It Is Everywhere

By Neal B. Freeman

Tuesday, August 12, 2025

 

I used to joke with my friend Irving Kristol about his friends at the Anti-Defamation League, who professed to see antisemitism everywhere, even among baseball fans who for dark and unspoken reasons chose to root for the Red Sox over the Yankees. A National Review editor from those days, who might prefer to remain nameless, once deadpanned to an all-hands meeting that, projecting ADL’s numbers, within just three years 127 percent of American adults would be reported as committed antisemites. Even the Jews laughed.

 

It’s been a long, hot summer.

 

Two months ago, my next-door neighbor needed a new roof on his otherwise elegant Florida home. (The sun here beats the tar out of the shingles and the roof must be replaced every ten years or so.) He hired a motley crew and, in old-school journo style, I wandered over to chat them up over lunch breaks. They are an oppressed people, roofers. Spend a few summer days on a roof here and you will begin to look, and probably to feel, like a strip of bacon very recently fried. Roofers, in the manner of oppressed peoples everywhere, need someone to blame for the living hell their lives have become and they have settled on the rich guys who live in air-conditioned splendor beneath expensive new roofs. Those guys tend to be lawyers, developers, forex traders, crypto bros. You know, Jews. They are the ones to blame.

 

Last month, I attended a mini-reunion with Yale friends. My aging classmates may be a bit fuzzy on what they had for lunch yesterday, but they remember with clarity the mad meritocratic dash through which we all had churned those many years ago. To a man, across the spectrum from the hard left to, well, me, we were disgusted by reports from campus that Jewish students have been harassed. For being Jewish, that is. That’s not the place we knew and loved. (I should also note that there is a general sense of relief that, under our new president, Yale seems to be losing the competition with Harvard and Columbia for the distinction of being the nation’s most antisemitic campus. Boola, boola.) The wheel has turned, almost 180 degrees. In our own time on campus, there was the occasional outburst of country club antisemitism, but on issues larger than the question of how keen Oliver Farnsworth IV was to play golf with Jews, the Ivy League had been a bastion of anti-antisemitism.

 

Week before last, I Zoomed in with a heavily credentialed group of national security experts. (My own clearances have long since lapsed, but I maintain a lively interest in the subject matter.) The group — analysts, retired military, a handful of shadowy intel types — conducted a tour d’horizon of the international situation, a magisterial review of who is doing what to whom and with what consequence for the rest of us. (I almost characterized that review as “Kissingerian,” but nobody really does “Kissingerian” like Kissinger, the centerpiece of a dozen Buckley dinners over the years.) As we wrapped up the conference, this influential assemblage concluded that, in a world bristling with Kims and Putins and Khameneis and Xis, the real troublemakers — the state actors so problematic that they must be accosted, like, now — were two men: one named Netanyahu, who, it was reported a few days earlier, isn’t feeding enough people in enemy territory; and the other named Zelensky, who in the middle of a war for national survival had tried, briefly and unsuccessfully, to suspend the work of his government’s anti-corruption unit. To my eye, these bad actors have only three things in common. They are both democratically elected. They both watched in horror as their people were attacked by brutal cross-border forces. And they are both Jewish. As a Yankee fan might say, what’s not to like?

 

These are anecdotes, not much more. But we have had the data for some time, and I seem to have needed the anecdotes to confirm emotionally what I had already accepted intellectually. I don’t know whether it’s that the ADL has stopped issuing screechy alarms or that I have stopped paying any attention to them. Whichever the case, the hour is late. The hardened reality is that antisemitism is everywhere now and the obligation falls to us to confront it.

 

And by “us,” I don’t mean the Trump White House or the Thune Senate or the Johnson House of Representatives. I mean “us” as in the country’s leading journal of conservative opinion. It won’t be enough to order up the occasional hit piece on a wayward soul. That is snipping the head off a dandelion. It will require a serious and sustained effort to uproot evil. It always does.