My father was shot while reporting on the second Intifada. I went on a journey to meet the man who saved his life.

If you want to gauge whether a protest chant is genocidal or anti-Semitic or disagreeable in any other way, you have to pay attention to more than the words. A chant is a performance, not a text. A leader initiates a call-and-response or else yells into a bullhorn, eliciting roars from the crowd. Hands clap, feet stomp, drums are beaten. The chanting creates a rhythm that can induce a sort of hypnosis, fusing individuals into a movement. The beat should be no more sophisticated than Bum-bah bum-bah bum-bah bum-bah, as in, “There is only one solution! Intifada, revolution!” To claim that a chant means only what it says is like asserting that a theatrical production is the same as a script.

You can start with the words, though. Take the chant about intifada revolution. Etymologically, intifada denotes a shaking-off, but in contemporary Arabic, it means an uprising: For instance, a 1952 uprising in Iraq against the Hashemite monarchy is referred to in Arabic as an intifada. But in English, including in English-language dictionaries and encyclopedias, the word refers primarily to two periods of sustained Palestinian revolt, the First and Second Intifadas. The first, which ran from 1987 to 1993, involved protests and acts of civil disobedience and was relatively peaceful, at least compared with the second, from 2000 to 2005, which featured Palestinian suicide bombings and targeted reprisal killings by Israeli forces; more than a thousand Israelis died in 138 suicide attacks. These intifadas received so much international press coverage that surely everyone in the world to whom the word means anything at all thinks of them first. The more general idea of insurrection can only be a poor second.

If that’s the association, then intifada is not a phrase that would indicate genocidal intent. Total casualties on both sides during these earlier periods of conflict run to somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000. At its most innocuous, though, it still implies violence. In the context of this particular chant, it might imply much more than that. Revolution doubles and intensifies intifada—an uprising is the beginning of a fight; a revolution is the wholesale destruction of a social order. “There is only one solution”: This has been deemed offensive on the grounds that “solution” evokes the Final Solution, the term used to describe the German decision to kill all Jews during World War II. The more salient point, it seems to me, is that the declaration rejects the idea that there is a political path to peace. It says that diplomacy is not an option, and compromise is not a possibility.

Of course, that’s just the chant on the page. The chant on college campuses is one slogan among many, taking on meaning from those that come before and after it. And, at the same time, it may be uttered by people who don’t care what they’re saying. At any given march or rally, some number of participants will have shown up in order to show up, to signal membership in a movement that they identify with much more than they agree with. When the protesters aren’t directly affected by the matter they’re protesting, the politics of identity frequently supersede the politics of ideas, as Nate Silver pointed out in his Substack newsletter last week. Participating in a political action becomes a way of fitting in, and a chant is the price of admission. As the police enter campus after campus, I’m guessing that the chants also channel rage at the authorities. “Free Palestine!,” sure, but also, Free my friends!

And yet, the plain meaning of a chant has an impact, even if the chanters aren’t fully aware of it. A chant is particularly effective when its message echoes and explains the overall mise-en-scène. “Globalize the Intifada!” is an ironically apt chorus for students marching through an American campus under Palestinian flags, their heads shrouded in keffiyehs, their faces covered in KN95 masks. “We don’t want no Zionists here!” has the ring of truth when chanted at an encampment where students identified as Zionists have been forced out by a human chain.

The other day, I stood outside a locked gate at Columbia University, near a group of protesters who had presumably come to support the students but couldn’t get inside. From the other side of the gate, a bespectacled student in a keffiyeh worked them into a rage, yelling hoarsely into a microphone and, at moments of peak excitement, jumping up and down. She had her rotation: “Intifada revolution,” then “Palestine is our demand; no peace on stolen land!” Then “Free, free Palestine!” Then “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Finally, “Intifada, Intifada!” No one stopping to watch could fail to get the message. The young woman wasn’t calling for a cease-fire or a binational confederation of Palestine and Israel. She was calling for war. Is that anti-Semitic? It depends on whether you think that the violent eradication of the state of Israel is anti-Semitic.

Chants may feel like spontaneous outbursts of political sentiment, but they almost never are. So where do they come from? Social media, of course—most chants are rhyming couplets; repeated a few times, they’re just the right length for an Instagram Story. Another source is the political-organizing manuals that are sometimes called toolkits. These function more or less as a movement’s hymnals.  

