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Schumer’s Warning

The Senate minority leader addresses antisemitism Victoria Pickering/The Baffler

Antisemitism in America: A Warning by Chuck Schumer. Grand Central Publishing, 256 pages. 2025.

Barely two weeks into his second presidency, Donald Trump mused that he would like to see the entire Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip relocated to other countries, possibly never to return. “Why would they want to return? The place has been hell,” he said, eliding that the reason Gaza has been hell is that Israel, with the help of generous military aid from both the Biden and Trump administrations, has carried out a merciless bombing campaign against a trapped civilian population without parallel this century. Human rights groups pointed out that what Trump was calling for would be straightforward ethnic cleansing, but that didn’t seem to bother the population of Israel—a survey taken shortly after the remarks indicated that roughly eight out of ten Israeli Jews supported Trump’s proposal at least in theory, while a mere 3 percent objected to it on moral grounds. Even before Trump floated the idea, Israel’s campaign in Gaza since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks had been called at least potentially genocidal by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Court of Justice, and numerous leading scholars of genocide.

But Chuck Schumer knows better. The Senate minority leader and New York Democrat is, as he boasts frequently in his new book Antisemitism in America: A Warning, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history, and right now, in the midst of a world-historical atrocity being carried out by the U.S. and Israeli governments, he has more pressing concerns. He is certainly familiar with the charge—as he notes, protesters frequently gather outside his Park Slope apartment building to chant “Schumer, Schumer, you can’t hide, you’re supporting genocide”—but he dismisses it as a blood libel. “Whatever one’s view of how the war in Gaza was conducted, it is not and has never been the policy of the Israeli government to exterminate the Palestinian people,” he writes, ignoring numerous statements from Israeli officials that suggest otherwise, such as the Deputy Knesset Speaker’s stated goal of “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth” or the Heritage Minister’s proposal to nuke Gaza because there were “no uninvolved civilians” there. But Schumer is more troubled by how the rhetorical invocation of “genocide” and “settler-colonialism,” however substantially accurate, might make American Jews feel.

American Jewish feelings, indeed, appear to be the overriding reason why Schumer wrote this book. As he explains in the introduction, for most of his public-facing career, he never tried to conceal or downplay his Jewish identity but also felt no need to lean into it, content to simply be himself. But after visiting Israel in the immediate wake of the October 7 attacks, he felt moved to speak out as a Jew, apparently against the advice of his Senate staff who felt that it might be politically risky. Schumer decided he had to do it anyway: “I share these reflections because I have sensed that many of my Jewish friends are struggling with how to respond to this new feeling of foreboding for Jews in America,” he writes, waving off concerns and crediting himself with a certain degree of bravery. “It is never wrong to speak out about antisemitism.” He notes that his name, Schumer, derives from the Hebrew shomer, meaning guardianor watchman, and in alerting America to the dangers of antisemitism, he intends to be, “as my forefathers once were, a shomer on the wall.”

Self-congratulation is a running theme in Antisemitism in America, which doubles as a political memoir and is more interesting in that mode than as a polemic about its titular subject—notwithstanding that it was written with the assistance of Josh Molofsky, Schumer’s longtime speechwriter, whom Schumer credits with enabling him to produce a 224-page book while carrying on his Senate duties uninterrupted. As far as insights into antisemitism, Schumer has little to offer that hasn’t already been said by advocates like the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs’s Amy Spitalnick, or by writers like Dara Horn or Bari Weiss. He subscribes to the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which condemns many forms of criticism of Israel, and like all of the above he believes that antisemitism emanates from both right and left, the former taking the form of neo-Nazi violence and the latter the form of anti-Zionism. What he has to say about antisemitism is predictable, redundant, and only interesting by virtue of who he is.

Who Schumer is, on the other hand, is interesting, and it does come through in many parts of Antisemitism in America. As I read it, I found myself wondering whether this book was really written for gentiles as a basic primer on the Jews and our feelings, as quite a lot of it is 101 recitations of American Jewish history and folklore that will be tediously familiar to anyone who grew up steeped in it. For me, Schumer is the furthest thing from exotic. Born in 1950 to an exterminator and a housewife with roots in Ukraine, he is three years older than my dad and grew up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood (Midwood), where he attended the same public high school (James Madison) as my grandmother before going off to Harvard for undergrad (where he was Clean for Gene, but thought the SDS kids were too extreme) and law school and then running for office. Like many millennial progressives in Brooklyn, I know exactly where Schumer lives and where he goes to shul, have passed his building countless times, and have even attended protests there. Schumer sounds like my boomer relatives, has the same sense of humor, and has more or less the same left of center political positions across the board. When he writes that caring about Israel is an important part of his Jewish identity, he cites a 2020 Pew survey indicating that over 80 percent of American Jews feel the same way, and in my own observation that is certainly true. As an upwardly mobile, highly educated, not especially devout, culturally liberal, and firmly if not fanatical Zionist with a legal background, Schumer has as good a claim as any American politician to be Everyjew.

