By: Brandon Rattiner
Senior Director of the JCRC
It feels like I am living in two realities. Both are exhausting and terrible.
In one, politicians constantly exploit antisemitism for political purposes. They make a show of their outrage and demand the other side disavow its very real, very ugly behavior.
This week, Democrats rightly condemned an attack ad depicting Phil Weiser with horns, imagery used to demonize Jews for centuries. It is what prompted me to write this. The ad echoes other antisemitic rhetoric from the far right targeting Colorado’s Jewish leaders this election cycle. Republicans who so readily accuse Democrats of tolerating antisemitism must be equally willing to confront it within their own ranks.
But Democrats should not mistake condemning the ad for doing the work. Republicans are also right to demand that Democrats stop making excuses for anti-Israel activists whose rhetoric and behavior cross into antisemitism. This is especially true of Democratic Socialists who are increasingly arguing with Jews themselves. They assume an authority they do not have, telling Jews that Israel can be decoupled from Jewish identity even though most Jews say otherwise. Then they caricature what Jews are actually saying—falsely claiming that we label all criticism of Israeli policy antisemitic—and use that straw man to blame antisemitism on Jewish advocacy or Israel itself, rather than confront the hostility toward ‘Zionists’ that too many in their own movement have helped normalize.
Everyone is comfortable talking about antisemitism in the abstract. Everyone is eager to use Jewish pain as a wedge issue. Almost no one wants to do the hard work.
Then there is the other reality: the one Jews in Colorado actually live in.
Last week, Denver police reported that someone drove past the home of an elderly Jewish couple and threw a tire onto their lawn marked “f*** you Zionists.” Imagine finding that outside your home. Imagine wondering who did it and whether they might come back.
All the self-serving wordplay insisting that hostility toward “Zionists” has nothing to do with Jews collapses when an elderly Jewish couple finds that message on their lawn.
This is our community’s reality. Just this summer, the Winston Downs neighborhood association alerted residents to increasing anti-Jewish harassment taking place in the East Denver neighborhood. A rabbi wrote that someone yelled “dirty Jew” at him from a car in Southeast Denver. ADL filed a federal civil-rights complaint alleging Boulder Valley School District failed to respond adequately to a Jewish student being choked and called a “stupid kike.” A Denver Jewish facility canceled a day of camp because of a bomb threat.
This is just three months in the lives of Jews in Colorado. This is the reality that disappears when antisemitism becomes a partisan or abstract debate about tropes, ideology, and terminology.
So, I am asking our leaders again. Stop enabling antisemitism. And stop using Jewish pain to score political points. Antisemitism is not something that only appears across the aisle. It is a climate that every political coalition helps either create or confront.
Start with your own.