Tom Stoppard’s acclaimed 2020 play, Leopoldstadt, is set in the Jewish community of pre-pogrom Vienna. We know what’s coming. “My own feeling is that marginal social attitudes never go away,” he commented recently. “They’re something like a latent virus that becomes activated under certain conditions.”

Those “marginal social attitudes” – antisemitic acts – are essential elements in his partly autobiographical drama that reflects the tremorous experiences of European Jews over the first half of the twentieth century. Some of those same attitudes have intensified across America over the first decades of the 21st century.

In its most common form, antisemitism exists among those who view Jews as threats to the Christian way of life in modern America. While it occasionally explodes into deadly violence, like the fatal shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh five years ago, it more often manifests though lower-level criminality such as defacing public property with swastikas, acts of intimidation or physical assaults. Spikes of activity usually follow international incidents involving Israel or inflammatory statements from celebrities and political figures. University campuses have also recorded a rise in antisemitism, usually when Jewish student groups are vilified for Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens and Palestinians.

To track hate crimes against Jews, Federal agencies rely on local police reports, which have shown a slight decline over the last ten years. But the data is incomplete, prompting groups that study hate crimes to argue that, on the contrary, 2022 was the worst year in decades for antisemitic activities.

Right wing influencers with millions of followers are reinforcing prejudices

The most recent federal statistics, for example, did not include police reports from large areas of the four states with the largest Jewish populations – New York, California, Florida and New Jersey. And the Anti-Defamation League, a national organisation that fights antisemitism and follows it through media reports, says antisemitic incidents are on a five-year upward trend, with 1,561 reported last year, nearly half of them in those four states. Whatever the actual numbers, incidents have been frequent and disturbing enough that in March 2022 President Joe Biden appointed historian Deborah Lipstadt as a special envoy to monitor and combat global antisemitism.

In December he also named Vice President Kamala Harris’s Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff, to head an interagency task force to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia. Both are first-time positions within an administration.

Why these efforts now? While they form just two per cent of the US population, Jews have suffered 63 per cent of hate crimes based on religion, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And unlike other oft-targeted groups – Blacks, Asians, Muslims, gays and transgender individuals – Jews are singled out as “evil” for their perceived societal roles as highly-educated, financially-successful “elites” who have succeeded at the expense of whites. As such, Jews have been accused of controlling Hollywood, major media companies and the world economy – the last an antisemitic trope that has lingered for decades. They’re even sometimes accused of killing Jesus and Christian boys.

Biden’s appointments also reflect a need to counter the powerful influence of high-profile individuals who use social media platforms to express views that Jews regard as threatening. Twitter has become especially problematic. Since Elon Musk became chief executive, he has reinstated people once banned for their antisemitic views. According to The Forward, an online Jewish news organisation, this includes Ali Alexander, a leader of America’s far right movement who has complained about “Jewish supremacy”, David Icke, who has contended that Jews secretly run the world, and Andrew Anglin, an avowed neo-Nazi who founded The Daily Stormer, an antisemitic website.

“We have a far more permissive environment for people to say whatever they want,” says Rabbi Steve Leder of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, one of the nation’s largest Jewish congregations. “Someone with a following can tweet or post something seen by tens of millions almost instantly. That’s a relatively new phenomenon.”

While lot of antisemitic messaging comes from the comfort of anonymity and fake names, the audaciously hi-vis events that attract widespread media coverage are even more problematic. For example, the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, used social media to attract hundreds of neo-Nazis and white supremacists. There’s also been a recent spate of antisemitic views expressed by online influencers with millions of followers, which reinforce prejudices and draw out more extremists. Here are a few examples:

• In Charlottesville, marchers from the political far right chanted, “Jews will not replace us” – a reference to the dubious theory that Jews and other minority groups will replace whites in American society.
• Donald Trump, whose son-in-law and daughter are devout Jews, won international acclaim for helping Israel sign peace accords with several Arab nations. Yet he hosted a dinner for Kanye West, the entertainer, fashion designer and unabashed antisemite now known as Ye, and Nick Fuentes, a well-known white nationalist and Holocaust denier. A week later, Ye stated: “Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.”
• Kyrie Irving, a star basketball player for Brooklyn Nets, drew widespread condemnation and an eight-game suspension for promoting a film that included antisemitic tropes.
• Dave Chappelle, a popular comedian, gave a wry monologue that included anti-Jewish tropes: “There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood,” he said to nervous laughter. “A lot.”

