Is antisemitism worse on the Right or the Left? As Deborah Lipstadt argued in Jan. 2024, invoking Sholem Aleichem, the question is akin to choosing between dysentery in Kyiv and cholera in Odesa.
MS NOW analysts Michelle Goldberg and Antonia Hylton chose cholera.
Screenshot of the MS NOW panel on The Weekend: Primetime, March 14, 2026.
During the March 14, 2026, episode of The Weekend: Primetime, hosted by journalist Ayman Mohyeldin, the panel discussed bigotry in the Republican party. When Catherine Rampell argued that antisemitism is also rising on the Left, Michelle Goldberg and Antonia Hylton repeatedly overruled her, creating a clear two-against-one dynamic with the host on their side.
Goldberg conceded that “ferocious anti-Zionism” on the Left can cross into antisemitism but insisted the Right has embraced more explicit forms, including Nazism. When Rampell pointed to a Hezbollah-linked synagogue attacker as a counterexample, Goldberg dismissed the claim and Hylton backed her.
The pattern held. Hylton argued the Right rewards antisemitism, unlike the Left. Rampell countered with a Democratic candidate bearing a Nazi tattoo. Even as Rampell warned against treating antisemitism as partisan, her position remained isolated and repeatedly challenged.
Strikingly, Hylton’s claim that left-wing antisemitism is not rewarded can be easily disputed with the victory of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose forthright anti-Zionist stance mobilized 62 percent of his voters. Mamdani, ahead of the election, repeatedly refused to denounce calls to “globalize the intifada,” a popular chant at anti-Israel protests that invokes the Palestinian intifadas in which over a thousand Israeli civilians were murdered in suicide bombings, shootings, and stabbings. Old videos of him showed that he blamed the Israelis Defense Forces for police brutality in the United States.
Was his electoral victory not a reward for his antisemitism?
The most crucial conclusion, however, that these MS NOW commentators failed to grasp is that whether members of a political party express support for Hitler or for terrorism against Israelis, they are still supporting the mass murder of Jews.
While Goldberg and the MS NOW commentators drew attention to neo-Nazism on the Right, they omitted the fact that anti-Zionism is also a core component of the neo-Nazi ideology. Notably, Nick Fuentes, a known white supremacist leader who attended the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, has repeatedly expressed anti-Israel sentiment tied to his neo-Nazi values. Fuentes founded the non-profit America First Foundation, which lists Zionism, the Jewish right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, on its website as a “foreign and immoral” ideology that has “undermined” U.S. sovereignty. Other openly anti-Zionist white supremacists are David Duke, Andrew Anglin, Richard Spencer, and many others.
The unholy, anti-Zionist alliance of fascism and Islamism has reared its ugly head throughout history, most infamously among Adolf Hitler, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and numerous politicians in the Arab world in the 1930s and 40s. At Heinrich Himmler’s behest, al-Husseini spread Nazi propaganda throughout the Middle East and traveled to the Balkans to recruit Bosnian and Albanian Muslims for Waffen-SS, while repeatedly calling for Arabs to join Axis militaries. He often spoke of a “worldwide Jewish conspiracy” that controlled the British and U.S. governments and sponsored Soviet Communism. He argued that global Jewry aimed to infiltrate and subjugate Palestine as a staging ground for the seizure of all Arab lands.
The 1941 Farhud pogrom in Iraq was rooted in the mixture of pro-Nazi propaganda and anti-Zionist sentiment fomented by the Iraqi government that was allied with the Nazi regime. In 1948, many Albanian and Bosnian Muslims who served in the Waffen-SS and other Axis forces, joined Arab militaries to fight against the nascent Jewish state.
More recently, in July 2022, when anti-Israel group BDS Boston published a map that pinpointed locations of Jewish communal organizations in Massachusetts, which the organization charged were interconnected nodes of “Zionism, Policing, and Empire,” white supremacist groups like the Goyim Defense League platformed it, further threatening Jewish communities.
We saw this coming. White supremacist groups like GDL are joining the Iranian regime and anti-Zionist bigots to promote the antisemitic Mapping Project. This isn’t protected political speech; it’s poisonous incitement that endangers the Jewish community. #ScrapTheMap https://t.co/KFDNNmwyMO
— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) July 18, 2022
Even on its own, anti-Zionism on the Left has resulted in violent attacks on Jewish individuals and communities. Left-wing groups and academics, such as the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter and Judith Butler, celebrated and excused the October 7, 2023, frenzy of Hamas-led violence. Left-wing college administrators looked the other way as Jewish students were targeted on university campuses, and professors maliciously singled out their Jewish students.
Attacks motivated by left-wing antisemitism
As chants like “Globalize the Intifada” and “Resistance is justified when a people are occupied” have grown in popularity in pro-Palestinian circles over the last five years, there have been increasingly more attacks on Jewish individuals and institutions across the U.S.
In May 2021, Salem Seleiman attacked a Jewish man wearing a kippah on the sidelines of an anti-Israel protest in Times Square while chanting “filthy Jew,” “dirty Jew,” and “f*** Israel.” Seleiman was sentenced to two years in prison in December 2025 for the hate crime.
In April 2022, a Jewish counter-protester was assaulted at a protest organized by the anti-Zionist group Within Our Lifetime, as he was walking with an Israeli flag on his back, like a cape.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recorded 5,200 antisemitic incidents between Oct. 7, 2023, and the end of that year in the U.S. Over a third of all antisemitic incidents in all of 2023 were in reference to Israel or Zionism. 2024 then saw another record-breaking year of antisemitic incidents in the U.S., with the ADL recording a total of 9,354 for the entire year. Of those attacks, nearly two-thirds were tied to anti-Zionist sentiment.
In May 2025, ;a terrorist murdered two Israeli embassy employees outside the Jewish Museum in Washington D.C. The attacker yelled “Free Palestine” upon his arrest. The next month, a man threw an explosive at a Boulder, Colorado rally that called for the release of the hostages held in Gaza, injuring eight.
The latest attack, on Mar. 13, 2026, saw a Lebanese-American dual national ram his truck into Temple Israel, while over 100 children were in the building. Just the security guard who confronted the attacker was injured at the scene.
For these MS NOW pundits, denouncing Republicans took precedence over confronting antisemitism wherever it proliferates.
Just as Mohyeldin had previously claimed that the Right was weaponizing antisemitism to attack free speech on college campuses during anti-Israel protests, these reporters mirrored the exact behavior they had previously condemned, underlining their hypocrisy and double standards.