Dr. Eric R. Mandel is the director of MEPIN, the Middle East Political Information Network, and the senior security editor of The Jerusalem Report. He briefs members of Congress, their foreign-policy teams, and the U.S. State Department on Middle East security and strategy.
(Oct. 13, 2026 / JNS)
For the first time in my life, as someone who believes deeply in American exceptionalism, I fear for my country.
The health of a democracy can be measured by how it treats minorities. By that standard, America is failing its Jewish citizens. Although Jews represent barely 2% of Americans, they of late account for more than half of reported religion-based hate crimes.
Even that FBI classification perpetuates a misunderstanding: Judaism is not merely a religion. It is a nearly 4,000-year-old civilization encompassing peoplehood, history, culture, traditions and an ancestral homeland: Israel.
Anti-Zionists prefer defining Jews exclusively by religion because acknowledging Jewish peoplehood and historical ties to Israel undermines their effort to delegitimize the Jewish state. But millions of secular, atheist and religious Jews regard Israel as integral to their identity.
Why should antisemites get to decide what Judaism means or whether Jews deserve national self-determination?
Most American Jews (85%) maintain an attachment to Israel, even while sometimes criticizing its government. Yet Democratic Socialists and other anti-Zionists increasingly portray Zionism as inherently racist and genocidal. By extension, Jews who support Israel become morally complicit and, in extremists’ eyes, legitimate targets, as evidenced by the attacks on Jews in restaurants, synagogues and on college campuses.
This is how anti-Zionism becomes a vehicle for antisemitism.
Anti-Zionists use a small minority of anti-Zionist Jews as cover, claiming that these Jews are proof that anti-Zionists cannot be bigoted. Unfortunately, Jewish ancestry does not immunize everyone against self-loathing or alignment with antisemites. Organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace and influential donors, including George Soros and his son Alexander Soros, deserve condemnation for their alliances with people and organizations that want to eliminate Jews from their homeland.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism identifies denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, such as by claiming Israel’s existence is inherently racist, as antisemitism. This is certainly correct.
Since “from the river to the sea” means eliminating Israel from border to border, its advocates must answer this question: What happens to the nearly 8 million or so Jews living there?
A democracy that fails to protect its Jews places its own future in jeopardy.
Consider Zohran Mamdani, the anti-Zionist mayor of New York City. On the third anniversary of Oct. 7, a day to remember Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians, he used the occasion to accuse Israel of genocide, which columnist Bret Stephens of The New York Times called “Zohran Mamdani’s Moral Obscenity.”
Mamdani’s rhetoric reveals a longstanding hostility toward Israel. Oct. 7’s victims included murdered children, tortured civilians, and women subjected to horrific sexual violence. As one coroner described the massacre, people were “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina or were shot in the breast, others raped so violently that their pelvises were broken, parents were killed in front of their children.”
Could Mamdani not devote one day to remembering those victims without making Israel the principal villain? Have his Jewish anti-Zionist supporters, who cheered him, also lost their humanity?
Human-rights language has been hijacked, redefined and weaponized to demonize Israel while atrocities in Iran, China and Russia receive comparatively little attention. Such double standards undermine international law.
This brings us to the Nobel Peace Prize, just awarded to Navi Pillay, chair of the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
A Wall Street Journal editorial titled “A Nobel Prize for Hating Israel” correctly identified the antisemitism at work in international bodies. It noted that Pillay’s “career has been marked above all by hatred for Israel and the Jews who support it.” She is “devoted to attacking the Jewish state and twisting international law to distort the meaning of genocide.”
The International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice deserve rigorous scrutiny for politicization and anti-Zionism. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is right to challenge what he sees as institutional bias against Israel and the United States. The sooner Washington cuts off funding and enforces its sanctions on these bodies—if for no other reason than that they endanger American citizens—the better.
Meanwhile, too many universities still police microaggressions against other minorities while failing to confront the macroaggressions, intimidation and harassment of Jewish students. The U.S. Department of Justice is rightly demanding consistent civil-rights enforcement.
Jewish history warns where unchecked hatred leads: crusades, inquisitions, expulsions, pogroms, the Farhud, the Holocaust.
The political consequences are unmistakable. A decade ago, candidates unwilling to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state faced political isolation. Today, Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed can be unapologetically anti-Israel and consider the Jewish state as bad as the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, Iran. Not only will those positions not hurt his chances of election, they will give him a leg up in many Democratic precincts.
Nor is this exclusively a progressive problem. On the right, Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and the “groypers” spread openly antisemitic conspiracy theories, amplified by prominent voices like conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson.
These are different ideologies with different vocabularies, but a disturbingly familiar target.
Jewish history warns where unchecked hatred leads: crusades, inquisitions, expulsions, pogroms, the Farhud, the Holocaust. The murder of 1.5 million Jewish children should forever remind humanity of the consequences of normalizing antisemitism.
What should American Jews do?
They should stop cowering. They should be unapologetically proud Jewish Americans; demand equal protection; educate Americans and Jews unfamiliar with their heritage about Jewish civilization, peoplehood and Israel’s central place in Jewish identity; and advocate for the IHRA definition as a framework for recognizing antisemitism while protecting legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and constitutional free speech. Stop allowing political loyalty to excuse antisemitism, whether from Democrats, Republicans, progressives or conservatives.
I still believe in the fundamental decency of Americans and the promise of American exceptionalism. But a democracy that fails to protect its Jews places its own future in jeopardy.