Ye, Irving and Chappelle are all enormously popular, and their words don’t fade into the ether. Days after Ye wrote on social media that he intended to “go death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” (a reference to “defcon”, the US military term for emergency mobilisation) a group of protesters hung a banner over a crowded LA freeway that said, “Kanye is right about the Jews.” They stood above it, arms extended in a Nazi salute. And on the day Irving returned to his team, a hate group that shared his views handed out antisemitic literature outside the Brooklyn arena.

Ye, Irving and Chappelle are also Black, and their pronouncements undermine renewed efforts by Black and Jewish community groups to repair fractures in efforts to fight racism and antisemitism. Blacks and Jews were inseparable allies in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Prominent Jewish leaders marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr in peaceful protests across the South.

Later, the communities drifted apart over Zionism, affirmative action and economic issues but came together to face the nation’s growing white supremacist movement. In recent years, Black and Jewish groups have collaborated in working for voting rights, economic opportunities and equal justice.

“When you really look at the organising on the ground and acknowledge the strategic and powerful way in which organisers can and should be supported, the Black community and the Jewish community still have a very close connection,” King’s daughter-in-law, Andrea King, president of an organisation that raises money to help minority groups, told me in a recent interview. “Those in the [Black] struggle and the continual struggle for freedom understand not only the history and the special and unique role that the Black and Jewish relationship played, they understand the continuing role.”

Those efforts notwithstanding, American Jews sense a change. Some synagogue services are now guarded by armed security personnel with weapons and bomb-sniffing dogs. Metal detectors stand at entry points. Orthodox Jews are encouraged not to wear clothing intrinsic to their religious beliefs. Old antisemitic texts, like the fabricated 1903 work, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, have gained renewed resonance among haters.

The Jews represented in Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt tried to downplay “marginal social attitudes”. The Jews of 21st century America are well aware of this, and of what followed.

The new McCarthyism

Back room deals shadow the House Speaker

It was Winston Churchill who noted that, even with all its faults, democracy wasn’t the worst form of government, given the alternatives. He might have changed his view if he’d seen the new Republican House majority struggle to pick a Speaker last month.

It took five days and fifteen rounds of voting, the most since 1860, for Representative Kevin McCarthy to win the gavel – a fitting capstone to years of Republican rabble-rousing, shape-shifting and, finally, self-segregating into conservative and ultra-conservative camps, the latter including members most loyal to former president Donald Trump.

McCarthy ascended after the November elections in which Republicans won 222 seats to the Democrats’ 212, a slim advantage that exposed the sharp divide within Republican party. The ultras initially held back their support for McCarthy as they worked back-room deals extracting promises to increase their influence over policy. Only then did they drop their objections, giving McCarthy and the ultras a pyrrhic victory at best. Any legislation that gets through the Republican House will run into the Democrat-led Senate. And these days, there’s not much hope for compromise.

At minimum, the new House majority made their goals clear: smaller government, less spending, fewer regulations, an anti-woke social agenda and what promises to be their calling card over the next two years: investigations into all things Biden.

One of McCarthy’s biggest concessions was more seats on the committee that oversees the investigations. Sure enough, the panel includes more than a dozen members who voted to overturn the 2020 election and keep Trump in office. One of them, Jim Jordan of Ohio, is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

They plan probes into Biden family business ties, the flawed withdrawal from Afghanistan, the response to the coronavirus and the so-called “weaponisation” of law enforcement to target conservatives, which Democrats cast as a get-even tactic for years of investigations and impeachments of Trump.

“It appears that House Republicans may be setting the stage for divorced-from-reality political stunts, instead of engaging in bipartisan work on behalf of the American people,” the White House said in an official statement.

McCarthy also seated ultras on two of the most important committees: Ways and Means, which oversees spending, and Rules, which determines which bills come before the House. And in one deal he might come to regret, he agreed to allow any one member (reduced from five, under his Democrat predecessor, Nancy Pelosi) to request a snap vote to oust him.

An eight-term member from California’s Central Valley farmlands, McCarthy has yearned for the Speakership since his arrival in 2007. He finally got
it in a way that’s already seen as “quintessential McCarthy”: through politically expedient deals. Having initially denounced Trump for inciting the 2021 Capitol attack, he apologised to him in person two weeks later, realising he’d need support from Trump loyalists in the House to win Speaker. Sure enough, it was Trump’s personal calls to several ultras during the final round that helped push him over the top.

And so ended the fifth-longest effort to elect a House Speaker, though well short of the record of 133 rounds in 1856. Beaming with success after the voting ended, McCarthy raised his hand to be sworn in. “Now the hard work begins,” he said.

Does it ever.

Michael Janofsky is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. He previously spent 24 years as a correspondent for The New York Times