The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

The eruption of antisemitism on the left—dressed up as opposition to Israel’s tactics in a war started by its enemies—is the most potent form of antisemitism in America.  Wall Street Journal columnist, Gerard Baker writes, “Antisemitism has a strong pedigree on the left: The equation of capitalism’s evils with the supposed avarice of Jewish financiers is a popular theme, and to it has been added the modern ‘settler colonialist’ narrative that alleges Zionist rapine in Palestine.”  Baker adds that “our universities are run by leaders who are models of the left-wing ideology that dominates so much of our politics and culture.  It deems the rights of certain people less worthy of protection than others, it divides the world into oppressor and oppressed.  You can call for the murder of all Jews, but say sex is biological and you will be punished . . . ‘Truth’ has been deposed and replaced with the monomaniacal ideology of the ‘My Truth’ crowd.”

Additionally, David Brooks offers a penetrating analysis of the situation on so many of America’s elite universities.

• “Over the past five weeks, Jewish students on America’s campuses have found themselves confronted with those who celebrate a terrorist operation that featured the mass murder and reportedly the rape of fellow Jews. They see images of people tearing down posters of kidnapped Jewish children. At M.I.T., Jewish students report that they were told by some faculty members to avoid the university’s main lobby—which had been the site of a pro-Palestinian protest—for their own safety. At Cooper Union, Jewish students were barricaded in the library by a protest that started out as a pro-Palestinian demonstration and quickly became, one student reported, ‘pure anti-Jew.’ Rabbi Nomi Manon, who has directed the Hillel at the University at Albany since 2011, told The Albany Times-Union, ‘Every Jewish student that I talk to feels a sense of impending doom, anxiety, fear or anger about the really marked rise in antisemitism.’ Shabbos Kestenbaum, who is a graduate student at the Harvard Divinity School, told The Forward, ‘The past few weeks have been the most isolating, saddening, maddening experience I’ve ever had.’”
• “Universities are supposed to be centers of inquiry and curiosity—places where people are tolerant of difference and learn about other points of view. Instead, too many have become brutalizing ideological war zones, so today the most hostile place to be an American Jew is not at some formerly restricted country club but on a college campus . . . It centers on a hard-edged ideological framework that has been spreading in high school and college, on social media, in diversity training seminars and in popular culture. The framework doesn’t have a good name yet. It draws on the thinking of intellectuals ranging from the French philosopher Michel Foucault to the critical race theorist Derrick Bell . . . The common ideas associated with this ideology are by now pretty familiar:

1. We shouldn’t emphasize what unites all human beings; we should emphasize what divides us.  2.  Human relations are power struggles between oppressors and oppressed groups.  3.  Human communication is limited. A person in one group can never really understand the experience of someone in another group.  4.  The goal of rising above bigotry is naïve. Bigotry and racism are permanent and indestructible components of American society.  5. Seemingly neutral tenets of society—like free speech, academic freedom, academic integrity and the meritocracy—are tools the powerful use to preserve their power.”

• “There are many teachers and administrators who believe that they best serve society not by being open and curious and searching for the truth but by propagating this ideological framework.  One passage from a D.E.I. curriculum guide symbolizes for me the way ideological activism is replacing intellectual inquiry as the primary mission of universities. It’s for the faculty at California Community Colleges, and it advises: ‘Take care not to ‘weaponize’ academic freedom and academic integrity as tools to impede equity.’  In other words, spreading a specific ideology is more important than academic integrity.  Students have gotten the message that they are not on campus to learn; they are there to express their certainties and to advance a rigid ideological formula.   One upshot is that universities have become battlefields. Eboo Patel is the founder and president of Interfaith America, which over the past 20 years has worked on about 1,200 campuses to narrow toxic divides and build bridges between people of all faiths or no faith. Over these decades, he has concluded that far from creating a healthier, more equitable campus, this ideology demonizes, demeans and divides students. It demeans white people by reducing them to a single category—oppressor. Meanwhile, it demeans, for example, Muslim people of color, like Patel, by reducing them to victims.”

But since World War II it has been mostly the right that has been promoting raw antisemitism, with Holocaust denial and other conspiracies.  Today, we see it among MAGA devotees as well.  Baker offers several examples:

• “Joe Rogan, the podcaster with the biggest audience, last week hosted a man who has made a living spreading sympathetic falsehoods about Nazi Germany. I won’t dignify his sham scholarship by naming him, but he became famous recently when Tucker Carlson called him America’s ‘most honest popular historian.’  He told a credulous Mr. Carlson that Winston Churchill was the ‘chief villain’ of World War II and that the Jews who were murdered in Nazi concentration camps somehow ‘ended up dead’ there, as though six million all experienced freak fatal outcomes: accidentally stepping on rakes as they tilled the lush Buchenwald gardens, perhaps, or overindulging on Auschwitz cuisine.  One quote captures the substance of the latest colloquy: ‘When did Hitler start going after the Jews?’ Mr. Rogan asks. A rambling answer punctuated with elementary historical errors ends with this gem: ‘His antisemitism is what allowed him to love the German people.’ Greater love hath no man than this: to hate the Jews for his own compatriots.”
• “Rogan has hosted others with vile views, including one who claims the Jews were responsible for 9/11 and a prominent right-wing woman who retails to tens of millions the basest of blood libels. I’m sure Mr. Rogan is no anti-Semite, but it’s a problem that one so influential promotes (and seldom challenges) people with ideas that were once so self-evidently wrong they could only be contained in the most uneducated and malevolent of minds.”
• Take Elon Musk as a second example.  “We have proliferating examples of this normalization of previously marginalized ideas and symbols. I am willing to accept that when Elon Musk made that arm gesture at a rally after Donald Trump’s inauguration he wasn’t giving the Hitler salute. But his, shall we say, carelessness with such symbolism is worrying: How many noxious people saw it as a bold display by a high public figure, a ratification of their own Nazi psychopathologies?  This casualness was on display . . .  when Mr. Musk shared another user’s post with his 220 million followers that stated ‘Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector workers did.’ Stipulate again that Mr. Musk didn’t intend to exonerate the Führer from responsibility for the Holocaust, but what does it say about current attitudes to Jewish suffering that the man eliminating the jobs of tens of thousands of government workers seems to approve of comparing them, even in jest, to members of, say, the Einsatzgruppen (a category of German public-sector workers in the 1940s) who gleefully murdered babies?”

