We are today witnessing a dramatic rise in antisemitism in the United States and around the world that most Jews alive have never seen, experienced or imagined before. This millennia-old shape-shifting hatred that appears in different forms in every era continues to permeate our politics and culture.

It is important to understand what modern Jew-hatred is and what it is not. To that end, despite it being a complex psychological, cultural, religious, political, and historic phenomenon unlike any other hatred in world history, I offer a few comments below that I believe help clarify what this hatred is, what it is not, and what we Jews (and others) should do as we confront it.

“There are a number of modern and classic iterations of antisemitism that continue to be promulgated by the [political] far left and far right. They include Holocaust denial, offensive stereotypes of Jews (such as casting a Jewish individual as a Christ-killer, a puppet master, imposter, and swindler who manipulates national events for malign purposes, a foreigner, a controller of banking, the media, government, and the wealthy elite), denying the Jewish people our right to self-determination, applying double standards to Jews and Israel that are not applied to any other nation, using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism to characterize Israel and/or Israelis, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, and holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel.” –Rabbi John Rosove, “From the West to the East – A Memoir of a Liberal American Rabbi” (West of West Books, 2024)

“The antisemite was a coward, afraid of himself, of his own consciousness, of his own liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and the world — of everything except the Jews. The antisemite doesn’t hate Jews because of some bad experience with flesh-and-blood Jews, but uses a preexisting ‘idea of the Jew’ as a prism for ordering his troubled world. Antisemitism was thus a psychic liberation from responsibility for one’s conscience, a rebellion against the burdens of rationalism….If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.” -Jean Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (1946)

“Jews know that democracy is their best protection. Less democracy means less protection for all minorities, and even if the dictator makes a big show of being the Jews’ protector and a friend of Israel, it’s at best temporary and conditional. No one is ever safe with a dictator, certainly not the Jews.” -Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz, July 29, 2022

“Today, anti-Zionism is often a form of antisemitism, but not always. After all, there are plenty of anti-Zionist Jews who identify as Jews proudly. However, the single-minded blind obsession with Israel often bleeds into hatred of Jews and normalizes Jew-hatred. Of course, not all criticism of Israel is illegitimate or unwarranted, and certainly not antisemitic, but some of it is, and on some college campuses and on-line forums a lot of it is. We need to be able to appreciate subtlety, nuance, and historical context, and to distinguish between legitimate critique and the new mutated form of antisemitism dressed up in the garment of pathological anti-Zionism.” -Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch – Podcast “In These Times” with Natan Sharansky (2022)

“What we generally call antisemitism is a 19th-century coinage that helped turn an ancient religious hatred into a racial hatred. As racial hatred came to be considered uncouth after World War II, anti-Zionism (that is, blanket opposition to a Jewish state, not criticism of particular Israeli policies) became a more acceptable way of opposing Jewish political interests and denigrating Jews. Should Israel cease to exist, new forms of bigotry will surely develop for the next stage of anti-Judaism, adapted to the prevailing beliefs of the times. The common denominator in each of these mutations is an idea, based in fantasy and conspiracy, about Jewish power. The old-fashioned religious antisemite believed Jews had the power to kill Christ. The 19th-century antisemites who were the forerunners to the Nazis believed Jews had the power to start wars, manipulate kings and swindle native people of their patrimony. Present-day anti-Zionists attribute to Israel and its supporters in the United States vast powers that they do not possess, like the power to draw America into war. On the far right, antisemites think that Jews are engaged in an immense scheme to replace white, working-class America with immigrant labor. Tucker Carlson and others have taken this conspiracy theory mainstream, even if they are careful to leave out the part about Jews… the foul antisemitism of the right, yoked to its old themes of nativism, protectionism, nationalism and isolationism, is erupting into the public square like a burst sewage pipe.” –Bret Stephens – What an Antisemite’s Fantasy Says About Jewish Reality – NYT – Jan. 21, 2022

“In 2025 America, antisemitism is real – sometimes in plain sight, sometimes encoded and winked at, and sometimes expressed as obsessive hatred of Israel and Zionism. The problem transcends left-right politics – stretching from Nick Fuentes and “great replacement” conspiracists on the far-right to those on the far-left who cast Jews globally as oppressors. We see it everywhere – from chants in the streets to online memes in our social media feeds and conspiracies festering in the darker corners of the web. As we wage this critical fight, we must take care not to undermine either our own interests or the health of American democracy. And we must be honest that – at times – the fight against antisemitism is itself being politicized and weaponized. If we are not careful in our approach, we risk ending up less safe, less free, and more isolated.

