Israeli officials seized AP equipment and have taken down a live shot of northern Gaza accusing the news organisation of violating a new media law by providing images to Al Jazeera.

As the EU prepares to vote in European elections, the big issues for Walter Baier, the lead candidate of the European Left, are the cost of living crisis, the war in Gaza and the rise of the far right. He discusses these and other concerns with Aïda Sánchez Alonso in The Global Conversation.

The oldest president in American history has a problem with the nation’s youngest voters.

Support from voters under 30 has powered every Democratic presidential victory for the past half century; Joe Biden carried the demographic by 24 points in 2020, his biggest margin of any age group. But according to several recent surveys, the president’s support among young voters has plummeted. Polls covering six swing states released last week by The New York Times, Siena College, and The Philadelphia Inquirer found Biden losing to Donald Trump (though within the margin of error) among voters under 30. The two men were effectively tied in this month’s national poll from Fox News.

These results have prompted a mix of panic and disbelief among many Democrats, who see little chance of a Biden victory if he can’t win back one of the party’s core constituencies. Yet analysts who study the youth vote say the president’s standing with this key group isn’t nearly as bad as Democrats tend to think, and they attribute many of the struggles he is having to an underappreciated finding: Most first-time voters know surprisingly little about Trump. The most targeted data suggest that Biden maintains a double-digit lead over Trump among voters ages 18 to 29. It’s smaller than it was four years ago, but experts say Biden has a good opportunity to run it up.

Surveys that specifically poll voters under 30—as opposed to those in which young people are merely a subset of respondents—show Biden leading Trump by double digits. In the Harvard Youth Poll, a biennial survey considered the gold standard for measuring young voters, Biden led Trump by 13 points among registered voters. That advantage was virtually identical to the margin found in surveys (one national and one across several battleground states) commissioned this spring by Voters of Tomorrow and NextGen America, a pair of Democrat-aligned groups who are targeting the youth vote, according to summaries they shared with me. Pollsters place more trust in these findings because they sample a larger number of young people—and therefore have a smaller margin of error—than the surveys that have shown less favorable results for Biden.

[Read: The real youth-vote shift to watch]

Still, those margins aren’t close to what they were in 2020. Biden is polling worst with 18-to-22-year-olds, most of whom were children when Trump was president. In polls and focus groups, this cohort demonstrated little awareness of the major controversies of Trump’s term. “They didn’t fully know who Donald Trump was,” Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, NextGen America’s president, told me. “Some of them were 10 years old when he was first elected. And if they had good parents, they were probably shielded from the images of crying babies being ripped from their mothers at the border, or from the sight of Heather Heyer being run over by white supremacists in Charlottesville.”

In polling conducted by Blueprint, a Democratic data firm, fewer than half of registered voters under 30 said they had heard some of Trump’s most incendiary quotes, such as when he said there were “very fine people on both sides” demonstrating in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, or when he told members of the Proud Boys, the far-right militia group, to “stand back and stand by” during a 2020 debate. Just 42 percent of respondents were aware that, during his 2016 campaign, Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

The youngest voters know Trump more as a ribald commentator than as a political leader. Santiago Mayer, the 22–year-old founder of the Gen Z group Voters of Tomorrow, which has endorsed Biden, told me that his 18-year-old brother and his friends see Trump as more funny than threatening. “They don’t know much about Donald Trump’s agenda, and Donald Trump is an entertaining character,” Mayer said. “They are gravitating toward him not because of their political beliefs but out of sheer curiosity.”

A related problem for Biden is that young voters don’t know much about what he’s done, either. The president has kept a lower profile than his two predecessors, and young people as a group aren’t as civically engaged as older Americans. As a result, pollsters have found that young voters are less aware of Biden’s accomplishments, even on issues that they say are important to them. Many of them don’t know, for example, that he signed the largest climate bill in history (the Inflation Reduction Act) or the most significant change to gun laws in decades (the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act), or that he has forgiven about $160 billion in student debt. “The more they pay attention, the more they approve of and are likely to vote for Biden,” John Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, told me. “The biggest challenge for Biden,” he said, “is that an overwhelming number of young people do not appreciate the degree to which he’s delivered on promises he made in 2020. I hear that in every single city.”

