First, let’s do a little kvelling, as the chosen people say — that’s Yiddish for the breathless expression of pride. Times of crisis on the public stage tend to reveal character, and how morally on point has our governor been since — and let this sink in — he and his family were the targets of assassination?

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Even when those who should know better engage in the ethically bankrupt lingua franca of whataboutism — one of the governor’s prospective general election opponents, Republican Rep. Dan Meuser, failed the adult in the room test by essentially blaming the victim — Josh Shapiro has stuck to the high road. By speaking and writing about his role as a father and husband during this trauma, he put a human face on the too-often faceless victims of political violence. His refusal to cave to fear, to proudly proclaim his faith, and his calls for adhering to the rule of law and due process — all have hit just the right tone.

Shapiro’s most important phrase, invoked time and again ever since a deranged Jew-hating asshole who lives with his mother tried to kill him and his family? Moral clarity.

At a time when moral relativism seems to be the careful default in our politics, it’s something of a throwback to hear calls for strict adherence to our once-shared values of right and wrong.

Maybe we’re having a moment, because suddenly “moral clarity” is a phrase we’re hearing a lot lately. It’s a common refrain in Douglass Murray’s new, deeply reported book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization. It’s also a theme that courses through Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary, the late Victoria Amelina’s diary from the frontlines in Ukraine — before the 37-year-old mom was killed by a Russian missile while sitting with friends in a cafe. A war crime, in other words — speaking of moral clarity.

We live in a time where we don’t have to go seeking confirmation bias; ours finds us now. We’re enveloped more and more by the moral fog of culture war. But there are some things, as old as our history, that remain true: There is good and evil in the world, and in the hearts of men. (And, yes, it is usually men.) When we obfuscate, when we mislabel, when we equivocate, when we whatabout, we attack the fragile common thread of humanity itself.

That’s why the attack on Shapiro, his wife, their children and guests convinces me we need a new way to frame such horror, lest such acts fade with each etch-a-sketch news cycle. To do that — and maybe Shapiro can lead in this way — I’m now on board with the movement to retire the term “antisemitism” and replace it with what it is: Jew hate. Why not take a page from Ted Turner, who, upon creating an international TV news network in the early 1980s, cut short an interminable brainstorming among his team, all of whom were trying to come up with a catchy name for the venture. Here’s an idea, Turner said. We’re going to call it what it is: Cable News Network. CNN was born.

Saying what it is

Call it what it is — not a bad game plan for this moment. A decade ago, the legendary Philly activist Connie Smukler first pitched me on the idea — “antisemitism” is too unclear, too ethereal, too academic, she said. It doesn’t pull at the heartstrings. She had the chops to make the case: With her late husband Joe and a handful of Philly housewives, Connie rescued over a million Jews from Soviet oppression in the 70s and 80s, inspiring a young Josh Shapiro at the then-Akiba Hebrew Academy. That’s interesting, I remember thinking when Connie made the case, and I tucked it away.

An ADL report this week finds an 893 percent increase in antisemitic attacks over the last decade and a particular explosion since the beheadings, rapes and kidnappings of peace-loving Jews in Israel on October 7, 2023. No wonder a movement is gaining steam to do just what Connie presaged a decade ago.

The National Holocaust Museum has replaced the term antisemitism with “anti-Jewish racism.” “At a time of soaring levels of Jew hatred,” writes Etan Smallman in The Independent, the phrase “is serving to actively cloud the many problems we face. A 2019 poll found that more than half of under-25s did not know what [antisemitism] meant.”

So let’s go back into the roots of the word. It was adopted in the late 1800s by the German Jew hater Wilhelm Marr. “The term ‘antisemitism’ was coined not to marginalize Jew hatred but to mainstream it,” Stephen D. Smith, the emeritus executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation and the inaugural UNESCO chair on genocide education, has written. That etymology alone should make us wonder why the term still predominates. Complicating matters was that “semite” was not a descriptor just of Jews — it was a catch-all phrase applying to peoples who spoke a common language, Jew and Arab alike. (We won’t even get into the controversy surrounding hyphenating the word — which Trump has brought back, over the objection of experts who have actually spent their lives thinking about how we talk about this, like the Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt.)

In practice, what difference might using the “Jew hate” label actually make? Well, the Governor’s hesitancy to bogart the legal process notwithstanding, let’s be real: The attacker (media ought not to use the names of those who commit political violence or domestic terror) announced his motivation in his 911 call. Add that it took place on the first night of Passover? That’s Jew hate, and calling it thus robs the narrative of all tangential issues: Mental health, the war in Gaza, the plight of the economy as a way to understand the attacker. Jew hate as a starting point renders all of it irrelevant, or at least tertiary.

