Sara Lehmann is an award-winning New York based writer. For more of her writings please visit saralehmann.com. This article first appeared in Hamodia.
The midterm elections came two days after I attended a Rage Against the Hate conference, sponsored by Shurat Hadin Israel Law Center. I then found around 50 more reasons to rage against the hate.
The Democratic Party’s trouncing of Republicans underscored the need for such a conference in the first place. Democrats gained over 40 seats in the House of Representatives, flipped 7 Senate seats and 5 governorships. And some close races are still being contested.
Not all winning Democrats are anti-Israel or antisemitic, but all winning antisemites are Democrats.
And sadly, their victories enable anti-Israel officials on the right, like Vice President Vance, to drop their flimsy veneer and blame Israel as one of the reasons for their colossal defeat.
Shurat Hadin, headed by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, hosted its third annual conference in Manhattan to bring together pro-Israel leaders and laypeople alarmed at the soaring Jew-hatred around them. The center is a non-governmental organization that leads the international legal fight to halt terror financing, combat BDS, and defeat lawfare attacks against the IDF.
Obviously, the overarching theme of the conference was how to fight antisemitism. During one of the sessions, the moderator asked the panelists if they thought it possible to eradicate antisemitism. Some of the guest speakers were optimistic and some more realistic, but I squirmed in my seat thinking that the question itself was essentially an oxymoron.
Any student of Jewish thought, and certainly Jewish history, knows that “Esav soneh l'Yaakov" (“Esau hates Jacob"). Jews will never rid themselves of their haters until the Mashiach arrives. The question then is not will the hatred end but rather how to fight against it until redemption comes.
With the ascendency of the red-green alliance of Islamists and the radical left in the halls of congress and state governing bodies, the need for solutions is now immediate and urgent. Darshan-Leitner, whose organization has secured billions of dollars in judgements against terror organizations, state sponsors of terrorism, and banks that support terrorism, has a principal piece of advice - “follow the money".
Haters needs to be clothed and fed. They are supported by international money laundering schemes involving shady banks and crypto companies like Binance, leftist financiers such as Soros and others, as well as indirectly by the billions of dollars Qatar pours into universities and elsewhere.
Terror groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis exist only because of Iranian funding. When anti-Israel Democrats bully Israel, they threaten to cut off financial aid. Indeed, when President Trump abruptly, on election day, announced cessation of $4 billion in annual funding to Israel after this year, he positioned it as a way to eliminate a "bad talking point" that left-wing Democrats used against Republicans.
On the flip side, Trump utilized the power of the purse to clamp down on university antisemitism in the aftermath of the violent riots that shook campuses after October 7. His administration froze and canceled billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts, and the policy largely accomplished its goal.
Money talks. And people are compelled to listen if financial threats are backed by legal enforcement.
This past Sunday, on the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a group of leftist Jew-hating cyclists held a bicycle “boycott ride" targeting several Jewish-owned businesses in Philadelphia. Counter protests were organized and patrons lined up to support the affected businesses. But Tal Fortgang of the Manhattan Institute, in a November 7 WSJ op-ed, suggested that the only enduring defense is an offense - a monetary one. He recommended that “State officials can investigate the organizers and promoters of this odious protest to see if tax-exempt institutions were involved. If they were, they should lose their tax-exempt status."
The American masses, especially the younger generation educated and indoctrinated by Tik Tok, also needs to be made aware of the threat of legal enforcement. To a large degree, Trump succeeded in reigning in college culprits guilty of facilitating acts of antisemitic hate by dangling disappearing bills in front of them. But it was Rep. Elise Stenanik who immortalized the matter in the media by her legendary thrashing of Ivy League University heads during a congressional inquiry into their conduct.
Disinformation needs to be combatted with information. We cannot give up the fight against antisemitic propaganda even if the struggle seems to be one of diminishing returns. But we must also not fool ourselves into thinking that if only Jew-haters knew all the facts, they would stop hating us.
The main issues that drove the Democratic rout was affordability and anti-Trumpism. But it was ostensibly because of and not despite the in-your-face brand of antisemitism promoted by newly elected Jew-haters, like Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, New Jersey’s Adam Hamawy, New York’s Claire Valdez and others, that pushed them over the finish line.
Among their supporters, no amount of pro-Israel PR will help. In addition to legal and financial recourse, petitioning for ongoing security and police protection for Jewish communities seems the only resort.
Nor will political change in Israel achieve political change regarding Israel. Americans who trash Prime Minister Netanyahu don’t revile him because he is the prime minister but because he is the prime minister of the Jewish State. The next Israeli prime minister will be treated with the same disdain.
Following the midterm elections, Yair Lapid, head of Israel’s main left-wing party, proposed to rebuild support for Israel by having Israeli leaders go on a “listening tour" of the U.S. Self-hating Jewish Democratic congressman-elect Brad Lander responded, “We aren’t starving for a barnstorming tour. We’re hungry to see respect for international law and human rights."
There’s no way to sugarcoat the loss of the midterms, especially for American Jews and for Israel. But knowing how to effectively address the challenge is the first step in confronting the new reality.