Chuck Schumer in America—A Warning

A Review of Senator Chuck Schumer's Antisemitism in America: A Warning

Dan Berger

July 1, 2025

Antisemitism in America: A Warning

by Senator Chuck Schumer

Grand Central Publishing

2025

The first thing to say about Chuck Schumer’s Antisemitism in America: A Warning is that nobody wants this book. No blurbs, reviews, or endorsements grace its cover. The only praise for the author’s half-century as an elected official can be found inside the book’s pages, from Schumer himself. The curious reader who looks at the back cover will instead be greeted with an excerpt from the book that promises “the specter of antisemitism haunting the American continent” threatens the foundations of the United States itself. Yet the specter haunting the back cover is the senator himself, who appears above the quoted passage, reading glasses resting slightly askew on the bridge of his nose, with a sly smile. Though sounding an alarm, he seems completely at ease.

This disjoined pairing of comfort and panic is a fitting metaphor of the book itself and the peculiarly American Jewish liberal perspective it claims to represent. This volume, breezy but infuriating, invites the reader into a tête-à-tête with the senator as ventriloquized by his former chief speechwriter, who coauthored the book (though his name does not appear on the cover). The tone aspires for a kind of conversational gravitas, as if we are listening to Schumer during a schvitz at the Ninety-Second Street Y. The classic Jewish jokes, the talk of the old country, the repeated references to his SAT scores—all are in service of his larger goal of warning against the rising tide of antisemitism.

Schumer is right when he says that “Jews are living through the worst period of antisemitism in America in generations.” But he is wrong, dangerously so, about its sources, expressions, and antidotes. Like its author, Antisemitism in America demonstrates the longstanding and uniquely American dishonesty about its two chief subjects: antisemitism and Israel. The bulk of contemporary antisemitism is located on the far right, which has captured the federal government. But because they largely support Israel, Schumer is left with a hapless both-sidesism that oscillates between absurd and atrocious. Schumer fails to address the history of antisemitism as well as its modern incarnations because he shares the goals of many historical antisemites in undermining the left. And he has made common cause with many modern antisemites to pull out all the stops for Israel, no matter what. This book is a warning, to be sure, but about the dishonest brokers of antisemitism, whose fealty to Israel overrides all other personal values or political objectives.

A Momzer in Exile¹

Across ten chapters and 220 pages, Antisemitism in America promises to blend memoir, history, and social and political analysis. It would be a tall order for a competent analyst, which we lack in Mr. Schumer. Instead, we have a rags-to-riches-to-biblical-prophecy story of a people: Jews were oppressed in Europe, found freedom in the United States, and need Israel to preserve a future for Jewish people as promised in the Torah. The geopolitical comity between the United States is now under threat, he tells us, because social media has fueled demagoguery and bigotry on both sides of American politics.

This is not your grandparents’ history of Jews in America. Early in the book, Schumer celebrates that the Union’s victory in the Civil War allowed him to become the highest-ranking Jewish politician in US history, since Judah Benjamin (the Jewish vice president of the Confederacy) was defeated. Whether he sees other good fortune in the defeat of the slavocracy is unspoken. Though Schumer acknowledges the history of antisemitism in the United States, he skips some of its most notable episodes. Shockingly, there is no mention of Leo Frank, the National Pencil Company superintendent who was lynched in Georgia in 1915 on false accusations of having murdered Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old laborer at the company. The Frank case helped launch the Anti-Defamation League, who Schumer relies on throughout the book for data on antisemitism, despite being increasingly recognized as a dishonest and virulent Israel advocacy organization.²

Likewise, Schumer skips over the Cold War, the Red Scare, and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Convicted of “conspiracy to commit espionage” for the Soviet Union, the Rosenbergs were executed at the start of shabbat on June 19, 1953. Six months before their murders, a CIA memo hoped that the couple would be convinced to “appeal to Jews in all countries to get out of the communist movement and seek to destroy it.” Their refusal sent them to the gas chamber, at the behest of a Jewish judge (Irving Kaufman) and attorney (Roy Cohn). In demonstrating that reactionary Jews choose domination over solidarity—even solidarity with “their own kind”—the Rosenberg case is a potent analogue to modern attacks on anti-Zionist Jews. And there is a potent throughline. Rosenberg prosecutor Roy Cohn was the right-hand man to Joseph McCarthy’s thoroughly antisemitic attacks against the left and would become an advisor to a young Donald Trump. Schumer, who writes of his college-years’ frustration with Students for a Democratic Society and other leftwing groups, took up the anticommunist mantle. He even donned a tux in 1979 to attend the fifty-second-birthday bash for Roy Cohn at the legendary Studio 54. None of that appears in Antisemitism in America. Instead, he writes that Robert Zimmerman changing his name to Bob Dylan is a poignant example of mid-twentieth century antisemitism.³