The “rally toolkit” of the group Within Our Lifetime, a radical pro-Palestinian organization with connections on American campuses, lists 40 chants. I’ve heard almost half of them at Columbia, including “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here,” which, I learned from the toolkit, is a translation of a chant in Arabic. A fall-2023 Palestine Solidarity Working Group toolkit contains chant sheets from the Palestine Youth Movement and the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. (This word salad of names is in no way nefarious; political organizing is the art of building coalitions.) The lists overlap, with minor differences: The Palestinian Youth Movement’s sheet, for instance, includes several “Cross Movement Chants” that connect the Palestinian cause to others, such as “Stop the U.S. War machine—From Palestine to the Philippines.”

Some observers believe that one toolkit in particular reflects outside influence. A lawsuit claiming that Hamas is working with the national leadership of two organizations, National Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, has just been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Virginia on behalf of nine American and Israeli plaintiffs, including six victims of October 7; it specifically cites NSJP’s Day of Resistance Toolkit as evidence. The chairman of AMP, Hatem Bazian, who was also one of NSJP’s founders, denies the claim, and told The Washington Post that the lawsuit is a defamatory “Islamophobic text reeking in anti-Palestinian racism.” The question remains to be adjudicated, but it is safe to say that the toolkit makes NSJP’s ideological affinities clear. The toolkit, released immediately after October 7, advised chapters to celebrate Hamas’s attack as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance” and to lay the groundwork for October 12, “a national day of resistance” on campuses. Student groups across the country did in fact hold rallies and walkouts on October 12, two weeks before Israel invaded Gaza.

The Day of Resistance Toolkit is an extraordinary artifact, written in stilted, triumphalist prose that could have been airlifted out of a badly translated Soviet parade speech. “Fearlessly, our people struggle for complete liberation and return,” the document states. “Glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people.” NSJP includes graphics for easy poster-making; one of these is a now-notorious drawing of a crowd cheering a paraglider, a clear allusion to the Hamas militants who paraglided into Israel. And under “Messaging & Framing” come several bullet points; one group of these is preceded by the heading “When people are occupied, resistance is justified.” Under it, one finds the entire state of Israel, a recognized member-state of the United Nations, defined as an occupation, rather than just the West Bank, and its citizens characterized as “settlers” rather than civilians “because they are military assets used to ensure continued control over stolen Palestinian land.” If Israelis are not civilians, of course, then murdering them could count as a legitimate act of war. That heading, inverted (“Resistance is justified when people are occupied”), was soon being chanted by thousands of people around the country. The phrases did not originate with the toolkit, but it surely gave them a boost.

Many protest chants come across as unoriginal, but lack of originality is actually desirable. The more familiar a chant’s wording and cadence, the easier it is to pick up. A chant modeled on a much older one may also subtly advance a geopolitical argument. “Hey hey, ho ho! Zionism has got to go!,” which is an echo of “Hey hey, ho ho! LBJ has got to go!,” suggests a link between Gaza and Vietnam, Israeli imperialism and American imperialism. I don’t think that’s a stretch. The 1968 analogy is everywhere. Last week, I watched a Columbia protest leader praise a crowd by saying that they’re continuing what the anti-war protesters started. That night, dozens of today’s protesters did exactly that by occupying Hamilton Hall, also occupied in 1968.

I’m guessing that the Houthis—another Iranian-backed terrorist group, which controls a part of Yemen—provided a template for at least one chant. Around February, Columbia’s protesters were recorded chanting “There is no safe place! Death to the Zionist state!,” which struck me, in this context, as a taunting reply to Jewish students’ complaints about safety, followed by what sounded like a version of the actual, official Houthi slogan “God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.” And indeed, a month earlier, the crowd had openly chanted in support of the Houthis, who had been firing missiles at ships traveling through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The U.S. and Britain had just begun bombing them to stop the attacks, and the students sang, “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around!”

Does support for the Houthis and alleged support for Hamas mean that the students also support the groups’ sponsor, Iran? I doubt that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the student groups exchange messages on Signal. But at the very least, the chants raise the possibility that some of the more extreme radicals on campus align themselves with the Iranian government’s geopolitical orientation more than with America’s, and have somehow persuaded their followers to mouth such views.

