Chuck Schumer’s moral cowardice has enabled antisemitism

Any doubt about that was erased when it was announced that he was writing a book about antisemitism, due to be released this week. But his office just canceled the senator’s book tour, which would have taken him to stops at prestigious Jewish venues in Atlanta, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, as well as a few scheduled appearances in California. The reason cited was “security concerns.”

That really seals the deal. At a time when Jews are facing an unprecedented surge in hate directed against them, that a Jewish leader who is protected around the clock by Capitol Police—and who claims to be a leader of his community, as well as the self-styled shomer or “guardian” of Israel—would choose to hide rather than face his critics says all there is to know about him, his book and exactly why we don’t need to hear a word from him on the subject.

The shomer title is a piece of dishonest shtick that Schumer has been using his entire adult life, all spent in political office. It’s an attempt to cash in on the fact that his name sounds like the Hebrew word for “guardian” or “watchman.” In truth, its meaning derives from a German word that meant “shoemaker” or a good-for-nothing vagabond. That wouldn’t matter if the 74-year-old had acted as the shomer of the Jewish community or a valiant supporter of Israel during his 44 years serving in Washington, the last 26 in the Senate. When running for re-election or speaking to Jewish groups, he puts on a show whose purpose is to portray himself as an ordinary guy from Brooklyn determined to look out for other Jews and the most devoted friend of Israel in Congress.

The truth has always been different. Schumer is—like many in his profession and much of humanity—solely interested in his own interests and professional advancement. But it has become hard to miss in recent years as his quest to be the leader of the Democratic caucus in the Senate came into conflict with a sea change within his own party when it comes to Israel and the Jews.

That produced episodes like the debate about the dangerous 2015 Iran nuclear deal promoted by former President Barack Obama.

Outside of the far left, the entire Jewish community and almost all Israelis were opposed to this act of appeasement to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Schumer didn’t feel he could get away with voting for it and also rightly feared that if he used his considerable influence to persuade fellow Democrats to join him in opposing it, it would alienate the president. More than that, it would doom his chances of becoming Democratic leader after Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) retired after the next election in 2016. So, he voted “no” but pledged not to advocate against Obama’s pet foreign-policy project.

He survived that slimy compromise in his usual manner in which he sought to assure both factions in his party—the remaining supporters of Israel, and the increasingly powerful and vocal intersectional left-wing hostile to the Jewish state—that they could rely on him.

An attack on Israel’s government

After the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, it became a lot more difficult for Schumer to keep talking out of both sides of his mouth.

In March of last year, just five months after the slaughter of 1,200 men, women and children on Oct. 7, Schumer gave a speech on the floor of the Senate in which he demanded that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resign and falsely accused the Israeli Defense Forces of targeting Arab civilians.

Why involve yourself in the domestic politics of a fellow democracy and seek to undermine its war of self-defense while it was fighting for its life against Palestinian terrorists?

The answer was that he did it to give cover to the Biden administration’s similar bashing of Netanyahu and the IDF. Schumer was in a position to rally support for the Jewish state during the war. He could have led the pushback against leftists within his own party, who were wrongly blaming Israel for genocide and pressuring President Joe Biden to slow-walk arms deliveries and engage in efforts that hampered Israel’s ability to eradicate Hamas. Instead, he used his unique position as Senate Majority Leader to legitimize critics.

That was a particularly loathsome but also predictably partisan performance for a man who had already shown a willingness to sink pretty low throughout his Senate career if by doing so he could gain favor from the Democratic base. He was, after all, the senator who in 2020 publicly threatened U.S. Supreme Court justices Neal Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh if they voted against his preferred position on abortion, saying “You will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you.” But, as he always does, Schumer got away with it.

Schumer has always been the sort of backer of Israel who couched his support in terms that regarded Jerusalem as only truly worthy if it did as its liberal American friends advised it to do. Like many other liberals, he still thinks of the conflict between the Jewish state and its foes as one that can be solved by a two-state solution. The overwhelming majority of Israelis stopped believing that way after the 1993 Oslo Accords proved to be a disaster amid the carnage of the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005. That the 2005 withdrawal of every Israeli soldier, settler and settlement from Gaza led to a Hamas terror state in the Strip solidified that consensus.