Schumer’s bowdlerized history of antisemitism leads him to outrageous claims in the present. In discussing rightwing antisemitism, Schumer says the greatest fear is that it become “co-opted by leaders for political gain.” He makes no acknowledgment of the realization of that precise fact in the modern United States, where the GOP has used antisemitism to fuel their assaults on immigrants and trans people. But because Schumer does not recognize these populations as Jews (much less believe in the linked fates of subalterns) rightwing antisemitism becomes almost a hypothetical for him. Of Trump’s 2016 closing campaign ad, which featured images of Jewish financiers George Soros, Janet Yellen, and Lloyd Blankfein while Trump railed against the “global special interests” and “political establishment” immiserating Americans, Schumer concludes that the campaign came “close to the line of antisemitism.” While Trump himself has been in league with a rogue’s gallery of antisemites from the Proud Boys to Christian nationalists and others, Schumer is clear about the man himself. “Let me state unequivocally: I do not believe Donald Trump is an antisemite. But he all too frequently has created the feeling of safe-harbor for far-right elements who unabashedly or in coded language express antisemitic sentiments.” Like he did to a January 6 rioter wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” shirt, Trump himself gets a pardon.

The only demand Schumer recounts making on his longtime friend Benjamin Netanyahu was during the Israeli prime minister’s 2019 visit to the United States, when Schumer remembers telling the genocidaire: “You can’t just go on Sean Hannity, you have to make the case for supporting Israel on Rachel Maddow too.”

Two of the founding pillars of Trumpism—conspiracism and Christian nationalism—are antisemitic. This is indeed the most openly antisemitic administration in living memory. (Nixon, famously antisemitic in private, was more openly preoccupied with crushing Black revolt and the white counterculture to openly peddle the kind of conspiracism that animates Trumpism.) And Schumer has either ignored or looked away from these deadly forms of antisemitism because he agrees with them. So long as the bombs flow to Israel and police target immigrants and radicals at home, Schumer can scarcely be bothered.

Not surprisingly, Palestine solidarity protestors are not afforded the same grace he extends to the most powerful antisemites. The chapter on “Antisemitism on the Left” is the longest one in the book on its own, and the left is the main target of the chapter on “Antisemitism and Israel.” Schumer diagnoses what he calls “Israel-related antisemitism.” It is there where his morbid allegiances meet his warped sense of history in a vainglorious attempt to erase Palestinian personhood.

Bubbe-meisa in Babylon⁴

American Zionists like Schumer bring a historical amnesia to the question of Palestine that is positively American. That is, his task is not just to justify Israeli crimes but deny their existence. As many commentators have pointed out, Israelis routinely say things about Zionism, Jews, and Israel that, if said by an American, would cause US Zionist organizations to level accusations of antisemitism. Israel has an anti-Zionist political party (comprised largely of Palestinian citizens of Israel), whereas more than three thousand students were arrested—some of the expelled or denied their degree—for protesting US complicity with Israeli war crimes. More than thirty states have laws criminalizing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, despite it being the exact kind of nonviolent tactic Zionists insist that Palestinians lack.⁵ Schumer, however, frets that BDS has grown in “visibility and support” and acting as a possible gateway to antisemitism.

