‘I told you so’ cuts both ways
Liberal writer Franklin Foer excoriates conservative Jews even as the left betrays him.
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In a recent Atlantic article, liberal pundit Franklin Foer slammed conservative Jewish intellectuals like Ben Shapiro and Yoram Hazony who threw in their lot with the MAGA movement only to be stunned by the rise of antisemitism on the right.
“For a time, it was possible for the Jewish intellectuals of MAGA—a small but influential set of podcasters, columnists, and theorists—to minimize antisemitism in the movement,” Foer writes. “But it’s now so ubiquitous and so noxious that even they can’t ignore it.”
Shapiro, Hazony, and others, Foer states, “were delusional in denying the problem for so long. They built careers inside a movement animated by fantasies about ‘globalists,’ suspicions of hidden hands, and a yearning for national purity—an ideological combination that has never been particularly healthy for Jews.”
“They lent their prestige to it anyway, certain that the hateful rhetoric was meant for someone else.” Foer asserts. While admitting that some MAGA Jews have pushed back against antisemitism, Foer grants them little, saying, “Now that it has landed directly on them, they want credit for noticing the stench.”
Speaking of anti-Trump conservative David Brooks’s article “The Terrifying Future of the American Right,” a report on one of Hazony’s “national conservative” conferences, Foer states, “Jewish history supplied a pretty good preview of what that terrifying future might look like. Four years after Brooks attended Hazony’s conference, it has unmistakably arrived. Each week brings a new instance of antisemitism moving from the internet’s febrile periphery into the conservative movement’s mainstream.”
It is only fair to say that Foer is, in the main, correct in his assessment. What he is really saying is, “I told you so,” and he is not entirely wrong.
I do not share his contempt for the likes of Shapiro and Hazony, but I do regard them as tragic. As I have written elsewhere, they forgot the essential truth that the Jews, in the end, have no politics. That is, we have no left and no right. We have only our friends and our enemies, and nothing else. No Jew should ever throw everything he has into a non-Jewish political movement, because the possibility of betrayal is ever-present.
That being said, one cannot escape the sense that Foer doth protest too much. That is, perhaps he excoriates Shapiro, Hazony, and others because he senses that this betrayal has another side, a mirror image, in his own political camp.
Indeed, what Foer appears to be implying throughout his screed is that the left is the sole political refuge for the Jews. The antisemitism he addresses and denounces is entirely of the right. He mentions not a single incidence of left-wing antisemitism nor a single left-wing antisemite. He appears to believe, quite sincerely, that the Jews have no enemies to the left.
The problem with this is that it is obviously untrue. The evidence of our eyes proves as much: The rise of the antisemitic Red-Green Alliance between radical leftists and radical Muslims; its conquest and colonization of American higher education and similar institutions; its use of systematic antisemitic harassment, intimidation, and violence, including outside synagogues; the election of an antisemite as mayor of New York, who has taken up the cudgel on behalf of antisemitic hate rallies and refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist; politicians and activists from Ilhan Omar to Cenk Uyghur who normalize and propagate antisemitic rhetoric and incitement; and the murder of several Jews and non-Jews by members of the Alliance.
All of this has been the work of the left, whether under its own power or in collaboration with radical Muslims. It is not “the internet’s febrile periphery,” it is mainstream left-wing politics. It is the left today.
To be fair again, Foer has criticized left-wing antisemitism elsewhere, though he appears to have a disturbing tendency to minimize it. In a 2024 interview, for example, he said he is “not especially scared” for his children in educational settings and remarked of the rampage of antisemitism on college campuses, “I’ve heard from people at Harvard and Yale—which have taken a lot of heat, and antisemitic incidents have happened there—but I think a lot of students there would say it’s not as bad as people on the outside are portraying it.”
I do not know which “people” Foer has been talking to, but I have spoken with students who feel very differently. One, ironically from Foer’s alma mater Columbia University, told me she was making Aliyah because of the hate she had experienced on campus. In other words, the situation is so bad that some young Jews are literally leaving the country.
Perhaps Columbia University is, in fact, the key to everything. Because, if Foer were to admit how bad things are on his own side of the political divide, he would have to admit that his own alma mater, the precious bastion of privilege where he received his credentials and his career, has now thoroughly betrayed him and, for the most part, is staffed, run, and attended by people who hate him.
The same, he would be forced to acknowledge, may be true of all the other accoutrements of his privilege. He might have to surrender to the ominous truth that the Jews can never be privileged, because the privileged can always decide that they are Jews. In such a situation, there is no choice but to underplay, deny, and look elsewhere for the enemy.
Interestingly, Foer himself appears to be well aware of the issue of privilege except when it comes to himself. He wrote of today’s left, “Today, Jews are treated in sectors of the left as the epitome of whiteness. But any analysis that focuses so relentlessly on the role of privilege, as the left’s does, will be dangerously blind to antisemitism, because antisemitism itself entails an accusation of privilege. It’s a theory that regards the Jew as an all-powerful figure in society, a position acquired by underhanded means.”
This is at least some kind of an acknowledgment. But again, it is acknowledgment in the name of denial. The left, after all, is not “dangerously blind to antisemitism.” Much of it is, quite consciously, antisemitic to the core. At times, it is antisemitic to the point of genocidal rage, and we know this because the left says so. “From the river to the sea” and “by any means necessary” mean what they mean.
My guess is that Foer simply has not heard these necrophilous chants. In his bubble of privilege, the privilege of fortuitous birth into an accomplished and intellectual family, followed by the studied path of credentialism through a systemically antisemitic institution, he simply cannot hear them. Even if a faint echo enters his consciousness, it is soft enough to ignore.
This is, ironically, precisely what Foer accuses the likes of Shapiro and Hazony of doing, not without reason, but there is a terrible irony in saying, “I told you so” when a great many of us have been trying, for decades, to warn Jews like Foer that the enemy was coming for him too.
As for those of us who sounded the warning and were not listened to until it was too late, we can only say: Well, Mr. Foer, we told you so.
What is so bizarre is that by acknowledging the antisemitism of the left, Foer would appear at least a little more honest and credible. Instead it looks like he is obviously hiding something, which undermines his position and and exposes himself as a polemicist, not a truth-teller. How does he not know this?
My guess is, if he were asked, he’d try to evade by saying his essay was about the right, and there’s already plenty of critics taking on the left, etc. etc. and maybe offer, at best, a token and coerced acknowledgment of left wing Jew-hatred.
I don't agree that American Jews cannot join a political movement as Shapiro and Yorzany have done. The Conservative movement has by and large been friendly to Jews and Israel for decades now. Of course the rise of hostility to Jews and Israel on the right changes things and these figures and others are attempting to fight it not accommodate it. Which is of course what figures on what used to be the mainstream left, including Jews like Foer, have been doing and are doing. Here we see Foer literally insisting its not really happening and the MAIN threat remains on the right. I see this echoed by Democrats everywhere.
What I do agree with is that Jews who care about our people cannot put other interests ahead of this one and must be prepared to leave any movement that becomes untenable. This is something few on the left seem able to do. Most act like Foer, unwilling to even admit the problem exists. He is especially pathetic.