If Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted defeat in June 2021, finally yielding the stage to a coalition of his opponents, he could have retired at the age of 71 with a decent claim to having been one of Israel’s more successful prime ministers.

He had already surpassed the time in office of Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, becoming the country’s longest-serving prime minister in 2019. His second stretch in office, from 2009 to 2021, coincided with perhaps the best 12 years Israel had known since its founding in 1948. The country enjoyed relative security, with no major wars or prolonged Intifadas. The period was one of uninterrupted economic growth and prosperity. Thanks to its early adoption of widespread vaccination, Israel was one of the first countries in the world to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic. And toward the end of that span came three agreements establishing diplomatic relations with Arab countries; more were likely on the way.

Twelve years of Netanyahu’s leadership had seemingly made Israel more secure and prosperous, with deep trade and defense ties across the world. But this wasn’t enough to win him another term. A majority of Israelis had tired of him, and he had been tainted by charges of bribery and fraud in his dealings with billionaires and press barons. In the space of 24 months, Israel held four elections ending in stalemate, with neither Netanyahu nor his rivals winning a majority. Finally, an unlikely alliance of right-wing, centrist, left-wing, and Islamist parties managed to band together and replace him with his former aide Naftali Bennett in June 2021.

[Read: Netanyahu should quit. The U.S. can help with that.]

At that point, Netanyahu could have sealed his legacy. A plea bargain on offer from the attorney general would have ended his corruption trial with a conviction on reduced charges and no jail time. He would have had to leave politics, probably for good. Over the course of four decades in public life, including 15 years as prime minister and 22 as the Likud party’s leader, he had already left an indelible mark on Israel, dominating the second half of its history. But he couldn’t bear the thought of giving up power.

Within 18 months, he was back as prime minister for the third time. The unwieldy coalition that replaced him had imploded, and this time around, Netanyahu’s camp of far-right and religious parties ran a disciplined campaign, exploiting the weaknesses of their divided rivals to emerge with a small parliamentary majority, despite still being virtually tied in the vote count.

Nine months later, Netanyahu, the man who promised, above everything else, to deliver security for Israel’s citizens, presided over the darkest day in his country’s existence. A total breakdown of the Israeli military and intelligence structure allowed Hamas to breach Israel’s border and embark on a rampage of murder, kidnapping, and rape, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and taking more than 250 hostage. The calamities of that day, the failures of leadership leading up to it, and the traumas it caused will haunt Israel for generations. Even leaving completely aside the war he has prosecuted since that day and its yet-unknown end, October 7 means that Netanyahu will always be remembered as Israel’s worst-ever leader.

How does one measure a prime minister?

There is no broadly accepted ranking of the 13 men and one woman who have led Israel, but most lists would feature David Ben-Gurion at the top. Not only was he the George Washington of the Jewish state, proclaiming its independence just three years after a third of the Jewish people had been exterminated in the Holocaust, but his administration established many of the institutions and policies that define Israel to this day. Other favorites include Levi Eshkol, for his shrewd and prudent leadership in the tense weeks before the Six Day War, and Menachem Begin, for achieving the country’s first peace agreement with an Arab nation, Egypt.

All three of these men had mixed records and detractors, of course. Ben-Gurion had autocratic tendencies and was consumed by party infighting during his later years in office. After the Six Day War, Eshkol failed to deliver a coherent plan for what Israel should do with the new territories it occupied and the Palestinians who have remained under its rule ever since. In Begin’s second term, Israel entered a disastrous war in Lebanon, and his government nearly tanked the economy. But in most Israelis’ minds, these leaders’ positive legacies outweigh the negatives.

Who are the “worst prime ministers”? Until now, most Israelis regarded Golda Meir as the top candidate for that dismal title. The intelligence failure leading to the Yom Kippur War was on her watch. Before the war, she rejected Egyptian overtures toward peace (though some Israeli historians have recently argued that these were less than sincere). And when war was clearly imminent, her administration refrained from launching preemptive attacks that could have saved the lives of hundreds of soldiers.

[Read: The end of Netanyahu]

Other “worst” candidates have included Ehud Olmert, for launching the second Lebanon war and becoming Israel’s first former prime minister to go to prison for corruption; Yitzhak Shamir, for kiboshing an agreement with Jordan’s King Hussein that many believe could have been a significant step toward resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict; and Ehud Barak, for spectacularly failing to fulfill his extravagant promises to bring peace with both the Palestinians and Syria.

But Benjamin Netanyahu now surpasses these contenders by orders of magnitude. He has brought far-right extremists into the mainstream of government and made himself, and the country, beholden to them. His corruption is flamboyant. And he has made terrible security decisions that brought existential danger to the country he pledged to lead and protect. Above all, his selfishness is without parallel: He has put his own interests ahead of Israel’s at every turn.

Netanyahu has the distinction of being the only Israeli prime minister to make a once reviled movement on the right fringe of the country’s politics into a government stakeholder.

Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of a Jewish-supremacist group called Kach, won a lone seat in the Knesset in 1984. He openly called for replacing Israeli democracy with a constitution based on the laws of the Torah and for denying Israel’s Arab citizens equal rights. During Kahane’s single legislative term, the entire Israeli political establishment shunned him. When he got up to speak in the Knesset, all of its members would leave the plenum.

In 1985, Likud joined other parties in changing election law so that those who denied Israel’s democratic identity, denied its Jewish identity, or incited racism could be barred from running for office. Under this provision, Kach was never allowed to compete in another election. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990. Four years later, a member of his movement killed 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron, and the Israeli government proscribed Kach as a terror organization and forced it to disband.

But the Kahanists didn’t go away. With each Israeli election, they tried to rename their movement and adjust its platform to conform with electoral law. They remained ostracized. Then, in 2019, Netanyahu saw a roadblock on his path to reelection that they could help him get around.

Several Israeli parties had pledged not to serve in a government led by an indicted prime minister—quite possibly, enough of them to shut Netanyahu out of power. To prevent that from happening, Netanyahu needed to eke out every possible right-wing and religious vote for his potential coalition. The polls were predicting that the latest Kahanist iteration, the Jewish Power party, which is led by the thuggish but media-savvy Itamar Ben-Gvir, would receive only about 10,000 votes, well below the threshold needed to make the party a player on its own; but Netanyahu believed that if he could persuade the Kahanists and other small right-wing parties to merge their candidates’ lists into a joint slate, together they could win a seat or two for his potential coalition—just what he needed for a majority.

Netanyahu began pressuring the leaders of the small right-wing parties to merge their lists. At first the larger of these were outraged. Netanyahu was meddling in their affairs and, worse, trying to coerce them to accept the Kahanist outcasts. Gradually, he wore down their resistance—employing rabbis to persuade politicians, orchestrating media campaigns in the nationalist press, and promising central roles in future administrations. Media figures close to Netanyahu accused Bezalel Smotrich, a fundamentalist settler and the new leader of the religious Zionist party, of “endangering” the nation by making it easier for the hated left to win the election. Soon enough, Smotrich’s old-school national-religious party merged not only with Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power but with an even more obscure, proudly homophobic party led by Avi Maoz.

Netanyahu did worry a bit about the optics. Throughout five stalemated election campaigns from 2019 to 2022, Likud coordinated closely with Jewish Power, but Netanyahu refused to be seen in public with Ben-Gvir. During the 2022 campaign, at a religious festival, he even waited backstage for Ben-Gvir to leave the premises before going up to make his speech.

Two weeks later, there was no longer any need to keep up the act. Netanyahu’s strategy succeeded: His coalition, merged into four lists, edged out its squabbling opponents with 64 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

Netanyahu finally had the “right-wing in full” government he had often promised. But before he could return to the prime minister’s office, his allies demanded a division of the spoils. The ministries with the most influence on Israelis’ daily lives—health, housing, social services, and the interior—went to the ultra-Orthodox parties. Smotrich became finance minister; Maoz was appointed deputy minister in charge of a new “Agency for Jewish Identity,” with power to intervene in educational programs. And Ben-Gvir, the subject of numerous police investigations for violence and incitement over a period of three decades, was put in charge of a newly titled “Ministry of National Security,” with authority over Israel’s police and prison services.

As Netanyahu signed away power to the Kahanists, he told the international news media that he wasn’t forming a far-right government. The Kahanists were joining his government. He would be in control. But Netanyahu hadn’t just given Israel’s most extreme racists unprecedented power and legitimacy. He’d also insinuated them into his own formerly mainstream party: By March 2024, Likud’s candidates for local elections in a handful of towns had merged their slates with those of Jewish Power.

Likud long prided itself on combining staunch Jewish nationalism, even militarism, with a commitment to liberal democracy. But a more radical stream within the party eschewed those liberal values and championed chauvinistic and autocratic positions. For much of the past century, the liberal wing was dominant and provided most of the party’s leadership. Netanyahu himself espoused the values of the liberal wing—until he fell out with all the main liberal figures. By 2019, none was left to oppose the alliance with Ben-Gvir’s Kahanists.

Now more than a third of Likud’s representatives were religious, and those who weren’t preferred to call themselves “traditional” rather than secular. They didn’t object to cooperating with the Kahanists; indeed, many had already worked with them in the past. In fact, many Likud Knesset members by that point were indistinguishable from the Jewish Power ones. Israel’s worst prime minister didn’t just form an alliance of convenience with the country’s most irresponsible extremists; he made them integral to his party and the running of the state.

That Netanyahu is personally corrupt is not altogether novel in the history of the Israeli prime ministership. What makes him worse than others is his open contempt for the rule of law.

By 2018, Netanyahu was the subject of four simultaneous corruption investigations that had been in motion for more than a year. In one, known as Case 4000, Netanyahu stood accused of promising regulatory favors to the owner of Israel’s largest telecom corporation in return for favorable coverage on a popular news site. Three of the prime minister’s closest advisers had agreed to testify against him.

Investigations of prime ministers are not rare in Israel. Netanyahu was the subject of one during his first term. The three prime ministers who served in the decade between his first and second terms—Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert—had all been investigated as well. Only in Olmert’s case did police deem the evidence sufficient to mount a prosecution. At the time, in 2008, Netanyahu was the leader of the opposition.

“We’re talking about a prime minister who is up to his neck in investigations and has no public or moral mandate to make fateful decisions for Israel,” Netanyahu said of Olmert. “There is a concern, I have to say real, not without basis, that he will make decisions based on his personal interest of political survival and not on the national interest.”

[Graeme Wood: Why the most hated man in Israel might stay in power]

Ten years later, Netanyahu would be the one snared in multiple investigations. Then he no longer spoke of corruption in high office but of a “witch hunt,” orchestrated by rogue police commanders and left-wing state prosecutors, and egged on by a hostile news media, all with the aim of toppling a right-wing leader.

Netanyahu was determined to politicize the legal procedure and pit his supporters against Israel’s law-enforcement agencies and judiciary. Never mind that the two previous prime ministers who had resigned because of corruption charges were from the center left. Nor did it matter that he had appointed the police commissioner and attorney general himself; both were deeply religious men with impeccable nationalist backgrounds, but he tarred them as perfidious tools of leftist conspiracy.

Rather than contemplate resignation, on May 24, 2020, Netanyahu became the first sitting Israeli prime minister to go on trial. He has denied all wrongdoing (the trial is still under way). In a courthouse corridor before one session, he gave a 15-minute televised speech accusing the legal establishment of “trying to topple me and the right-wing government. For over a decade, the left wing have failed to do this at the ballot box, and in recent years have come up with a new idea. Elements in the police and prosecutor’s office have joined left-wing journalists to concoct delusional charges.”

The law didn’t require Netanyahu to resign while fighting the charges against him in court. But doing so had seemed logical to his predecessors under similar circumstances—and to Israel’s lawmakers, who had never envisaged that a prime minister would so brazenly challenge the justice system, which he had a duty to uphold. For Netanyahu, however, remaining in power was an end in itself, one more important than preserving Israel’s most crucial institutions, to say nothing of Israelis’ trust in them.

Netanyahu placed extremists in positions of power, undermined confidence in the rule of law, and sacrificed principle to power. Little wonder, then, that last summer, tensions over the role of Israel’s judiciary became unmanageable. The crisis underlined all of these reasons that Netanyahu should go down as Israel’s worst prime minister.

For 34 of the past 47 years, Israel’s prime ministers have come from the Likud party. And yet many on the right still grumble that “Likud doesn’t know how to rule” and “you vote right and get left.” Likudniks complain about the lingering power of “the elites,” a left-wing minority that loses at the ballot box but still controls the civil service, the upper echelons of the security establishment, the universities, and the media. A growing anti-judicial wing within Likud demands constitutional change and a clamping-down on the supreme court’s “judicial activism.”

Netanyahu had once minimized these complaints, but his stance on the judiciary changed after he was indicted in 2019. Indeed, at the start of his current term, Likud’s partners demanded commitments to constitutional change, which they received. The ultra-Orthodox parties were anxious to pass a law exempting religious seminary students from military service. Such exemptions had already fallen afoul of the supreme court’s equality standards, so the religious parties wanted the law to include a “court bypass.” Netanyahu acceded to this. To pass the legislation in the Knesset, he appointed Simcha Rothman, a staunch critic of the court, as the chair of the Knesset’s Constitution Committee.

He also appointed Yariv Levin, another fierce critic of the court, as justice minister. Just six days after the new government was sworn in, Levin rolled out a “judicial reform” plan, prepared by a conservative think tank, that called for drastically limiting the court’s powers to review legislation and gave politicians control over the appointment of new justices.

Within days, an extremely efficient counter-campaign pointed out the dangers the plan posed, not just to Israel’s fragile and limited democracy, but to its economy and security. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested in the streets. Likud began to drop in the polls, and Netanyahu privately urged the leaders of the coalition parties to delay the vote. They refused to back down, and Levin threatened to resign over any delay.

