Fighting the New Antisemitism

By Melissa Langsam Braunstein

Thursday, July 16, 2026

 

There has been an ominous change in American attitudes toward  Jews. Consequently, it is time to reassess existing efforts to combat Jew-hatred and consider a different tack.

 

Recent polling demonstrates just how bad things have become. The Manhattan Institute discovered that 26 percent of Republican voters younger than 50 “believe that Jews receive too much favorable treatment.” Further, 54 percent of men and 39 percent of women under 50 say that “the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.” The Pew Research Center reported that 57 percent of Republicans ages 18 to 49 have an unfavorable  opinion of Israel.

 

The Manhattan Institute found that, across the aisle, 8 percent of 18- to 29-year-old Democratic voters “describe themselves as openly antisemitic.” Twenty-four percent of 18- to 29-year-olds agree that “the Holocaust . . . was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.” Twenty-six percent of 18- to 29-year-olds and 16 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds “believe that Israel is a colonial apartheid state that must be dismantled and that Israel . . . bears responsibility for any and all violence” since 1948. A Pew survey noted that 47 percent of Democrats under 50 “have a very unfavorable view of Israel,” and “among Muslim Americans, only 4 percent see Israel positively.”

 

In the spring 2026 Yale Youth Poll of 18- to 34-year-olds, 16 percent of respondents say that “Israel’s actions in Gaza have made me think more negatively of Jewish people.” Twenty-nine percent agree that “wealthy Jewish donors have too much control over American  politics,” and 34 percent agree that those donors “prioritize” Israel’s interests. Finally, 17 percent of respondents believe that “Jews should move on from the Holocaust.”

 

Against this background, 29 states now require Holocaust education. While this effort is laudable, the content of such programs has been criticized for disregarding pre-Holocaust antisemitism and its political application, using the Holocaust as a vehicle to teach generic morality and obscuring or downplaying contemporary threats to Jews. Some school districts invest in “anti-hate” education, covering antisemitism among various forms of “hate.” According to the Jewish Funders Network, “the Jewish community currently spends approximately $600 million a year fighting antisemitism” through a variety of educational, advocacy, legal, and other programs.

 

If all these efforts aren’t showing promising results, what does help turn people away from antisemitism and anti-Zionism? Nine individuals who were initially taught hostile messages about Jews, Israel, or the Holocaust told me what changed their minds, along with what American Jews, school leaders, and public officials could do differently to yield better results.

 

Dalia Al-Aqidi, born in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, is a Republican running to replace Representative Ilhan Omar in her Minnesota district. During her early years, Iraqi schooling and the state-run media conveyed hatred of Israelis and Jews, but when Al-Aqidi traveled to Europe, she realized that Israelis were “not my enemy.” She credits reading with giving her new understanding, and her grandmother, who explained to a young Dalia that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated “because he had a vision” of peace with his Israeli neighbors.

 

Born in Toronto to Indian immigrants, Mubin Shaikh, of the U.S.-based organization Parents for Peace, grew up attending both public school and Koran school. After being caught hosting a raucous high school party, Shaikh became more religious. He traveled to India and Pakistan, where “a chance encounter” with the Taliban started him on a road to extremism. Shaikh considered fighting in Chechnya, but marriage refocused him on his family and his future. On their Middle Eastern honeymoon, he and his wife visited Israel, which prompted Shaikh to rethink what he had been taught about Jews and, by extension, Israel. Two years of “Arabic and Islamic studies in Syria” with Sufis taught Shaikh that Salafists’ “extremist interpretations” are “not part of the religion.” Now he works to counter extremism and radicalization.

 

Kasim Hafeez, of Christians United for Israel, the largest pro-Israel organization in the U.S., is the son of Pakistani immigrants who was born and raised in England. Now an American citizen, Hafeez recalls that “highly emotive” anti-Jewish messages were “taught as fact” in the predominantly Muslim neighborhood where he grew up. After Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against the writer Salman Rushdie for his 1989 novel The Satanic Verses, young British Muslims, including a teenage Hafeez, were radicalized by outside groups. Though he dismissed as “Zionist lies” any information that conflicted with what he was being told, Hafeez decided to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories and see for himself. On that trip, he says, “Meeting Israelis and  Jews changed everything.”