Other factors are driving the disconnect between Biden and young voters as well. When Blueprint asked young voters what concerned them most about a potential second Biden term, their top worry was that he’d be too old for the job. Next on the list, however, was inflation. People in early adulthood are also less economically stable than their older peers and more sensitive to costs. So although campus protests over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza have dominated headlines, polls show that inflation is a much bigger drag on Biden’s support among young voters, and a more significant issue for them than for older people. “Young voters just think that Biden doesn't have his eye on the ball economically when it comes to inflation,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told me. “It is surprising but not inexplicable that voters under 30 associate lower price points with Donald Trump. But they do, because it’s just a hard fact that prices were lower and the rate of inflation was lower when Donald Trump was president.”

[Read: Biden’s weakness with young voters isn’t about Gaza]

“I think people would forgive age if they felt that Biden could bring prices down,” Smith added.

Still, Biden has advantages over Trump that could help him win back young voters by November. Voters under 30 have retreated from both parties and are more likely to register as independents than in the past. But they remain more progressive than the electorate as a whole, and in recent polls they align much closer with Biden on the issues than with Trump. In 2022, Tzintzún Ramirez said, young voters expressed antipathy toward the Democratic Party in polling but ended up backing Democratic candidates in the midterms. She and other analysts see a similar dynamic at play now, where young voters are telling pollsters they’re undecided or registering support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other third-party candidates as a protest against both Biden and Trump. Surveys show this to be especially true for young men and voters of color, many of whom have soured on Biden. But support for third-party alternatives typically drops as the election nears. Young voters also tend to make their choice later in the campaign.

Perhaps the best data point for Biden is that he’s hardly worse off among young voters than President Barack Obama was at this point in his 2012 reelection bid. Like Biden, Obama won big among voters under 30 during his first presidential victory but struggled to communicate his record to them. Della Volpe told me that in Harvard’s polling, Obama had the same 13-point advantage over Mitt Romney among registered voters in the spring of 2012 that Biden has over Trump now. He would nearly double that margin by the fall, thanks in large part to an aggressive ad campaign that portrayed the former Massachusetts governor and businessman as an out-of-touch and greedy financier.

Donald Trump would seem to need no introduction to voters—except, that is, to those who were too young or tuned out to fully remember his presidency. Giving them a well-funded history lesson could be Biden’s best hope for a second term.

Exclusive footage obtained by Al Jazeera shows Israeli soldiers removing corpses from a morgue tent.

The End of the Golden Age

Anti-Semitism on the right and the left threatens to end an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans—and demolish the liberal order they helped establish, Franklin Foer wrote in the April 2024 issue.

Franklin Foer’s article on the end of the Golden Age for American Jews makes an excellent and painful connection between the rise of anti-Semitism and the decline of democratic institutions throughout history. I was a child in Communist Romania in 1973 at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. Some of my teachers made my life miserable in school simply because I was Jewish. My parents had to bribe them with American cigarettes to stop them from tormenting me. Three years later, my family and I defected to the United States. The U.S. was known around the world for its democratic institutions, and we wanted to get away from a country where anti-Semitism ran rampant.

No one born here can imagine what it was like to be free, to be Jewish and dare to admit it. But that was America in the 1970s and ’80s. Today’s America frightens me: I’ve lived in an authoritarian state before; I understand viscerally what’s at stake in this year’s election. For the first time in 48 years, I think twice before telling people I’m Jewish.

Monica Friedlander
Cambria, Calif.

I am a 96-year-old Holocaust survivor. I was born in Berlin in 1928 and observed the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany. There is a world of difference between those days and the United States today. In Germany, anti-Semitism was sanctioned, even encouraged, by the authorities. Police officers stood by laughing when boys beat us on our way to school. The government passed laws forbidding us from owning radios, newspapers, telephones, even pets. The world knows how that ended: I was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. I think Franklin Foer’s article is a bit over the top.

Walter L. Lachman
Laguna Niguel, Calif.

Although an interesting review of 20th-century Jewish entertainers and intellectuals, Franklin Foer’s assessment ignores the street reality.

I was born and raised during the Franklin D. Roosevelt years. Growing up, I was given a bloody nose by other kids more than once on my way home from school. They shouted anti-Semitic slurs and attacked me for “killing their God.” When I served in the military, my roommate asked whether I had horns, and if it “had hurt when they took them off.” When I applied for a job at a prestigious law firm, I was told, “We do not hire your kind.”

I went on to enjoy a successful career. But the underlying prejudice has always been present. The fact that we Jews have been entertaining and creative does nothing to eliminate the basic prejudice against us as “the other.”

Benjamin Levine
Roseland, N.J.