Netanyahu’s motives, unlike those of his partners, were not ideological. His objective was political survival. He needed to keep his hard-won majority intact and the judges off-balance. But the protests were unrelenting. Netanyahu’s independent-minded defense minister, Yoav Gallant, pointed to the controversy’s dire implications for the Israel Defense Forces as hundreds of volunteer reserve officers threatened to suspend their service rather than “serve a dictatorship.”

Netanyahu wasn’t sure he wanted to go through with the judicial coup, but the idea of one of Likud’s senior ministers breaking ranks in public was unthinkable. On March 25 of last year, Gallant made a public statement that the constitutional legislation was a “clear and major threat to the security of Israel” and he would not be voting for it. The next evening, Netanyahu announced that he was firing Gallant.

[Anne Applebaum: Netanyahu’s attack on democracy left Israel unprepared]

In Jerusalem, protesters besieged Netanyahu’s home. In Tel Aviv, they blocked main highways. The next morning, the trade unions announced a general strike, and by that evening, Netanyahu backed down, announcing that he was suspending the legislation and would hold talks with the opposition on finding compromises. Gallant kept his post. The talks collapsed, protests started up again, and Netanyahu once again refused to listen to the warnings coming from the security establishment—not only of anger within the IDF, but that Israel’s enemies were planning to take advantage of the country’s disunity to launch an attack.

The debate over judicial reform pitted two visions of Israel against each other. On one side was a liberal and secular Israel that relied on the supreme court to defend its democratic values; on the other, a religious and conservative Israel that feared that unelected judges would impose incompatible ideas on their Jewish values.

Netanyahu’s government made no attempt to reconcile these two visions. The prime minister had spent too many years, and all those toxic electoral campaigns, exploiting and deepening the rift between them. Even when he belatedly and halfheartedly tried to rein in the radical and fundamentalist demons he had ridden back into office, he found that he could no longer control them.

Whether Netanyahu really meant to eviscerate Israel’s supreme court as part of a plot to weaken the judiciary and intimidate the judges in his own case, or whether he had no choice in the matter and was simply a hostage of his own coalition, is immaterial. What matters is that he appointed Levin as justice minister and permitted the crisis to happen. Ultimately, and despite his professed belief in liberal democracy, Netanyahu allowed Levin and his coalition partners to convince him that they were doing the right thing—because whatever kept him in office was right for Israel. Democracy would remain strong because he would remain in charge.

Trying to diminish the powers of the supreme court isn’t what makes Netanyahu Israel’s worst prime minister. The judicial reform failed anyway. Only one of its elements got through the Knesset before the war with Hamas began, and the court struck it down as unconstitutional six months later. The justices’ ruling to preserve their powers, despite the Knesset’s voting to limit them, could have caused a constitutional crisis if it had happened in peacetime. But by then Israel was facing a much bigger crisis.

Given Israel’s history, the ultimate yardstick of its leaders’ success is the security they deliver for their fellow citizens. In 2017, as I was finishing my unauthorized biography of Netanyahu, I commissioned a data analyst to calculate the average annual casualty rate (Israeli civilians and soldiers) of each prime minister since 1948. The results confirmed what I had already assumed. In the 11 years that Netanyahu had by then been prime minister, the average annual number of Israelis killed in war and terror attacks was lower, by a considerable margin, than under any previous prime minister.

My book on Netanyahu was not admiring. But I felt that it was only fair to include that data point in his favor in the epilogue and the very last footnote. Likud went on to use it in its 2019 campaigns without attributing the source.

The numbers were hard to argue with. Netanyahu was a hard-line prime minister who had done everything in his power to derail the Oslo peace process and prevent any move toward compromise with the Palestinians. Throughout much of his career, he encouraged military action by the West, first against Iraq after 9/11, and then against Iran. But in his years as prime minister, he balked at initiating or being dragged into wars of his own. His risk aversion and preference for covert operations or air strikes rather than ground operations had, in his first two stretches in power, from 1996 to 1999 and 2009 to 2021, kept Israelis relatively safe.

Netanyahu supporters on the right could also argue, on basis of the numbers, that those who brought bloodshed upon Israel, in the form of Palestinian suicide bombings and rocket attacks, were actually Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the architects of the Oslo Accords; Ehud Barak, with his rash attempts to bring peace; and Ariel Sharon, who withdrew Israeli soldiers and settlers unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, creating the conditions for Hamas’s electoral victory there the following year. That argument no longer holds.

If future biographers of Israeli prime ministers undertake a similar analysis, Netanyahu will no longer be able to claim the lowest casualty rate. His 16th year in office, 2023, was the third-bloodiest in Israel’s history, surpassed only by 1948 and 1973, Israel’s first year of independence and the year of the Yom Kippur War, respectively.

[Read: This war isn’t like Israel’s earlier wars]

The first nine months of 2023 had already seen a rise in deadly violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as terrorist attacks within Israel’s borders. Then came the Hamas attack on October 7, in which at least 1,145 Israelis were massacred and 253 kidnapped and taken to Gaza. More than 30 hostages are now confirmed dead.

No matter how the war in Gaza ends, what happens in its aftermath, or when Netanyahu’s term finally ends, the prime minister will forever be associated above all with that day and the disastrous war that followed. He will go down as the worst prime minister because he has been catastrophic for Israeli security.

To understand how Netanyahu so drastically failed Israel’s security requires going back at least to 2015, the year his long-term strategic bungling of the Iranian threat came into view. His mishandling didn’t happen in isolation; it is also related to the deprioritization of other threats, including the catastrophe that materialized on October 7.

Netanyahu flew to Washington, D.C., in 2015 to implore U.S. lawmakers to obstruct President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Many view this gambit as extraordinarily damaging to Israel’s most crucial alliance—the relationship with the United States is the very bulwark of its security. Perhaps so; but the stunt didn’t make subsequent U.S. administrations less supportive of Israel. Even Obama would still go on to sign the largest 10-year package of military aid to Israel the year after Netanyahu’s speech. Rather, the damage Netanyahu caused by presuming too much of the United States wasn’t to the relationship, but to Israel itself.

Netanyahu’s strategy regarding Iran was based on his assumption that America would one day launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear program. We know this from his 2022 book, Bibi: My Story, in which he admits to arguing repeatedly with Obama “for an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.” Senior Israeli officials have confirmed that he expected Donald Trump to launch such a strike as well. In fact, Netanyahu was so sure that Trump, unlike Obama, would give the order that he had no strategy in place for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program when Trump decided, at Netanyahu’s own urging, to withdraw from the Iran deal in May 2018.

Israel’s military and intelligence chiefs had been far from enamored with the Iran deal, but they’d seized the opportunity it presented to divert some of the intelligence resources that had been focused on Iran’s nuclear program to other threats, particularly Tehran’s network of proxies across the region. They were caught by surprise when the Trump administration ditched the Iran deal (Netanyahu knew it was coming but didn’t inform them). This unilateral withdrawal effectively removed the limitations on Iran’s nuclear development and required an abrupt reversal of Israeli priorities.

Senior Israeli officials I spoke with had to tread a wary path here. Those who were still in active service couldn’t challenge the prime minister’s strategy directly. But in private some were scathing about the lack of a coherent strategy on Iran. “It takes years to build intelligence capabilities. You can’t just change target priorities overnight,” one told me.

[Read: A shocked and frazzled collective mind]

The result was a dissipation of Israeli efforts to stop Iran—which is committed to the destruction of Israel. Iran sped further than ever down the path of uranium enrichment, and its proxies, including the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border, grew ever more powerful.

In the months leading up to October 7, Israel’s intelligence community repeatedly warned Netanyahu that Iran and its proxies were plotting a major attack within Israel, though few envisaged something on the scale of October 7. By the fall of 2023, motives were legion: fear that an imminent Israeli diplomatic breakthrough with Saudi Arabia could change the geopolitics of the region; threats that Ben-Gvir would allow Jews greater access to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and worsen conditions for Palestinian prisoners; rumors that the deepening tensions within Israeli society would render any response to an attack slow and disjointed.

Netanyahu chose to ignore the warnings. The senior officers and intelligence chiefs who issued them were, to his mind, conspiring with the law-enforcement agencies and legal establishment that had put him on trial and were trying to obstruct his government’s legislation. None of them had his experience and knowledge of the real threats facing Israel. Hadn’t he been right in the past when he’d refused to listen to leftist officials and so-called experts?

Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7 was the result of a colossal failure at all levels of Israel’s security and intelligence community. They had all seen the warning signals but continued to believe that the main threat came from Hezbollah, the larger and far better-equipped and trained enemy to the north. Israel’s security establishment believed that Hamas was isolated in Gaza, and that it and the other Palestinian organizations had been effectively deterred from attacking Israel.

Netanyahu was the originator of this assumption, and its biggest proponent. He believed that keeping Hamas in power in Gaza, as it had been for nearly two years when he returned to office in 2009, was in Israel’s interest. Periodic rocket attacks on Israeli communities in the south were a price worth paying to keep the Palestinian movement split between the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank enclaves and Hamas in Gaza. Such division would push the troublesome two-state solution off the global agenda and allow Israel to focus on regional alliances with like-minded Arab autocracies that also feared Iran. The Palestinian issue would sink into irrelevance.

Netanyahu’s disastrous strategy regarding Gaza and Hamas is part of what makes him Israel’s worst prime minister, but it’s not the only factor. Previous Israeli prime ministers, too, blundered into bloody wars on the basis of misguided strategies and faulty advice from their military and intelligence advisers.

Netanyahu stands out from them for his refusal to accept responsibility, and for his political machinations and smear campaigns since October 7. He blames IDF generals and nourishes the conspiracy theory that they, in alliance with the protest movement, somehow allowed October 7 to happen.

[Hillary Rodham Clinton: Hamas must go]

Netanyahu believes that he is the ultimate victim of that tragic day. Convinced by his own campaign slogans, he argues that he is the only one who can deliver Israel from this valley of shadows to the sunlit uplands of “total victory.” He refuses to consider any advice about ending the war and continues to prioritize preserving his coalition, because he appears incapable of distinguishing between his own fate, now tainted by tragic failure, and that of Israel.

Many around the world assume that Israel’s war with Hamas has proceeded according to some plan of Netanyahu’s. This is a mistake. Netanyahu has the last word as prime minister and head of the emergency war cabinet, but he has used his power mainly to prevaricate, procrastinate, and obstruct. He delayed the initial ground offensive into Gaza, hesitated for weeks over the first truce and hostage-release agreement in November, and is now doing the same over another such deal with Hamas. For the past six months, he has prevented any meaningful cabinet discussion of Israel’s strategic goals. He has rejected the proposals of his own security establishment and the Biden administration. He presented vague principles for “the day after Hamas” to the cabinet only in late February, and they have yet to be debated.

However one views the war in Gaza—as a justified war of defense in which Hamas is responsible for the civilian casualties it has cynically hidden behind, or as an intentional genocide of the Palestinian people, or as anything in between—none of it is Netanyahu’s plan. That’s because Netanyahu has no plan for Gaza, only one for remaining in power. His obstructionism, his showdowns with generals, his confrontations with the Biden administration—all are focused on that end, which means preserving his far-right coalition and playing to his hard-core nationalist base.

Meanwhile, he’s doing what he has always done: wearing down and discrediting his political opponents in the hope of proving to an exhausted and traumatized public that he’s the only alternative. So far, he’s failing. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Israelis want him gone. But Netanyahu is fending off calls to hold an early election until he believes he is within striking distance of winning.

Netanyahu’s ambition has consumed both him and Israel. To regain and remain in office, he has sacrificed his own authority and parceled out power to the most extreme politicians. Since his reelection in 2022, Netanyahu is no longer the center of power but a vacuum, a black hole that has engulfed all of Israel’s political energy. His weakness has given the far right and religious fundamentalists extraordinary control over Israel’s affairs, while other segments of the population are left to pursue the never-ending quest to end his reign.

One man’s pursuit of power has diverted Israel from confronting its most urgent priorities: the threat from Iran, the conflict with the Palestinians, the desire to nurture a Westernized society and economy in the most contested corner of the Middle East, the internal contradictions between democracy and religion, the clash between tribal phobias and high-tech hopes. Netanyahu’s obsession with his own destiny as Israel’s protector has caused his country grievous damage.

Most Israelis already realize that Netanyahu is the worst of the 14 prime ministers their country has had in its 76 years of independence. But in the future, Jews might even remember him as the leader who inflicted the most harm on his people since the squabbling Hasmonean kings brought civil war and Roman occupation to Judea nearly 21 centuries ago. As long as he remains in power, he could yet surpass them.

O

ne of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.”

I switched to a different computer-science section.

Israel is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore. But the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up. Few students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence. Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance—they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs. The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus.

For four months, two rival groups of protesters, separated by a narrow bike path, faced off on Stanford’s palm-covered grounds. The “Sit-In to Stop Genocide” encampment was erected by students in mid-October, even before Israeli troops had crossed into Gaza, to demand that the university divest from Israel and condemn its behavior. Posters were hung equating Hamas with Ukraine and Nelson Mandela. Across from the sit-in, a rival group of pro-Israel students eventually set up the “Blue and White Tent” to provide, as one activist put it, a “safe space” to “be a proud Jew on campus.” Soon it became the center of its own cluster of tents, with photos of Hamas’s victims sitting opposite the rubble-ridden images of Gaza and a long (and incomplete) list of the names of slain Palestinians displayed by the students at the sit-in.

Some days the dueling encampments would host only a few people each, but on a sunny weekday afternoon, there could be dozens. Most of the time, the groups tolerated each other. But not always. Students on both sides were reportedly spit on and yelled at, and had their belongings destroyed. (The perpetrators in many cases seemed to be adults who weren’t affiliated with Stanford, a security guard told me.) The university put in place round-the-clock security, but when something actually happened, no one quite knew what to do.

