“Antisemitism appears from the left and the right, but not equally,” a Mar. 24, 2026, Los Angeles Times Op-Ed, is part of a growing editorial trend in left-leaning media. By repeatedly platforming arguments that downplay antisemitism on the left, while framing right-wing extremism as the only urgent threat to Jewish safety, these outlets create a lopsided reality for their readers.
Authors David N. Myers and Joshua Goetz argue that antisemitism on the left is largely a response to Israeli military actions, while stressing that antisemitism on the right is the greater threat because of its perceived proximity to political power. In doing so, they present readers with a false choice: sounding the alarm on one form of hate while actively rationalizing the other.
A 2025 rally in New York City on the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre. (credit: Oleg Yunakov, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Most notably, although the authors condemn those who blame Israeli actions for fueling antisemitic attacks on Jews worldwide, they nevertheless hold the Jewish state – rather than the attackers – as responsible for preventing antisemitic violence. Tellingly, the print edition subheadline adds: “There’s another elephant in the room: Israeli military action appears to fuel global anti-Jewish violence.”
Shifting responsibility on Israel and away from the antisemites flies in the face of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, adopted by scores of Western nations, which explicitly includes: “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.” (Interestingly, the digital version of the article hyperlinks to studies which cite the IHRA definition.)
The authors point to what they describe as the “utter devastation of Gaza,” including the reported deaths of more than 70,000 Palestinians (a figure that does not differentiate between combatants and civilians), and cite Israeli attacks in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, which, they argue, were conducted with a high degree of impunity.
Missing from their argumentation is the recognition that the war in Gaza followed the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, when Hamas-led terrorists killed 1,200 people and kidnapped more than 250 during an organized attack on Israeli territory. Missing, too, is the reality that Israel faces not isolated threats, but a network of hostile groups across the region, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen. All have called for Israel’s destruction and have acted on those threats. Since Oct. 7, Israelis have lived under near-constant rocket fire, along with pledges that such attacks will be repeated.
Despite this context, Dr. Myers and Goetz suggest that if Israel halts its military operations to prevent further attacks against its civilians, left-wing antisemitism, often framed as anti-Zionism, will decline. This argument shifts responsibility away from those expressing antisemitism and places it on the Jewish state that acts in its own self-defense. It also fails to address key questions: why should Israel be expected to absorb ongoing attacks without responding, risking the safety of its citizens, in the hope of reducing hostility toward Jews elsewhere? By their logic, half the world’s Jews — all those who live in Israel — are expendable.
Left-Wing Antisemitism Framed as Anti-Zionism Predates Israel Itself
Perhaps inconvenient to these authors’ argument is that the targeting of Jews under the guise of anti-Zionism did not begin with Israeli policy. Anti-Zionism has roots in strands of far-left ideology that long predate the state itself. Thinkers with lasting legacies such as Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and Vladimir Lenin rejected Zionism as incompatible with their socialist views. While Karl Marx predated modern political Zionism, his writings left an intellectual legacy deeply critical of nationalism and, by extension, Jewish statehood.
The Soviet Union later developed a structured campaign of anti-Zionist propaganda between the 1940s through the 1980s. It portrayed Zionism as racist, imperialist, and illegitimate. Anti-Zionist tropes from this period still recycled today include claims that Zionism is racism, a tool of Western imperialism and colonialism, a form of fascism and even Nazism, and that “Zionists” secretly control governments, media, and finance. Soviet messaging also depicted Zionism as aggressive and genocidal while casting Jews associated with it as disloyal to the empire. These narratives were systematically used to incite delegitimizing global campaigns against the Jewish state to destroy it.
The argument that Israeli military action causes violence against Jews in the Diaspora ignores over a century of anti-Zionist ideology and related violence. One could just as easily argue the reverse: that the rejection of a Jewish state has driven many of the conflicts that lead to Israeli military action.
The Left is Home to Most American Jews
The authors’ assertion that antisemitism on the right, still a grave problem, poses the main threat to American Jews overlooks a basic reality: most American Jews live, work, and engage in left-leaning social, cultural, and political environments. While Dr. Myers and Goetz rely on academic sources to argue that antisemitism is more prevalent on the right, they failed to consider the immediate, daily impact of left-wing hostility on American Jewry.
For decades, American Jews have voted overwhelmingly Democratic – about 80 percent in 1992 and still at least 66 percent in 2024, with some estimates reaching 78 percent. They are also concentrated in major cities, universities, and advocacy spaces that tend to lean heavily liberal.
The authors rightly point out the danger of antisemitism on the right, but they present a false dichotomy. Demanding accountability on the left does not require ignoring the right.
If incidents are rapidly arising within the environments people inhabit daily, it is logical to demand those immediate threats be addressed with the exact same vigor applied to the severe threats on the right.
The “house on fire” analogy, often used in discussions of Black Lives Matter, holds that when one house is burning, attention should be focused there because the danger is most urgent.
But what happens if two houses are burning across from one another?
By solely platforming those calling for urgent attention towards antisemitism on the right while minimizing it on the left, these left-leaning outlets are pouring water on only one of the houses while allowing flames to engulf the other.
In doing so, these outlets absolve themselves of any responsibility in confronting the problem in their own camp, using the blaze across the street as an excuse to ignore the smoke in their own kitchen.