Dr. Batya Ungar-Sargon is a journalist and author who served as opinion editor of The Forward and later deputy opinion editor of Newsweek. Her forthcoming book, “The Jews and the Left” tells the story of antisemitism in America, and the changing political tides. Rabbi Aron White spoke with her to understand more of her analysis, and what American Jews need to reckon with now.

Your work centers on the relationship between Jews and the political left. But let’s start with the mirror image: when did the idea take hold that antisemitism is primarily a right-wing phenomenon, and what was that based on?

In the U.S., as around the globe, antisemitism was primarily a right-wing phenomenon for most of modern history. In Europe, Jewish emancipation, where it existed, was always a function of the Left. The Right, associated with the Church and the aristocracy, opposed Jewish rights, while the philosophers of the Left pushed for emancipation. In the U.S., where antisemitism has always been rare, it was almost always on the political Right – until the 1960s. The Republican Party attacked FDR relentlessly as being in the pocket of the Jews. Father Coughlin and Henry Ford were enamored with the Nazis. Meanwhile, FDR was a hero to the Jews: he ended the Depression, hired oodles of Jews to work on the New Deal. Antisemites called it “The Jew Deal,” and they weren’t wrong – and of course, he defeated Hitler. As Judge Jonah F. Goldstein put it, Jews lived in three velten (worlds): di velt (this world), yene velt (the world to come), un Roosevelt.

The sheer magnitude of Hitler’s attempt to eradicate world Jewry, coded as right-wing, eclipsed every other antisemitic event before and since, making the Soviets’ left-wing anti-Zionism seem far less threatening than perhaps it was. So the idea that antisemitism was a right-wing phenomenon was a true one for most of modern history, certainly for the first half of the twentieth century. That began to change in the late 1960s.

The Right would also push for America to be declared a Christian nation, which many Jews viewed as inherently threatening. But America isn’t a Christian country – it’s a Judeo-Christian one. It was founded as an inherently religious country based on civilizational values that the founding fathers found in the Torah, or the Hebrew Bible, as they called it. And it turns out, that was the ticket to Jewish freedom: Christians establishing a country in which everyone could worship G-d in their own way. In a sad irony, most American Jews don’t practice our religion. They rejected the component of our identity that was most precious to our founders – who embraced us so wholeheartedly from day one in this country.

You describe how Jewish and biblical themes were central to early American political culture. When did that change?

It’s actually alive and well in Evangelical discourse about the nation. But it declined in the culture at large because the Left took control of the culture in the post-war era, and the Left is secular. The biblical and Jewish roots of the nation weren’t meaningful to them – and sadly, this includes many Jews.

American Jews view themselves as an immigrant community, but we aren’t. There have been Jews on U.S. soil since 1654. We erased the first 250 years of our existence here – my book is about why.

For most American Jews, their affiliation with liberal, Democratic politics is as important to their Jewish identity as our religion – if not more so. It’s a lot to ask our fellow Americans to look past how we talk about ourselves and remember the history we forgot, and it is a massive credit to those who do.

If the Left gave Jews a political home, what were the practical benefits of that partnership?

It was a huge boon for workers, because we created the labor movement. There’s a five-day work week because of Jews. Jews were the first Americans to strike for better wages and better working conditions.

We were also wildly overrepresented in the Civil Rights Movement – some 70% of the lawyers drafting legislation in the South to dismantle Jim Crow were Jewish, and a third of the white martyrs to Klan violence were Jews.

Jews gave a huge boost to all the righteous fights of the Left over the twentieth century – and some less righteous ones. And at least until the Left turned on the Jews, these causes gave American Jews a sense of self in a country whose love of the Jews had always been so intense that our greatest “threat” was erasure through intermarriage.

You describe 1967 as the turning point. What happened, and how did this shift unfold?

In 1967, Israel won the Six-Day War in a massive show of force against five Arab armies, shocking the world with its military strength. It reshaped Jewish identity in the eyes of the world, which had grown accustomed to seeing Jews as victims of a horrific genocide.

But the 1960s was not a hospitable time for images of military success. The Vietnam War was raging, and the Left was where opposition to the war was strongest – and they did not bother to distinguish between wars of choice and wars of existential defense. As long as the Jews were victims of the Nazis, there was sympathy for them from all corners of American society. The Left had also loved that Israel was, at the time, a socialist country – in fact, for a long time, the Democrats were more pro-Israel than the Republicans. But when Israelis went from being socialist farmers on kibbutzim to military warriors, the Left turned on Israel. As J.J. Goldberg put it, “The spirit of the 1960s was hospitable to Israelis in sandals, it seemed, but not to Israelis in helmets.”

Soon after, Dr. King was assassinated, and the ideals he had fought for – equality for all, a common American identity in which all were free – were discarded for the more radical Black separatist movement, which argued not for a shared American identity but for every minority embracing its unique oppression. Being anti-white – which, in practice, meant being antisemitic, since Jews were the white Americans most involved in the Civil Rights Movement – was how you proved you weren’t still caught up in Dr. King’s more conciliatory vision, which the Left began to portray as passé.

A worship of weakness replaced the fight for equality, and Jews were quickly cast into the oppressor category – for their economic success at home, and for Israel’s military strength abroad. And oppressors are evil.

Then the Soviets, who sided with the Arabs in the Middle East, began peddling the lie that Zionism is racism as a way of weakening Israel, a client state of their great adversary. That is how the Left started to turn on the Jews – the very Jews without whom there would have been no Leftist successes in America.

How do you assess the state of left-wing antisemitism since October 7th? Is this an escalation of existing trends, or something fundamentally new?

It has definitely intensified sharply. But none of it would have shocked anyone who got a humanities degree in the decades before. It was all baked in.

Do you see this as connected to the campaign against Israel in international institutions – the UN, the NGOs, the international courts?

I don’t put much stock in NGOs or the UN. We’re in a populist age, and even the organized Left is fairly disconnected from large, mainstream institutions.

It’s comforting to think that these protesters are being paid to demonstrate on behalf of Hamas or the Ayatollah Khamenei. But the truth is, most of them aren’t. They simply believe what they are chanting. That’s much harder to accept, because convincing people they are wrong is far more difficult than simply cutting off their funding.

Thank you very much for speaking with us.