[Conor Friedersdorf: How October 7 changed America’s free speech culture ]

Stanford has a policy barring overnight camping, but for months didn’t enforce it, “out of a desire to support the peaceful expression of free speech in the ways that students choose to exercise that expression”—and, the administration told alumni, because the university feared that confronting the students would only make the conflict worse. When the school finally said the tents had to go last month, enormous protests against the university administration, and against Israel, followed.

“We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” students chanted, a slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single Arab nation. Palestinian flags flew alongside bright “Welcome!” banners left over from new-student orientation. A young woman gave a speech that seemed to capture the sense of urgency and power that so many students here feel. “We are Stanford University!” she shouted. “We control things!”

“We’ve had protests in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict has.

I’ve spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the past six months in my capacity as a student journalist. We first met in September, a few weeks into his tenure. His predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had resigned as president after my reporting for The Stanford Daily exposed misconduct in his academic research. (Tessier-Lavigne had failed to retract papers with faked data over the course of 20 years. In his resignation statement, he denied allegations of fraud and misconduct; a Stanford investigation determined that he had not personally manipulated data or ordered any manipulation but that he had repeatedly “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes” from his lab.)

In that first conversation, Saller told me that everyone was “eager to move on” from the Tessier-Lavigne scandal. He was cheerful and upbeat. He knew he wasn’t staying in the job long; he hadn’t even bothered to move into the recently vacated presidential manor. In any case, campus, at that time, was serene. Then, a week later, came October 7.

The attack was as clear a litmus test as one could imagine for the Middle East conflict. Hamas insurgents raided homes and a music festival with the goal of slaughtering as many civilians as possible. Some victims were raped and mutilated, several independent investigations found. Hundreds of hostages were taken into Gaza and many have been tortured.

This, of course, was bad. Saying this was bad does not negate or marginalize the abuses and suffering Palestinians have experienced in Gaza and elsewhere. Everyone, of every ideology, should be able to say that this was bad. But much of this campus failed that simple test.

Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Stanford released milquetoast statements marking the “moment of intense emotion” and declaring “deep concern” over “the crisis in Israel and Palestine.” The official statements did not use the words Hamas or violence.

The absence of a clear institutional response led some teachers to take matters into their own hands. During a mandatory freshman seminar on October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with students in the class. Loggins then asked the Jewish students to identify themselves. He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me. Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. (Loggins did not reply to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Stanford said that there were “different recollections of the details regarding what happened” in the class.)

“We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” three students in the class wrote in an email that night to administrators. “This isn’t what Stanford was supposed to be.” The class Loggins taught is called COLLEGE, short for “Civic, Liberal, and Global Education,” and it is billed as an effort to develop “the skills that empower and enable us to live together.”

Loggins was suspended from teaching duties and an investigation was opened; this angered pro-Palestine activists, who organized a petition that garnered more than 1,700 signatures contesting the suspension. A pamphlet from the petitioners argued that Loggins’s behavior had not been out of bounds.

The day after the class, Stanford put out a statement written by Saller and Jenny Martinez, the university provost, more forcefully condemning the Hamas attack. Immediately, this new statement generated backlash.

Pro-Palestine activists complained about it during an event held the same day, the first of several “teach-ins” about the conflict. Students gathered in one of Stanford’s dorms to “bear witness to the struggles of decolonization.” The grievances and pain shared by Palestinian students were real. They told of discrimination and violence, of frightened family members subjected to harsh conditions. But the most raucous reaction from the crowd was in response to a young woman who said, “You ask us, do we condemn Hamas? Fuck you!” She added that she was “so proud of my resistance.”

David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature with a focus on postcolonial studies, also spoke at the teach-in, explaining to the crowd that “European settlers” had come to “replace” Palestine’s “native population.”

Palumbo-Liu is known as an intelligent and supportive professor, and is popular among students, who call him by his initials, DPL. I wanted to ask him about his involvement in the teach-in, so we met one day in a café a few hundred feet away from the tents. I asked if he could elaborate on what he’d said at the event about Palestine’s native population. He was happy to expand: This was “one of those discussions that could go on forever. Like, who is actually native? At what point does nativism lapse, right? Well, you haven’t been native for X number of years, so …” In the end, he said, “you have two people who both feel they have a claim to the land,” and “they have to live together. Both sides have to cede something.”

The struggle at Stanford, he told me, “is to find a way in which open discussions can be had that allow people to disagree.” It’s true that Stanford has utterly failed in its efforts to encourage productive dialogue. But I still found it hard to reconcile DPL’s words with his public statements on Israel, which he’d recently said on Facebook should be “the most hated nation in the world.” He also wrote: “When Zionists say they don’t feel ‘safe’ on campus, I’ve come to see that as they no longer feel immune to criticism of Israel.” He continued: “Well as the saying goes, get used to it.”

Zionists, and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a “dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’ doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms. Arab and Muslim students also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,” but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.”

In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash.

Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.

Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”

At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying.

Protests at Stanford. Sources: Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu / Getty

Saller avoided the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he “can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that, beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”)

When the university finally said the protest tents had to be removed, students responded by accusing Saller of suppressing their right to free speech. This is probably the last charge he expected to face. Saller once served as provost at the University of Chicago, which is known for holding itself to a position of strict institutional neutrality so that its students can freely explore ideas for themselves. Saller has a lifelong belief in First Amendment rights. But that conviction in impartial college governance does not align with Stanford’s behavior in recent years. Despite the fact that many students seemed largely uninterested in the headlines before this year, Stanford’s administrative leadership has often taken positions on political issues and events, such as the Paris climate conference and the murder of George Floyd. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Stanford’s Hoover Tower was lit up in blue and yellow, and the school released a statement in solidarity.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: Let the activists have their loathsome rallies]

When we first met, a week before October 7, I asked Saller about this. Did Stanford have a moral duty to denounce the war in Ukraine, for example, or the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims in China? “On international political issues, no,” he said. “That’s not a responsibility for the university as a whole, as an institution.”

But when Saller tried to apply his convictions on neutrality for the first time as president, dozens of faculty members condemned the response, many pro-Israel alumni were outraged, donors had private discussions about pulling funding, and an Israeli university sent an open letter to Saller and Martinez saying, “Stanford’s administration has failed us.” The initial statement had tried to make clear that the school’s policy was not Israel-specific: It noted that the university would not take a position on the turmoil in Nagorno-Karabakh (where Armenians are undergoing ethnic cleansing) either. But the message didn’t get through.

Saller had to beat an awkward retreat or risk the exact sort of public humiliation that he, as caretaker president, had presumably been hired to avoid. He came up with a compromise that landed somewhere in the middle: an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s “intolerable atrocities” paired with a statement making clear that Stanford would commit to institutional neutrality going forward.

“The events in Israel and Gaza this week have affected and engaged large numbers of students on our campus in ways that many other events have not,” the statement read. “This is why we feel compelled to both address the impact of these events on our campus and to explain why our general policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly connected to campus has limited the breadth of our comments thus far, and why you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future.”

I asked Saller why he had changed tack on Israel and not on Nagorno-Karabakh. “We don’t feel as if we should be making statements on every war crime and atrocity,” he told me. This felt like a statement in and of itself.

In making such decisions, Saller works closely with Martinez, Stanford’s provost. I happened to interview her, too, a few days before October 7, not long after she’d been appointed. When I asked about her hopes for the job, she said that a “priority is ensuring an environment in which free speech and academic freedom are preserved.”

We talked about the so-called Leonard Law—a provision unique to California that requires private universities to be governed by the same First Amendment protections as public ones. This restricts what Stanford can do in terms of penalizing speech, putting it in a stricter bind than Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, or any of the other elite private institutions that have more latitude to set the standards for their campus (whether or not they have done so).

So I was surprised when, in December, the university announced that abstract calls for genocide “clearly violate Stanford’s Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.” The statement was a response to the outrage following the congressional testimony of three university presidents—outrage that eventually led to the resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill. Gay and Magill, who had both previously held positions at Stanford, did not commit to punishing calls for the genocide of Jews.

Experts told me that Stanford’s policy is impossible to enforce—and Saller himself acknowledged as much in our March interview.

“Liz Magill is a good friend,” Saller told me, adding, “Having watched what happened at Harvard and Penn, it seemed prudent” to publicly state that Stanford rejected calls for genocide. But saying that those calls violate the code of conduct “is not the same thing as to say that we could actually punish it.”

Stanford’s leaders seem to be trying their best while adapting to the situation in real time. But the muddled messaging has created a policy of neutrality that does not feel neutral at all.

When we met back in November, I tried to get Saller to open up about his experience running an institution in turmoil. What’s it like to know that so many students seem to believe that he—a mild-mannered 71-year-old classicist who swing-dances with his anthropologist wife—is a warmonger? Saller was more candid than I expected—perhaps more candid than any prominent university president has been yet. We sat in the same conference room as we had in September. The weather hadn’t really changed. Yet I felt like I was sitting in front of a different person. He was hunched over and looked exhausted, and his voice broke when he talked about the loss of life in Gaza and Israel and “the fact that we’re caught up in it.” A capable administrator with decades of experience, Saller seemed almost at a loss. “It’s been a kind of roller coaster, to be honest.”

He said he hadn’t anticipated the deluge of the emails “blaming me for lack of moral courage.” Anything the university says seems bound to be wrong: “If I say that our position is that we grieve over the loss of innocent lives, that in itself will draw some hostile reactions.”

“I find that really difficult to navigate,” he said with a sigh.

By March, it seemed that his views had solidified. He said he knew he was “a target,” but he was not going to be pushed into issuing any more statements. The continuing crisis seems to have granted him new insight. “I am certain that whatever I say will not have any material effect on the war in Gaza.” It’s hard to argue with that.

People tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average students who have changed.

Elite universities attract a certain kind of student: the overachieving striver who has won all the right accolades for all the right activities. Is it such a surprise that the kids who are trained in the constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look at the world like a series of multiple-choice questions, with clearly right or wrong answers? Or that they think they can gamify a political cause in the same way they ace a standardized test?

Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel.

It’s not that there isn’t real anger and anxiety over what is happening in Gaza—there is, and justifiably so. I know that among the protesters are many people who are deeply connected to this issue. But they are not the majority. What really activates the crowds now seems less a principled devotion to Palestine or to pacifism than a desire for collective action, to fit in by embracing the fashionable cause of the moment—as if a centuries-old conflict in which both sides have stolen and killed could ever be a simple matter of right and wrong. In their haste to exhibit moral righteousness, many of the least informed protesters end up being the loudest and most uncompromising.

Today’s students grew up in the Trump era, in which violent rhetoric has become a normal part of political discourse and activism is as easy as reposting an infographic. Many young people have come to feel that being angry is enough to foment change. Furious at the world’s injustices and desperate for a simple way to express that fury, they don’t seem interested in any form of engagement more nuanced than backing a pure protagonist and denouncing an evil enemy. They don’t, always, seem that concerned with the truth.

At the protest last month to prevent the removal of the sit-in, an activist in a pink Women’s March “pussy hat” shouted that no rape was committed by Hamas on October 7. “There hasn’t been proof of these rape accusations,” a student told me in a separate conversation, criticizing the Blue and White Tent for spreading what he considered to be misinformation about sexual violence. (In March, a United Nations report found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence,” including “rape and gang rape,” occurred in multiple locations on October 7, as well as “clear and convincing information” on the “rape and sexualized torture” of hostages.) “The level of propaganda” surrounding Hamas, he told me, “is just unbelievable.”

The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong. You don’t have to understand what you’re arguing for in order to argue for it. You don’t have to be able to name the river or the sea under discussion to chant “From the river to the sea.” This kind of obliviousness explains how one of my friends, a gay activist, can justify Hamas’s actions, even though it would have the two of us—an outspoken queer person and a Jewish reporter—killed in a heartbeat. A similar mentality can exist on the other side: I have heard students insist on the absolute righteousness of Israel yet seem uninterested in learning anything about what life is like in Gaza.

I’m familiar with the pull of achievement culture—after all, I’m a product of the same system. I fell in love with Stanford as a 7-year-old, lying on the floor of an East Coast library and picturing all the cool technology those West Coast geniuses were dreaming up. I cried when I was accepted; I spent the next few months scrolling through the course catalog, giddy with anticipation. I wanted to learn everything.

I learned more than I expected. Within my first week here, someone asked me: “Why are all Jews so rich?” In 2016, when Stanford’s undergraduate senate had debated a resolution against anti-Semitism, one of its members argued that the idea of “Jews controlling the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions” represented “a very valid discussion.” (He apologized, and the resolution passed.) In my dorm last year, a student discussed being Jewish and awoke the next day to swastikas and a portrait of Hitler affixed to his door.

[David Frum: There is no right to bully and harass]

I grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture. When I found out as a teenager that some of my ancestors had hidden their identity from their children and that dozens of my relatives had died in the Holocaust (something no living member of my family had known), I felt the barest tremor of identity. After I saw so many people I know cheering after October 7, I felt something stronger stir. I know others have experienced something similar. Even a professor texted me to say that she felt Jewish in a way she never had before.

But my frustration with the conflict on campus has little to do with my own identity. Across the many conversations and hours of formal interviews I conducted for this article, I’ve encountered a persistent anti-intellectual streak. I’ve watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. Indeed, two parties at Stanford were reported to the university this fall for allegedly making people say “Fuck Israel” or “Free Palestine” to get in the door. A spokesperson for the university said it was “unable to confirm the facts of what occurred,” but that it had “met with students involved in both parties to make clear that Stanford’s nondiscrimination policy applies to parties.” As a friend emailed me not long ago: “A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it.”

Readers may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford. After all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of America.

And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this.

For so long, Stanford’s physical standoff seemed intractable. Then, in early February, a storm swept in, and the natural world dictated its own conclusion.