We cannot define legitimate criticism of the Israeli government as antisemitism – especially not in law. Weaponizing antisemitism as justification to slam the gates shut [on immigration into the United States] is not “protecting Jews,” it is erasing a core American ideal that granted us protection. To allow right-wing actors – including those willing to defend and platform dangerous figures like Nick Fuentes – to chip away at those pillars in the name of “protecting Jews” is not only hypocritical and ironic – it is deeply, dangerously self-defeating. Not all the anger coming at the Jewish community today is rooted in ancient hatred. Some of it is rooted in protest against the policies of the government of Israel – policies that many Jews disagree with as well. While some protest on the left crosses a line into antisemitic narratives, that doesn’t negate the legitimate reasons for much of the protest. We cannot fight antisemitism by censoring political speech, by withdrawing from civil rights coalitions, by letting the far-right weaponize our fear, or by refusing to look at our own agency and responsibility. We should be honest that both the left and right ends of the spectrum have some antisemitic elements and not allow this important issue to be made into a political football. We need to defend democracy. Defend free speech. Build alliances. Protect the rule of law. And we need to do all this out of a firm conviction that Jewish safety in America will not come from isolating ourselves or policing ideas. It will come only from solidarity, partnership, and the deep and universal American promise that freedom and equality are not for some, but for all.” –Jeremy Ben-Ami, “Can We Do Better at Fighting Antisemitism,” Word on the Street, November 2, 2025)

Kareem Abdul-Jabaar’s newly published book We all want to change the world – My Journey through Social Justice Movements from the 1960s to Today is a sweeping, thoughtful, self-revelatory, honest, and inspiring review of most of the major social justice movements and human rights challenges in the United States since the 1950s when Kareem was coming of age as a African American athlete in New York City. One of the greatest basketball players in the history of the NBA, Kareem is now among the most prolific writers, probing thinkers and public intellectuals in America.

I read Kareem’s Substack newsletters from start to finish each time he publishes (twice weekly) and I find him always smart, rational, intellectually honest, thorough in his research, moral, and entertaining with his short videos of extraordinary athletic feats, musical selections, and cultural moments. Just as his Substack newsletter is worth reading, so is his newest book.

Kareem covers the impact on American society of the movements for Free Speech, Civil Rights, anti-Vietnam War, Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation, and the cultural, emotional and psychological mindsets that spawned the courageous leadership that furthered human rights and opportunities in the United States for discriminated groups of Americans.

Kareem describes his personal mantra as that inspired by civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer’s adage: “No one is free unless everyone is free,” and what Dr. King said in another way: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

As a young black man growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in New York City, becoming a famous athlete, meeting Dr. King, Mohammad Ali, and other leading black sports, entertainment and human rights figures, and reading constantly from the time he was a teen-ager, the shy, intellectual, self-reflective and compassionate young man felt compelled to think not only about himself and his athletic career and the moral compromises that many fellow black athletes felt they had to make in order to further their careers, but about every individual struggling for dignity beyond the stereotypes and cultural definitions that oppressed them.

Kareem wrote:

“Writing [the chapter on Civil Rights as My Gateway Movement] was especially challenging for me. As I chronicled the history of decade after decade of civil rights abuses and the martyrs who gave up their lives in pursuit of the freedoms already promised by our Constitution, I felt the rising heat of frustration and anger from my younger days. I needed to take frequent breaks to remind myself that frustration and anger by themselves accomplish nothing. Injustice is fueled by indifference, but passion without a plan is just as destructive. For me, the fiery passion of my youth needed to be channeled in order for me to do my part to bring about justice.”