It is both easy and besides the point to bemoan the hypocrisy of the ruling class. Lies are de rigeur for the elite, and all the more so amid the chaos of rising authoritarianism and imperial decline. Still, we must acknowledge some of Schumer’s clueless hypocrisy, for it is the armature of American liberal Zionism. Throughout Antisemitism in America, Schumer defines one of the main expressions of antisemitism to be holding “Jews and Israel” to a “double standard.” Yet he hardly treats Jews or Israel like other nations. He claims that denying Jewish self-determination or statehood is a level of discrimination directed only at Jews, even as he justifies the denial of self-determination and statehood to Palestinians. He approvingly quotes the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance 2016 document on antisemitism, which objects to “applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation,” without acknowledging that it is morally and legally wrong for any nation to engage in apartheid and genocide.⁶ In one of the many rhetorical questions Schumer poses whose gravitas is evacuated by the obvious answer, he poses “When other peoples seek their nationhood, is that racist?” He asks that question only after asserting that the claim “free Palestine” is a call for murdering Jews. His claim to believe that “Jews, like everyone else, needed a homeland” is contravened by his considerations (or lack thereof) of “everyone else.”

His pervasive grammatical tic of linking “Jews and Israel” as a unitary identity does exactly what he claims to oppose. It is true, as he says, that it is antisemitic to call someone a Zionist if what you mean is Jew. Yet Schumer’s concern about that slippage is only evident when the Zionist epithet is used critically; his default position, throughout not only this book but his career, assumes Jew means Zionist. Schumer is guilty of what he himself defines as antisemitism.

The contradictions get more Byzantine with his insistence that legitimate criticism of Israel exists, while he then defines any criticism as illegitimate. “It must be said, clearly and from the start, that anyone can criticize the policies of Israel’s government, the actions of its military, the statements of its politicians, and denounce the devastating loss of life in Gaza without exhibiting a shred of antisemitism,” Schumer says toward the end of Antisemitism in America. But he never does that. The Israeli military earns no criticism in these pages. While he mentions disagreeing with Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itmar Ben Gvir, Schumer offers no criticism of the Israeli government. He certainly does not mention that they are wanted for war crimes. “One could list many potential criticisms of Israel’s government, its domestic policies, and its foreign relations that are not at all antisemitic,” Schumer affirms. But he never does. It seems that the only legitimate criticism of Israel is acknowledging the possibility of criticizing Israel in an inoffensive manner. To actually criticize it—particularly to demand a change to the actions, funding, or arming of Israel’s government and military—is antisemitic. He blames antisemitism for “the tendency today to label Jews and Israel as ‘oppressors.’” And barring any challenge from ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects who count among his constituents, the critique of Zionism is prima facie off-limits.

To explain why, Schumer sins against history and logic. Like many liberal Zionists, Schumer embraces multiculturalism in the United States but Jewish supremacy in Israel, so long as it doesn’t call itself Jewish supremacy (too loudly). Schumer asks Israel’s critics to learn more about the history of Israel, but only from the hasbara perspective. He denies the purchase of settler colonialism as an analytic because Jews lived in the Levant thousands of years ago. (It’s an echo of his 2018 speech to AIPAC that “the reason there is not peace” between Israel and Palestine is because Palestinians “don’t believe in the Torah.”)⁷ That history gives Jews a permanent claim to the land, even though he affords no such claims to Palestinians who have lived there for centuries. Early Zionists spoke openly about settling and colonizing the land; no doubt drawing on his thesaurus, Schumer instead says that “Jews came to build a nation, improve the land, and live there permanently.” His denial of settler colonialism as a heuristic leads him to give a vibes-based “proof” that Israel is a liberal democracy that leans heavily on unrealized proposals; he offers the 1947 UN partition plan that would have put Jerusalem under international control to preserve its significance to Jews, Muslims and Christians—even though Jerusalem has been a divided city and ongoing point of contention since 1948.

Of the ongoing genocide happening in Gaza, Schumer is categorical. He claims that the word genocide is “most painful to Jewish ears”—more painful, to him, than the actual experience of genocide, approaching its second year. He blames Hamas and Hezbollah for Israel’s ongoing bombing and forced starvation of Gaza. While he allows that Israel has not taken “enough care to prevent the loss of innocent lives,” he blames the denial of “food, water, and medical supplies” on Israel’s “overly stringent inspection and restriction of humanitarian assistance.” He hopes—against all evidence to the contrary—that Israelis will choose to do different, but offers no plan B in case they don’t.⁸ The only demand Schumer recounts making on his longtime friend Benjamin Netanyahu was during the Israeli prime minister’s 2019 visit to the United States, when Schumer remembers telling the genocidaire: “You can’t just go on Sean Hannity, you have to make the case for supporting Israel on Rachel Maddow too.”

