
Today marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day. While Israel commemorates the victims and survivors of the Holocaust in the spring, communities around the world choose to remember the 6 million who perished on January 27, the day that Auschwitz was liberated. Yet today, 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, there’s been a chilling rise of antisemitism across the world—including in the US, where 18% of the world’s Holocaust survivors and 36% of the world’s Jews live.
According to the Anti-Defamation League’s recent Global 100 survey, nearly half of the world’s population hold significant antisemitic beliefs. That number has significantly risen since the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.
Dr. Rafael Medoff, a historian of antisemitism and founding director of the David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, told Davar that the rise in antisemitism is evident across the US. “It’s not only in ‘bad neighborhoods’ or certain parts of the country,” he said. “There are incidents everywhere, especially in the place where Jews expected it the least—college campuses, where it was assumed that educated, enlightened people would not resort to bigotry. But that’s the new reality in America.”

According to Medoff, the events of October 7, 2023, have had a significant impact on American Jews in several ways. The attacks led many Jews to feel more connected to Israel, since they gained a greater appreciation for the terrible dangers that Israel faces. They made some Jews on the moderate left much more skeptical about the Palestinians’ interest in peace. And at the same time, the attacks have radicalized the small minority of American Jews who oppose Zionism—who are now much more open about their hatred of Israel.
“Another important change has been a deep disillusionment among many American Jews concerning the nation’s universities,” he said. “Most Jews looked to the universities as the great beacon of hope, a source of rational and enlightened thinking. Instead, they now realize that many professors have been indoctrinating students with anti-Israel hatred, and many university administrations are willing to tolerate violent behavior, including attacks on Jews, in order to avoid confronting the radicals.”
He noted that in the 1930s, many American universities cultivated friendly relationships with Nazi Germany. “They invited Nazi representatives to their campuses and had student exchange programs with Nazi-controlled German universities. Then, as now, many university leaders were ready to overlook the antisemitic actions of terrorists and dictators,” he said. “That represents a moral collapse on the part of America’s self-proclaimed intellectual leadership.”
The following is a lightly edited transcript of an interview with Medoff.
What should the American Jews do with this horrible situation?
Some American Jewish organizations have raised a lot of money by promising the Jewish community that they will fight, and even defeat, antisemitism. That is not realistic. Lawsuits and political action can help keep antisemitism on the margins of society, but they cannot eliminate it. Tolerance education in schools can influence some young people, but only very gradually.
It is also important to have symbolic gestures, such as declarations by the president, or other governments and leaders, against antisemitism. But even there, sometimes political interests can interfere. Remember that when Israeli diplomats proposed to the UN, in 2005, that it create International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Israelis naturally wanted to include a reference to antisemitism—but the UN refused. It adopted a resolution creating a day to commemorate the most brutal manifestation of antisemitism in history—without a single mention of the word “antisemitism” in the text.
President Trump has a warm and sympathetic attitude towards Israel. However, at a rally celebrating Trump’s inauguration, tech billionaire Elon Musk made a gesture that some critics have compared to the Nazi salute. How do Jewish communities in the United States react to this?
American Jews are understandably sensitive about any gesture that even slightly resembles the Nazi salute, after a year in which that salute has been used by pro-Hamas protesters on many college campuses. Some of the protesters have used the Nazi salute as a way of comparing Israel to the Nazis, while some have used it to express their sympathy for the Nazis.
This is a surprising and confusing era for many American Jews. There was a time when it seemed that most antisemitism in the United States was coming from the far right. Then it began coming from Marxist groups, the Black Panthers and other extremists on the far left. Today, most of the antisemitism is coming from Hamas supporters, especially on college campuses. In fact, the antisemitic hate group that has the largest number of members in America today is the Nation of Islam, headed by Reverend Louis Farrakhan.
Here is the latest example of antisemitism coming from strange new sources: last week there was a shooting in a school in Nashville, Tennessee carried out by an African American student whom was an admirer of the Nazis and made videos of himself making the Nazi salute. Therefore, American Jews are adjusting to a very disturbing new reality.
President Trump seems to have close relations with extremist groups in the United States. Trump released rioters who stormed the Capitol from prison, some of whom are avowedly antisemites.
American politicians court the Black vote, the Jewish vote, or the Youth vote. That is understandable. However, it is very troubling when they court the antisemitic vote. When Kamala Harris decided not to choose Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate—even though that would have helped her chances of winning—it was widely understood that she was afraid that picking him would alienate the section of her party which is deeply hostile to Israel, Zionism, and Jews.
Such attitudes have deep roots. Franklin D. Roosevelt was also worried about losing the votes of bigots. That was why he loudly denied rumors that he invited some African Americans to a luncheon in 1929, and that was why he refused to support anti-lynching legislation in the 1930s. FDR tried to show white racists that he deserved their votes. And so did Jimmy Carter, when he declared during the 1976 Democratic primaries that he supported the right of whites to safeguard the “ethnic purity” of their neighborhoods against the “intrusion of blacks” and other “alien groups.”
White racists were not the only bigots whose votes FDR courted. He was concerned about the antisemitic vote, too. He refused to let the immigration quotas be filled, because he was afraid that antisemitic voters would turn against him. More than 190,000 quota places from Germany and German-occupied countries could have been used to save Jews from the Nazis, but instead those places were left unused from 1933 to 1945—because he feared losing the antisemitic vote.