Heavy rains flooded campus. For hours, the students battled to save their tents. The sit-in activists used sandbags and anything else they could find to hold back the water—at one point, David Palumbo-Liu, the professor, told me he stood in the lashing downpour to anchor one of the sit-in’s tents with his own body. When the storm hit, many of the Jewish activists had been attending a discussion on anti-Semitism. They raced back and struggled to salvage the Blue and White Tent, but it was too late—the wind had ripped it out of the ground.

The next day, the weary Jewish protesters returned to discover that their space had been taken.

A new collection of tents had been set up by El Boudali, the pro-Palestine activist, and a dozen friends. He said they were there to protest Islamophobia and to teach about Islam and jihad, and that they were a separate entity from the Sit-In to Stop Genocide, though I observed students cycling between the tents. Palestinian flags now flew from the bookstore to the quad.

Administrators told me they’d quickly informed El Boudali and his allies that the space had been reserved by the Jewish advocates, and offered to help move them to a different location. But the protesters told me they had no intention of going. (El Boudali later said that they did not take over the entire space, and would have been “happy to exist side by side, but they wanted to kick us off entirely from that lawn.”)

When it was clear that the area where they’d set up their tents would not be ceded back to the pro-Israel group willingly, Stanford changed course and decided to clear everyone out in one fell swoop. On February 8, school officials ordered all students to vacate the plaza overnight. The university was finally going to enforce its rule prohibiting people from sleeping outside on campus and requiring the removal of belongings from the plaza between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The order cited the danger posed by the storm as a justification for changing course and, probably hoping to avoid allegations of bias, described the decision as “viewpoint-neutral.”

That didn’t work.

About a week of protests, led by the sit-in organizers, followed. Chants were chanted. More demands for a “river to the sea” solution to the Israel problem were made. A friend boasted to me about her willingness to be arrested. Stanford sent a handful of staff members, who stood near balloons left over from an event earlier in the day. They were there, one of them told me, to “make students feel supported and safe.”

In the end, Saller and Martinez agreed to talk with the leaders of the sit-in about their demands to divest the university and condemn Israel, under the proviso that the activists comply with Stanford’s anti-camping guidelines “regardless of the outcome of discussions.” Eight days after they were first instructed to leave, 120 days after setting up camp, the sit-in protesters slept in their own beds. In defiance of the university’s instructions, they left behind their tents. But sometime in the very early hours of the morning, law-enforcement officers confiscated the structures. The area was cordoned off without any violence and the plaza filled once more with electric skateboards and farmers’ markets.

The conflict continues in its own way. Saller was just shouted down by protesters chanting “No peace on stolen land” at a Family Weekend event, and protesters later displayed an effigy of him covered in blood. Students still feel tense; Saller still seems worried. He told me that the university is planning to change all manner of things—residential-assistant training, new-student orientation, even the acceptance letters that students receive—in hopes of fostering a culture of greater tolerance. But no campus edict or panel discussion can address a problem that is so much bigger than our university.

At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?

When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.

At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.

“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.

“But are you a Zionist?”

“Yes.”

“Then we are enemies.”

On a soggy January day, New York Mayor Eric Adams travels to a theater in the Bronx to deliver his State of the City address. As dignitaries and the odd reporter take their seats, an Afro-Latino jazz band jams onstage, followed by a flamenco dance company, a gospel choir, and a gamut of religious leaders—Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Sikh. “O Lord, in obedience with your holy word, we intercede on behalf of our mayor,” a Latina evangelical minister says, setting the mood. “Bless him with courage like you gave David, wisdom like you gave Solomon.”

Adams, wearing a well-tailored three-piece suit, steps onstage. Union workers raise their arms and sway rapturously. Beaming, he beckons his top aides to stand one by one—all women of color. It’s a stirring display, a power flex by a Black mayor showing off his diverse administration.

Alas, Adams punctuates the scene like this:

“These women, let me tell you something—you may cut the umbilical cord but that fluid that carries you is something that is spiritual and lasts a lifetime.”

“I don’t just like them; I love them!”

The mayor’s amniotic reverie appears to catch one deputy mayor off guard; a forced grin freezes on her face.

Adams himself has a megawatt smile and an ebullient streak, as I saw while following him around the city for a few weeks. The 63-year-old mayor also has a long history of ad-libbing in odd and often self-aggrandizing ways that befuddle his audiences. One day last summer he went before an audience in Brooklyn and proclaimed, “I am the symbol of Black manhood in this city, in this country, and what it represents. I am the mayor of the most powerful city on the globe, and people need to recognize that!” Not long after, he attended an India Day celebration and declared: “I am Gandhi-like. I think like Gandhi; I act like Gandhi; I want to be like Gandhi.” He has insisted that “I am mayor because God gave me the authority to be mayor” and says he designs policy with a “godlike” approach.

Not long ago, in fact, it was as if God had parted the electoral sea for him. In the 2021 mayoral election, elites and liberal-left voters divided their ballots between his closest rivals. Adams, a former New York City Police Department captain who first entered public life as an advocate for Black officers, ultimately eked out a one-percentage-point victory in the Democratic primary.

Two years into his term, though, the mayor’s groove is worn, his once-high poll ratings are sickly, and disrespect from fellow politicians is mounting daily. His mayoralty just might be heading toward a crack-up. For close to two years, a river of asylum-seeking migrants, 175,000 so far, has flooded the city’s streets and shelters. A visibly rattled Adams, who had not previously managed an agency bigger than the largely ceremonial office of the Brooklyn borough president, proclaimed a budget apocalypse in September. “I don’t see an ending to this,” he said then. “This issue will destroy New York City.”

[Juan Williams: Eric Adams is making white liberals squirm]

November brought a more ominous turn for Adams. Federal agents waved aside his security team, handed him a subpoena, and seized his cellphones and iPad as part of an investigation into his campaign fundraising. And FBI agents late last month searched two homes of an influential aide to Adams who has also raised money for him.

Adams has not been charged with anything. But the chasm between prophetic destiny and the reality of his mayoralty gets wider and wider. How in the Lord’s name could this have happened?

One frigid morning this winter, I followed him to the Islamic Cultural Center of the Bronx, a mosque that serves West African communities. Many dozens of men, laborers and taxi drivers and shop clerks, crowded about Adams, laughing and holding up cellphones to film him.

The imam praised the mayor before handing him the microphone. Standing in the adoring midst, Adams galloped off on a passionate, almost angry speech. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, he said, he stood with Pakistanis and demanded the release of unjustly detained boys. “No one joined me,” Adams said. “I was by myself.” When a bombing in Lahore, Pakistan, killed 75 people in 2016, he alone wanted to fly to Pakistan and “fight on behalf of these innocent people. I couldn’t get anyone to take a flight with me.”

Each of these anecdotes is at best a concatenation of fact and fiction. Yes, Adams attended vigils after the 2016 bombing. He even discussed joining a group trip to Lahore to meet that city’s mayor, according to a local Pakistani activist with whom Adams’s press office put me in touch. The flight fell through not because others lacked his courage, but because of scheduling conflicts and a State Department travel warning.

The mayor’s claim of leading protests after 9/11 seemed still more grandiose. I wrote in-depth about that community after 9/11, and neither I nor any of the activists I met then recall seeing him at such demonstrations. Adams went to a federal jail on his own to register his disapproval of the detention policy, a spokesperson told me, adding by email that the “mayor does feel that the press should have paid more attention at the time.”

Adams wrapped up his mosque talk pointing at the audience. “You align yourself with those who want to malign me!” he said. Some of the immigrants exchanged puzzled looks. Us?

Adams’s voice rose, and his message became more evident: He suggested that he and his listeners are kindred in a hostile political world. “I was born in this country, yes, but let’s get something clear: I am African. I am African,” he said, adding, “Are we going to allow the enslaver that ripped us away from each other generations ago to rip us again?” He wasn’t talking about how he or his administration might help audience members; he was asking them to stand with him.

What sets Adams apart when things are going well, what makes him sound inescapably different from other New York Democrats today, is his cargo of life experience accumulated in a tough New York far removed from affluent brownstone Brooklyn, the Upper West and East Sides, and the hipster-socialist belt that runs from Williamsburg to Astoria. To be a self-made mayor from the underbelly of an unequal city takes considerable strength and political skill. In a city where some prominent liberal politicians took up slogans such as “Defund the police,” Adams’s background gives him the standing to challenge upscale-progressive truisms.

But as Adams walked into a late-January press conference in City Hall’s elegant mayoral wing, he looked drawn and tired. The left-leaning city council was poised to override his veto of a bill that would require police officers to record the race, ethnicity, gender, and age of every person they talked to during an investigation, even if the conversations were friendly. This legislation, Adams insisted, would drown cops in paperwork and impair crime fighting. He was desperate to defeat it. A day earlier, a sympathetic council member had called Adams. “Eric,” this member said, “you just might be the only Black man in New York politics who opposes this city-council bill.”

The mayor’s impending defeat seemed all the more confounding because the issue should have played to Adams’s strengths. As an ex-cop, he had campaigned as the tough-on-crime candidate. Voters in Black, Asian, and Latino working- and middle-class neighborhoods formed the bedrock of his support, and—unlike the city’s political class—shared his visceral sense of crime’s malignancies. Polls suggest that not only do Black and Latino voters oppose defunding the police, but a majority favor increasing the police budget. Adams touched on this reality often during his campaign. “I challenge you,” he told reporters: “Go through these communities with high crime and you start telling them you are going to pull the police away. You are going to need a cop.”

But at the press conference I attended, he backpedaled. He insisted that compromise remained possible. “I support the concept of this bill, I cannot say that enough,” he said. But, he continued, “I will never do anything or support anything that’s going to erode public safety in the city.”

Later that same day, the city council voted by an overwhelming margin to override his veto. Left-wing members claimed that Adams had ignored Black trauma. They were not elected, said one council member, “to make the NYPD officers’ lives easy or more convenient.”

Lincoln Restler, a tousle-haired white councilman who represents Brooklyn Heights, Williamsburg, and neighboring Greenpoint, rose to explain his vote. A private-school kid and the son of a private-equity investor, Restler grew up in Brooklyn Heights, a genteel neighborhood on a bluff overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. He sounded intent on reeducating the mayor. “I have been deeply disturbed by his misinformation campaign,” Restler said. “I have news that I’d like to share: Racism exists.”

Restler’s declaration could hardly be a revelation for the mayor. Over the years, Adams—who declined multiple requests for an interview for this article—has told of a mother perched on poverty’s edge in South Jamaica, Queens, scratching for dollars to buy food for her six children and to pay the mortgage after her husband left, and a troublemaking teenager who ran with a gang. In some versions of his story, after a 15-year-old Adams and an older brother stole money, or possibly a television, from a prostitute, two white cops pulled them into the local precinct and beat them. As Adams once recalled it: “They asked, ‘Do you feel like a beating?’ like you might ask, ‘Do you feel like a hamburger?’” Eventually, Adams said, a Black cop told the white cops to stop.

Years later, Adams decided to join the police. He spoke of this improbable epiphany to the journalist Juan Williams in 1999, a conversation Williams later recounted in The Atlantic. Adams figured being a cop was a great hustle; cops were more powerful than the petty criminals he admired. He had seen firsthand that a Black officer could even face down two white ones. “That Black guy was able to go among those white guys and stop this,” Adams told Williams. “He got juice—J-U-I-C-E, as the kids would say.”

Eric Adams at City Hall in 1998. (CHESTER HIGGINS JR./The New York Times/Redux)

Adams graduated from the police academy with top grades and headed into the subways, where he was seen as an effective transit cop. The New York City of the 1980s abounded with dystopian menace. Swaths of the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn were burned-out ruins. The homicide rate was four to seven times higher than it is today. One night in 1988, a mile from the small brick home where Adams had grown up, in Queens, the police officer Edward Byrne sat in a patrol car guarding the home of a Guyanese woman who had spoken out about drug dealing on her block. Two men walked up; one tapped on Byrne’s window, and the other shot the officer in the head five times. Byrne was among dozens of police officers killed in the ’80s.

The NYPD itself was in turmoil. Adams became the head of two associations of Black officers and rose to captain, all the while challenging his bosses in what was then a majority-white department over racial discrepancies in hiring and promotions, and over police brutality toward civilians. Line cops were expected to keep their lips pressed shut when around reporters, but Adams rarely hesitated to chat with the media. He went on television and testified before the city council about the abuses of the department’s street-crimes unit. Commissioners came to detest him.

His activism, he has maintained, put his life at risk. He has described an incident in 1996, when a dark sedan pulled up beside his car late at night in Brooklyn. A man said his name, and Adams saw a gun barrel sticking out the side window, he recalled three years ago in an interview with The City, a nonprofit local news site. The future mayor hit the gas and heard a shot, and a bullet shattered his back window. He speculated that the shooter might have been a cop but offered no evidence. “When I look back, I’m amazed I was able to get out of the department alive,” Adams told The City.

This tale, as with so much that Adams says, has curious gaps and logical inconsistencies. He told the press that the shooter was Black. But why would a Black officer shoot at a Black captain with a reputation for speaking up for the rights of Black officers? Did a sergeant really advise him, as Adams claimed, not to file a report of the shooting? Adams, who by his own account refused that guidance, told The City that the department simply dropped its investigation. But in fact, A decorated Black detective, Andre Parker, investigated the incident, according to Streetsblog NYC. Although that officer had grown up in the neighborhood where the incident supposedly took place, and knew it well, he could find no corroborating information.

Wilbur Chapman, now retired, was at the time the department’s chief of patrol and its highest-ranking Black officer. He, too, spoke his mind to reporters and was no fan of Adams. “Adams did very little, but he was very good at getting attention,” Chapman told me. When I asked him about that long-ago shooting, Chapman laughed. “Why was he shot at? By whom? I have never heard of a police officer who was shot at and a desk sergeant would not take his report. It’s all one of the mysteries of the 20th century.”