One slogan, however, has become emblematic of the debate over the possible anti-Semitic content of pro-Palestinian chants. Its stature can be attributed, in part, to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik, who infamously insisted, during hearings on campus anti-Semitism, that it amounted to a call for genocide. The slogan, of course, is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Israel’s supporters hear it as eliminationist: From the Jordan to the Mediterranean, which is to say, across the land that had been under British control before it was partitioned by the United Nations in 1947, Palestine will be free of Jews. Where are they supposed to go? Many Jews find the possible answers to that question very disturbing. Palestinians and their allies, however, reject the Jewish interpretation as a form of catastrophizing. They say that the chant expresses the dream of a single, secular, democratic nation in which Palestinians and Jews would live peacefully side by side, in lieu of the existing Jewish ethno-nationalist state. (It is hard to dispute that in this scenario, Jewish Israelis would lose the power of collective self-determination.)

Before “From the river to the sea” caught on in English, it was chanted in Arabic. It is not clear when it first came into use, but Elliott Colla, a scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies at Georgetown University, believes that it emerged during the First Intifada—or rather, two versions of it did. One was nationalist: “Min al-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya”: “From water to water, Palestine is Arab.” The other was Islamist: “Falasteen Islamiyyeh, min al-nahr ila al-bahr”: “Palestine is Islamic from the river to the sea.” At some point during the Oslo peace process, Colla says, a third chant appeared: “Min al-nahr ila al-bahr, Falasteen satataharrar,” or “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” “It is this version—with its focus on freedom—that has circulated within English-language solidarity culture from at least the 1990s,” Colla writes in a recent article.

Therefore, Colla writes, “Palestine will be free” should be considered a new chant expressing the ideal of a more inclusive state, not merely a translation of the older, more aggressive chants. It gives voice to a “much more capacious vision of a shared political project.” The problem with Colla’s benign reading of the slogan, however, is that the more nationalist or Islamist Arab-language chants are still in circulation; they share airtime with the English-language variant at American protests. In January, I started seeing videos of American students chanting “Min al-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya.” The menace implicit in the Arabic chant bleeds into the English-language version.

If a chant’s meaning changes according to the other ones being chanted at the same event, the signs being waved, the leader’s general affect, and so on, then today’s chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are not beautiful messages of peace. A voice breaking the calm of a neoclassical quad with harsh cries of “Intifada, Intifada” is not a harbinger of harmonious coexistence. “We don’t want two states! We want all of it!” seems especially uncompromising when sung next to snow that’s been stained blood-red with paint. (I imagine that the red snow was meant to allude to the blood of Gazans, but sometimes a symbol means more than it is intended to mean.) Student protesters often say that all they want is for the killing to stop. That may well be true. But that is not what they’re chanting, or how they’re chanting it.

“I am a professor! I am a professor of economics!” said Caroline Fohlin, face down, pinned to the ground by police at Emory University, in Atlanta, during campus demonstrations in late April. Her glasses had been thrown from her face, her head knocked against the concrete. While Fohlin’s words might be taken to suggest entitlement—a belief that her faculty status should confer immunity—I heard something else: an appeal to neutrality. It seemed to me that Fohlin was not in the quad to join the students in their protest of the war in Gaza: She was just trying to look out for them.

Other faculty members have been roughed up too. Video showing the arrest of Emory’s philosophy-department chair, Noëlle McAfee, went viral. So did a clip of the Dartmouth historian Annelise Orleck getting knocked over and zip-tied. At Washington University in St. Louis, where I am on faculty, Steve Tamari, a history professor at nearby Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, was filmed being tackled and dragged by police; Tamari says he was hospitalized with broken ribs and a broken hand. During a protest at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the sociology professor Samer Alatout was detained; he says police inflicted the head gash that was visible in images circulated on social media.

Though sometimes called “student protests,” students are only some of those participating in the campus demonstrations and occupations of the past three weeks. My university reported that 100 people were arrested on April 27, of which 23 were students and at least four were employees. Various roles are represented at the protests, and those roles bear different meanings. The faculty members whose images have been shared most widely aren’t among the protesters so much as beside them; they’ve been watching over students as their guardians, instead of marching as their peers. This is helicopter protesting, fit for the helicopter-parent generation.

