The Antisemitism Awareness Act is Our Latest Self-Inflicted Existential Threat (Larry Gellman- February 17, 2025)

Larry Gellman currently serves on the board of NJN, J Street, and CLAL. Over the last 40 years he served as a founding member of the AIPAC board in Tucson and was a national leader and honoree of Israel Bonds, a founder of the Milwaukee Jewish Day School, and named Jewish Man of the Year in both Milwaukee and Tucson after chairing Federation annual campaigns in both cities. He spent his career as a widely recognized financial advisor and won awards as a television news reporter in Ohio and Wisconsin. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

It is very significant that the leaders of Americans for Peace Now and Ameinu decided to call our new combined organization "The New Jewish Narrative". The basic fundamental definitions of what it means to be Jewish or a Zionist or pro-Israel or what constitutes antisemitism have never been less clear or more the source of passionate disagreement and confusion among caring Jews.

There has never been a time when Jews were more in need of a New Narrative to provide a framework for enabling fact-based, civil, and respectful conversations regarding the meanings of those terms and how to support Israel and move forward as a Jewish community--assuming that is even possible.

Throughout Jewish history, there have been several decent periods and many more very challenging periods. The most common storyline is that Jews have repeatedly faced vicious and brutal discrimination from powerful gentile neighbors who have sought to literally or figuratively humiliate, hurt, or destroy us. We are familiar with legitimate feelings of victimhood and until recently we have had no experience at all regarding how to deal with the power and control over our own destiny that the State of Israel and American Jews enjoy today. In short, we developed narratives and organizations to help us deal with our victimhood but we have no cultural norms regarding how to deal with victory and success.

As I said in my column for APN last July, the term "antisemitism" has been weaponized and politicized (most notably through laws, college policies, and statements) that establish the unconstitutional Israelist International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) definition which overwhelmingly deals with criticism of Israel and those who "target" Israel and claim to care too much about Israel as the one and only definition of antisemitism. 

President Biden--to his credit--resisted huge pressure from AIPAC and Israelist Jews and Republicans to anoint the IHRA definition as the one and only legal definition two years ago and instead said it was one of several (including the Nexus and Jerusalem definitions which were far less Israel-centric) that are both useful and essential. 

And last year, Senator Chuck Schumer bravely and wisely refused to even allow the Antisemitism Awareness Act to be voted on in the Senate after passing the House. But now--one election and a few months later--Schumer and many of his fellow Democrats have succumbed to pressure from AIPAC and Jewish legacy organizations and pressure from the Trumpenyahu Cult and are SPONSORING the same bill which is now certain to pass by a large margin and become law. 

The bill does not provide a single example of how to fight antisemitism. It simply states that the unconstitutional IHRA definition--which outlaws free speech and states that anyone who suggests that some Jews (most of the Jews I know including myself) are loyal to both the U.S. and the State of Israel-- is the sole legal definition and can be used by the government to charge those who criticize Israel too effectively with a crime and cost them their jobs and their businesses and could perhaps even send them to prison.

In short, in the same way that abortion was criminalized and enabled zealous prosecutors to send providers and recipients of abortions to prison and have their lives ruined, so too this bill risks doing the same to those who are critical of the actions of the Israeli government and branding them as antisemites and criminals. 

This is yet another victory for the Israelists and billionaires who run some legacy organizations and now our government in their fight to remove Jewish and American values as our defining principles and replace them with arbitrary and clearly unconstitutional mandates and laws that make the exercise of those guaranteed rights as criminal activity.

Meanwhile, some Jewish organizations have abandoned most references to "Judaism," and the Jewish ethics and wisdom traditions that most of us were raised with and which for many of us have been the magnet and the glue that attracted us to Jewish study and activism and community leadership. Today, those organizations are all about unequivocally supporting the Israeli government no matter how it behaves and wallowing in very real Jewish victimhood and antisemitism without ever acknowledging how great it is to be a Jew today or any inconvenient truths about the consequences of the Occupation or Israeli government policies in the West Bank and Gaza. For decades, Federations and JCCs sponsored Torah and Talmud classes which attracted thousands. Today virtually all of those classes are sponsored by Chabad or synagogues on a local basis.

There is still Jew hatred among some on the far left who equate Jews as being unequivocal supporters of the Israeli government and its actions but that hatred mostly related to the behavior of Israel. The real existential threats to Jews and Israel are from White and Jewish Supremacists and the political AIPAC/Evangelical/Republican alliance that now is clearly in control of Congress and legacy Jewish organizations. The AAA and the IHRA definition are loaded with examples of antisemitism related to criticism of the behavior of Jews and Israel but provide not a word about the actions of someone like Elon Musk who twice gave a Nazi salute during Trump's inauguration and then told German neo-Nazis they should stop feeling guilty about the Holocaust.

We are getting more and more troubling news every day about the actions of our new president and his cult of enablers and how they plan to use and abuse the absolute power granted them by this election to destroy democracy and a civil caring society. Now, for purely political reasons, some of our Democratic leaders and champions have chosen to join them.

There has never been a better time in history to be a Jew than it is in the U.S. today and the differences between what it was like back when Jews were getting nose jobs and changing their names here just a generation ago are overwhelming. And the term Zionism has never been more confusing since virtually everyone who uses it does so to convey very different views about what it means since it was created as an aspirational term before that dream was realized.

To create space and civility and pluralism in the Jewish community to deal with the many new challenges that have come from winning multiple victories and living lives that are beyond the wildest aspirational dreams of our parents and grandparents and any other Jews in history, we desperately need a New Jewish Narrative to help us move forward and to get us to stop digging the semantic hole in which we are being voluntarily buried.