The night before I read Franklin Foer’s article, a stranger tore my mezuzah off my doorframe. I was upset—but so was my non-Jewish roommate. In that, he was part of a broader American tradition: At the founding of our country, George Washington promised the Jews of Rhode Island, “To bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

The Jewish American Golden Age predates the 20th century, and has outlasted it. Not only has America been the best place in the diaspora to be a Jew, but the scale of Jewish participation and inclusion is larger than many realize. The highest-ranking American armor officer to die in combat was the legendary Maurice Rose—a Jewish major general who died fighting the Nazis in Germany. Foer quotes Thomas Friedman saying that the Six-Day War made American Jews realize they could be tank commanders—but Jews have been tank commanders as long as America has had tanks.

In Columbus, Georgia, where I live, shortly after the October 7 attacks, the mayor and city-council members attended my synagogue. People from all over the country reached out to express their sympathy and support. A friend stationed in Syria checked in after Iran launched missiles toward Israel, concerned about my Israeli family and how I was dealing with American anti-Semitism. America’s continuing warm welcome isn’t just anecdotal: The Pew Research Center recently found that Jews are viewed more positively than any other U.S. religious group.

Anti-Semitism may be on the rise, but it is and remains un-American. My great-great-grandfather, a Jewish refugee, arrived in New York on the Fourth of July. According to family lore, he saw the fireworks and thought they were for him. In a way, they were. This July, I look forward to celebrating the Golden Age’s 248th anniversary.

Jacob Foster
Columbus, Ga.

I was disappointed reading “The End of the Golden Age.” I think the Golden Age is now, as so many American Jews rise up to say “Not in our name.” We are recognizing the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. It’s time for everyone to recognize it too. Criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza is not anti-Semitism. American Jews and Israeli Jews will be safe when we can recognize the resilience and survival of both Palestinians and Jews and see how our struggles are interconnected.

R. Toran Ailisheva
Oakland, Calif.

Franklin Foer interprets a survey—“nearly one in five non-Jewish students said they ‘wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state’ ”—to mean that they were saying they wouldn’t be friends with most Jews. I would challenge this interpretation.

As a Columbia graduate, and as someone who can actually read the Yiddish on The Atlantic’s cover, I do not question the Zionist dream of a haven for Jews. But I question the need for a predominantly religious state, which I fear will inevitably lead to a theocracy, intolerant even of Jews deemed insufficiently Orthodox. Israel is headed in that direction.

Elliott B. Urdang
Providence, R.I.

We were surprised and dismayed that The Atlantic would publish Franklin Foer’s article about the rise of anti-Semitism without any accompanying articles discussing the concurrent rise in anti-Palestinian racism. Students who protest the brutal war crimes committed in Gaza or advocate for the freedom and dignity of the Palestinian people are being silenced and persecuted. We hope The Atlantic will publish stories that highlight efforts seeking peace and justice for all. Right now, we need solutions. We need voices supportive of our shared humanity, not inflammatory rhetoric that will lead to further polarization and alienation.

Samar Salman
Ann Arbor, Mich.

Christina Kappaz
Evanston, Ill.

Franklin Foer replies:

A writer’s deeply ingrained instinct is to want their stories to prove prophetic. In this instance, I desperately hope that I will be proved wrong. Sadly, in the aftermath of publishing this article, I have heard too many stories like Jacob Foster’s, of mezuzahs ripped from doors in the night. One of the most ubiquitous critiques of my story, echoed in R. Toran Ailisheva’s letter, is that my argument equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Many mainstream Jewish groups take that stance, but it is not my contention. I explicitly stated that there are strains of anti-Zionism that paint a vision of life in a binational state, where Palestinians and Jews peacefully coexist. That vision strikes me as hopelessly quixotic, but it isn’t anti-Semitic. Unfortunately, criticisms of Zionism are rarely so idealistic. They are usually cast in ugly terms, depicting a dangerous Jewish cabal guilty of dual loyalties, betraying the hallmarks of classical anti-Semitism.

Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “Democracy Is Losing the Propaganda War,” Anne Applebaum examines how autocrats in China, Russia, and other places have sought to discredit liberal democracy—and how they’ve found unlikely allies on the American far right. Our cover draws inspiration from constructivist propaganda artists such as Alexander Rodchenko and Gustav Klutsis. The angled imagery and ascending lines evoke the style of a Soviet propaganda poster, updated with liberalism’s new rivals.