Following her arrest at Emory, Fohlin’s attorney told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she “was not a protester,” but had just come down from her office out of concern for students on the quad. In so doing, she saw authorities wrestling an individual to the ground and approached to intervene: “What are you doing?” she asked the police, appearing to tap one on the back before another officer grabbed her. McAfee told a similar story in a local-television interview: “I saw something going on … A bunch of police had tackled a young person, and threw them on the ground, and were just pummeling them,” she said. McAfee, whose scholarship connects feminist theory to political life, acknowledged the gendered role of protector that she felt she was playing. “The mother in me said, Stop, stop,” she told reporters.

The role of protector isn’t limited to women, of course. Before his detention, Tamari can be seen filming the protesters around him, perhaps as a means of documentation. In a statement issued later, Tamari positioned himself as a participant, but also a peacekeeper: “I joined the student-led protests on Saturday to stop the genocide and support and protect the students.” Alatout, the University of Wisconsin professor, expressed a similar ambition: “My and other faculty and staff’s position is that we are defending the students’ rights,” he said. “To demonstrate and to protest, and that we are defending them.”

Protection has been a theme of the protests. Members of Congress have pressured university presidents to demonstrate that they have done enough to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism. Disputes about the intention and etymology of campus chants and calls for Intifada, mixed with political motivations quite separate from the real operation of campus life, are also set against a years-long trend to cast safety as a matter of sensation, and sensation as equal to harm.

One timely example: After the Columbia University protests, some law students reportedly called for exams to be canceled, because the events of the week had left them “irrevocably shaken.” To feel unsafe is to be unsafe in the contemporary campus scene, and one’s perception of a slight, or even an act of violence, has become akin to its reality. Professors have played a role in advancing that ethos in their classrooms and offices, in part out of political empathy, in part because they truly care about students and their well-being, and in part because their institutions now demand it.

That situation has now circled back on itself. At UCLA last week, the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles and other organizations organized a rally on campus—a counterprotest, really, to the pro-Palestinian encampments—to “advocate for the protection of Jewish students,” as David N. Myers, one of the school’s history professors, put it. According to Myers, another, more agitated group of counterprotesters was also present, and came close to instigating a brawl with the anti-war activists. Myers wrote that he and other faculty “inserted ourselves between the two groups to serve as a buffer.” A few days later, the situation did turn violent, and some among the original student protesters were beaten by a mob, as the police stood aside. At first, police action was creating danger, then its absence did the same. Amid the confusion of today’s campus protests, it can be hard to predict who will be vulnerable to whom at any given time, and when protection can or should be provided.

Clearly students there and then badly needed help, of a sort that faculty could not reasonably provide. In the current college climate, concern for safety is a constant, but rarely modulates above a steady background noise. At the protests, as during the school year, teachers mostly offer their protection as a means of staving off much lesser harms than those delivered by stick-wielding thugs. At Columbia, one professor urged news cameramen not to film students inside the encampment, according to The New York Times, seemingly to guard the students’ reputations.

Columbia professors have been involved in student protests in the past, but they didn’t position themselves like this, as purveyors of moral support. Instead, they played the role of mediators. In 1968, when students occupied several buildings across campus, faculty at one point physically positioned themselves between the protesters and the police—in the interest of bringing the matter to a close. A faculty statement from the time read, in part, “As members of the faculty, we are determined to do everything within our power rapidly to resume the full life of this institution in the firm expectation that our proposals will permit a climate to prevail that will once again allow reason, judgment and order to reign.” That sentiment bears far more resemblance to the goals of today’s administrators and politicians—the restoration of order and resumption of business as usual on campus—than it does to the goals of professors who have intervened in recent weeks to keep students safe.

Today’s protests might look similar to those previous ones when viewed in pictures, but their context is transformed. Students and parents have spent years demanding more and better services on campus, including services to help students feel and be safe and comfortable. Universities have swelled into giant bureaucracies in response to regulatory demands and competition. College life itself, especially at elite private universities, is now consumed by professionalization more than self-discovery, thanks in part to the astronomical cost of attendance. Campuses have become more diverse, making today’s faculty motivations different and more varied than those driving the (whiter, maler) Columbia faculty of ’68, who yearned for reason’s victory. And politics has become more identitarian, giving selfhood greater sway.

