Jews who came to the United States from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries celebrated the country as the "Goldene Medina," Yiddish for the "Golden Land." And by comparison to life in Czarist Russia with its pogroms, conscription of Jewish men for 25 years and restrictions on professions and owning land, so it was.

Jews have certainly flourished in the United States. While only a little over 2% of Americans are Jewish, over 30% all the Nobel Prizes won by Americans have been won by Jews, ranging from Bob Dylan's for literature to Paul Samuelson's for economics. The founders of iconic American companies such as Facebook, Estee Lauder, the Home Depot, Oracle and Warner Brothers were all Jewish.

In fact, a March 2023 Pew Research poll found Americans felt more positive about Jews than mainline Protestants, evangelicals, Catholics or atheists. And yet by March 2024, an article in The Atlantic declared the golden age of American Jews is ending. Another article in The New York Times this month reported "a sense that simply existing in public as a Jewish person is increasingly dangerous."

What changed in those 12 months? On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel. The subsequent war between the terrorist group and the Jewish state awakened the slumbering dragon of American antisemitism, prejudice against Jews. Three recent assaults on Jews in this country dramatically illustrate the point:

— In April, a man set fire to the residence of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, on the first night of Passover. The accused called Shapiro a monster "for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people." As a state governor, Shapiro has no role in formulating U.S. policy toward the Middle East.

— In an incident last month, a man who murdered a young couple he did not know as they left the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., told police, "I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza."

— This month, a man yelled out "Free Palestine!" as he set fire to demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado, who were calling for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

In all three cases, the motivation for the attack was opposition to Israel. In all three cases, the intended targets were presumed to be Jewish. The attackers' reasoning must have gone something like this: I am against Israel, Israel is a majority-Jewish state, therefore I should attack Jews wherever I find them. The assailants then targeted Jews not because of their individual beliefs, which they did not know, but because they are Jews.

Blaming a Jew who is an American resident and citizen for what happens elsewhere in the world is not a pro-Hamas, pro-Arab or pro-Palestinian stance; it is an antisemitic one. It is antisemitism when American citizens who are Jewish are held responsible for the actions of the state of Israel, a foreign country over 6,000 miles away.

Americans of Russian descent whose families have been in the U.S. for generations are seldom if ever blamed for the bloodshed resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why then do so many who oppose Israeli actions in the Middle East blame American Jews whose roots in this country often go back a century or more? The obvious answer is antisemitism, a prejudice against Jews that can be traced back from ancient times through the Holocaust when 6 million Jews were murdered because of their religious ancestry.

The renewal of widespread antisemitism in this country is like a biblical plague of locusts that lay buried for years, only to reemerge and devastate society. In 2022, the Anti-Defamation League counted 3,697 antisemitic incidents in the United States. Two years later, the number was 9,354, up over 2.5 times. Swastikas were painted near a Holocaust memorial in Philadelphia and on a synagogue in Minneapolis. Jews were excluded from an anti-Nazi rally in Cincinnati and a march supporting lesbians in New York City.

I live on the Harvard campus during the school year. There are Jewish students and faculty here who support Israel's efforts to free the hostages and defeat Hamas, and there are Jews who oppose the very existence of the state of Israel. One Jewish student told me over a meal in the dining hall that he feared for his physical safety if he spoke out in favor of Israel. Since the Oct. 7 attack, many students now hide their identity as Jews. There have been chants on campus to "globalize the intifada" — which seems to call for exporting Middle Eastern violence to the U.S. A report on antisemitism at Harvard found, "We are not aware of any other group on campus that is subject to social exclusion as part of an intentional campaign by political organizers."

Rabbi David Wolpe, a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School in 2023-24, said a Jewish student told him: "They don't just hate what I believe. They hate me." Sheila Katz, chief executive of the National Council of Jewish Women, wrote: "Our position on this war, or on Israel, does not affect how extremists perceive us. To them, we are all Jews, and that alone makes us targets for hate and violence."

Antisemitism is anti-American. It is now and always has been. In 1790, George Washington wrote to a synagogue in Rhode Island: "May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

Amen.

A renaissance man, Keith Raffel has served as the senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, started a successful internet software company and written five novels, which you can check out at keithraffel.com. He currently spends the academic year as a resident scholar at Harvard. To find out more about Keith and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at creators.com.

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Photo credit: Levi Meir Clancy at Unsplash