If the police department was one major factor in Adams’s rise to prominence, his religion was the other one. He grew up in the Church of God in Christ, a predominantly Black Pentecostalist denomination. Pentecostalism, a fast-growing evangelical movement, is notable for its emotional services and an outlook imbued with a sense of personal revelation. “There’s a huge emphasis on the work of the spirit as transformative,” Eli Valentin, a political consultant, preacher, and lecturer at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, told me. “When the mayor says he is called personally by God, he is speaking quite literally.”

As a young man, Adams was drawn to a particular Pentecostal church, the House of the Lord in Downtown Brooklyn. Its ministry is grounded in activism for the poor; its motto exhorts, “Be ye not hearers of the word only, but doers also.” The church’s pastor, the Reverend Herbert Daughtry Sr., had served time in prison as a young man and loomed large in the cosmology of New York City activist preachers. He helped persuade Adams to become a cop. “Some of us needed to work outside of the system, and some inside the system,” Daughtry told The New York Times when asked about Adams in 2021. “To model what policemen should be about and to find out what’s going on. Why were we having all these killings?”

By Adams’s account, everything came together—his faith, his work in policing—when God told him to enter politics. “Thirty something years ago I woke up, out of my sleep in a cold sweat. God spoke to my heart and said, ‘You are going to be the mayor January 1, 2022,” he recounted during a Father’s Day service last year at Lenox Road Baptist Church, according to an account of the event in the New York Post. “You cannot be silent,” he says that God told him. “You must tell everyone you know.” Adams took this counsel to heart. “I would tell everybody, ‘I’m going to be mayor on January 1, 2022. People used to think I needed medication.’”

Adams has often expressed his admiration for the city’s first Black mayor, David N. Dinkins, a social democrat who believed in multiracial coalitions and was elected to a single four-year term in 1989. But Dinkins’s emphasis on racial amity was not Adams’s jam. In 1993, Herman Badillo, a former Puerto Rican Democratic member of Congress, ran on an electoral ticket with Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican. Adams lashed out at Badillo, saying that if he was really interested in his community, he would have married a Latina. Badillo’s wife was Jewish.

Adams grew close with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a Black nationalist with a long history of anti-Semitic statements. Adams criticized Major Owens, a Black member of Congress from Brooklyn and a liberal icon, for attacking Farrakhan too harshly. In 1994, Adams declared that he would challenge Owens in a primary. But Adams failed to collect enough signatures and implied, without offering evidence, that Owens’s partisans had stolen his petitions.

[From the April 2024 issue: The Golden Age of the American Jews is ending]

As a politician, Adams was flailing. He changed his registration to Republican, saying Democrats had failed the Black community on crime. A few years later he reenrolled as a Democrat, perhaps realizing that the Republican Party offered no sure path in a Democrat-dominated city. Finally, in 2006, he gained election to the state Senate. When I interviewed Adams in that era, he came across as a nuanced critic of the police department, if not particularly conversant on other issues.

His senate tenure is best known for a moment of low comedy. In his first year, he gave a speech complaining loudly that senators were underpaid at $79,500 a year—about $117,000 in today’s money. “I deserve to get paid more, and I’m only a freshman, and I’m complaining,” Adams said. “Show me the money. Show me the money. That’s what it’s all about.”

Behind the scenes, he proved adept at the business of back-scratching and ethically dubious campaign fundraising that has long defined the state Senate. He became chair of that body’s Racing and Wagering Committee, and he played a role in selecting a company to operate video slot machines at the state-owned Aqueduct Racetrack. One evening in 2009, when the contract was still under deliberation, Adams threw a birthday party and fundraiser for himself and loudly thanked one of the contract bidders for his contributions. He did so in front of representatives of another bidder, who later felt like they had no choice but to contribute to Adams’s campaign fund.

The manner in which Adams, top legislative leaders, and New York’s then-governor handled the Aqueduct issue triggered a state inspector general’s corruption investigation, in which the birthday party became a subplot. Under oath, the senator testified that he could not recall whether Aqueduct bidders were present that night. His memory lapses and other explanations for his actions, the inspector general’s report stated, “strains credulity.”

During his senate years, Adams also planted himself in the bosom of the Brooklyn Democratic Party machine. When he set his eyes on the Brooklyn borough presidency in 2013, he ran unopposed. His new office was a fiefdom that reformers had all but stripped of its once-formidable power. But it was still a high-visibility seat in the most populous New York City borough. His political makeover was under way. His persona as a cop with a social-justice conscience played well with white liberals. And the man who had embraced Farrakhan came to build alliances with the borough’s large Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects. (This January, an Orthodox publication, Shtetl, reported that Adams had sided with members of Agudath Israel, an Orthodox organization, against the state education department’s efforts to demand that religious schools give children a basic education in secular subjects. The poor quality of education at some yeshivas has been a years-long scandal, but Adams urged his audience to fight harder against state oversight. “Where’s our presence in the streets?” he exhorted. “Where’s our outrage when you talk about protecting the foundations of your schools?”)

In interviews, former Adams staffers described him as forever on the move—from a St. Patrick’s Day parade to shopping at Tashkent Supermarket in Brighton Beach, home to many immigrants from the former Soviet Union, to a block party to mosques and churches. No ethnic event was too insignificant. That is good retail politics. But Steve Zeltser, who was hired to be Adams’s man in south Brooklyn, left after becoming unsettled by his boss’s omnivorous flesh-pressing. “No issues seemed to move him,” Zeltser told me. “His ‘vision’ as borough president was how he could become mayor.”

Adams announced his candidacy for New York’s highest office a year after the city adopted ranked-choice voting, which meant that a candidate could win the Democratic nomination without a runoff weeks later against the second-place finisher. He faced three major opponents: the left-liberal MSNBC pundit and former mayoral counsel Maya Wiley, who is Black; the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, an Asian American; and the former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, who is white. Race and ethnicity are not determinative in city elections, but they are rarely incidental.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic and a nationwide upheaval triggered by George Floyd’s murder the summer before, press coverage of the 2021 campaign fixed on social-justice themes. Adams obliged, but only to a point: He focused more on crime fighting, and promised to get couch-bound workers back into half-empty office buildings. On occasion, he lashed out. In a speech on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, he condemned those who had moved into gentrifying neighborhoods: “Go back to Iowa. You go back to Ohio,” he said. “New York City belongs to the people that were here.”

Many of those newcomers, younger white renters, leaned to the political left and supported his opponents. When Adams edged out his closest contender in the final tally, he suggested this was a rebuke for a leftward-moving Democratic Party. He doubled down on his campaign message: “If Black lives really matter, it can’t only be against police abuse,” he said in a speech the night of the primary. “It has to be against the violence that’s ripping apart our communities.”

After that, his public messaging became more progressive-friendly. He began to talk of building affordable housing, perhaps with an eye to courting liberals before the general election. Behind closed doors, he tended to his right flank: A few nights after his primary victory, he dined at a former mob joint in East Harlem as the guest of a blustery conservative white former cop and a conservative billionaire supermarket baron.

To peer back over five decades of mayors is to see a parade of definable New York types: Edward Koch, a former congressman, took office in 1978, as the city hovered near bankruptcy. Acerbic, funny, peevish, and commanding, he had a gift for selecting top deputies who understood the city and bragged about making other politicians sweat. Dinkins tried to unify a racially torn city during a deep recession and hired some innovative commissioners. The operatic Giuliani, who yearned to liberate the city from the crime that had scarred it for decades, waved off reporters’ questions as “really actually jerky” and demanded police officers’ obedience by saying, “After all, I’m the M-A-Y-O-R.”

His successor, Michael Bloomberg, an impatient builder of bike lanes and parks and housing, personified the power of pro-business technocracy. Bloomberg famously rode out a nasty blizzard in Bermuda and afterward suggested that snowbound New Yorkers should quit complaining—after all, Broadway plays were still full. Bill de Blasio, elected from the Democratic Party’s left wing at a moment of yawning inequality, fancied himself a progressive national leader for the modern age. (He ran for president in 2020 but withdrew before collecting a single delegate.)

Adams’s place in this lineage is not yet evident. He craves power and acclaim, and that’s a start for any New York mayor. But he also struggles with an elementary act of political self-definition: What vision animates his mayoralty beyond the trappings of office and accumulation of power?

Early on, Adams let reporters tag along as he exercised and ate poke bowls and practiced politics. He charmed billionaires and reassured real-estate moguls about taxes and chatted about crime with barbers in Brownsville, Brooklyn. He stayed up as evening bled into early morning. Life was a whirl; why sleep?

Reporters delighted in his metaphysical fixations. Despite his religious upbringing, he espoused the healing properties of crystals and speculated that his girlfriend just might be clairvoyant. Challenged early in his mayoralty about his claims of veganism (he was, it came out, a fish-eating vegan), he told the press: “I eat a plant-based-centered life.”

Governing came less naturally. He values loyalty over management expertise. His hiring is haphazard. He seemed to credit God’s guidance for his preference for “nontraditional people” over experts. “If all the professionals were all that good, then why were we such a mess?” he said, according to the New York Post.

Adams has few close friends in politics. Before a mayoral debate in 2021, as opponents chatted, he sat on a chair behind his podium and meditated. In office, he has drawn his inner circle hermetically tight. Ingrid Lewis-Martin, his closest adviser and de facto enforcer, is married to a man who went through the police academy with him. Philip Banks III, his deputy mayor for public safety, was once the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed official—and a friend of Adams within the department. Banks suddenly resigned from the force in 2014, and a federal prosecutor named him an unindicted co-conspirator in a bribery case. Banks has denied wrongdoing, and Adams has not answered questions about the matter. A mayoral spokesperson told The New York Times that Banks had made honest mistakes.

One can hardly overstate the politically incestuous nature of his administration. Banks’s brother, David, is the schools chancellor and the romantic partner of Sheena Wright, Adams’s first deputy mayor. David Banks has employed the mayor’s romantic partner, Tracey Collins, as a senior adviser to one of his deputy chancellors. When he was borough president, Adams—who has been dogged by questions about where he actually resides—maintained for four years that he was renting a room from a friend in Brooklyn. That friend, Lisa White, reportedly retired in 2019 from a $53,000-a-year job as a 911 dispatcher. When Adams became mayor, the police department hired White as a deputy commissioner at a salary of $241,000. City Hall insists that Adams had nothing to do with her appointment.

Adams takes media questions in January. (Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty)

Sometimes the Adams administration manages to please his party’s restive left. The mayor committed the city to spending $18 million to help erase medical debts held by working-class New Yorkers. He has—after a very slow start—ramped up production of subsidized housing for the working class, and officials found money for special beds for mentally ill homeless people.

Addressing a problem that affects all New Yorkers, his city-planning department has embarked on an ambitious rezoning effort, generally well received, to allow more housing construction in a city starved for apartments. Also affecting everyone are the subways—the arteries of the city. When violence and homeless encampments rendered trains and stations forbidding, Adams sent cops trooping in, and violent subway crime fell for a time.

Kathryn Wylde, the president of the business group Partnership for New York City, can enumerate Adams’s flaws but inclines toward a friendly accounting. “I have great sympathy for his situation,” she told me. “He’s got guns off the streets, he’s confiscated and destroyed illegal motorbikes, and sanitation service has improved.”

Most reviews from the city’s permanent government are more acerbic. Bloomberg was taken with Adams’s centrist-liberal politics and his ability to advocate for victims of police violence even as he spoke of getting tough on criminal violence. He and his aides have invested time and money into trying to make a success of Adams’s mayoralty. The returns are not overwhelming. “Time is running out to put points on the board for a successful reelection,” Howard Wolfson, a former deputy mayor in the Bloomberg administration, told me.

Adams is a micromanager. He demands to sign off on commissioners’ hires and is reluctant to entrust work to subordinates. The wall around his inner circle is not easily breached, and out-of-favor commissioners and deputies email in hopes of snaring meetings. The atmosphere is less New Age than Machiavelli; the mayor believes in crystals, but a knife is handier. “It’s like Succession,” Zeltser, the former borough-president’s-office aide, told me. “You throw daggers to get near him.”

The mayor has created a troop of special advisers: a rat czar, a public-realm czar, a weed czar, an efficiency czar, and so on. This tendency can unsettle senior department leaders who coexist with these free agents. Some czars have impressive résumés, while others are known principally for their fealty to the mayor. Denise Felipe-Adams—no familial relation to Adams—is one of the leaders of his newly created Office of Innovation and Emerging Markets. She worked for six years as a special assistant in the borough president’s office, and last year posted on social media that her “bossman” is the “#Realest #Dopestbrother running this city.” “They are his agents of chaos,” noted a prominent businessperson who requested anonymity in hopes of getting phone calls returned by City Hall.

Adams recently proposed a Department of Sustainable Delivery, to try to impose order on the food-delivery business, whose riders hop on souped-up scooters or electric bikes and spin into the night, often riding on sidewalks and against traffic. Why he did not delegate this task to his Department of Transportation went unexplained.

For all of his misadventures as mayor, the debate over the police bill comes closest to revealing the distance between his vision and his skills. To watch this mayor try and fail to impose his will was instructive.

He held a press conference at NYPD headquarters, a fortified tower just east of City Hall, to criticize the police bill, and tore into an antagonist, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, whose home is on an Army base in Brooklyn. “Like, I find it astonishing that we have a public advocate who pushed for this police bill. He lives in a fort! A fort!” Adams said.

The public advocate was uncowed. The mayor, Williams said to reporters, resembled a “bratty” 5-year-old “throwing a temper tantrum.” With that, Williams sliced to the heart of the mayor’s personal conceit. “Eric Adams is not the messiah for New York City. The same God that elected him elected a lot of us on the exact same day.”

