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ANTISEMITISM REAL AND FAKE  
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Robert Kuttner
November 4, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ Both kinds are on the rise, and feed on each other. _

, Credit: Anthony Behar/Sipa USA via AP Images

 

The world of antisemitism is topsy-turvy, yet all too familiar.
Let’s begin with that great defender of the Jews, Donald Trump.

Preposterously, Trump characterizes elite universities that have long
been havens for Jewish faculty, students, and researchers as pits of
antisemitism. He then uses that false charge as a thin pretext to deny
liberal universities funds and to try to put them into personal
receivership, and to shift federal civil rights policy away from
defending Blacks, where America has far too much unfinished business,
to obsessively and fraudulently defend Jews.

This is the same Trump who has neo-Nazis among his fervent supporters.
When neo-Nazis broke up a peaceful march, causing one death, at
Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, chanting, “Jews will not replace
us,” Trump declared that there were “good people on both sides.”

Meanwhile, American Jews have gone from long-standing affection for
Israel to the point where a majority of Jews in the U.S. believe that
Israel is guilty of war crimes
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and 39 percent are willing to call it genocide. Among young Jews, the
percentages are higher.

Yet real antisemitism is on the rise—and the prime minister of
Israel and the military policies of Israel in Gaza and the West Bank
are the prime source of its revival. The two leading pro-Israel
groups, AIPAC and the ADL, are doing their best to resurrect the
ancient slander of “dual loyalty,” by demanding that Jews proclaim
their support for Israel.

Outside hundreds of synagogues, you can see prominent signs promoted
by the Israel lobby, most commonly, “We stand with Israel,” often
festooned with American and Israeli flags. That’s sly. Does that
slogan mean the children of biblical Israel, the current Israeli
government, the wretched policies of that government, or all three? It
makes the dual loyalty slander literally true.

Some Jews play into rising antisemitism. The ultra-Orthodox can
display an entitled and belligerent indifference to non-Jews. A good
friend was recently on an American Airlines flight on a Friday
afternoon, from LaGuardia to Cleveland, scheduled to depart at 3:37
p.m. Given the government shutdown and the air traffic controllers
mess, the flight was delayed. By a little after 4:30, it was cleared
for takeoff.

At that point, a young ultra-Orthodox couple on board realized that
the flight would probably land after sundown, on Shabbat. They told a
flight attendant that their religion prohibited them from flying after
sunset on the Sabbath, and they demanded to be let off the plane.
After a hurried conference with the pilots, the plane headed back to
the gate, where they disembarked.

Now the plane had to get back in line for takeoff. Rather than being
an hour late, it would be two and a half hours late. What followed was
pandemonium on board and some viciously antisemitic comments.

Was it too much to ask of this young couple that they plan ahead, in
case their plane was late? Had it already taken off, should it have
turned around in midair?

When 1,100 rabbis sign a letter
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equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and specifically attacking
the candidacy of New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, does that
make Jews more secure or more at risk?

In Rockland County, New York, ultra-Orthodox Jews gained control of
the local East Ramapo school board. Having created their own private
schools, they declared a public school surplus property and then
bought it on the cheap for use as a religious school.

America on the whole has been hospitable to Jews, and most Jews
reciprocate. But you sometimes get the feeling that at least some
ultra-Orthodox don’t mind if they set off a pogrom. (Their refusal
to abide by Israel’s universal conscription laws has brought the
nation’s secular majority and ultra-Orthodox minority to blows.)

Some antisemitism is self-inflicted. More precisely, it is inflicted
by people like those anti-Mamdani rabbis, by those Rockland County
school closers, and by Bibi Netanyahu, and it spills over to endanger
the broader Jewish community.

Moreover, Trump’s false love-bombing of the Jews also engenders
antisemitism. Why should Jews get special treatment?

AGAINST THIS BACKGROUND, I RECENTLY happened to see a one-man
performance called _Playing Shylock_ [[link removed]],
which is showing through early December at the Shakespeare Center in
Brooklyn. The performer is Saul Rubinek, the child of Holocaust
survivors, who was born in a refugee camp after World War II, and grew
up speaking Yiddish.

The premise of the play is that the audience has come to see _The
Merchant of Venice_. It’s intermission, there is a commotion
backstage, and Rubinek, dressed as a stereotypical Shylock, comes out,
chagrined, to tell the audience that management has caved in to
pressure from conservative Jewish groups and canceled the rest of the
run.

What follows is a dazzling 100-minute solo performance on whether _The
Merchant of Venice_ is antisemitic, the nature of stereotypes and
antisemitism, how much of the current anxiety about rising
antisemitism is legit and how much is trumped up, and antisemitism
through the ages.

Along the way, we learn that Shylock is seldom played by a Jew, and
that whenever _Merchant_ is shown, the show’s producers do
anticipatory damage control with Jewish organizations. In the play,
Rubinek/Shylock recounts his visit to the local Jewish Community
Center. There, a 19-year-old tells him that he’s afraid to wear his
Star of David on campus. Rubinek muses aloud about whether canceling
_The Merchant of Venice_ will make the haters less likely to
machine-gun synagogues, and delivers a hundred equally profound and
irony-laced comments.

Rubinek quotes from the press release by the theater management of
this imaginary production: “Continuing to stage this production of
_The Merchant of Venice_ would be inappropriate at this time of rising
antisemitism.” And Rubinek asks the audience, “Yeah, but has there
ever been a time when antisemitism was not rising? When, when was this
magical time? Before or after Moses parted the Red Sea?”

What’s remarkable is that the play was written over several years
and opened in 2024 in Toronto—before Trump took office for a second
term, before the demonstrations at Columbia University, before claims
that protests against genocide in Gaza made Jews on American campuses
unsafe, and before Trump tried to shake down universities for being
insufficiently solicitous of Jews.

The play never mentions Gaza, or Trump, or Netanyahu, yet it can be
read as a profound comment on the present moment—and on Jewish
history.

For the fact is that antisemitism is both things: often exaggerated,
and also all too real. It can be rekindled by deliberate mischief and
hatred, or opportunism, or ignorance.

And what of the charge that Shylock both illustrates antisemitism and
promotes it? Shylock was of course a stereotypical Jewish moneylender.
But Shakespeare, as Rubinek’s brilliant depiction shows, was far
more subtle than that. He both gave the audience the villain that the
play needed, and then bent over backwards to depict both Shylock’s
humanity and his emulation of Christians in his desire for revenge.

The play ends with Rubinek doing Shylock’s greatest soliloquy, in
which Shakespeare demonstrates the moneylender’s humanity (“If you
prick us, do we not bleed …”), first in English, then in Yiddish.
_Ven ir shtecht undz, blutn mir den nisht?_

_ROBERT KUTTNER is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect,
and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest
book is __Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the
Struggle to Save Democracy_
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_Follow Bob at his site, __robertkuttner.com_
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