Like many American Jews, Schumer’s sense of his own family history informs his anxieties about what he insists is an unprecedented surge in antisemitism since October 7. When he first learned of the attacks, he writes, “I thought of my ancestors on the porch in Galicia” who were machine-gunned by Nazis in front of the entire town. Memories of the Holocaust and other old world persecutions haunt most American Jews: “They are imprinted on our hearts for as long as we live,” he writes, “filling us with an unspoken and ill-defined grief, a sense of having lost something vast and beautiful.” But what about the Palestinians, virtually all of whom have experienced comparable losses in their own lifetimes? Are they not entitled to similar grief? In a jaw-droppingly callous passage just a few pages later, Schumer quotes a Bill Maher segment from December 2023 at length, the gist of which is that Palestinians should just get over it. “Was it unjust that even a single Arab family was forced to move upon the founding of the Jewish state? Yes,” Schumer quotes Maher as saying. “But it’s also not rare. Happening all through history, all over the world. And mostly what people do is make the best of it.”

Palestinians in general receive vanishingly little attention in Antisemitism in America. Schumer assures us that their suffering does trouble him but is always quick to blame Hamas for using innocent people as human shields, a cliche I’ve been hearing since I was a kid and one that conveniently absolves Israel of all responsibility for civilian casualties. Schumer (or more likely Molofsky) did plenty of research for this book, and is obviously not a stupid person; willful ignorance is the only explanation for why he seems to have read no Palestinian history, talked to no Palestinian activists or intellectuals, and seen no need to treat Palestinian lives as even comparably important to the emotional wellbeing of American Jews in the face of impolite rhetoric and vandalism.

Schumer repeatedly quotes Franklin Foer’s April 2024 Atlanticcover story bemoaning the end of the Golden Age of American Jewry, but it’s unclear whether he’s ever heard of the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi or even leading Jewish critics of Israel like Peter Beinart. He celebrates Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban for denouncing SDS protesters at Harvard in 1970 as antisemites and cites Daniel Patrick Moynihan, his fellow New York senator, as a personal hero for denouncing a 1975 United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism. He writes of a previously warm personal relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he once had over to his apartment for pastrami sandwiches. While he acknowledges that the relationship has soured, Schumer attributes this entirely to Netanyahu’s rightward drift in the context of Israeli politics and his open ideological alignment with Trump; it has nothing to do with Palestinians.

One gets the sense that Schumer is at least a little embarrassed by his decision, made well before Trump’s victory last November and subsequent ongoing assault against everything decent in American life, to focus so much attention on this issue. When I agreed to review Antisemitism in Americafor The Bafflermonths ago, my editor repeatedly requested a review copy from Grand Central, Schumer’s publisher, which is standard practice, and was repeatedly ignored. I eventually learned Grand Central wasn’t just blowing off me or The Bafflerand that at least two other reputable publications were treated similarly. This is a highly unusual step for a mainstream publisher and suggests some preemptive anxiety about critical attention. Schumer did, however, have the conservative New York Timescolumnist Bret Stephens over to his apartment to undertake a friendlier assessment of the book. “My job is to keep the left pro-Israel,” Schumer told Stephens, who was too polite to note that Schumer is completely failing at that.

On March 18, I was supposed to attend Schumer’s event promoting the book alongside the obsessively Zionist congressman Ritchie Torres at Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side, where tickets started at $45, the proceedings were not to be recorded, and all audience questions were to be pre-screened. But a day earlier, all of Schumer’s book tour events were postponed indefinitely in the wake of his decision to break from most of his caucus in voting for a Republican-backed budget deal that would keep the government open while further empowering Trump to dismantle it. This apparent treachery has enraged a wide spectrum of the Democratic base, and calls for Schumer to be ousted as minority leader and primaried in 2028, perhaps by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are getting louder. After all, leading the Democratic opposition to Trump—who, at least according to Antisemitism in America, is not an antisemite—is Schumer’s actual job.