Like a great many American Jews, however, Schumer is still stuck in the past and feels that Israel ought to be saved from itself by forcing it to make suicidal concessions to the Palestinians. He continues to support a policy of imposing a Palestinian state on the region, even though Oct. 7 has demonstrated to Israelis from left to right what happens when the Palestinians get a safe haven from which they can plot attacks on them.

Advising Columbia University

Yet Schumer’s betrayal of the Jewish community would be more fully exposed later in 2024, when a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives revealed that the senator was actually advising leaders of Columbia University in New York City not to worry too much about criticism of their failures to protect Jewish students in the weeks and months after Oct. 7 as the campus was turned upside down by antisemitic, pro-Hamas mobs. Schumer told them only Republicans cared about the issue.

The House subpoenaed the text messages from former Columbia University president Minouche Shafik to her board members about the advice given to her by the senator. While he talks a lot about how awful Jew-hatred is—mostly focusing on examples from the far right—he conveniently downplays or ignores what’s been going on inside the mainstream of his own party.

By telling Shafik that Columbia’s leaders should merely “keep [their] heads down,” Schumer showed his true colors. No one who gives a damn about antisemitism or the welfare of Jewish students would have said such a thing. It comes naturally, though, to someone who understands that the primary threat to his status as Senate Democratic leader and potentially to his heretofore safe seat comes from the antisemitic political left that is particularly strong in New York.

Indeed, the alleged worries about Schumer’s “security” this week don’t come from supporters of Israel. Instead, they come from the base of the Democratic Party which is upset that he didn’t use a filibuster to prevent the nation’s budget from being passed last Friday, thereby shutting down the government to spite President Donald Trump and the Republicans. In the past, left-wing Democrats excoriated the GOP for threatening shutdowns over budget votes and labeled the “filibuster” a vestige of “Jim Crow” racism. But the anti-Trump “resistance” is now warning Schumer that he may face a primary challenge in 2028 from someone like “Squad” leader Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for not doing their bidding and keeping the government funded.

This demonstrates just how little credit Schumer’s record of moral compromises and undermining Israel has earned him with his party’s base.

In the months after his comments to Columbia were revealed, Schumer twice frustrated friends of Israel. In the last weeks of the lame-duck Congress, he refused to allow a vote in the Senate on the Antisemitism Awareness Act that codified the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of the term into federal law. That measure overwhelmingly passed the House by a large margin and had majority support in the Senate. Still, Schumer was worried about alienating so-called “progressives” in his party who traffic in the hatred of Israel and Jews.

After the new Congress took office in January, he used a cloture vote and the threat of a filibuster to block the passage of a bill that would have imposed serious sanctions on the International Criminal Court and all who do business with it because of their antisemitic prosecution of the Jewish state on false charge of “genocide” in the Gaza Strip.

A shameless fraud

That’s an impressive list of actions that hurt Israel. And that brings us to his book launch.

After all that he’s done in recent years, he is the last person who should be treated as an authority on the fight against antisemitism or the need to stand with Israel during its war against genocidal Islamist terrorists. Perhaps only a man whose only gainful employment during his life has been that of a politician and who has spent the last four and a half decades telling the world how much of a defender of the Jews he is could believe what his press releases say. Only such a person so divorced from reality and the truth could have had the chutzpah to have a book published under his name (regardless of which staffers or ghosts actually wrote it) in which he proffers advice about how to fight a surge of Jew-hatred he has done so much to aid.

This is the context in which his Antisemitism in America: A Warning should be viewed. Its content is irrelevant to the discussion. Any book on the subject from a man, let alone a Jew, who was advising those who enabled and tolerated antisemitism at Columbia to continue to do nothing about the targeting of Jewish students has no standing to speak or write about the subject. Self-respecting Jews and decent people of all faiths and backgrounds should simply ignore the book as the work of a shameless fraud.

His refusal to face his critics—be they in the Jewish community or from his party’s base that thinks he isn’t radical enough to suit them—is just one more indication of the same moral cowardice that he has exhibited time and again. A fair-minded history of his sorry career will label him as not merely a typical political opportunist. He’s also a disgrace to his people and a crucial ally, whether they appreciate him or not, of those who have fomented an unprecedented surge of hatred against Jews.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.