitism is not being taken seriously enough and, at times, is even stoked by the political left … that Jewish people are being targeted simply for being Jewish, for reasons that have nothing to do with Israel.”
From there, he notes the rise of
- “Vandalizing or threatening synagogues or Jewish community centers”
- “Vandalizing or boycotting Jewish businesses and delis.”
- “Harassing Jewish educators, such as emailing a high school teacher: ‘All Jews need to be exterminated.’”
- “Etching swastikas into desks at a high school and painting graffiti on the walls reading JEWS NOT WELCOME.”
- “Punching someone who is wearing a yarmulke and dousing him with pepper spray, shouting ‘Dirty Jew. Filthy Jew, F*** Israel. Hamas is going to kill you.’”
There’s more in Schumer’s book on all of this. A lot more. But at last, a prominent Democrat has gone decidedly public with the realization that yes, in fact, there is not only a serious rise in antisemitism, but it is bubbling up inside the Democratic Party, once a friendly ally of a good many left-leaning Jews.
Here in my own state of Pennsylvania, the Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro is on some short lists as the party’s presidential standard-bearer in 2028. Yet this in fact will be an impossibility if the governor is attacked by intra-party opponents for no other reason than his Jewish faith.
Indeed, in 2024, he was on some short lists to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. That in turn produced headlines like this one from the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle: “Did Kamala Harris opt against Josh Shapiro because he is Jewish? — A progressive effort sought to portray Shapiro as too supportive of Israel and intolerant of its critics, dubbing him ‘Genocide Josh.’”
The Harris campaign vigorously denied this. But the fact that there were Democrats out there seriously asking the question speaks volumes in terms of Schumer’s point — confession? — of the antisemitism problem in his own party.
The bottom line?
Senator Schumer, a decided Democrat partisan that he is, has written a book that takes a serious look at the rise of antisemitism in modern-day America, including both political sides, social media, and, of course, with respect to America’s relationship to Israel itself.
The view here is that Schumer personally is going to have to face a challenge for renomination from inside his own New York party, that opposition coming from the far left darling Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And if so, at what point will AOC’s own record on Israel, Jews, and antisemitism be called into question?
Not to mention, how will Schumer and his party deal with the rise of Zohran Mamdani, the decidedly antisemitic presumed Democrat nominee for mayor of New York?
All of which is to say, Democrats have a decided antisemitism problem in their ranks.
And with the election years of 2026 and 2028 directly ahead, stay tuned for a potentially pitched internal battle over the issue.
READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: