News AnalysisWhat does Chuck Schumer’s new book actually say about antisemitism on the left?
The New York Democrat learned long ago that he ‘was never going to be on the side of the radicals’ — but doesn’t say anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic
Chuck Schumer marches in the Celebrate Israel Parade in the rain on June 5, 2016 in New York City. Photo by Getty Images
By Arno Rosenfeld March 18, 2025
Sen. Chuck Schumer’s new book about antisemitism comes at a trying time for many of the Jewish liberals he has represented for half a century.
Fighting antisemitism has become a rallying cry for President Donald Trump’s MAGA Republicans. In recent weeks, conservatives used it to justify deporting international students and slashing federal funding to Columbia University, winning plaudits from some Jewish leaders who are usually skeptical of the right-wing agenda.
Meanwhile, the left — including many Jews — has largely come to see high-profile campaigns in the name of antisemitism as a kind of proxy war on universities and other elite institutions. Some Jewish liberals have warned that this has only made rooting out antisemitism on the left more difficult.
Schumer, a Brooklyn Democrat who became the country’s most senior Jewish elected official ever when he took over as Senate Majority Leader in 2021 and now is Minority Leader, clearly has thoughts about this. Nearly half of Antisemitism in America: A Warning, which published Tuesday, is focused on how antisemitism on the left intersects with politics around Israel.
But across some 92 pages dealing with the subject, Schumer manages to say remarkably little. He mixes appeals to nuance — and instances of political daring — with hackneyed talking points and anecdotes presented without proper context. And his conclusion is hardly revelatory: “Be careful,” Schumer says to his imagined allies on the left. “Do not let your desire for justice in the world lead you to bring a little more injustice into the world.”
Never ‘on the side of the radicals’
Schumer, who is 74, starts his chapter on “Antisemitism on the Left” with a meandering recollection of his time as a undergraduate at Harvard that he acknowledges “is not a story about antisemitism.”
He describes joining the Harvard Young Democrats and campaigning against the Vietnam War in an uneasy campus coalition that also included some Maoist students he calls “arrogant and nasty.” One day the Maoists and their allies occupied a campus building as part of a protest against the ROTC’s presence at Havard. Administrators wanted to call the police, but Schumer and other moderates from the Young Democrats convinced them to instead hold a schoolwide referendum on whether to kick out the ROTC.
Then Harvard reneged on the deal, called in the police after all and Schumer watched as one officer clubbed a friend’s girlfriend, who was on the scene as a journalist.
Schumer was outraged and participated in an eight-day strike that followed. Still, his takeaway was that he “was never going to be on the side of the radicals.” He writes that he couldn’t stand the “division, anger, and name-calling on campus.”
Better to work within the system, Schumer decided.
Campus anecdotes abound
Schumer writes that he agreed with the anti-war protesters on the merits, but thought that “their zeal and fury led them to be not only demeaning but disruptive, which was ultimately counterproductive.” That is the lesson he attempts to apply to the focal point of the chapter: the campus protests against Israel and its prosecution over the war in Gaza.
In that case, Schumer says, he did not agree with the protesters — that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, for example — but he did empathize with them and “could hear what they were saying. His top complaint seems to be that they were “disruptive” — like the protesters from his own days on campus.
The students occupying Harvard’s library after Oct. 7, 2023, were “surely discomfiting” to the people trying to study there, Schumer writes, interfering with what he describes as the room’s “quiet majesty.”
Schumer does not grapple with whether the premise of the protests, slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free” and what some Jews saw as a callous posture toward Israeli casualties were antisemitic. He instead shares a series of alarming anecdotes that, as presented, few would defend.
He describes an incident at UCLA where protesters hammered a piñata of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and says definitively that one of them shouted “beat that fucking Jew,” though in a video posted on X you cannot hear it clearly. He takes a complicated confrontation between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian activists outside a LA synagogue and boils it down to agitators “yelling at, shoving and kicking Jewish men in yarmulkes trying to get inside to pray.” He argues that Columbia failed to discipline students who harassed Jews, but seems to give as an example a student who accosted a kippah-wearing classmate and said “Fuck the Jews” — without mentioning that the student was suspended for it.
Dodging on anti-Zionism
While blatant instances of antisemitism — synagogue vandalism, for example — shot up after the Oct. 7 attacks, it was actually relatively rare within the pro-Palestinian protest movement, which especially on college campuses included a large number of Jews.
In fact, part of the reason that the Anti-Defamation League changed its criteria for counting antisemitic incidents to include virtually all anti-Zionist activity is because many of those protests did not include vitriol directed toward “Jews.”
In contrast, Schumer appears sensitive to the concerns of organizations like the Nexus Leadership Project, which has lobbied Democratic politicians against equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. He goes out of his way to note his own criticism of Israeli policies and Netanyahu’s leadership. But he also expresses deep skepticism of anti-Zionism and says it often invokes an antisemitic double standard against Jews.
Ultimately, he leaves the question of whether anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic as one of many “morally complex” questions that, “as a country, we need to have an honest conversation about.” Just not, apparently, in this book about antisemitism.
It’s hard to tell if Schumer himself is conflicted, or just being careful — he is, after all, a politician.
At one point, he shares the account of a Harvard rabbi who said a woman yelled at Jewish students lighting a menorah that the Holocaust was fake. He suggests that this incident made slogans at pro-Palestinian demonstrations “indistinguishable from the vilest antisemitic screeds,” though he doesn’t say which he sees as parallel to Holocaust denial.
The book is billed as a memoir, and Schumer says that a New York protest on Oct. 8, 2023, organized by the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter where rallygoers chanted “resistance is justified” and otherwise seemed to be celebrating the terror attack “really shook me.” But he doesn’t call that event antisemitic — perhaps because, he acknowledges, he knows some of the leaders.
Afterward, he recounts, he had a respectful but apparently unproductive meeting with them in Washington to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Once again, five decades later, he found himself struggling to separate his empathy for leftists from his anger over their tactics.
“I think we all left the meeting with the same feeling; not angry, but sad,” Schumer writes. “Shortly after our meeting, the same militant groups, including the two leaders I met with, resumed protesting in front of my apartment.”