Baker correctly and poignantly concludes that “With the widening acceptance of these casual intimations of a particular evil, we are establishing a perilous common groundwork for language and ideas—rapidly defining antisemitism down.  The larger problem is the steady undermining of truth itself. So much contemporary ideology rests on eradicated standards of objective reality, so people can believe all kinds of impossible things. The abandonment of academic truth is partially to blame. The tendentious and dishonest nonsense that holds sway at most of our top universities and the intolerance with which its adherents exclude dissent have undermined faith in academic truth and debased the currency of scholarship so that anyone with access to a social media account can propagate his own ‘learning.’  The collapse of trust in almost all our sources of information—media, government, experts of all sorts—has allowed epistemic malignancy to flourish. Fifty years ago Nazi apologetics were malicious ahistorical fantasy, a thin veil for ancient bigotry, whose propagandists were rightly ostracized from serious political company. Today they’re just another interesting lie that will get you a fat paycheck on YouTube.”

As Christians, how should we think about Joe Rogan and Elon Musk?  Is the virulent anti-Semitism promoted by or at least tolerated by these men acceptable?  Is this an important biblical issue?  Should we find such views repulsive and offensive?  Yes, we should!  I begin with a review of certain basic assumptions, rooted in Scripture, which inform a biblical view of the Jews and Israel:

1. The Bible presents accurate and trustworthy history.  Our God is a God of history, and Scripture documents His redemptive work in history.  That redemptive story is revealed in the history of Israel, in the early church and of course most importantly in Jesus Christ.  The Old Testament historical books are authentic accounts of actual historical events, many of which have been validated by archeology.  The hundreds of prophecies about the First Advent of Messiah were fulfilled in space-time history by Jesus.
2. There are three important biblical covenants that define God’s relationship with the Jewish people:  The Abrahamic Covenant, the Davidic covenant and the New Covenant.  God promised Abraham descendants as numerous as the sand of the seashore and the stars of the sky, land and blessing—that in him “all the nations would be blessed” (Genesis 12:1-7).  Because of Genesis 15:9-21, we are to understand these covenant promises as eternal and unconditional.  God promised King David an eternal throne, dynasty and kingdom (succinctly summarized in 2 Samuel 7:16).  The Old Testament prophets (major and minor) are filled with hundreds of promises about the coming Son of David who would rule and reign.  The New Testament declares Jesus to be that King.  Finally, the New Covenant contains God’s promise of spiritual blessing and renewal energized by the coming of His Holy Spirit (see Jeremiah 31:31-33 and Ezekiel 36:24-29).
3. The Mosaic covenant was a conditional Covenant, added to the Abrahamic Promise (see Galatians 3:19-22), which defined how Israel was to walk with God.  The God of the Bible is the Sovereign Lord who chose Israel to be a vehicle to reveal His holiness and His righteous character to the nations.  As the major and minor prophets indicate, when God disciplined His people, He did so on the basis of the curses and blessings of the Mosaic Covenant (see Deuteronomy 28).  But His ongoing promise to restore them and renew them was always on the basis of His covenant commitment to Abraham.
4. I believe that God will keep His covenant promises to Israel; indeed, when His Son returns a national regeneration of Israel will occur.  With clarity, Paul declared in Romans 11:26 that there is coming a day when “all of Israel will be saved.”  This remarkable event will be preceded by the re-gathering of the Jewish people to their homeland.  God promised this re-gathering throughout the Old Testament but most clearly in Ezekiel 36-37.  In these vital chapters, God declares that He will bring His people back to their land, renew them spiritually and fulfill completely the promises He made to Abraham and David and then implement all the dimensions of the New Covenant (see especially Ezekiel 37:15-28).

The Bible is very clear:  The Jewish people are in an unconditional and unilateral covenantal relationship with God.  [See Genesis 12:1-7—and numerous references throughout the Bible to this Abrahamic covenant.]  God states categorically that He will bless those who bless the Jews and curse those who curse the Jews (Genesis 12:3).  Anti-Semitism, whether from the right or the left, is a perilous development within American civilization.  I believe strongly that God has blessed America because this nation has been a refuge and an advocate for the Jewish people.  If anti-Semitism continues to raise its ugly head in America, God will remove His hand of blessing from this nation and it will face His judgment.  Joe Rogan and Elon Musk should be ashamed of themselves.

See Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal (12 December 2023); Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal (16-17 December 2023); David Brooks in the New York Times (17 November 2023); Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal (18 March 2025); and James P. Eckman, A Covenant People, pp. ix-xiv.