To Schumer, Jews are culturally incapable of committing genocide. He claims that because Jews “have been victims of genocide” that it is impossible for Israel to commit genocide: Because of the Holocaust, Jews are infallible. And because of October 7, Israel is Thanos-like, inevitable. Behind the mantle of investigating antisemitism, Schumer engages in full-throated genocide denial. Never mind what Israeli officials say and do, Schumer sees the Holocaust as a get-out-of-genocide free card for Israel. (Of the queers, communists, Romani people and people with disabilities also targeted for extermination by the Nazis, Schumer says not a word.) But just as having your heart broken is no prophylactic against breaking someone else’s heart, there is no absolution in being the descendants of people who survived atrocity. Likewise, Schumer says that anyone who chants “from the river to the sea” is supporting Hamas because the phrase appears in its charter.⁹ This petulant chain of equivalencies is akin to saying Hitler’s vegetarianism makes anyone who does not eat meat an adherent of the Third Reich. And for someone concerned about the expansionist dreams of political parties, Schumer makes no mention that Likud—Netanyahu’s party, which has been a leading force in Israeli politics for more than a generation—has a party platform that declares “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Such sentimental dreams of expropriating the land of “Greater Israel” can be found throughout the Israeli right, which dominates the country.¹⁰

The first thing to say about Chuck Schumer’s Antisemitism in America: A Warning is that nobody wants this book.

And here we see the demented affinities of American liberal Zionism reach their tragic apotheosis: freezing cultural identities in place, permanent victims against permanent villains, destroying the world to save Israel. In the grim fairytale inhabited by the senior senator, history absolves (some of) us of even the most horrific crimes if we believe it hard enough. In Schumer’s fairytale, the United States must ensure Israel’s military supremacy, but neither country bears any responsibility for what that entails. He believes it’s possible to have an empire and the moral high ground too.¹¹ Though many Israeli politicians, celebrities, and others are open about the military violence colonialism requires, Schumer brings an eternally American commitment to evacuating both the material conditions and moral culpability of apartheid and genocide.

A Shmendrik in Office¹²

By his account, he was always this way. Beyond the repeated references to his perfect SAT score and his attendance at Harvard, the most curious unhumble brag in the book is of his own political acumen. “I found myself to be a natural legislator … I liked the back-and-forth of negotiations, and I wanted to get things done,” Schumer boasts at one point. A fuller accounting of his career is beyond the scope of this review, but one wonders what accomplishments the Senator has in mind. One of his early successes as a legislator (not discussed in the book) was, in 1978, stripping funding from the Lincoln Detox, a radical drug-treatment program in the Bronx that was started by the Young Lords and staffed by Black nationalists such as Mutulu Shakur. Lincoln pioneered the use of acupuncture as a nonpharmaceutical response to heroin addiction. Echoing Republican attacks on the poor, Schumer dubbed the program a “ripoff” and a “scandal” undeserving of city funding. The clinic was evicted shortly thereafter, though it continued for a brief time at another location.¹³

Schumer has preached moderation in everything but empire. He voted for the war in Iraq in 2002 and voted against the Iran nuclear deal in 2015; judging by Antisemitism in America, he still pines for war with Iran. Indeed, prior to the US bombing Iran, Schumer tried to goad Trump into military action by calling him “Taco Trump,” a reference to a petulant acronym, “Trump Always Chickens Out.”¹⁴ It’s not just that his positions are morally untenable, though they certainly are. They also do not evince the hallmarks of a “natural legislator,” insofar as one measures that category by political power. Schumer’s time in office has seen the Democratic Party march ever rightward while losing their power. It was Schumer, after all, who prophesized in 2016 that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats would sweep 2016 by trading blue-collar workers for Blue-Dog elites: “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”¹⁵ All but one of those states went to Trump in 2016, but that didn’t stop Schumer from repeating that strategy—and its results—in 2024. More recently, Schumer led a pack of ten Democratic senators who voted to support Trump’s disastrous budget coming up for discussion, thereby assuring its passage in the GOP-controlled Senate.