It would be tragic if President Trump’s pardons of the January 6 rioters stemmed from similar motives. Racists, antisemites, and other extremists should be kept on the margins of society, not treated as a legitimate part of mainstream American political culture. Bigots deserve to be ostracized, not courted.
How are Jews preparing for another term of President Trump?
The same as they would for any president: appreciating some of what he does, disagreeing with some of what he does, and worrying about the unknown.
Many of the pro-Palestinian extremists blame the Jews and Israel for Harris’ loss. Where the Jews placed in all this mess?
Such accusations are ironic, because most Jews voted for Harris. However, people who want to blame the Jews will do so no matter what. Hamas supporters blame Israel and Jews for everything. The radical left group “Code Pink” has been blaming Jews for the wildfires in Southern California.
Do you see a different attitude towards Israel, Jewish identity, and antisemitism between Jews who identify with the Democrats versus those who identify with the Republicans? Is there a different attitude toward different communities of Jews? Different generations, Jews from different regions?
In America, neither the right nor the left has a monopoly on antisemitism. Remember that the neo-Nazis’ bombing of the only synagogue in Idaho, in 1984, happened the same year that the African American leader Jesse Jackson used the anti-Jewish slur “Hymies” and the Reverand Louis Farrakhan called Judaism a “gutter religion.” The 1991 pogrom against Jews in Crown Heights, led by the Black leader Al Sharpton, took place just a few months before the Republican secretary of state, James Baker, made his infamous “f— the Jews” remark. In 2018, a white supremacist murdered Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue; in 2019, black supremacists murdered Jews in a kosher grocery store in New Jersey and a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York.
Antisemitism is not confined to one political camp, or one religious denomination, or one part of the country. It can, and has, come from all directions.
Nowadays there is a rush to compare current events to the Holocaust. There used to be an atmosphere where nothing was allowed to be compared to the Holocaust, but in recent times this has reversed and now everything is compared to the Holocaust. Many such as researchers and lawyers also claim that Israel is committing genocide. On the other hand, Hamas has not been accused of attempting to commit genocide. What do you think about that? Where is this going?
Raphael Lemkin’s intention, in coining the term “genocide,” was to create a legal definition that the international community would agree upon. If everyone recognized that such behavior was wrong and deserved special focus and consequences, then genocide could be prevented.
Today, however, there is no longer a universal consensus regarding genocide. A significant segment of the international community has embraced the “Gaza genocide” like even though there is overwhelming evidence that it is false. Some of those yelling “Gaza genocide” actually believe it. And some endorse it for reasons of political convenience. In the United States, a significant number of university professors support this lie—a phenomenon reminiscent of professors in Germany who immediately began teaching Nazi ideas when Hitler rose to power.
We should remember that this is not the first time a large number of countries have embraced outright lies against Israel. Recall that in 1975, 72 countries supported the United Nations resolution calling Zionism a form of racism; only 35 opposed it, and 32 abstained. Therefore, only 35 countries were willing to speak the truth — while more than seventy believed Zionism either is racism or were ready to say so in order to appease the Arab world. Moreover, 32 others did not have the courage to vote at all.
The false charge of genocide in Gaza has emptied the word of its meaning. If we have reached the point that “genocide” is nothing more than a weapon for antisemites to use against the Jews, we might as well retire the word.
What lessons from the Holocaust have we not learned well enough? I want to address both the Israelis and Jews in the United States. What did we not do right? What did we miss? Why are we again facing pogroms and massacres, and in a situation where humanity has returned to openly hate us?
One of the most important lessons from the Holocaust is to recognize that the United States has a moral obligation to use its power to save innocent lives. That does not mean the US has to intervene in every crisis around the world, but it does have a responsibility to do something when there is a feasible opportunity to do so.
In 1944, American Jewish officials repeatedly asked the Roosevelt administration to bomb the railways and bridges over which hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being deported to Auschwitz. Golda Meir, Moshe Sharett, Eliahu Elath and other Labor Zionist officials also pleaded with American and British diplomats to bomb those targets. In response, Allied officials claimed it was impossible for their planes to reach that far into Poland. However, that was false. American planes repeatedly bombed the industrial zone of Auschwitz because they considered it a military target. But the nearby railway lines and gas chambers were not.
Every generation faced with the question of whether or not to “bomb Auschwitz.” Every few years there is another situation in which innocent people are being slaughtered, and an American president must decide whether to do anything about it. In the case of Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur, America’s leaders turned away.
Polls found that most Americans supported the US bombings that stopped the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans (1995), the use of American air power to rescue thousands of Yazidis from ISIS (2014), and the US air strikes on Syrian chemical weapons sites, in 2017 and 2018. There is every reason to believe there would be strong public support in the United States today for military intervention to preempt genocidal actions by rogue regimes, such as Iran.
Just last month, the US government acknowledged that Arab militias in Sudan are once against committing genocide against blacks. Our government also previously determined that China is engaged in genocide against the Muslim Uyghurs. In addition, the Iranians continue to openly threaten genocide against Israel. Sadly, the Biden administration chose not to respond. Now we will see if the new administration is any different.