It’s a bad sign for the mayor when his roar elicits only eye rolls. Weeks later, mayoral aides walked into City Hall’s elegant rotunda, the traditional DMZ between the council and the mayoral wings, and tried to abscond with chairs just before a council press conference. When that failed, they declined to turn on the lights. The switches are on the mayor’s side of the building, so the press conference took place in the twilight.

On February 5, a retired police inspector who was a former comrade of the mayor pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge brought by the Manhattan district attorney. Dwayne Montgomery, 65, admitted to raising thousands of dollars in straw donations for Adams’s campaign. This practiced form of New York election chicanery works like this: Wealthy contributors are capped in what they can give to a campaign, so they round up people to “contribute” and then reimburse them. Disguising the source of campaign money is against the law. The City, which has done fine work mining the scandal, noted that Adams’s campaign “has been flagged repeatedly for accepting tens of thousands of dollars in illegal donations.” His campaign has repaid some, although not all, illicit donations, and prosecutors have dubbed some givers unindicted co-conspirators.

No less worrisome for the mayor is the news that a U.S. attorney is examining whether the Turkish government funneled illegal donations through straw donors. Why Ankara cared about this city’s mayoral race remains unclear. In November, the FBI raided the Brooklyn home of the mayor’s chief fundraiser, 25-year-old Brianna Suggs. Suggs—whom Lewis-Martin, the mayoral adviser, has described as a goddaughter—has not been charged. When news broke of that raid on her home, Adams was in Washington, D.C., intending to meet with White House leaders and fellow mayors about the migrant crisis. He canceled those meetings and flew back to New York to comfort Suggs after what he termed her “traumatic experience.” Yet he has since said he did not speak to her that day, because he “didn’t want to give any appearance of interference.”

Criminal investigations are unpredictable. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio emerged legally unscathed from his own fundraising scandal. But as a former federal prosecutor told me, when a judge permits the FBI to seize a sitting mayor’s phones, it’s not a great sign.

Adams is not yet politically bereft. Particularly if the FBI probe fizzles, he could remain a formidable candidate in 2025. Even as much of New York’s political world marches to his left or simply writes him off, he retains a base among Black voters. Especially if he faces strong progressive opponents, Adams might rebound among other New Yorkers who shared his views on policing in 2021.

When people describe Adams as eccentric, they routinely lump together different types of statements. Some things that Adams says are quite idiosyncratic: his bit about umbilical cords, or his recent claim on X that New Yorkers call their city “the Port-Au-Prince of America”—which essentially nobody ever says. By contrast, his mysticism and his claims to be the Lord’s own anointed, while perhaps off-putting to young city dwellers and the secular professional class, are unremarkable to the millions of religiously observant New Yorkers. And even his retailing of conspiracy theories begins to look like a familiar City Hall move, made by politicians from many different backgrounds. It’s the rhetoric of a calculating mayor who is tired of criticism and understands the old politics of them-versus-us.

At a meeting last June, an 84-year-old tenant advocate whose family had fled the Holocaust sharply challenged Adams about why his appointees had supported big rent increases. He stiffened and told her not to point her finger at him. “Don’t stand in front like you treated someone that’s on the plantation that you own,” he said in a video clip that went viral.

In January, Adams met with a multiracial group of senior citizens in Queens. In the overheated community room of an apartment building, the elders greeted Adams with warm claps and smiles. But the migrant crisis was clearly eating at him. “You need to know what they dropped in my lap,” he told his audience. Chicago, Washington, and Los Angeles, he continued—what do these cities have in common? He answered his question: Each has a Black mayor and each faces a migrant wave. He suggested that Greg Abbott, the Texas governor who has been busing border migrants to blue states, is trying to embarrass Black mayors and show that they can’t govern. “You see the hustle?” he demanded. But Adams’s account doesn’t add up. Los Angeles has experienced nothing like the migrant flow into New York and seems to be coping; Denver, which Adams didn’t mention, has been overwhelmed by asylum seekers and has a white mayor.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Something’s fishy about the ‘migrant crisis’]

When making public speeches, Adams plays up his pride in his many “chocolate” advisers. “I hear people outside saying, ‘Fight the power,’” he said in a speech in a Brooklyn megachurch last year, his voice scornful. “Negro, we are the power.” But such politics can register as anachronistic. In the midst of his recent battles with the city council, he suggested to its speaker, Adrienne Adams, who is Black and unrelated to him, that two top Black leaders cannot afford to let each other fail. She flashed a sardonic look at her aides afterward. Yes, she went to the same high school as Adams. But her political destiny is not tied to his.

Adams’s setbacks keep multiplying. This week, a former NYPD staffer filed a lawsuit accusing him of demanding oral sex in exchange for helping her obtain a promotion in the early 1990s; the mayor promptly and emphatically denied the claim, saying, “This did not happen—it did not happen.” In the last week of February, Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, found that the Adams administration’s issuing of no-bid contracts with companies to deal with the migrant influx had led to “exorbitant” fees that varied “wildly.” The city, Lander found, likely had wasted millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, crime on the subways has rebounded, prompting New York Governor Kathy Hochul to deploy state troopers and National Guard members to help patrol the system. Although New York has recouped its severe employment losses from the pandemic, its growth rate trails that of many other cities. Poverty indicators are rising. Illegal marijuana shops proliferate by the hundreds, and Adams’s handling of the city budget is erratic. As for rats, well, one ran across my feet as I stepped off the Q train recently. No czar in sight.

Adams has become fond of mentioning Matthew 21:12, in which Jesus evicts the money changers from the temple. At the end of January, he visited P.S. 156, in Brownsville, for a public meeting. At one point, he turned the discussion to Jesus, and to himself. “Jesus walked in the temple, he saw them doing wrong.” What did Jesus do? he demanded of an older woman in the audience. Jesus turned the tables over, she replied. Adams nodded happily and made the inevitable comparison: “I went to City Hall to turn the table over!”

It’s fine, I suppose, to feel enraptured with your godly mission. But I kept returning to a more worldly question: Why, other than to confirm his exalted sense of his destiny, did he want to become mayor in the first place? At times, I wondered whether he could pierce the shroud of his own mysteries.

The more he struggles with managing the city, the more everyone else in government defies him, and the longer the investigations drag on, the more his temple looks like the one in need of cleaning out.

American leftists are facing a question that has become a perennial bugbear. Come November, should they support the Democratic incumbent Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump? Or, given their profound reservations about both candidates, should they abstain from voting at all?

Biden’s support for Israel’s brutal war in Gaza has given the conundrum special urgency this year, but the question has become exhaustingly familiar. Four years ago, the country’s largest leftist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, loudly declared that it was not endorsing Biden, despite his backing by a coalition that included Bernie Sanders, Angela Davis, the DSA’s own Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, most major trade unions, and, implicitly, The New England Journal of Medicine. When some in the DSA’s leadership suggested that the organization could at least call on its members in swing states to consider voting for Biden, the majority voted down the proposal. Biden went on to win without any organized help from the DSA.

At moments like these, the American left could stand to learn from the experiences of its international counterparts. The international left seems largely to recognize that it is too small to survive on its own and must therefore build coalitions—most important, to ally with those who defend democracy and basic civic rights. And this is true despite the fact that the left in countries such as France, India, and Japan is a formidable force, boasting organizations with millions of members and sending delegates to serve in legislative and executive office. American leftists, meanwhile, have spent decades mired in niche subcultures of activist groups—they are marginal and yet still spurn coalitions that risk adulterating their purity.

[Helen Lewis: The left can’t afford to go mad]

The United States is relatively rare among democracies in that it has long lacked a far-left party with legislative representation, a distinction that has something to do with the peculiarities of its political system. In most parliamentary democracies, political parties are membership-based and ideologically aligned, whereas in the United States, they are loose coalitions that can encompass a wide range of views.

This protean structure didn’t stop American social movements from achieving important milestones throughout the 20th century—among them, female suffrage, workers’ rights, and an end to segregation. To get there, rights campaigns often had to fight both the Democratic and the Republican establishments. But they managed to mobilize masses, carve out new political spaces, and ultimately make the journey from protest to politics.

Bayard Rustin explained the relationship between movement and party in 1965: “Southern demonstrators had recognized that the most effective way to strike at the police brutality they suffered from was by getting rid of the local sheriff—and that meant political action, which in turn meant, and still means, political action within the Democratic party where the only meaningful primary contests in the South are fought.”

America’s youth-led social-protest movements petered out by the end of the 1970s, however, and the left came to place itself outside the political system, condemning itself to marginality. American leftist activists continued to bring some changes through trade unions, civil-rights organizations, and feminist groups, but they did not coalesce into an organized political movement until 2016, when a democratic socialist senator from Vermont took the step of running in the Democratic primaries. In doing so, Bernie Sanders helped the minuscule DSA grow its membership from 6,200 in 2015 to a peak of 95,000 in 2021 (it now stands at about 78,000).

The DSA is a tiny force in a country of 332 million. And it is less a nationwide political organization than a federation of local activist groups that share a banner despite the wildly divergent politics of their members. The DSA’s elected representatives reliably showed up for Biden in 2020 and have voted for measures such as support for NATO’s enlargement. The national political leadership of the organization, however, has taken diametrically opposed positions. The organization lacks a united political program even on such basic matters as whom to endorse for president.

Many in the DSA good-heartedly argue that what matters is grassroots, and in many cases local, activism, not who gets elected to Congress or the White House. In this sense, the DSA seems more comfortable with the pre-Bernie activism of bumper stickers and single-cause groups than with the prospect of building a cohesive political force.

The international left, by contrast, has both a history of cohesion and the baggage to go along with it. Many leftists are still struggling to transcend the legacy of the 20th century’s authoritarian socialism. Some once-powerful parties of the left have simply disappeared into thin air (as in Italy). New leftist parties, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, emerged or drew strength from the wreckage of the 2008 global economic recession but didn’t achieve as much as optimists had hoped. Still, socialist parties on multiple continents are major political actors in ways that their American counterparts simply are not, and the reason is at least in part their willingness to forge pragmatic alliances.

This imperative is taken as elementary in much of the world. India’s communist parties have worked within the country’s multiparty democratic structures since its independence in 1947 and have thus also remained relevant in the post-Soviet era. Last year, they came together with the Indian National Congress and a range of left, center-left, centrist, regionalist, and even center-right parties to form the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA). Their aim was to present a united front against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, whose chauvinism and authoritarianism have had a chilling effect on the world’s biggest democracy. Pointing to the threat such forces pose to “the ethos of the country,” Annie Raja, the leader of the Communist Party of India, told a local publication, “At such a juncture, any party which is sincerely wishing to save this country and democracy and secularism must try to unite.”

Similarly, the Turkish left, including the Workers Party and several other Marxist groups, campaigned last year for the centrist presidential candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu, whom it viewed as having the best chance to beat the authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Although Erdoğan still won, the left’s campaign gave it new national visibility and its largest parliamentary representation in decades.

In Israel, a left-wing coalition with Arab and Jewish members decided to join Zionist parties of the left and the center in endorsing the centrist Benny Gantz for prime minister, with a goal of ousting Benjamin Netanyahu, seen by the group as a menace to Israel’s democracy.

In countries where democracy itself is not under threat, leftists have learned to make broad alliances in order to remain politically relevant. In Portuguese elections on March 10, the Communist Party, the Left Bloc, and the left-leaning green parties gained about 13 percent of the vote among them. They will now do all they can to exclude far-right and even center-right forces from forming a government. In other words, they are likely to support the center-left Socialist Party, roughly the Portuguese equivalent to Biden’s party. That party’s leader, Pedro Nuno Santos, helped coordinate the support of communists and the Left Bloc for a previous government in 2015–19.

Similarly, in Spain the Communist Party and Podemos are part of a coalition cabinet led by the center-left Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. One of that country’s most popular politicians is the communist deputy prime minister and labor minister, Yolanda Diaz, who has vocally backed the Palestinian cause and was recently in Washington to work with her American counterpart on new regulations protecting workers from artificial-intelligence algorithms.

One can criticize the left for joining governments in Spain and Portugal, but not without acknowledging that the policies these governments have adopted have already changed millions of lives. Spain has passed gender-equality laws that improve transgender rights, offer state-funded paid leave for women who suffer from painful periods (a first among European countries), and mandate greater parity for women in politics and the public sphere. Portugal reversed austerity measures that had included deep cuts to wages, pensions, and social security; The New York Times termed the result a “major revival.” Whatever soul-searching the American left wants to do about its conception of socialism, if it seeks to be a serious political force, it must also attempt to win elections, come to power, and change real people’s lives.

On a subnational level, too, leftists outside the United States have put sloganeering aside to pursue concrete goals in office and show what their ideals can look like in real life. In India’s Kerala, a democratically elected communist-led government has made particular strides in human development, poverty reduction, public education, and, most recently, public health; the international news media lauded K. K. Shailaja, Kerala’s health minister, for her handling of the coronavirus pandemic, even though the state later faced a new wave of the virus.

[Conor Friedersdorf: How October 7 changed America’s free-speech culture]

Closer to home, Chile’s President Gabriel Boric, who was actually endorsed by the DSA, leads a pioneering left-wing government. Patient political work and broad alliances propelled him to the Mint Palace. Former President Michelle Bachelet, from the country’s center-left, supported Boric in 2021, as did an even more liberal predecessor, Ricardo Lagos. That did not stop the Communist Party from enthusiastically joining his government, and Camilla Vallejo, once a fellow leader of the student movement, now serves as a cabinet minister. Under the leadership of its first-ever communist mayor, Irací Hassler, the capital city of Santiago has taken steps to bolster women’s rights by offering support to victims of domestic violence, for instance, while battling food insecurity and publicly condemning discrimination against migrants.

In the first half of the 20th century, the United States actually had a powerful leftist force in the form of the Socialist Party of America. Its members won municipal races in places such as Berkeley, California, and Schenectady, New York. The party’s proud centerpiece was Milwaukee, which had three socialist mayors for a total of 38 years from 1910 to 1960. Those further to the left often made fun of them as “sewer socialists” who cared more about the city’s excellent public-sanitation system than about the socialist revolution (like all good leftist insults, this one had originated as an internal jab within the party).

