It’s easy to make fun of Chuck Schumer. It doesn’t take much imagination to portray the gentleman from New York as a soulless, spineless, viciously partisan publicity hound, as Bob Dole did when he quipped that the most dangerous place in Washington was the space between Schumer and a television camera. All such petty allegations must now be retired, because in Antisemitism in America: A Warning, Chuck Schumer had given us one of the most important and courageous political memoirs in recent history—perhaps in spite of himself, to be sure, but perhaps not.
The subject alone should compel us to applaud the Senate’s minority leader. With his hometown, New York City, shaken by the thuds of so many pro-Hamas marches, and with the Democratic Party cheering on the jaunty jihadis, it surely takes courage for anyone to stand up to the madness and refuse to partake in anti-Semitic vulgarity. But
Schumer’s decision to speak out against Jew-hatred is even more commendable considering that he is—as Donald Trump stated—America’s best-known Palestinian. Or at least, the foremost representation of the Palestinian style in American politics. That is what the book offers in its portrayal of how Chuck Schumer came to be the man he is today, and how his journey offers lessons to American Jews in how not to be good Jews.
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Schumer, it is well-known, was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, and a less confident man would’ve made some effort, however puny or performative, to reclaim or wrestle with these Jewish roots in a serious, meaningful way. But Charles Ellis Schumer wants you to know that he is free and that he has shed the weight of the Old World and its old ideas. “To this day,” he confesses in one of the book’s many sharp passages, “I can read Hebrew, but I have no earthly idea what it means. Part of being Jewish is not always knowing what everything means.”
With that, Schumer, like Walt Whitman in an off-the-rack suit, is free to sing the body politic electric. The title he’s given his book turns out to be another gag: Anyone expecting a studious look at the layered history of Jews in America and those who resent them would soon learn that Schumer has little patience for the drudgeries of this tale, on account of it being the tale of people who are not, for the most part, Chuck Schumer.
Schumer addresses centuries of Jewish life stateside by quoting not any of America’s great historians but an Israeli journalist, Ari Shavit, who profoundly informs us readers that “the fusion of Jewish culture and American democracy had produced wonders.” The greatest of these wonders, of course, being Chuck Schumer himself.
Readers of political memoirs tend to approach their fare as a lion does a herd of lame gazelles on the savannah, expecting that soon a few good morsels of red meat will be flung their way. Schumer has 50 years of experience with which to succor us. He became a New York State assemblyman in 1975; he was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1981 and was sworn in as senator in 1999. You would think that his decades in office would produce an anecdote or two, something to show us that the consummate politician had lived and loved, shaken hands, and broken bread and promises. You would expect, in short, accounts of other people. Instead, this volume contains precisely two anecdotes in which people other than Schumer appear to us in full: one about Tip O’Neill having a funny encounter with Schumer’s grandmother, and the other about Benjamin Netanyahu soiling the senator’s living room with a bottle of soda to illustrate a point about Israel’s bubbly economic future. If you’ve been following Schumer’s career—and he has, for decades, been making sure that you do—you’ve likely heard both yarns before. The senator hasn’t taken pen and ghostwriter to paper to amuse you with bon mots. He has come to tell you the story—the real story—of his life.
And his life is politics, or, more accurately, the dogged pursuit of power to the exclusion of anything and anyone else. Why, for example, did the seasoned Congressman Schumer choose, in the late 1990s, to challenge the Republican Al D’Amato and run for senate? And why might such a bit of careerist marginalia belong in a book about anti-Semitism in America? It’s because, Schumer tells us, he was called to seek higher office by some transcendent spirit, “a feeling that winning a Senate election in a big state like New York would prove something about what Jews could achieve in America.”
That Herbert Lehman had already proven this very point in 1949, the year before Schumer was born, when he was elected senator from New York, or that Jacob Javits confirmed it by serving in the same role from 1957 to 1981—the year Schumer made it to Washington—means little to him. He might’ve grown up his entire life with Jewish senators representing his home state, but these senators were not Charles Ellis Schumer.
Some may find Schumer’s failure to tip his hat to his elders strange—especially, again, in a book purporting to grapple with the place of Jews in American society. But such bores would be missing the point, for tradition and its stony demands are precisely what Chuck Schumer has come before us to smash. Judaism, the burden with which he’d been saddled at birth, would’ve required him to carry a bundle of heavy and austere virtues, many of which would’ve hindered him from winning elections and kneecapping political enemies. It would’ve forced him, to give but the most recent and obvious example, to gape with horror at his own party’s descent into orgiastic paroxysms of Jew-hatred and announce that he has no choice, as a self-respecting Jew, but to leave it, or at least to go to war against many of its most ascendant figures. But such principled stands are an affront to the can-do spirit that animates Chuck Schumer—the spirit of mid-century, middle-class, unorthodox Judaism, the spirit that sees the corner office, not the World to Come, as the ultimate destination that stirs hearts, minds, and souls.
And this is how Chuck Schumer became a Palestinian. Trump’s taunt to this effect, sophomoric as it might’ve been, merely captured, as great taunts so often do, a deeper and more troubling truth. With Judaism no longer of any real use to Schumer in the punishing game of politics in the 21st century, he needed to find a new identity. That is not much of a problem for those who believe that identities, like T-shirts or Nespresso machines, come in many sizes and colors and can simply be picked up and discarded at will. The identity Schumer needed to further his political goals was one that could harvest the goodwill of exhausted liberals while simultaneously unburdening itself of Western civilization’s pestering norms and portraying political opponents as irredeemable oppressors who couldn’t be reasoned with, only eradicated. In other words, a Palestinian.
Consider, for example, Schumer’s discussion of social media, which he credits as being a major engine of spreading anti-Semitism in America. How did we get here? And what is to be done?