 

Faran Jeffery, of the United Kingdom’s Midstone Centre for International Affairs, grew up in Pakistan, where antisemitic views were mainstream and “range[d] from just a casual antisemitic remark . . . to Islamists calling for the complete annihilation of Israel.” In Pakistan, Jeffery says, “Holocaust education is nonexistent.” He says his “relearning process started quite early, initially thanks to the internet and later strengthened by my own experiences with the Jewish community.”

 

“A jihadist organization” recruited Noor Dahri as a teenager in Pakistan. By that point, he’d already encountered the idea that Jews were Islam’s enemies. After joining the jihadist organization, though, Dahri was taught that “the Holocaust was a myth fabricated by Jews” and that he should “hate Zionists.” When Dahri “arrived in the United Kingdom about 25 years ago,” he’d abandoned jihadism but “still harbored hatred toward Israel and Zionists.” Joining London’s police about a decade later was transformational. “There, I met a Jewish colleague who became a close friend. Through our conversations about Israel, Palestine, and Zionism, she challenged many of my assumptions and patiently helped me better understand the history of the conflict. I also joined Israeli and Jewish Facebook groups, read Israeli newspapers and books, and spoke with Israelis online to broaden my understanding.” Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel had a particularly strong impact on his thinking. Today, Dahri is a counterterrorism researcher.

 

Kylie Ora Lobell, who runs a marketing firm, grew up in a secular Christian family in Baltimore. In college, Lobell was taught that Israel, which she admits she couldn’t even point to on a map, “was a settler colonialist project” and “the aggressor.” She said she didn’t know that when Israel was founded, “Jews were returning to their homeland.” Lobell started dating a Jewish man who took her for a Shabbat dinner hosted by Chabad. She eventually decided to convert to Judaism. “It wasn’t until I visited Israel that I learned the truth,” she says. As simple a thing as sitting beside Muslims on the train made Lobell realize that “this is clearly not apartheid.”

 

“Having direct conversations with people” is what changed Minnesota native Jeff Schoep, founder of Beyond Barriers, a nonprofit that counters extremism. For 25 years, Schoep was the national leader of the National Socialist Movement, which “was America’s oldest and largest neo-Nazi Party” at the time. “Meeting Jews who contradicted the stereotypes,” and “being treated with dignity by people I expected to hate me,” created “cognitive dissonance.” Schoep gradually came to the realization “that my worldview was wrong.” When speaking to students, he uses his own story to illustrate “what can happen when people go down wrong paths.”

 

For Wisconsin native Arno Michaelis, a former neo-Nazi who now works for Parents for Peace, comedy was key to his evolution. When a girlfriend introduced Michaelis to Seinfeld, he says, “I was hooked from the minute I saw it, and it was just really hard for me to maintain my antisemitism” while chuckling at the show’s humor. He simultaneously belonged to a “white power band” that would sing about Jews being “the scum of the earth.” The band loved the movie This Is Spinal Tap, which they knew had a Jewish director, writers, and stars. For Michaelis, the “hypocrisy of loving that movie and hating Jews” was “literally painful.”

 

Danny Burmawi, who heads the Ideological Defense Institute, was born and raised Muslim in Jordan, where he was “taught to hate Jews as . . . theology” and to consider Israel “a theological wound.” When Burmawi became a Christian in 2007 and stopped accepting “the theology that required the  Jew to be the cosmic enemy, the hatred had nothing to stand on.” He describes another pivotal moment that happened in Chicago. “Two days after the [October 7] Hamas massacre,” he tells me, “my wife noticed a Jewish woman grab her children and flee the moment she heard me speaking Arabic on a park bench.” After what had just happened in Israel, Burmawi empathized with that mother’s gut-level fear.

 

Al-Aqidi suggests that  Jews work with organizations like Clarity Coalition to combat the narratives spread by the “red-green alliance” (where the radical left meets Islamism). Jews “need help” from Muslims and Christians “to combat their narratives, especially the Muslims who understand the atrocities of the radical and political Islamism.” Speaking up is “the only way to be free.”

 

Dahri agrees that American Jewry must more effectively challenge “Islamists and Islamist ideology, which are central drivers of hatred toward Jews and Israelis.” Programs on antisemitism, anti-Zionism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Holocaust should explain “the role that both religious and political movements have played in perpetuating” Jew-hatred. Muslims who “grasp the complexities of the conflict and endorse Israel’s stance against terrorism” can be partners in interfaith work. Jewish organizations should work with them, supporting their efforts to challenge extremism in their own communities.