But Milwaukee’s sewer socialists could boast something that purists simply can’t: They made a difference in the lives of millions of working people. Those are the politics—result-oriented and pragmatic—that convince people to give the socialist left and its ideas a chance. If American socialists truly want to emerge as a serious political force in the world’s most powerful country, they need to stop cosplaying radicalism and learn how to defend democracy, build broad coalitions, and run successful governments.

We look at whether there is a shift within the Jewish community against Israel’s actions and policies.

Labour suspended Ms Abbott for saying Irish, Jewish, and Traveller people do not face racism "all their lives".

If Trump Wins

In The Atlantic’s January/February issue, 24 contributors considered what Donald Trump could do if he were to return to the White House.

The Atlantic’s January/February issue performs a valuable service by raising the country’s awareness of what’s in store should Donald Trump be reelected president. In the same way, the United States ought to understand how reelecting Joe Biden might benefit Americans and improve world security. We also need to learn about the inner workings of the Biden administration, its future policies and programs, and how another four years could affect the quality of American lives.

Todd Everett
Healdsburg, Calif.

Although the various articles in the “If Trump Wins” issue may have been accurate, I fear they didn’t go far enough in analyzing the real problem: the Republican Party. Few of Donald Trump’s successes as president could have been accomplished without the full support of nearly the entire GOP. Few of Trump’s second-term goals will be realized without full Republican support. The United States doesn’t have a Trump problem; it has a Republican problem. He is merely the latest and perhaps most powerful Republican voice calling for the end of the modern federal government, a position favored by many Republicans since President Ronald Reagan and Grover Norquist. The assaults on government, civil rights, and democratic norms that this issue so ably describes will continue with or without Trump as long as modern Republicans control any levers of government.

Catherine Whiting
Kensington, Md.

As experts in the fields of poverty and social policy, we were saddened that The Atlantic’s January/February issue ignored the damage Donald Trump would do to the social safety net if he were to regain the White House. As the 2024 campaign season ramps up, it is crucial that poverty and the safety net receive sufficient attention.

Throughout Trump’s administration, we led a working group documenting the myriad ways that Trump and the GOP sought to weaken, retrench, and dismantle essential programs such as Medicaid and SNAP. Trump’s efforts largely took place without public scrutiny, relying on changes to byzantine bureaucratic procedures and not congressional debates or policy discussions. He even sought to alter how the federal government measured poverty to kick hundreds of thousands of recipients off federal anti-poverty programs or reduce their already meager benefits.

The safety net grew during the early days of the pandemic in an effort to protect America’s most vulnerable citizens. But these programs were largely temporary, and the safety net has unfortunately returned to its paltry, pre-pandemic status. Even with a Democrat in the White House, the safety net doesn’t receive the attention or focus necessary to ensure that Americans are adequately protected. But if Trump is given another term, he would continue his full-scale war on the nation’s poor. We know what he can do, and what he will do.

Ryan LaRochelle
Senior Lecturer, University of Maine
Orono, Maine

Luisa S. Deprez
Professor Emerita, University of Southern Maine
Portland, Maine

Why do articles like Mark Leibovich’s “This Is Who We Are,” which subtly derides Trump voters, seem to outnumber the articles explaining why people voted for Donald Trump? I live in a rural area, and I didn’t vote for Trump—but I know many good people who did. I understand that the current system really doesn’t work for them, and that they want things to change, much like the people who voted for Bernie Sanders and for Ross Perot before that. Why, for example, has wage growth stagnated since the early 1970s, while productivity has risen? For the sake of the country, The Atlantic should avoid articles like Leibovich’s and focus on the real issues.

Robby Porter
Adamant, Vt.

Mark Leibovich’s article, “This Is Who We Are,” reveals an important truth, but I wish he’d gone even further. Trying to “understand” Trump voters is a pointless exercise.

I consider myself a political independent. Many of my family members voted for Donald Trump in 2016. I couldn’t see why Trump’s insulting comments about women and Senator John McCain weren’t disqualifying for them, as they were for me, so I started engaging with my father, a college buddy of his from Ohio, and an uncle via email. What I learned from 2016 through 2020 was concerning. Most of their information came from nasty and transparently manipulative chain emails that put down “libs,” vilified Nancy Pelosi, laughed off climate change. I wondered why my relatives—smart, successful people—found these emails useful. Naively, I started fact-checking them. But as Megan Garber observes in this issue, the truth doesn’t matter. Once, I made the mistake of replying to everyone copied on the chain. I learned then of Trump supporters’ group psychology—they will defend one another no matter what, ganging up on anyone not going along with their line.

Later, as fires burned on three sides of my California home, I emailed my father a basic primer on climate-change science. I remember taking time to find the best resources: short, factual, based on information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. In response, he notified my family that he was never speaking to me again. He died of a heart attack in 2020. When I broke the news of my father’s death to my uncle, one of his first reactions was to say that he was sorry I had decided to send that “disrespectful” climate-change email, implying that I had deserved to be ostracized.

I sent my father that email out of respect for him. He was an intelligent man. We had engaged in many thoughtful political discussions over a lifetime. The error I made was appealing to that intelligence post-Trump. After a steady diet of cynical half-truths and lies from chain emails and Fox News, my father could no longer absorb counterfactuals dispassionately; he saw them as attacks.

That was the end of my efforts to understand Team Trump’s perspective. The media, too, need to stop trying to understand Trump voters as if they are aliens. They are our family members. Like us, they are human, with all the human susceptibilities. It isn’t condescending to call them out.

Louise Yarnall
La Selva Beach, Calif.

Reading “If Trump Wins” was, in a word, exhausting. I came away thinking two things. First, the Democratic Party needs to get better at messaging, as was put best by Helen Lewis in her article, “The Left Can’t Afford to Go Mad.” Second, all of this just underscores the absurdity of the Electoral College. That Donald Trump—or anyone—doesn’t have to win the most votes to be “elected” and that everything detailed in the issue could possibly come to pass even though a plurality of the country might vote against it is Kafkaesque.

Ramsey Chilwell
San Francisco, Calif.

Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, Franklin Foer writes about the end of what he calls the “Golden Age of American Jewry.” Rising anti-Semitism, on the right and the left, threatens to undermine an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans—and it could in turn destroy the liberal order they helped establish.

Heritage Image Partnership / Alamy; Everett Collection / Alamy

For our cover design, we drew inspiration from the aesthetic traditions of Yiddish-theater posters, adapting their colors, typefaces, photo treatments, and intermingled languages. (Special thanks to David Roskies at the Jewish Theological Seminary for his Yiddish expertise.) From the mid-19th century through the outbreak of World War II, Yiddish theater companies flourished across Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in London, Paris, and New York. For Jewish immigrants to the United States, the critic Jesse Green has written, Yiddish theater offered “a keepsake of home, and yet also a means of acculturation.” Their comedies, dramas, and melodramas explored communal and cultural concerns but also looked outward, taking up the stories of Jews in America.

On the cover, we sought to assemble a cast of icons from the Jewish Golden Age. Along the top row, from left to right, are Saul Bellow, Bob Dylan, Susan Sontag, Leonard Nimoy, Henry Winkler, and Betty Friedan. In the center is Barbra Streisand, surrounded, clockwise from the top right, by Lenny Bruce, Ruth Westheimer, Steven Spielberg, Adam Sandler, Jonas Salk, Gilda Radner, Winona Ryder, Ralph Lauren, and Philip Roth. Along the bottom row, from left to right, are Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jerry Seinfeld, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Louis Brandeis, and Cynthia Ozick.

— Peter Mendelsund, Creative Director

This article appears in the April 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

For The Atlantic’s April cover story, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” staff writer Franklin Foer reports on how the rise of anti-Semitism on both the right and the left threatens to end an era of unprecedented safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans, one that spanned the latter part of the 20th century. Foer argues that, with the first decades of the 21st century marked by conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, the liberal order that Jewish Americans helped establish, rooted in values of tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism, is being demolished.

The rise of anti-Semitism on the political right is well documented, with Donald Trump attracting the allegiance of white supremacists and freely borrowing their tropes. Foer reports from the Bay Area on the anti-Semitism that has spread on the American left since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. He writes that the brand of anti-Zionism adopted in some corners of the contemporary left “doesn’t stop with calls for an end to the occupation of the West Bank. It espouses a blithe desire to eliminate the world’s only Jewish-majority nation, valorizes the homicidal campaign against its existence, and seeks to hold members of the Jewish diaspora to account for the sins of a country they don’t live in and for a government they didn’t elect. In so doing, this faction of the left places itself in the terrible lineage of attempts to erase Jewry—and, in turn, stirs ancient and not-so-ancient existential fears.”

Foer explores how these ascendant political movements on both sides of the political spectrum are dispensing with the ideals of tolerance and pluralism, and replacing them with intolerance and even violence. Foer writes, “Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good for Jews. And what’s bad for Jews, it can be argued, is bad for America.”

Foer’s article describes in detail the golden age that Jewish writers, filmmakers, musicians, and intellectuals helped create after World War II: “As anti-Semitism faded, American Jewish civilization exploded in a rush of creativity. For a time, the great Jewish novel—books by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Bernard Malamud, inflected with Yiddish and references to pickled herring—was the great American novel. Under the influence of Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Elaine May, Gilda Radner, Woody Allen, and many others, American comedy appropriated the Jewish joke, and the ironic sensibility contained within, as its own.” Foer writes that Jews created new genres of Americana and in turn remade America’s image of itself, with “the folk revival popularized by Bob Dylan, Art Garfunkel, and Paul Simon; the movies mythologizing the decency of the American Everyman produced by David O. Selznick, Louis B. Mayer, and Jack Warner.”

This all ended on September 11, 2001, Foer argues: “It didn’t seem that way at the time. But the terror attacks opened an era of perpetual crisis, which became fertile soil where the hatred of Jews took root.” Foer continues, “In the era of perpetual crisis, a version of this narrative kept recurring: a small elite—sometimes bankers, sometimes lobbyists—­maliciously exploiting the people. Such narratives helped propel Occupy Wall Street on the left and the Tea Party on the right. This brand of populist revolt had long been the stuff of Jewish nightmares.”

Foer writes in his conclusion, “When anti-Semitism takes hold, conspiracy theory hardens into conventional wisdom, embedding violence in thought and then in deadly action. A society that holds its Jews at arm’s length is likely to be more intent on hunting down scapegoats than addressing underlying defects. Although it is hardly an iron law of history, such societies are prone to decline … If America persists on its current course, it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them.”

“The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending” published today in The Atlantic. There will be an event to discuss the cover on March 18 at Sixth & I, in Washington, D.C., and online, with Foer joined in conversation by Yolanda Savage-Narva, the vice president of racial equity, diversity, and inclusion for the Union for Reform Judaism, and others, in a dialogue led by Sixth & I's Senior Rabbi, Aaron Potek. Tickets are available via Sixth & I here.

Press Contact:
Paul Jackson | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

In our April cover story, my colleague Franklin Foer explores how anti-Semitism on both the right and the left threatens to end a period of unprecedented safety and prosperity for American Jews—and the liberal order they helped establish. Frank and I chatted last week about the past and future of anti-Semitism, and about some lesser-understood moments in American Jewish history.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The Supreme Court once again reveals the fraud of originalism, Adam Serwer argues. The Supreme Court is not up to the challenge. Where did evangelicals go wrong? What is going on with Europe’s economy?

What Liberalism Did

Isabel Fattal: You write that “part of the reason I failed to appreciate the extent of the anti-Semitism on the left is that I assumed its criticisms of the Israeli government were, at bottom, a harsher version of my own.” How did October 7 change this thinking for you?

Franklin Foer: For a long time, I didn’t actually think that anti-Semitism was an American problem. And then Donald Trump happens, and it’s clear that he’s given this green light to white supremacists who existed in the dark alleyways of American life. Suddenly anti-Semitism starts to become something that’s much more present, much more socially acceptable in America.

But I had assumed that it was more menacing in its right-wing form than its left-wing form, in part because so much of the debate on the left has been about Israel, and it’s easy to bracket that off into an entirely separate conversation: They’re trying to end an occupation; they want to end what is objectively oppressive treatment of Palestinians.

But then, on October 7, it became painfully clear that there are critics of Israel who don’t believe in peaceful coexistence. A far larger swath of the left than I imagined seemed to want to see the disappearance of the state of Israel. I was also noticing the way in which Zionism became a ubiquitous term of derision in left-wing discourse. It was pretty clear that it was often being used as a synonym for Jew.

Isabel: You write that “anti-Semitism itself entails an accusation of privilege.” Can you talk a bit about how the idea of privilege has always been an element of anti-Semitic theorizing?

Frank: As a concept, anti-Semitism has a tendency to break people’s brain, because it just falls outside of every single taxonomy we use to describe racial and ethnic hatred. We’re used to understanding racism as a power dynamic—oppressors and the oppressed. But anti-Semitism is something very different. It’s an accusation that a secret cabal of people has obtained power by nefarious means and is pulling the strings. It’s exactly what people end up saying on campus all the time. Oh, we’re being shut down because of the donors. Oh, the Zionists control the universities; the Zionists control the media. They’re not saying Jew, but they might as well be. It’s the same old hideous tropes.

Isabel: Jews do hold power in American life and politics today, but there’s another way to have that conversation, isn’t there?

Frank: Right. There’s a way to have that discussion without having to deploy all of the nasty stereotypes, and without turning it into a conspiratorial accusation. Part of my piece is making the argument that American Jewish success is this incredible historical anomaly. Jews have risen to places of incredible power in American politics, society, and institutions. But that’s not a conspiracy. It’s a happy fact of living in a country where ancient stereotypes and blood-and-soil nationalism haven’t ruled the society.