In this new context, professors and students have developed a relationship of protection above all others. Faculty have been converted from instructors into personal coaches. Much is gained in this change, including its expression at campus protests; professors such as McAfee and Myers have shown bravery on behalf of students. And yet, something is also lost: By inserting ourselves into students’ lives as guardians of their welfare, we risk failing to protect an important aspect of their intellectual, political, and personal development—namely, their independence.

Recounting the intervention that had led to her arrest at Dartmouth, Annelise Orleck reported saying to the police, “Leave our students alone. They’re students. They’re not criminals.” Like some other faculty, Orleck drew a line at calling in law enforcement, a choice she said was unprecedented in her 34 years at the college. But since Columbia set the precedent to do so, policing itself has become a subject of campus demonstrations. Participants may well be risking arrest by design. At the same time, students seem ambivalent about the degree to which they really are at odds with authority, rather than reliant upon it. At Columbia, one was mocked after demanding “humanitarian aid” in the form of food and water after taking over Hamilton Hall. “I guess it’s ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students,” she said.

What, exactly, is the nature of that obligation? Attending college is an American coming-of-age ritual, and a means of giving students room to figure out how to live and act in the world. Orleck’s reminder that students are just students undercuts that mission, in a way. It’s both protective and infantilizing. It strips students of their power before they’ve even had a chance to test it out. None of us wants our students or our colleagues to be harmed. But there’s value in learning how it feels to take risks, and to reap their rewards.

Updated at 9:05 a.m. ET on May 3, 2024

President Joe Biden will make a speech on anti-Semitism on Tuesday, May 7, by way of observing the Holocaust remembrance in the Jewish religious calendar. If the speech is not to fail, or even backfire, the president needs to be very clear in his mind about what he has to say, and why.

The questions Biden needs to answer on Tuesday are not questions about beliefs or values. They are not questions about himself or his personal commitments. They are questions about American liberalism in general, about its ability to defend its stated commitments against challengers who plead victimhood as their justification. Biden hit a lot of the right themes in informal remarks at the White House yesterday. But there’s more to say, and it should be said clearly and without any Trumpian caveats about “good people on both sides.”

Anti-Semitism appears chiefly in two different forms in the United States. There is a right-wing variant based on religious dogmas or delusions of racial supremacy, which was the one on display in the “Jews will not replace us!” chants in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. There is also a left-wing variant, the one on display at American college campuses this spring, in which Jews are presented as the supreme oppressors of all the world’s oppressed. The first version is echoed by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s worry that she might be prevented from accusing Jews of killing Christ. The second is exemplified by Representative Ilhan Omar’s sneer about “pro-genocide” Jews.

Most American Jews accept that mainstream U.S. liberals like Biden reject both variants of anti-Semitism. But very observably, mainstream American liberalism is a lot more comfortable standing up to the Greene version than the Omar one.

This disparity explains why the campus anti-Israel protests have so alarmed many American Jews. The schools are reverberating with slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free” which to many ears means “Destroy the state of Israel and kill, expel, or subjugate its Jewish inhabitants.” We hear chants of “Globalize the Intifada,” which translates as “Bring mass murder to Jews everywhere on Earth.” We hear Jews blamed by association for every problem from police brutality to climate change—even both of those things at once. We see checkpoints on campus where Jews are quizzed on their beliefs before they are allowed to approach the university library.

[Tyler Austin Harper: America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed]

I would assume that virtually every university president in the country (and surely the great majority of university professors and administrators) disapproves of these behaviors. But these officials have over many years demonstrated that they flinch from acting against such misconduct: Jews are subjected to harassment and intimidation in ways that, if carried out against any other similarly identifiable group of students, would instantly invite the full weight of institutional punishment. Yet those responsible for the harassment and intimidation of Jews enjoy near-total impunity.

The universities provide the most conspicuous current instances of this phenomenon in American society, but they are not unique cases. In every domain where American liberalism holds sway—public education, local politics in deep-blue cities, labor unions, literature and the arts—Jews who share the almost-universal Jewish connection to the land of Israel face insult, threat, ostracism, even outright violence.

