The war in Gaza has served as the ostensible occasion for many of the encampments, road, bridge, and tunnel blockades,

protests, marches, vandalism, intimidation, destruction, and mayhem that we've seen in the United States over the

last many months. The targeting of Jews as Jews, and the chance and calls to perpetrate violence

against Jews as Jews, is manifest for all to see. Most of the protesters, of course, are not Jewish,

and most Jews are not sympathetic, at all, with their aims or their

tactics. Most American Jews are disgusted with them, but not all. Some American Jews have

joined in with the pro-Hamas mobs that menace synagogues, Jewish pedestrians, Jewish students,

kosher restaurants, and media figures. How do we understand them? The American

Jews who've joined in with the protesters? What do they think they're achieving? What precedence

in Jewish history can help us understand this stunning act of joining in with one's avowed adversary?

Gil Troy and Natanzh Ransky have referred to them as the un-Jews, and Eli Lake has diagnosed

the history of the as a Jew, who begins his sentences by saying, as a Jew, only to conclude

with a rebuke of the Jewish people and the Jewish state, but does not otherwise participate

in Jewish letters or Jewish life. What are the ideas behind Jewish anti-Semitism as they're

instantiated in the protest movement that convulsed American campuses this spring?

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. My guest today is Elliot Abrams,

the author of a forthcoming book on Jewish peoplehood, entitled If You Will It, that will be

published this fall by Wicked Son.

Elliot is the chairman of Tikva and a senior fellow at the Council in Foreign Relations.

He's been an observer of Jewish-American life for a long time, and the Jewish turn against Israel in America today is, in his view,

unlike the normal Jewish critiques of Israel that one hears every

Shabbat in every synagogue across the country. It's not the Jews don't like the Israeli

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