Isabel: Your story explores the idea that liberalism was co-authored and championed by Jewish Americans. Can you speak a bit about that heritage?

Frank: One of the things I wasn’t able to really get into in the piece is that the connection between Jews and liberalism goes back even before they came to America. When Jews were emancipated in Europe, the arrival of liberalism allowed Jews to escape the ghetto and to participate in society as something close to full citizens.

And then you get to America, where Jews were able to do even better with liberalism than they had in Europe, because in Europe there was always this devil’s bargain: If you wanted to participate in France, you had to do it as a Frenchman. You couldn’t do it as a Jewish French person. One of the things that made this country so extraordinary was that you could participate as an American citizen and you didn’t have to give up your identity. That was what emerged in the 20th century, and it was an idea that Jews helped refine and then introduce to the rest of the world.

Isabel: Right, and then you have Jews engaging in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, sharing common cause with other Americans.

Frank: I grew up in a Jewish world where this became almost mythological—the idea of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wearing his yarmulke and marching next to Martin Luther King Jr.

Isabel: How did this relationship between American Jews and the American left start to rupture?

Frank: Just after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, there was this broad sense that Israel was an underdog country. It was actually a liberal cause for a lot of that period: Because of anti-Semitism, progressives fervently believed that there should be a haven for this people who just escaped the Holocaust. Then the Six-Day War happens and Israel conquers territory filled with Palestinian refugees. Israel then suddenly gets cast as a colonial oppressor.

Other things are happening simultaneously. Above all, liberalism has also started to ebb as the dominant force in institutional life. In fact, liberalism is now under assault from both the illiberal left and the MAGA right. That’s the other main strand of the story. As liberalism has receded, anti-Semitism has begun to sprout. Liberalism, it turns out, was pretty effective at tamping down the hatred of Jews.

Isabel: Is there anything else you’d like to say to readers of this story?

Frank: I think one fair question that could be asked of the story is, is its conclusion a little bit too alarmist? I obviously can’t say exactly where things are going. Just because this is no longer a golden age doesn’t mean that we’re on the road to Nazi Germany. There are lots of other stops in between, and most of Jewish history doesn’t consist of golden ages. Ubiquitous anti-Semitism is what constitutes normal existence for much of Jewish history. Jews could still be incredibly influential and successful and can enjoy a lot of the benefits of American life while not living in a golden age.

Isabel: You’re speaking relatively to this anomalous blip in Jewish history.

Frank: Exactly.

Related:

The Golden Age of American Jews is ending. Why the most educated people in America fall for anti-Semitic lies

Today’s News

The Supreme Court decided unanimously that states cannot bar Donald Trump from running for a second term, after the Colorado Supreme Court had ruled that he was disqualified from holding office again on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment. A team of United Nations experts found what they called “reasonable grounds to believe” that victims were sexually assaulted in Hamas’s October 7 attack. Allen H. Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, pleaded guilty to felony perjury charges.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty.

It’s Time to Give Up on Email

By Ian Bogost

You got a new credit card, maybe, or signed up for a food-delivery service. Let the emailing begin. First there’s one to verify your new account, then a message to confirm that you’ve verified your new account, then an offer for an upgrade or a discount. A service I recently started using sent four emails for a single activity, counting log-in notices, confirmations, receipts, and confirmations of the confirmations. Workday, the software that manages HR and payroll for my office, emailed me an alert to approve the hours I had already approved. Online retailers seem to send at least three logistical emails for every order—when it’s placed, when it’s shipped, and when it’s been delivered. Then they send a handful more: a customer-satisfaction survey, a nag to fill out a customer-satisfaction survey, a thank-you for filling out a customer-satisfaction survey.

Also in your inbox: All of the email you get that is, you know, actually related to your job, your interests, or your personal life. Forget reading or responding; even just finding those messages amid the junk can be a chore. Email has felt overwhelming for a long time now, with all of its spam and scams and discount codes. But what used to be a vexatious burden is now a source of daily torment. Email cannot be reformed. Email cannot be defeated. Email can only be forsaken.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Other presidents have retired in March of their reelection year. The meditation start-up that’s selling bliss on demand America’s last Morse-code station

Culture Break

Jon Pack / A24

Read. “Tomato and Lettuce,” a new poem by Monica Rico.

Then, everything was garnish / two kids and a house, / a wife who kept the // beds made, shirts ironed / secrets hidden like dust // on the canned goods.”

Watch. Julio Torres’s existential comedy Problemista, in theaters, is a marvelous mixture of surrealism and social satire.

Play our daily crossword.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

On February 1, Joe Biden took the biggest step any U.S. president has ever taken against Israel’s settler movement. He issued an executive order “imposing certain sanctions on persons undermining peace, security, and stability in the West Bank” and used this new authority to punish four Israeli settlers for violence against Palestinians and Israeli peace activists. But because the president’s directive dealt with the West Bank and not the war in Gaza, and was initially applied to only a handful of people, it was largely overlooked—or cast by critics as a symbolic sop to disaffected Arab and Muslim voters in places like Michigan.

A careful reading of the order and conversations with officials both inside and outside the U.S. government, however, reveal that the move was no PR exercise. It was a warning shot—part of a deliberate strategy to splinter Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and to advance the cause of the two-state solution. In time, it could even upend the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

For more than a decade, Israel has struggled to contain a campaign of nationalist terror waged by radical Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. In 2021 alone, Israel’s internal security service recorded some 400 violent incidents—an increase of nearly 50 percent from 2020. Those were just the assaults reported to the authorities, something many Palestinians don’t bother to do, and most went unpunished. A number of attacks have been caught on camera, some of them taking place on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, in violation of the religious law that the perpetrators purport to follow. Since October 7, extremists have used the cover of the war in Gaza to advance their shadow war in the West Bank, threatening to further inflame the region.

Critics of the Biden administration’s focus on settler violence contend that the broad majority of Israelis in the West Bank are peaceful and law-abiding, which is true but irrelevant to the problem of dealing with those who are not. Others argue that significantly more Israelis have been killed in the West Bank by terrorist violence than Palestinians have been killed by Israeli settlers. This is also true but irrelevant: The U.S. already sanctions Palestinian terrorist groups—which are covered by the executive order too—and the majority of settler violence is meant not to murder Palestinians but to intimidate and ultimately displace them from their land, as my colleague Graeme Wood documented in October. Fundamentally, though, the fact that violent settlers are part of the current Israeli government proves that settler violence is no fringe phenomenon.

On February 26, 2023, two Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank village of Huwara shot and killed a pair of Israeli brothers in their car. In response, a horde of settlers descended on Huwara in an indiscriminate revenge riot that Yehuda Fuchs, the Israeli general who oversees the West Bank, dubbed a “pogrom.” But Bezalel Smotrich, the government’s finance minister, who also holds a position in the defense ministry, had a different reaction. “Huwara needs to be wiped out,” he said, but “the state of Israel,” rather than individual citizens, should do it.

This de facto endorsement of violence was not an isolated incident. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national-security minister and a Smotrich ally, later met with the families of settlers who had been arrested after the riot, vowing to “fix the injustice” they’d endured by being detained without trial over suspicion of violence—a practice Ben-Gvir has happily embraced when applied to Palestinians. “A closed, burnt Huwara—that’s what I want to see,” Zvika Fogel, a member of Parliament for Ben-Gvir’s party, told Israeli radio. “That’s the only way to achieve deterrence.”

[Read: The Israeli government goes extreme right]

Both Smotrich and Ben-Gvir live in settlements themselves, and their support for violence extends well beyond rhetoric. According to media accounts and a former deputy head of Israel’s internal security service, Smotrich was part of a 2005 plot to prevent Israel’s pullout of its settlers from Gaza by blowing up cars on a highway using 700 liters of gasoline. He was arrested and held for three weeks. Before being elected, Ben-Gvir regularly boasted about being indicted 53 times for various extremist offenses—including incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization (of which he was convicted). At the age of 19, he was interviewed on television while holding an ornament stolen from the car of then–Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was pursuing peace with the Palestinians. “Just like we got to this symbol, we’ll get to Rabin, too,” the young Ben-Gvir promised. Rabin was subsequently assassinated by a far-right gunman.

The dark spirit that claimed the former prime minister’s life endures today: When Fuchs, the Israel Defense Forces general, sought to crack down on settler extremism, he reportedly needed his own security detail to protect him, not from Palestinian terrorists, but from Jewish ones.

Smotrich and Ben-Gvir were once extremists on the outside of the Israeli establishment, looking in. But today, they are an essential component of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Because the current coalition received just 48.4 percent of the vote in Israel’s latest election and only assumed power thanks to a quirk of Israel’s electoral system, Netanyahu depends on several far-right parties to remain in office. The arrangement gives men like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich outsize influence over policy, despite their unpopularity with the broader Israeli public.

The October 7 massacre has made Netanyahu even more beholden to his extremist allies for his political survival. Polls consistently show that he would lose in a landslide if an election were held today. In practice, this means that while Israel’s army and security services have at times attempted to quell settler violence, they have received scant support from the political leadership. Given this reality, the Biden administration opted to act on its own—and its fundamental distrust of Netanyahu’s government is written explicitly into the text of last month’s executive order.

Far from being restricted to Israeli settlers who engage in explicitly violent conduct, the order enables sanctions on any actors who “threaten the peace, security, or stability of the West Bank.” This language could reasonably be interpreted to apply not just to direct perpetrators of violence, but to politicians whose policies enable them, including ministers such as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and even the prime minister himself. In fact, the Biden administration has already leaked that the two far-right politicians are potentially in line for sanctions. The order itself says that it can apply to “a leader or official of … an entity, including any government entity.”

The most telling language in this regard is also the most technical. At the outset, Biden’s directive gives the administration the authority to sanction anyone found “to be responsible for or complicit in” actions that imperil West Bank stability, “including directing, enacting, implementing, enforcing, or failing to enforce policies.” The key words here are “failing to enforce policies.” In deceptively bland legalese, this clause implies that the American administration already believes that Israel’s current authorities are not following their own laws. Violent settlers are not the only ones at fault—so, too, is the Netanyahu government that has not policed them.

I saw this dereliction of duty for myself in late 2022, when I visited the Palestinian village of Beita, which is overlooked by a small, makeshift settlement called Evyatar. Evyatar is illegal under Israeli law, and most Israelis I’ve met have no idea it exists. But the far right is deeply invested in the area and has repeatedly attempted to establish a foothold there. Like other wildcat settlements deep in the West Bank, Evyatar has provoked Palestinian protest, ultimately resulting in violence and Palestinian casualties. None of this would have happened had Israeli authorities cleared the site in a timely fashion, in keeping with Israel’s own laws. But Netanyahu repeatedly delayed its evacuation to avoid offending part of his base, and today, members of his hard-right government are personally connected to those attempting to resettle Evyatar. Biden’s executive order puts everyone implicated in these decisions—settlers, politicians, and military officials—on notice.

The president’s directive is a far cry from the sanctions regimes imposed on rogue states such as Iran. Still, nothing like it has ever been enacted with respect to Israel or any similarly allied country, as one former Office of Foreign Assets Control official pointed out to me. Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at George Mason University and one of the sharpest legal minds on the Israeli right, immediately grasped the implications. “The new sanctions tools against Israelis announced by the Biden Administration is not about settler violence,” he wrote on X. “It does not require acts of violence - anyone vaguely involved in doing or not doing anything the [White House] thinks undermines ‘peace’ and ‘security’ in [the West Bank] qualifies.”

Such fears aside, Biden is unlikely to immediately use his new authority in such a sweeping manner. The order, like other U.S. sanctions, is meant as a tool to apply pressure on a foreign government judiciously, allowing the administration to gradually tighten the vise in order to get results. And the new directive serves two overarching goals.

First, it destabilizes Netanyahu’s governing coalition. With regard to the Gaza conflict, Biden has limited leverage over the Israeli prime minister. As long as the Israeli public remains behind the war, which it perceives as an existential struggle with Hamas, Netanyahu is able to shrug off external pressure. But the Israeli public is not behind the far-right settlers, making them the perfect target for undermining Netanyahu’s support at home. Israelis do not want their relationship with the United States held hostage to the whims of violent radicals and their illegal wildcat settlements in the remote reaches of the West Bank. In this way, as he has done in other cases, Biden is throwing a wedge into Netanyahu’s coalition, forcing him to choose between the public’s preferences and his unpopular far-right partners.

[Read: Biden’s smart strategy for outmaneuvering Bibi]

Second, the executive order advances the cause of the two-state solution. The Biden administration recognizes that just as Hamas must be defanged for any negotiated Israeli-Palestinian solution to succeed, so too must the Israeli settler movement. In other words, the executive order isn’t a counterbalance to Biden’s Gaza strategy but a counterpart. Both aim to disempower actors who would otherwise exercise a violent veto over diplomatic progress.

The Biden administration has indicated its intent to roll out further settler sanctions in the coming weeks. This development has incensed the Israeli far right but also exposed its weakness. When Biden’s initial sanctions on four violent settlers compelled the Israeli banking system to cut them off, an outraged Smotrich threatened to propose legislation that would force the banks to do business with the settlers regardless of U.S. penalties. Essentially, the finance minister suggested that the stability of the entire Israeli financial system was a reasonable sacrifice to shield a few fanatics on the political fringe. As yet, Smotrich has not followed through with this move, which would be toxic with the broader public. But the reaction itself is revealing. If this is how he and his allies respond to American sanctions on even the country’s most extreme elements, the far-right parties will no longer be viable partners for any Israeli government that seeks to maintain a healthy relationship with the United States.

If the implementation of Biden’s executive order is followed to its logical conclusion, whether under his administration or a future one, Israel may find itself facing a fateful choice: It will be able to have radical settlers in its government or a functional U.S.-Israel alliance, but not both.