All of this presents a tremendous political problem for Biden. Of course, he’s not in charge of the art world or the literary milieu or the unions. He does not have much influence over public education, and even less over local politics. But he personifies American liberalism, and his political hopes in November are deeply intertwined with American liberalism’s image and standing.

Think of a national election as a job interview. The Republican candidate needs an answer to the question “Do you have the heart to care about me?” The Democrat must have an answer for the question “Do you have the guts to protect me?”

When Democrats look too weak to stand up to anti-Israel protests on campuses and in other liberal domains, their problem is not only one of how they handle anti-Semitism. It is a problem that goes to the central risk to their political brand: the perception of weakness.

[Daniel Block: Will Biden have a Gaza problem in November’s poll?]

The anti-Israel protesters get this: There’s a method to their mayhem. They want to punish Biden in November. They don’t have the votes to elect anyone they like better, nowhere near. But if they cannot hope to replace Biden, they can help to defeat him. By creating images of chaos, they support the Republican message that liberals like Biden are to blame for disorder.

Republicans audaciously tried that message during the riots that devolved from protests against the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, when Donald Trump was actually president. They’re eager to repeat the message in 2024.

Biden’s instinct on May 7 will be to speak sympathetically about Jewish fears while stressing his respect for the right to protest. His instinct will be to express compassion for all civilians at risk from the violence in the Middle East, both Palestinians and Israelis. If he does that and stops there, he will be delivering the right answer to the wrong question—the one for a Republican, about caring enough.

The speech he needs to give is not a speech from the heart. It’s a speech about his guts. The message wanted is more than “I care.” The message wanted is “I dare.”  

So after saying the things that are instinctive for him to say, he must keep going. He needs to say that no cause justifies violence on the streets and quads of America. He needs to affirm that universities cannot accept intimidation and unlawful disruption of educational activities. He needs to make clear that he supports those leaders who have protected their universities’ academic function, including their decision to call in the police where required. He should share his firm conviction that protest is not peaceful if it forcibly interferes with the rights of others.

He needs to do all of these things—not as a special favor to Jews on campus or off, but as a basic rule of good government. As president and as a presidential candidate, Trump has played favorites among lawbreakers. With one kind of culprit, he urged the police to crack their heads on the doors of their squad cars. Another kind of culprit he hailed as “hostages” and promised to pardon. If Biden is to campaign against Trump by calling him an inciter of riots, he himself needs to be an unwavering voice against riots, whatever the ideology of the rioter.

[David A. Graham: Biden’s patience with campus protests runs out]

The campus protesters may fantasize about a rerun of the disturbances of 1968. Mercifully, I do not see history repeating itself. But one lesson from that year bears applying to this year: Disorder hurts Democrats. When Biden speaks about anti-Semitism on Tuesday, he will be speaking not only for and about Jews; he will be speaking for and about his party and his belief system. Can Democrats enforce rules? Do they uphold equal justice, or do they indulge privileged categories of rule-breakers? Is his party strong enough to lead? Is he strong enough to lead?

In 1843, Karl Marx wrote an essay titled “On the Jewish Question” that argued for “the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” Marx was calling not for murder, exactly, but for the forced dissolution of Jewishness as a form of self-identification. In the century-plus since that essay, Marxist thinking has mutated in many ways, yet Marxist revolutionary movements have consistently resented Jewish particularity and identified it as a problem to be overcome, one way or another.

Today, Marxism has yielded to Palestinianism as the latest iteration of revolutionary idealism. But if the goal has changed, the obstacle has not. As Marx wrote, “We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time.” Swap out Judaism for Zionism, which has become protesters’ dog-whistling euphemism, and you could repeat Marx’s vituperation almost word for word at any campus encampment and get applause from your audience.  

Those are the people who also seek, in effect, to swap out Biden for Trump in November. When Biden speaks against them, he is speaking not only for and in defense of American Jews. He is speaking for and in defense of himself and the ideals to which he has devoted his public career.

This article originally stated that President Biden’s speech would be on Sunday, May 5. In fact, it is scheduled for Tuesday, May 7.