Schumer adheres to what has been called an “eternalist” view of antisemitism: that it is always there, waiting to be activated, and that Jews are uniquely targeted and so must be uniquely defended. In this view antisemitism is permanent, transhistorical, almost indefinable—and only about Jews. This eternalist view of antisemitism has long bolstered Zionist claims to the importance of Israel-at-all-costs.¹⁶ For Schumer and other eternalists, the existence of antisemitism functions as an antisolidaristic claim: Jews are forever alone against the world, facing attacks from left and right which somehow can only be resolved by becoming rightwing themselves. Schumer offers the whining grievance typical of this milieu. “Not that long ago, many of us had marched together for Black and Brown lives, we stood side by side against anti-Asian hatred, we protested bigotry against the LGBTQ community, and we fought for reproductive justice out of the recognition that injustice against one oppressed group is injustice against all,” he has the gall to write, before claiming that none of those groups have supported Jews amid rising antisemitism. A paragraph later, he makes the laughable claim that “hatred and prejudice against Jews has had roots in left-wing movements over the past two centuries.” He justifies this claim with three references: Karl Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,” Josef Stalin, and Jeremy Corbyn.

Despite failing to pass any legislation for reproductive justice, LGBTQ freedom, or against police violence as part of the protest movements he glibly references, Schumer acts like a jilted ally of the left instead of its vocal antagonist. He has no words for the ways in which powerful antisemites are further limiting reproductive freedom, attacking transgender existence, or enshrining police violence. Instead, he cheers on the goon squad. He lacks all sense of justice, whether social or poetic, in demanding “a stiffer barrier” against illegitimate protest. The reader brave enough to wade through the condescension and slander will find a boring bromide against the left, deemed a necessary sacrifice for Israel’s safety. His ultimate purpose is to maintain bipartisan support for unlimited US funding of Israel—and to vanquish anyone who gets in the way.

Chuck Schumer is an antisemite’s idea of a Jew. The seventy-four-year-old Senate minority leader is a rich and powerful figure with a sniveling persona, a man of no discernible values who scolds the masses for demanding too much, a politician who insists we not apply double standards to Jews while holding Israeli Jews uniquely exempt from international law—an American leader who would do anything for Israel. The contradictory anxieties animating antisemitism, with its talk of all-powerful but conniving weaklings exerting shadowy control over society for their own nefarious ends, have found a too-tragic avatar in the senior senator from New York. There is indeed a dangerous rise in antisemitism, driven largely by the reactionary forces to which Schumer has pledged to be a loyal opposition, if not a willing partner. We should heed the warning not of Antisemitism in America’s text but its subtext. The senator thinks that he has written a book to introduce readers to the complexities of Jewish life, absent Jewish thought or practice. In reality, it is a disturbing apologia for the ways Israel, with his support, has written the enactment of colonization and genocide into the Jewish story. The real fight against antisemitism requires the defeat of Chuck Schumer and the political forces he represents.

Anti-semitism, Anti-Zionism, Zionism

Dan Berger

Dan Berger is the author of Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey (Basic Books), among other books. Dan has published articles in Boston Review, Jewish Currents, and Truthout. He lives in Seattle, where he directs the Washington Prison History Project.

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Chuck Schumer in America—A Warning

A Review of Senator Chuck Schumer's Antisemitism in America: A Warning

Dan Berger

A Momzer in Exile¹

Bubbe-meisa in Babylon⁴

A Shmendrik in Office¹²

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Joint Statement by Independent Labor Organizations in Iran

“Are Women Weak Jews?”

The Antisemitism of Zionism

HELLO, COMRADE

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Chuck Schumer in America—A Warning

A Review of Senator Chuck Schumer's Antisemitism in America: A Warning

Dan Berger

A Momzer in Exile1Momzer: literally, a bastard; an untrustworthy and deceitful person.

Bubbe-meisa in Babylon4Bubbe-meisa: Historically, an old wives’ tale; it is used to mean an untrue story, nonsense.

A Shmendrik in Office12Shmendrik: A fool, a stupid person.

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Joint Statement by Independent Labor Organizations in Iran

“Are Women Weak Jews?”

The Antisemitism of Zionism

HELLO, COMRADE

NEED TO UPDATE YOUR DETAILS?

Support our Work

Gift Subscriptions, Renewals, and More

A Momzer in Exile¹

Bubbe-meisa in Babylon⁴

A Shmendrik in Office¹²