 

Hafeez and Michaelis believe that non-Jews need more exposure to Jews’ contributions to America and Israel’s contributions to the world. There should also be an effort to explain the basic principles and practices of Judaism. Jews themselves can contribute to such efforts in everyday life; as Hafeez says, welcoming non-Jewish friends into their homes for Shabbat can have a powerful impact.

 

Shaikh sees a need to “inoculate” students from elementary school age against falsehoods by teaching basic facts about the Jewish people and Israel. He and Michaelis visit high schools as guest speakers, and Shaikh has helped build “a trauma-informed, culturally educated” chatbot designed to screen for potential behavioral threats, such as whether an individual is an extremist risk and might need to be referred to Parents for Peace.

 

There are fundamentals to consider, too. As Michaelis understands it, teachers are allowed “to intentionally radicalize students,” and “teachers’ unions are rabidly antisemitic.” Schoep recognizes the left-wing emphasis on “oppression” as “the exact same rhetoric I once weaponized as a neo-Nazi leader and what fuels extreme far-right ideology.” The fixation on “whiteness, blackness, brownness” and “divisive terms like ‘white privilege’” only serves to “create racism” and “radicalize entire generations.” This worldview also turns adherents against Jews and Israel, while being divorced from the realities of Jewish identity, history, and diversity.

 

At the college level, Jeffery observes, undergraduates “taught to hate their own ancestors, history, culture and the overall idea of Western civilization” will also hate Jews and Israel, “because the Jewish people helped build the West.” Without serious change, “it’s not the external enemy the U.S. will be fighting 50 years from now” but “the internal one.”

 

Universities have spent the past several decades “teaching a frame in which the West is the permanent aggressor, and any non-Western grievance is sacred,” Burmawi says. “Holocaust skepticism and ‘Israel is genocidal’” follow from that. The solution is “teaching why the West produced human rights, individual dignity, limited government, the abolition of slavery, and . . . the Judeo-Christian root” of those ideas. “A generation that knows what built their freedom is far harder to recruit into burning it down.”

 

Lobell echoes these points: “People who hate Israel and the Jews typically hate America, too.” In her view, there’s a “silent majority” that recoils from radicalism, and politicians should remember that.

 

Noting that “you can’t fight what you can’t define,” Hafeez urges adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism at the state and federal levels. Further, there must be a “bipartisan realization” in Washington “that those who come to America to live and study must accept our values of a diverse and pluralistic society” and leave Jew-hatred behind.

 

Al-Aqidi says public officials must resist “Islamist groups . . . insisting that every law or government statement addressing antisemitism also includes Islamophobia.” That “false equivalence . . . shifts attention away from anti-Jewish hatred” and allows political Islamists to “recast themselves as the primary victims.”

 

Burmawi makes the most compelling case for what’s needed to counter the growing danger of antisemitism and anti-Zionism:

 

The instinct I see in much of the American Jewish establishment, to fight this by pleading for tolerance, is a losing strategy. It misreads the enemy entirely. You cannot tolerance-seminar your way out of a theological conviction or a critical theory catechism. Reasonableness reads as weakness to people who’ve been taught your existence is the problem. . . . Stop apologizing, and stop asking for permission. The single most persuasive thing the Jewish community can do for other Americans is to model the confidence I call “re-Zionization.” Israel is, right now, the most compelling argument in the world that a nation can be unashamed of its own survival, can name its enemy, can refuse the endless-grievance trap, and still be moral. Most Americans, especially young ones, aren’t antisemitic, they’re demoralized. They’ve been taught that any civilization defending itself is “supremacist.” When they see  Jews who won’t accept that framing, who say plainly “our existence is not up for debate,” it gives them permission to defend their own civilization too.

 

Jeffery likewise urges the Jewish community to stop taking “a very apologetic view towards Israel. . . . If someone wants a Jewish person to condemn Israel to be socially accepted, then that’s wrong, and it must not only be rejected but also confronted.” Efforts to educate non-Jews about Israel’s centrality to “Jewish identity” must continue, along with increasing engagement with “non-Jewish allies, who are already battling the lion in its own den.”

 

Combating antisemitism and anti-Zionism in American society isn’t a favor to Jews. Such efforts are part and parcel of preserving Western civilization. The problems underlying the turn against American Jews and Israel are multifaceted, so there’s no single solution. But clearly, given the recent polling, a rethink is necessary. And the first step must be winning back younger generations of Americans.