Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has chosen an inopportune time to publish a book. The release of Antisemitism in America: A Warning coincides with a revolt among Democrats against his failure to oppose a Republican budget that slashes Medicaid and other domestic spending. To avoid protests, he has had to cancel his book tour. His media interviews often feature questions about how the Democratic Party lost its way.

Antisemitism in America inadvertently helps explain the depth of frustration with Schumer: Although its subject is Jew-hatred, it reveals why Schumer can’t adequately confront the authoritarian danger posed by Donald Trump. In his book, Washington’s most powerful Democrat fails to recognize both the nature of the white nationalist threat powering the Trump presidency and the necessity of building a mass movement to fight it.

The core of Schumer’s argument—which draws heavily on Franklin Foer’s 2024 essay in The Atlantic, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” and will be familiar to readers of Deborah Lipstadt and Bari Weiss—is that antisemitism declined in the US in the second half of the 20th century but has returned with a vengeance in the early decades of the 21st, on both the left and the right. Schumer uses his own political rise to illustrate this bygone halcyon era. Reflecting on his election to the House of Representatives in 1980, he declares, “Twenty years earlier I was hearing schoolyard taunts on the streets of Brooklyn. Now I was sitting in the Speaker’s office.”

The problem with Schumer’s story begins with his account of why antisemitism declined after World War II. In the 1950s and ’60s, he writes, “opportunities were being extended to Jews that had not been extended before. America was getting used to us.” Then “as the ’60s gave way to the ’70s and ’80s, more of the institutional barriers were being broken down and Jews were starting to arrive into positions of power.” Schumer describes this process in the passive voice, as something natural and apolitical. It’s never clear who broke down these barriers or why they became permeable.

The only causal mechanism Schumer acknowledges is the Holocaust, which sensitized Americans to the dangers of Jew-hatred. Notably absent is the struggle against white supremacy. While Schumer mentions that many Jews supported civil rights, he never credits the civil rights movement—or the movements for women’s and LGBT rights—with weakening patriarchal, white Christian dominance. To be sure, the relationship between these activist struggles and Jewish upward mobility isn’t straightforward: Even as Jews benefited from a more inclusive America, many also joined the backlash against it. But Schumer largely bypasses this story of struggle and counter-struggle and describes the decline of 20th-century American antisemitism as something that just happened.

The one ’60s-era activist movement that Schumer discusses in any detail is the effort to end the Vietnam War. But although he participated in that movement as a student at Harvard, he writes mostly about his frustration with anti-war campus radicals. Their “zeal and fury,” he writes, “was ultimately counterproductive. They turned too many people off.” His disillusionment with campus activists “determined how I came to understand and relate to the art of politics, protest and left-leaning movements” for the rest of his life.

This sequestered, apolitical account of antisemitism’s decline lays the foundation for Schumer’s sequestered, apolitical account of antisemitism’s rise. He chalks rising Jew-hatred up to a grab bag of economic, technological, and foreign policy disruptions: “From the Iraq War to the 2008 Financial Crisis, the Great Recession and the Covid pandemic—alongside globalization and the drastic reorganization of the world from analog to digital—the world of the early twenty-first century looked a lot scarier and more chaotic than the world of the end of the twentieth century.” But this is too vague to hold explanatory power. Although Schumer devotes a chapter to “Antisemitism and the Right,” he doesn’t see white Christian nationalism as central to antisemitism’s resurgence, but simply as one factor among many.

He also makes little effort to connect bigotry against Jews to bigotry against other vulnerable Americans. Schumer sees the desire of some Jews to discuss antisemitism alongside other prejudices as a form of timidity. He explicitly rejects the claim that addressing Jew-hatred requires also “addressing Islamophobia and racism,” and insists that “antisemitism is worthy of concern and attention in its own right.” Empirically, this makes little sense. The Americans most hostile to Jews also tend to dislike other historically marginalized groups. The man who murdered worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 was initially radicalized by his fear of Central American migrants. At least two recentstudies show that the Americans most hostile to Jews also tend to be hostile to Muslims. And contrary to Schumer’s depiction, these intersecting hatreds are not equally spread across the ideological spectrum. As the political scientists Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden note in an influential 2021 study, “antisemitic attitudes are rare on the ideological left but common on the ideological right.” In December 2023, amid widespread furor over campus antisemitism, Hersh found that “the evidence from college students after October 7th is quite consistent with previous research.” It is “young people on the right,” far more than their leftist counterparts, who “endorse ominous and prejudicial statements about Jews.” And it is precisely these racial, religious, and cultural resentments—more than economic and technological dislocation—that explainsupport for Donald Trump.

