Blatant antisemitism on the NYC subway — and little outrage from the left

You never know what you might encounter when you venture into the subway system in New York City. There’s the random mariachi band that shows up out of nowhere, apparently mistaking the subway car for a Mexican restaurant. There’s the guy sitting next to you who is engaged in a loud, heated conversation — with himself. 

But what happened on June 10 goes beyond the usual annoyances subway passengers are prepared to put up with. This is from the New York Post: “Masked anti-Israel protesters took over a New York City subway car on Monday and demanded to know if there were any ‘Zionists’ on the train — then warned them: ‘This is your chance to get out.’”

Mayor Eric Adams said what happened was “vile” and “illegal.” People living outside the five boroughs may not even know what happened. It wasn’t big news as far as journalists in the mainstream media were concerned.

Imagine if white supremacists took over a subway car in New York and threatened Black passengers. Imagine the justifiable outrage. But the open hostility on the subway that day produced more yawns than outrage.

“The events of this week are obvious bigotry,” writes Nora Berman, an editor at the Forward, a news organization that covers matters important to American Jews. “But I’m not seeing my progressive friends post about it online. I’m not seeing the non-Jewish authors, journalists, activists and lawyers that I so deeply admire for their advocacy on trans rights, immigration, racial justice and criminal justice reform speak up and call out this appropriation of anti-Zionism to mask antisemitism.”

The left wasn’t nearly as detached in 2019 when Jussie Smollett, a Black actor, told Chicago police that on a bitter cold January night, at around 2 a.m., as he was leaving a Subway shop, he was confronted by two white men who beat him up  and wrapped a noose around his neck. The men, Smollett said, were wearing MAGA hats.

White guys in Chicago wearing MAGA hats and carrying a noose at two in the morning should have made even liberals a tad skeptical. But instead of skepticism, we got outrage. 

Joe Biden, who was mulling over the possibility of running for president, took to Twitter to say that “What happened today to [Smollett] must never be tolerated in this country.”

MSNBC’s Joy Reid joined the left-wing chorus. “Nooses never really disappeared as messages of a very specific kind of terror, but every time they’re used, my God, it’s chilling,” she said on Twitter. “Praying for Jussie’s full recovery. And for us all.”

On CNN, Brooke Baldwin said, “This is America in 2019.”

Except it wasn’t. Turns out Smollett concocted the whole story — and was later convicted by a Chicago jury for lying to police.

But the story fit liberal notions about race, Donald Trump and his supporters. Outrage, they seemed to believe, was a way to show how aligned they were with a Black man who told a story they were prepared to accept without a hint of skepticism. 

And you may remember another story, also in January 2019, that produced more left-wing outrage. That’s when a video went viral showing a 16-year-old student from a Kentucky Christian school — on a field trip to Washington to take part in the annual March for Life — who, we were led to believe, taunted a Native American elder who was at the Lincoln Memorial for the Indigenous Peoples March. The video showed the boy silently standing in front of the activist, who was chanting and beating on a small drum.

The boy didn’t utter a word to the man. He didn’t block his way — but still he became a poster boy for insensitivity at best, bigotry at worst. Why? Because he was smiling as he stood before the Native American elder — and (here’s what really made him a villain) he was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat.

The media couldn’t get enough of the story. The boy’s parents said their son was portrayed as a bigot — so they sued the Washington Post, claiming the paper targeted and bullied him, “because he was a white, Catholic student wearing a red ‘Make America Great Again,’ souvenir cap.”

The Post, while admitting no wrongdoing, settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount of money. CNN was also sued and also settled. 

So why does a red hat — and what many on the left believe it represents — generate more outrage than what happened in that subway car in New York? Maybe it’s because anti-Zionists are people of the left, not unlike a lot of journalists. Maybe it’s that old argument about Palestinians being oppressed and Israelis being their oppressors. Or maybe it’s because the left believes that showing outrage for the “right causes” is a way to seize control of the moral high ground, to believe they’re noble even if they're not.  

Let’s circle back to Nora Berman, the editor at the Forward. “The speed at which blatant antisemitic bigotry appears to have become wrapped up in the package of opposing Zionism is breathtaking. So is the number of intelligent people, normally highly attuned to injustice, who are ignoring it.”

Maybe they’d pay more attention if those anti-Jewish activists in that subway car were wearing red MAGA hats along with their Palestinian keffiyehs. Then liberals really would be outraged.

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page. Follow him @BernardGoldberg.