Since the dark day of 10/7/2023 when HAMAS terrorists breached the Israeli border to attack Southern communities, many have been shocked not only by events on the ground in the Middle East but the eruption of virulent Jew-hatred in the West.  Perhaps the most perplexing case of contemporary antisemitism is the United States, a country geographically far from the historical legacy of the Holocaust, a nation-state with Constitutionally-enshrined freedoms that have granted toleration to religious minorities, and the largest and most successfully assimilated population of Jews outside Israel.  Nevertheless, acts of verbal and physical violence against Jews have risen nearly 350% in the past two months, university campuses and urban centers are restive with protests, and there is even vociferously condemnation of Israel from the corridors of Congress.  How could this happen here — and now?

This paper, based on a larger research project, argues that the roots of the reaction to 10/7 in the United States were actually sown in another heady historical period over fifty years ago.  This analysis will consider the parting of ways between Zionism and the Left, the rise of the dueling transnational movements of Black and Jewish Power, and the unraveling of American Jewish unanimity around Israel between 1967 and 1975 that institutionalized a set of debates and discourses that are reflected as new iterations of old debates in 2024.  In particular, the study traces the transnational influence of Israel on the domestic questions of Jewish whiteness and power that have not only disrupted American Jewish allyship with other identity politics groups and also exacerbated internal ideological, denominational, and class tensions within the community.  By the time of the UN “Zionism is Racism” conference in 1975, a set of vocabularies and viewpoints had been set into motion that are reflected in our contemporary moment.

This paper aims to offer a transnational framework unique to Diaspora-Israel relations to historically inform pressing and politicized questions of victimhood, passing, privilege, power, and allyship in the face of resurgent contemporary antisemitism.