— Paul Spella, Senior Art Director

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

I’ve spent more than five decades making difficult decisions in finance, government, business, and politics. Looking back, what most prepared me for the life I’ve led was the open exchange of ideas that I experienced in college and law school, supported by a society-wide understanding that universities and their faculty should be allowed to pursue areas of study as they see fit, without undue political or financial pressure. More broadly, throughout my career, I have seen firsthand the way America’s higher-education system strengthens our nation.

I cannot recall a time when the country’s colleges and universities, and the wide range of benefits they bring, have faced such numerous or serious threats. Protests over Gaza, Israel, Hamas, and anti-Semitism—and the attempt by certain elected officials and donors to capitalize on these protests and push a broader anti-higher-education agenda—have been the stuff of daily headlines for months. But the challenges facing colleges and universities have been building for years, revealed in conflicts over everything from climate change and curriculum to ideological diversity and academic governance.

But there is a threat that is being ignored, one that goes beyond any single issue or political controversy. Transfixed by images of colleges and universities in turmoil, we risk overlooking the foundational role that higher education plays in American life. With its underlying principles of free expression and academic freedom, the university system is one of the nation’s great strengths. It is not to be taken for granted. Undermining higher education would harm all Americans, weakening our country and making us less able to confront the many challenges we face.

The most recent upheavals on American campuses—and the threat posed to the underlying principles of higher education—have been well documented.

In some cases, individuals have been silenced or suppressed, not because they were threatening anyone’s physical safety or disrupting the functioning of the university environment, but rather, it seems, because of their opinions. The University of Southern California, for example, recently canceled its valedictorian’s speech at graduation. Although administrators cited safety concerns, many on campus, including the student herself, said they believe that the true cause lay in the speaker’s pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel views. One does not have to agree with the sentiments being expressed by a speaker in order to be troubled by the idea that they would be suppressed because of their content.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Columbia University’s impossible position]

In other cases, it is the demonstrators themselves who have sought to force their views on others—by breaking university policies regarding shared spaces, occupying buildings, and reportedly imposing ideological litmus tests on students seeking to enter public areas of campus. Some activists have advocated violence against those with whom they disagree. Even before the unrest of recent weeks, I had heard for many years from students and professors that they felt a chilling effect on campuses that rendered true discussion—including exchanges of ideas that might make others uncomfortable—very difficult.

Even as free speech faces serious threats from inside the campus, academic freedom is under assault from outside. To an unprecedented degree, donors have involved themselves in pressure campaigns, explicitly linking financial support to views expressed on campus and the scholarship undertaken by students and faculty. At the University of Pennsylvania, one such effort pressed donors to reduce their annual contribution to $1 to protest the university’s decision to host a Palestinian literary conference. At Yale, Beverly Gage, the head of the prestigious Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, felt compelled to resign after the program came under increasing pressure from its donors. Among other things, the donors objected to an op-ed by an instructor in the program headlined “How to Protect America From the Next Donald Trump.”

It’s not just donors. Elected officials and candidates for office are also attacking academic freedom. On a Zoom call whose content was subsequently leaked, a Republican member of Congress, Jim Banks of Indiana, characterized recent hearings with the presidents of Harvard, MIT, Penn, and Columbia—along with upcoming ones with the presidents of Rutgers, UCLA, and Northwestern—as part of a strategy to “defund these universities.” In a recent campaign video, former President Trump asserted that colleges are “turning our students into Communists and terrorists and sympathizers,” and promised to retaliate by taxing, fining, and suing private universities if he wins a second term. Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, a close ally of Trump’s, has introduced a bill that would punish schools that don’t crack down on demonstrators. The bill would tax the endowment of such schools heavily and curb their access to federal funds.

The methods of these donors and politicians—politically motivated subpoenas and hearings, social-media pressure campaigns, campaign-trail threats—may not violate the First Amendment. They do, however, seek to produce a chilling effect on free speech. The goal of these efforts is to force universities to bow to outside pressure and curtail the range of ideas they allow—not because scholars at universities believe those ideas lack merit, but because the ideas are at odds with the political views of those bringing the pressure.  

All of this needs to be seen against a foreboding backdrop. At a time when trust in many American institutions is at an all-time low, skepticism about higher education is on the rise. Earlier this year, a noteworthy essay by Douglas Belkin in The Wall Street Journal explored “Why Americans Have Lost Faith in the Value of College.” The New York Times wondered last fall whether college might be a “risky bet.” According to Gallup, confidence in higher education has fallen dramatically—from 57 percent in 2015 to 36 percent in 2023. The attacks on free expression and academic freedom on campus are both causes and symptoms of this declining confidence.