“There was a period, especially after Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, during which social media companies decided to regulate content more forcefully on their sites, and some developed stronger terms of services and tools to flag posts that are controversial or contain misinformation,” Schumer writes. “But the American right waged a largely successful campaign to push back against those rules in the name of ‘free speech’—I would call it lying—and most of the companies backed off, with some devastating consequences.”
Barring the democratically elected president of the United States from a social media platform while welcoming Iran’s genocidal supreme leader? Suppressing the White House’s social media account several weeks before the 2020 election to stop it from sharing a news story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which turned out to be absolutely true despite the mendacious protestations of 51 high-ranking and politically motivated intelligence officials? That, in Schumer’s shameless telling, is how we must proceed. Shut out our opponents. Corrupt our systems of government further. Occupy public platforms to the exclusion of all other voices. Use force whenever necessary. A better distillation of the Palestinian approach is hard to find.
Because Palestine, like Chuck Schumer’s America, has never been and will never be a real place, let alone one that accommodates real, live Jews. Instead, Palestine, like Chuck Schumer’s America, is merely an abstraction, an abyss into which we may deposit the darkest ambitions of unscrupulous men and women.
To gentle ears, such an argument might sound unkind, even cruel. But Schumer is too smart and too honest to gussy things up with platitudes. He owns up to his appetites, which makes Antisemitism in America such a riveting read. In the chapter on the anti-Semitism of the right, for example, he repeats the long-debunked canard about Trump alleging that there were fine people on both sides of the Charlottesville rally of the extreme right, thus laying Jew-hatred at the feet of his political opponents. And on the left? There, Schumer boldly argues, you find a few passionate if misguided souls who, eager to repair the world, might have taken their zeal for tikkun olam a bit too far. How about Rashida Tlaib, who once said the Holocaust gave her “a calming feeling” and who retweeted a post containing a slogan—“from the river to the sea”—that Schumer himself admits is merely Hamas propaganda calling for the destruction of the world’s sole Jewish state? She’s not mentioned once. Or Ilhan Omar, who argued that American foreign policy toward Israel was “all about the Benjamins,” meaning bought and paid for by those greedy, all-controlling Jews? She, Schumer assures us, has apologized for her poorly chosen words and has since learned her lesson. Nothing to see here, folks. Schumer’s side is perennially righteous; it’s those right-wing fanatics who should be scourged by any means necessary.
And if the fanatics happen to be telling the truth, well, then, truth itself must be vociferously opposed. In Schumer’s telling, for example, we get George Soros, righteous philanthropist; there’s no mention of that other guy, the one who funneled millions of dollars into the election campaigns of radical attorneys general who rewarded criminal behavior, curbed law enforcement efforts, and made millions of Americans from New York to Los Angeles suffer. And when Republicans appear to oppose opening America’s borders, they’re speaking in the German-inflected tones of fascism, not reflecting the broad American consensus that letting in millions of unvetted, unlawful migrants is a reckless, reprehensible idea.
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Like those Palestinian crisis actors who one moment appear to us lying dead and bloody on a gurney only to rise the next moment and smile for the camera, Schumer understands that unreality is precisely the point. He is not interested in the reader fact-checking his claims and finding them wrong. Instead, in this book, he has given us a deathwork—a term coined by the American critic Philip Rieff to describe a work of art that borrows the sacred symbols of a culture only to subvert and destroy them. Just as James Joyce wanted, with his Finnegans Wake, to write a novel that would abolish the future possibility of writing novels, Schumer, with Antisemitism in America, has produced a political tractate that would abolish the future possibility of writing political tractates, giving us—to borrow a phrase from Rieff again—“fictions where once commanding truths were.”
You needn’t bother telling him, as he writes solemnly about the “wrenching scenes” of Jew-hatred at Columbia University, that he himself told the institution’s former president how only Republicans cared about anti-Semitism on campus and advised her to do nothing when she testified before the House of Representatives because only Republicans would be paying attention. He knows you know he did it. And he invites you to leave behind your petty attachments to empirically corroborated reality by offering instead a much more thrilling vision where nothing is true and everything is permitted.
“Chuck,” he writes to himself in internal monologue form, “if you focus mainly on the bad stuff, both in people and in groups, you will end up hating everything and everyone. You’ll be an unhappy person and it will be an unhappy world. The better thing you can do is look for the good in people and try to meet them there.” Except, of course, if you’re a Republican, or a Jewish student at Columbia, or anyone who points out how endemic anti-Semitism has become in the political party Chuck Schumer has been leading for the past four decades.
But now, at least, Chuck Schumer is doing his part. He has given us precisely what the subtitle of his book so grimly promises—a warning. Don’t think, he tells us with his signature side smile, that I and my left-leaning colleagues in Washington take any of this stuff seriously. Don’t delude yourself into believing that we’re keeping track of causes and effects. What we truly want is to use you Jews as yet another cudgel with which to gain yet more power to pursue precisely the policies that end up screwing you over even more.
You think free speech is good for you, giving you the liberty to address your haters? We want to curb it. You think having representation on both sides of the political aisle is healthier and more balanced? We want to make sure you’ll be forever trapped in one party only. You think unequivocally supporting Israel is a key part of your identity? We want to change that by telling you that you may support only the Israeli leaders, policies, and actions we deem acceptable and aligned with our interests. And we’ve got anti-Semitism to lean back on should you sadly decide to be disloyal.
We could’ve asked for no clearer, louder alarm bell. And we must be grateful to Chuck Schumer for so bravely giving us an unvarnished glimpse into his soul. It’s hard to imagine a more pressing warning. We must save ourselves. From Chuck Schumer.
Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
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