Antisemitism in America: A Warning by Chuck Schumer
Sen. Chuck Schumer’s new book offers a personal, urgent look at the rise of antisemitism in America.
Sen. Chuck Schumer’s Antisemitism in America: A Warning is one of the most urgent and timely books of the year. Co-written with Josh Molofksy and released in March 2025, it confronts a troubling surge in antisemitism that has intensified since October 7, 2023, blending Schumer’s personal experience with a sobering look at history and contemporary threats to Jewish life in America.
Schumer is the highest-ranking elected Jewish official in the United States, having previously served as Senate Majority Leader until Democrats lost control of the chamber after the 2024 election. It’s not an understatement to say that the troubling revival of antisemitism is a national crisis. That it continues to go largely unchecked is unfathomable. People who should be speaking out are too often silent—or worse, adding their own antisemitic contributions.
The antisemitism we’re witnessing today is the worst in modern American history. It’s no longer confined to the fringes but has become an everyday threat: attacks on synagogues and congregants, harassment of Jewish students on college campuses, conspiracies about Jews spreading across social media, and debates over Israel veering into dangerous territory. Schumer examines the historical, political, cultural, and global forces that have fueled this disturbing rise in 21st-century antisemitism.
Schumer gets personal in Antisemitism in America: A Warning, shedding light on his own generation of Jewish Americans. From his upbringing in 1960s Brooklyn to his years at Harvard in the 1970s, and even to the secure bunker on January 6, 2021, Schumer shares his journey toward understanding Jewish history, identity, and the challenges facing Jewish life in America today.
As I read through the book over the past few days, a number of passages stood out—ones I feel are essential to understanding not only what Jewish Americans are facing right now, but also how deeply misunderstood antisemitism and Zionism are in the broader public discourse.
One minor but noticeable quibble, especially as a Jewish American reader, is that Schumer doesn’t use BCE or CE, as many Jews do when referring to historical years. On another historical point, he misstates that the 1939 Nazi rally took place at the current Madison Square Garden; in fact, it was held at the 1925 iteration of MSG, as the current arena didn’t break ground until the 1960s.
In his introduction, Schumer makes an observation that couldn’t be more accurate:
“I’ve noticed a significant disparity between how my Jewish friends regard the rise of antisemitism and how many of my non-Jewish friends regard it. For many non-Jewish people, the antisemitism we’re seeing today is certainly troubling, but not alarming. Unlike Jews, non-Jews don’t see it as an urgent crisis.”
Schumer calls the rise of antisemitism “a five-alarm fire that must be run toward and extinguished.”
Regarding October 7 and its aftermath, Schumer writes:
“To me and to many Jews, the reaction in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks was evidence of a dangerous undercurrent of prejudice and bias that went beyond disputes with Israel’s policy. The fact that some in America felt an immediate instinct to ascribe blame not only to Israel but to Jews in America and Jews of all nationalities felt like a warning sign about the state of antisemitism in our country. In the months since, many Jews feel the undercurrent is too quickly becoming a deluge.”
He’s not wrong. I was met with antisemitism almost immediately after October 7. I’ve been open about the fact that several of my pre-10/7 LGBTQ friends unfriended, unfollowed, or blocked me—some of them fellow entertainment journalists. Where was the empathy? Where was the cognitive dissonance? It was…missing in action.
Schumer is also right when he writes that “Jews are living through the worst period of antisemitism in America in generations.” I wasn’t alive during the 1930s and 1940s, when it was nearly impossible for Jews to immigrate to America, but what I’ve experienced over the past two years—and even after the ceasefire—is the worst antisemitism I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. As digital communication and social media accelerate its spread, brushfires quickly become wildfires.
Importantly, Schumer addresses antisemitism on both sides of the political spectrum. As I’ve often said, antisemitism is a horseshoe—bonding both the far right and far left.
On the right, Schumer identifies two types. The first is “the kind expressed by certain rich and powerful WASPs who believed Jews were a threat to a social order that in their minds had naturally and rightly placed WASPs at the top.” This genteel antisemitism, once found in country clubs, dinner parties, white-shoe law firms, and even the State Department, was exclusionary and discriminatory but rarely violent.
The second type is the one most often called out—“the antisemitism of the populist far-right parties and the alt-right, the neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members and white nationalists who believe that Jews are a threat, not to elite social hierarchies but to racial hierarchies, to society, and the nation itself.” This is the ideology that fueled Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, and Poway.
There are those who believe the convicted felon now occupying the White House is an antisemite or is weaponizing antisemitism while giving right-wing hate a pass. Schumer doesn’t believe Trump himself is an antisemite, but he notes that “he all too frequently has created the feeling of safe harbor for far-right elements who unabashedly or in coded language express antisemitic sentiments.”
Antisemitism didn’t originate on the right, nor is it exclusive to it. It long predates modern political divisions. Schumer writes: “What’s important to understand is why certain ideological movements on the right latch on to antisemitism and—inadvertently or by design—help spread it.” What troubles Jews today, he adds, is that many of the same ideas historically prone to antisemitic thinking—ethnonationalism, resentment of cultural elites, an us vs. them mentality, and conspiratorial thinking—have all resurfaced.
