Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that he wrote his new book about the surge in antisemitism in the United States for multiple audiences but “particularly to the left.”
The Jewish Democrat told the co-hosts of “The View” Tuesday that he felt a special responsibility to address the left’s disturbing embrace of antisemitism in his book “Antisemitism in America: A Warning.”
“Me being a progressive Democrat, I thought I ought to talk to people on the left, that you can’t be antisemitic and you’re sliding into it. When you say ‘by any means necessary,’ does that mean kill all the Jews?” Schumer asked, referencing the slogan displayed on countless signs at anti-Israel protests across the country.
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“When you say ‘genocide,’ a vicious term… people may not feel Israel did it the right way, but it’s not genocide [in Gaza]. It’s Hamas who does genocide and wanted to kill all the Jews wherever they are,” he said.
Schumer said that antisemitism had been creeping into the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and 2008 financial crisis – with conspiracy theories that Jews were tipped off to the attacks and accusations that Jewish bankers caused the crash, respectively – but it exploded into the mainstream after Hamas’ barbaric Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
“A Jewish bakery, they throw a rock through their window, ‘You’re a Zionist.’ There’s a woman who lives near me, she’s head of the Brooklyn museum, she’s Jewish, she has nothing to do with Israel, they painted red paint all over her house. People who wore yarmulkes or Jewish Stars, they were punched and vilified,” he said, giving examples of what he called “real antisemitism.”
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According to the latest available federal data, antisemitic hate crimes surged in 2023 with anti-Jewish attacks being the leading category of religiously-based hate crimes. There were almost 5,000 anti-Jewish attacks recorded by the FBI.
Schumer listed four other audiences he wrote his book for and added that President Donald Trump should read the book, too.
“Trump treats Jews [in a way that’s] sort of transactional… but he doesn’t understand what Jewish people are like, and he does things that could lead to antisemitism,” he said.