It is ironic that, at a moment when higher education faces unprecedented assaults, more Americans than ever have a college diploma. When I graduated from college, in 1960, only 8 percent of Americans held a four-year degree. Today, that number has increased almost fivefold, to 38 percent. Even so, I suspect that many Americans don’t realize just how exceptional the country’s university system actually is. Although the United States can claim less than 5 percent of the world’s population, it is home to 65 percent of the world’s 20 highest-ranked universities (and 28 percent of the world’s top-200 universities). Americans can get a quality education at thousands of academic institutions throughout the country.

Despite the skepticism in some quarters about whether a college degree is really worth it, the financial benefits of obtaining a degree remain clear. At 25, college graduates may earn only about 27 percent more than high-school-diploma holders. However, the college wage premium doubles over the course of their lifetime, jumping to 60 percent by the time they reach age 55. Looking solely at an individual’s financial prospects, the case for attending college remains strong.

[David Deming: The college backlash is going too far]

But the societal benefits we gain from higher education are far greater—and that’s the larger point. Colleges and universities don’t receive tax exemptions and public funds because of the help they give to specific individuals. We invest in higher education because there’s a broad public purpose.

Our colleges and universities are seen, rightly, as centers of learning, but they are also engines of economic growth. Higher graduation rates among our young people lead to a better-educated workforce for businesses and a larger tax base for the country as a whole. Institutions of higher education spur early-stage research of all kinds, create environments for commercializing that research, provide a base for start-up and technology hubs, and serve as a mentoring incubator for new generations of entrepreneurs and business leaders. In many communities, especially smaller towns and rural areas, campuses also create jobs that would be difficult to replace.

The importance of colleges and universities to the American economy will grow in the coming decades. As the list of industries that can be automated with AI becomes longer, the liberal-arts values and critical-thinking skills taught by colleges and universities will become only more valuable. Machine learning can aid in decision making. It cannot fully replace thoughtfulness and judgment.

Colleges and universities also help the United States maintain a geopolitical edge. We continue to attract the best and brightest from around the world to study here. Although many of these students stay and strengthen the country, many more return home, bringing with them a lifelong positive association with the United States. When I served as Treasury secretary, I found it extremely advantageous that so many of my foreign counterparts had spent their formative years in the U.S. That’s just as true today. In many instances, even the leadership class in unfriendly countries aspires to send its children to study here. In a multipolar world, this kind of soft-power advantage matters more than ever.

At home, higher education helps create the kind of citizenry that is central to a democracy’s ability to function and perhaps even to survive. This impact may be hard to quantify, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

It is not just lawmakers and executives who must make difficult decisions in the face of uncertainty. All of us—from those running civil-society groups that seek to influence policy to the voters who put elected leaders in office in the first place—are called upon to make hard choices as we live our civic lives. All of us are aware that the country is not in its best condition—this is hardly news. Imagine what that condition might be if we set out to undermine the very institutions that nurture rigorous and disciplined thinking and the free exchange of ideas.

Of course, there is much about higher education that needs fixing. Precisely because colleges and universities are so valuable to society, they should do more to engage with it. Bringing down costs can help ensure that talented, qualified young people are not denied higher education for financial reasons. Being clear about the principles and policies regarding the open expression of views—even as we recognize that applying them may require judgment calls, and that it is crucial to protect student safety and maintain an environment where learning and research can be conducted—would help blunt the criticism, not always made in good faith, that universities have an ideological agenda. Communicating more effectively with the public would help more Americans understand what is truly at stake.

But the fact that universities can do more does not change a basic fact: It is harmful to society to put constraints on open discussion or to attack universities for purposes of short-term political gain. Perhaps some of those trying to discourage the open exchange of ideas at universities believe that we can maintain their quality while attacking the culture of academic independence. I disagree. Unfettered discussion and freedom of thought and expression are the foundation upon which the greatness of our higher-education system is built. You cannot undermine the former without damaging the latter. To take one recent example: After Governor Ron DeSantis reshaped Florida’s New College along ideological lines, one-third of the faculty left within a year. This included scholars not only in fields such as gender studies, which many conservatives view with distaste, but in areas such as neuroscience as well.

We can have the world’s greatest higher-education system, with all of the benefits it brings to our country, or we can have colleges and universities in which the open exchange of views is undermined by pressure campaigns from many directions. We can’t have both.

Whistle-blowers at military hospital tell BBC painkillers were “routinely” not used in procedures.

The Israeli and Hamas leaders are suspected of committing war crimes during the continuing war in Gaza.