Schumer challenges Republicans “to do more to put out the fire,” reminding them of their “obligation to shout down antisemitism coming from the right.” The silence, he writes, has been deafening.
Turning to the left, Schumer recounts his time at Harvard during the height of the Vietnam War, when he campaigned for Eugene McCarthy and protested for peace. (He also worked for Rep. Romano Mazzoli of Kentucky, whom I had the honor of meeting several times—a fact I didn’t know until reading this book.)
Schumer isn’t shy about addressing the campus protests that shook America last year. He found that “many college administrations were too slow to react to antisemitism in their own backyards, and even more hesitant to take disciplinary action against offenders.” Schumer writes that he used his voice—both publicly and privately—“to push administrations to do much more to stop antisemitism from spreading on America’s campuses.”
It goes without saying that many on the left are not taking antisemitism seriously enough. When they call out hate from the right but excuse it on their own side, they turn the Jewish community into pawns. The same applies to conservatives who do the reverse. We are not pawns.
Schumer explores the ideological roots of left-wing antisemitism, tracing them back to an 1844 essay by Karl Marx—ideas later amplified by the Soviet Union and still lingering today. Ironically, when Jews immigrated to America in large numbers at the turn of the 20th century, many found a political home on the left, becoming key voices in labor and civil rights movements.
But today, Schumer warns, there’s a real danger of left- and right-wing antisemitism feeding off each other. How soon before America becomes completely unsafe for Jews? It’s telling—and chilling—when people we once thought were allies push us out of spaces where we were once welcome. Schumer points to 2008 as a potential turning point, not because of Obama’s election, but because “many have identified it as the year antisemitism began rising again in the twenty-first century.”
Schumer also dissects antisemitic slogans—many of which call for the genocide of Jews. There’s no way to euphemize “from the river to the sea.” What happens to over seven million Jews living in Israel if that phrase were realized? Extermination or expulsion. It’s the very ethnic cleansing the far left claims to oppose. Similarly, phrases like “by any means necessary” and “globalize the intifada” are unmistakably antisemitic.
Just as he challenges Republicans, Schumer also calls on Democrats: “It is imperative for Democrats to speak out against antisemitism on the left.” The American left, he warns, “cannot afford to look the other way and be too complacent or forgiving about those who exhibit antisemitism within their ranks.”
Schumer also explains why so many Jews feel an emotional bond with Israel: it is our ancestral homeland. The Jewish community is not a monolith, but most Jews believe caring about Israel is “an important or essential part” of Jewish identity. I’ve visited twice—first in 2007 and again in 2024—and both trips were transformative. Yet it’s frustrating that affirming support for Israel now requires disclaimers like “I’m anti-Bibi, but…” Zionism has been turned into a slur, and Jews are being forced to justify our identity.
Originally, Schumer set out to show that understanding the Jewish-American experience was “critical to understanding and fighting antisemitism in America.” He later realized that it’s equally “necessary for people to think about how most Jewish-Americans understand Israel.” He’s absolutely right: “It is impossible to understand recent antisemitism in America without understanding the complex and multi-faceted relationship Jewish-Americans have with Israel.”
When I was growing up, presidential candidates didn’t need to clarify where they stood on Israel—it was a given that support for Israel was bipartisan. That’s no longer the case. Schumer recounts a 2019 confrontation with Netanyahu, who had begun favoring Republicans in public appearances. Schumer warned him that this approach would erode Democratic support and damage Israel’s bipartisan foundation. Netanyahu promised to change course—and then didn’t. The result has been devastating, as partisan division now threatens long-standing U.S.-Israel ties.
Schumer reminds readers why a Jewish homeland is essential. Most of his family perished in 1941 when the Nazis invaded Chortkiv in Galicia, present-day Ukraine. “It is impossible,” he writes, “to separate the idea of the State of Israel from the history of persecution and degradation of the Jewish people.” Had Israel existed before World War II, countless lives might have been saved.
If it hasn’t been said enough, Israel-related antisemitism is a serious and growing problem. The lack of empathy following the most barbaric attack on Jews since the Holocaust speaks volumes. The “sustained and increasing” blame directed at Israel—and by extension, Jews everywhere—continues long after the ceasefire. Many of these attacks have nothing to do with Israeli policy, yet Jews find themselves targeted all the same. Antisemitism won’t fade on its own; it’s up to all of us—Democrat, Republican, independent, Jew, and non-Jew alike—to call it out.
Late in the book, Schumer also addresses the misuse of the term genocide in debates about Israel. What’s happening is not genocide. It is not Israeli policy to exterminate Palestinians, nor did Israel provoke the war. It was a military response to a terrorist attack on Israeli soil. Hamas openly advocates for the genocide of Jews; October 7 was Israel’s 9/11. Those accusing Israel of genocide ignore Hamas’s tactics—especially their use of civilians as human shields.
Antisemitism in America: A Warning stands as both memoir and message—a sobering reminder of what happens when the world’s oldest hatred goes unchecked.