Case in point: Shapiro’s name was floated for vice president last year and a “No Genocide Josh” meme took hold, reportedly promulgated by the Democratic Socialists, including an aide to progressive Rep. Summer Lee, who, ironically, a Shapiro TV ad had helped elect to Congress. This despite the fact that Shapiro had been more critical of Israel’s prosecution of the war, and of Benjamin Netanyahu in particular, than Tim Walz, the other leading VP candidate. The campaign against Shapiro was about his Jewishness, not his record. That’s Jew hate.

Protests on college campuses? Those who register moral outrage over Israel’s prosecution of the war keep faith with the tradition of university give and take; there is, after all, a compelling case to be made that Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir’s brutal wartime tactics played right into the terrorists’ hands.

But protests like the one at Yale a few nights ago? Where agitators shut down an Israeli speaker by chanting “intifada” while wearing the headbands of the jihadi death cult Hamas? That’s Jew hate.

“The term ‘antisemitism’ was coined not to marginalize Jew hatred but to mainstream it.” — Stephen D. Smith

Mind you, this is not an argument for shutting down speech. It is, instead, a call to shame bad speech by saying exactly what it is. The masked protestors — many of them professional anarchists, not students — who terrorized the family of Penn President Larry Jameson by overtaking his property and taping their propaganda to his home’s windows? They were uncivil and unlawful, having trespassed, and they confused speaking truth to power with speaking stupid to it. (Israel’s brutal war is wrong and self-defeating and likely has included war crimes; just last week, Israel fired a deputy commander for the killing of 15 Palestinian medics, a nod to accountability you’d never find a death cult like Hamas engaging in. But in a population of 2.5 million, 45,000 deaths — perhaps half of which are direct enemy combatants — does not fit the definition of genocide, as everyone from John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, to the courageous Palestinians protesting Hamas’ tyranny both attest.)

Admittedly, it still gets tricky. Is anti-Zionism Jew hate, as many hold? Depends on the motive of the speaker, right? In his book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, Peter Beinart makes a compelling case for a one-state solution. I disagree — but do I think he, a Jew himself, wants to eradicate his people from the earth? Hardly. He’s courageously keeping faith with his religion’s tradition to debate and provoke and stand for what he sees as right. Now, a masked protester spitting “death to the Zionists” in Jewish student faces? That dude probably is not quite so pure and high-minded, right?

For me, I have a tough time getting past Israel’s vast settlement building on the West Bank. That was Netanyahu deviously preempting the only thing that will bring peace, some kind of two-state solution, which Palestinian leadership has rejected time and again since 1948. That said, it’s hard to defend the conditions of Israeli occupation. Jimmy Carter — no Jew hater, as Menachem Begin would testify — was on to something when he invoked the word “Apartheid” to characterize Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. (Though, mind you, that was before Israel gave back Gaza and nearly 10,000 settlement homes … and were rewarded for that good faith effort with Hamas.)

Complicated, right? All the more reason to call out that which isn’t so complicated. The reason Martin Luther King, Jr. marched arm in arm with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel during the Civil Rights Movement was that he knew that Jew hate was the canary in the oppressor’s coal mine. Descent into illiberalism, othering and genocide may start with Jews, but it rarely ends there. King said as much in a 1958 speech to the American Jewish Congress, a speech written by his great friend and partner, Stanley Levison. Man, does it ring true today, in the smoldering ash of the Governor’s Mansion reception room:

One of history’s most despicable tyrants, Adolph Hitler, sought to redefine morality as a good exclusively for the Aryan race. He bathed mankind in oceans of blood, murdering millions of Jews, old and young, and even the unborn. Negroes saw that such hideous racism, though not immediately applied to them, must sooner or later encompass them, and willingly they supported the struggle to achieve his defeat. There are Hitlers loose in America today, both in high and low places. As the tensions and bewilderment of economic problems become more severe, history’s scapegoats, the Jews, will be joined by new scapegoats, the Negroes. The Hitlers will seek to divert people’s minds and turn their frustrations and anger to the helpless, to the outnumbered. Then whether the Negro and Jew shall live in peace will depend upon how firmly they resist, how effectively they reach the minds of the decent Americans to halt this deadly diversion.

It is a singular testament that one can be gone from this mortal coil nearly half a century and still have more insight and wisdom than anyone still living on it. Our fight against the “deadly diversion” goes on, and perhaps our contribution to the effort can begin with simply stating clearly, without equivocation, what the things are that most threaten our common project. Jew hate, King tells us, is certainly one.

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