So why doesn’t Schumer connect antisemitism’s resurgence to the effort to revive mid-20th-century white Christian dominance and “make America great again”? Because that story doesn’t explain growing progressive criticism of Israel, which Schumer casts as a form of antisemitism at least equal to that of the Trumpist right. He’s particularly alarmed by what he considers an epidemic of pro-Palestinian antisemitism since October 7th. Like other American politicians and establishment Jewish leaders, he buttresses this claim by defining many contemporary progressive critiques of Israel as antisemitic without bothering to investigate whether such critiques might actually be true. Following the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, he suggests it is bigoted to apply “double standards” to Israel. “We have a problem with Israel-related antisemitism in America today,” Schumer writes, because the “sustained and increasing blame that Israel receives” in the US is “far beyond what any other country would face when put in similar circumstances.” But Schumer never discusses what those circumstances actually are; in fact, he says almost nothing about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians before October 7th. Reading his book, you’d never know that Palestinians in the West Bank live under military law, or that Palestinians in Gaza have lived for the last 18 years in what Human Rights Watch calls an “open-air prison.” You’d never know that the world’s leadinghuman rights organizations, and Israel’sown, accuse it of practicing apartheid. To acknowledge any of this would wreck Schumer’s argument. Is it really antisemitic for Americans to express special outrage when the US spends more than $20 billion in one year arming a state that Amnesty International says is committing genocide?

Like the IHRA, Schumer also suggests it is antisemitic to impugn Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. Criticism of Israel is acceptable, he acknowledges, but “to routinely and openly question the very existence of that nation—founded to give Jewish life a second chance, to give Jews a place to escape antisemitism—for me, and for many Jewish-Americans, crosses the line.” But while Israel gave many Jews fleeing Nazism a “second chance” at a decent life, it destroyed the lives of many Palestinians. It came into existence in 1948 by expelling roughly 750,000 Palestinians, expelled hundreds of thousands more in 1967, and now openly states its desire to ethnically cleanse two million Palestinians in Gaza. Schumer mentions none of this and thus concludes that only antisemitism could lead progressives to question the moral basis of the state.

Ultimately, elevating pro-Palestinian antisemitism and downplaying white nationalist antisemitism doesn’t only lead Schumer to minimize the Trumpist threat. It makes him complicit in it. Trump is attacking universities for the same reason he’s attacking law firms and independent media: to cow and enfeeble institutions that could challenge his authoritarian rule. But in the case of universities, a central pretext is that they have not protected Jewish students from the bigotry that allegedly pervades pro-Palestinian activism. Schumer agrees. In Antisemitism in America, he accuses Columbia of “a widespread failure to discipline both faculty and students who engaged in overtly antisemitic activities” after October 7th—even though the university’s former president suspended its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace within a month of the massacre, called in New York City police to arrest more than 100 students who had established a peaceful “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on the university’s lawn, and denounced some of her own faculty in testimony before a congressional committee.

Having conceded Trump’s premise, Schumer can only quibble around the edges when Trump wields it to crush academic freedom, freedom of expression, due process, and immigrant rights. When US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials seized Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident who is married to a US citizen and has been charged with no crime, the ACLU warned that it might constitute the biggest threat to free speech in the United States in the last half-century. Schumer’s response was far more equivocal. He began a March 11th tweet about Khalil’s detention by declaring that “I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports, and have made my criticism of the antisemitic actions at Columbia loudly known.” Schumer went on to suggest that Khalil “may well be in violation of various campus rules regarding how the protests were conducted last year,” and that Columbia should be “much more robust in how they combat antisemitism.” (He has gone on to clarify that only criminal law, not campus rules, should matter to Khalil’s case, while still implying that he is guilty of antisemitism.) Schumer cited no evidence that Khalil has done anything wrong. But the suggestion was that he should probably be punished for something. Only after that prologue did Schumer concede that if the Trump administration can’t prove Khalil has violated the law, “they are violating the First Amendment protections we all enjoy and should drop their wrongheaded action.”

“My job,” Schumer recently toldTimes columnist Bret Stephens, “is to keep the left pro-Israel.” If this—and not the defense of liberal democracy—is what Schumer considers his primary job, it’s no surprise that he won’t full-throatedly defend Khalil, or the other students who ICE agents are snatching off the street for opposing Israel’s destruction of Gaza. In his downplaying of the threat of white Christian supremacy, and his ignorance of and disdain for the 20th-century popular movements that once fought it, Schumer cannot see that such a movement is needed again—and that it will need to embrace people like Mahmoud Khalil, who oppose tribal supremacy not only in the US, but in Palestine and Israel as well.

Around the same time he published his book, Schumer chose not to wage a filibuster against Trump’s budget, even though progressives said it offered a unique opportunity to rally Americans against the president’s authoritarian onslaught. Whenasked by TheNew York Times how he would defend American democracy, Schumer said that if Trump’s polling numbers went down, Republican Senators would start opposing him. As evidence, he cited his conversations in the Senate gym. This is Schumer’s vision of moral progress without popular struggle. It warps his understanding of American Jewish history, makes him skeptical of contemporary movements for justice, and is proving radically inadequate in this moment of profound national peril.