President Joe Biden’s new “antisemitism strategy” has been criticized for excluding extreme criticism of Israel, in deference to radical left-wing groups that are a core part of the Democratic Party coalition. The strategy has also been attacked for potentially targeting conservatives.
But the biggest problem with the strategy is that it will not work, because it leaves out the most powerful tools for empowering Jewish communities to discourage hate.
Israel. The strategy fails to recognize that a strong U.S.-Israel relationship and a positive image of Israel are crucial to the security and well-being of Jews in America, both communally and individually. The strategy not only excludes the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which says that singling out Israel is potentially discriminatory, but also fails to say anything positive about Israel.
The fact is that Israel’s success has, over several decades, given American Jews greater pride and confidence. Not one of the strategy’s vaunted “100 new actions” does anything to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship. Instead the document merely claims that the Biden administration “has an unshakable commitment to the State of Israel’s right to exist,” while tactitly accepting that denying Israel’s right to exist is not antisemitic.
Guns. The single most important policy intervention that would make Jewish institutions safer from physical attack would be to arm and train more Jews to exercise their Second Amendment rights. Synagogues and Jewish schools need to become harder targets — an approach that is being taken seriously by Orthodox Jews, many of whom are obtaining firearms and creating armed community security organizations for self-protection.
The Biden strategy treats guns like they are the problem: one of its so-called “new actions” to protect Jews is actually an old executive action on “Reducing Gun Violence and Making Our Communities Safer.” Moreover, that action addresses what to do after a mass shooting, rather than how to defend communities — or how to improve criminal justice in the big, Democrat-run cities where Jews live so that violent felons are off the street.
Judaism. By far, the most significant form of antisemitism experienced by Jews on an everyday level is the embarrassment of being seen as different, or strange, by the non-Jewish society that surrounds us, no matter how tolerant it has become over the decades. This is a deeply engrained sense of inferiority that almost every Jew has felt at some point. It is the cultural baggage of centuries of discrimination, abuse, and persecution.
The way to fight this form of antisemitism is to encourage the public practice of the Jewish faith. There are vague hints in the strategy at encouraging employers to “acknowledge Jewish holidays” and other important days, but the Biden plan includes the new “International Holocaust Remembrance Day,” not the Jewish day of mourning for the Holocaust, Yom HaShoah. There is nothing in the plan about broader expressions of faith.
And there, really, is the core weakness of the strategy. The U.S. has been one of the most tolerant societies toward Jews partly because it has also been so religious, despite — or, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted, because — it does not have a state religion. But religious observance has fallen in the U.S. in recent years, as antisemitism has risen. The Biden strategy fails to address that crisis of faith, of which antisemitism is just one symptom.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.