This book is well-researched and well-written, and it lays out the historical facts and events of each of the human rights movements Kareem discusses in detail. He first presents those events historically, then dives into the emotional, social, and psychological challenges the leaders and followers of each movement confronted. For me, about three years younger than Kareem (age 78), I remember so much of what he describes, and I appreciate his insights about the forces that propelled the leadership of each movement to do what they did, as well as the baked-in cultural norms that reflected (and still reflects) the thinking of massive numbers of Americans.

Among other self-revelatory sections of the book, Kareem describes himself as a feminist. He wrote:

“As a Black teenager growing up in New York City, I loved books, movies, television, and music. Looking back on all that I was exposed to, I see now how those popular art forms conspired to produce a pounding thrum of dangerous misogyny, an insistent earworm that ran through my generation as it had so many generations before. With this evolving women’s movement, as more and more voices joined the chorus protesting misogyny, our heads were cleared enough to choose for ourselves. That’s how it was for me.”

In his epilogue, Kareem confessed:

“The biggest challenge I had in writing this book was the frequent breaks I had to take due to the build-up of frustration and anger. Again and again in my research, I saw the same pattern: basic human rights denied, indignities and disrespect piled on, and the refusal of oppressors to acknowledge why they were wrong. The worst was the complicity of so many people who disagreed with the discrimination in principle but who were too complacent to act. They might justify their collusion with ‘What can I do?’ but they already know the answer. They just don’t like it.”  

He concludes the book discussing the ongoing need for open and public protest in all the areas he discussed:

“The Founders enshrined the right to protest in our Constitution. They did that because they knew that the forces of self-interest and corruption would always try and to subvert the ideals of democracy they laid out.”

Kareem can be forgiven for the human rights issues he did not include in his book. However, there is one that Kareem does not discuss in this volume – the oldest of all hatreds, antisemitism. I’ve wondered why he didn’t discuss it specifically since it has become a major issue in North America, on college and university campuses, and around the world especially since Hamas’s brutal attack, murder and rape of 1200 Israelis and others on October 7, 2023 in Southern Israel and reactions to Israel and Jews as a consequence of the ensuing war between Hamas and Israel.

On October 9, 2023, two days after the Hamas attack, Kareem wrote in his Substack newsletter of his support of Israel. He condemned Hamas categorically, and elsewhere he described antisemitism as “especially heinous.” Kareem was the 2022 winner of Canada’s “Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center’s first Ally Against Anti-Semitism Award,” so his pro-Jewish and pro-Israel bona fides are undisputed. Given Kareem’s 1.1 million Substack readers and the likely large number of people of color, athletes, and liberal-left readers who will read this book (as well as interested moderates and conservatives), I would have appreciated his discussion of antisemitism, its nature and history going back thousands of years and reemerging today in the United States, especially in this post-October 7^th period in which so many on the far left publicly have identified with Hamas against Israel and Zionism and so many on the far right who openly court and identify with neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists, including the sitting President of the United States.

Hamas is among the most brutal, undemocratic, unenlightened, Jew-hating, extremist Muslim terrorist organizations in the world. It is one thing for decent people to want peace and justice for the Palestinian people in some kind of a demilitarized state of their own alongside a secure and democratic Jewish State of Israel, but it is something else entirely to support Hamas and its call for a free “Palestine from the River to the Sea.” That position means the destruction of the State of Israel and the murder of Jews. It is antisemitic Jew-hatred.  

There is a strong human rights case to be made about this oldest of hatreds that would have merited Kareem’s inclusion of a discussion of antisemitism in his book. Historically, the evidence is clear that in every country in which Jews have been discriminated against, attacked and accused of corrupting the soul of a people or nation, human rights generally and democracy specifically have been diminished and/or destroyed. To me, antisemitism would have been an obvious chapter to write about. I’m disappointed that Kareem didn’t take the opportunity to address Jew-hatred head-on, especially because I know he understands what antisemitism is and its “heinous” character. It was a missed opportunity to educate those very groups and individuals in which antisemitism has taken root and found a home in recent years on both the far left and the far right.