Someone Taught Him to Hate

Yesterday evening, I was walking to synagogue with my wife and our two children when a car slowed beside us. A man in the back seat rolled down his window.

“Hey,” he shouted. “Are you that guy from Twitter?”

Slightly embarrassed, I nodded.

The response was immediate.

“Fuck Israel.”

Then came the rest.

“Baby killer.”

“Fascist.”

“Nazi.”

“Scum.”

As the car began pulling away, he continued shouting and flipping me off. “There are children here,” I yelled back, pointing to my ten-year-old son and four-year-old daughter. It made no difference. The man kept screaming.

“Fuck Israel.”

As the car disappeared, I wasn’t offended. I wasn’t enraged. I wasn’t anything. Only saddened.

How did this man become so consumed by hatred that he could not hold it in any longer? How did we get to a point where screaming obscenities at strangers and their children has become acceptable behavior? How did we let things get so bad?

No one, I believe, is born hateful, but everyone can become hateful. Because hatred, at its core, begins with ignorance. It begins with falsehoods instead of facts and caricatures instead of complexity. It begins with lies, repeated often enough to sound true, and the dismissal of opposing viewpoints. It begins with a preference for certainty over curiosity. Eventually, ignorance hardens into conviction. Conviction hardens into contempt. And contempt hardens into hatred.

The man in the car did not invent the idea that Israel, as the homeland of the Jewish people, is uniquely evil. Nor did he invent the idea that violence against Jews and Israelis is morally justified or that Jews are responsible for everything wrong in the world. Someone taught him these things, normalized them, and made them seem righteous. Someone taught him how to hate.

To understand where this hatred comes from, we therefore have to examine the ideas that produce it. Unfortunately, that trail leads directly to our most revered institutions of higher learning.

Over the past several decades, American colleges and universities have increasingly embraced a new form of antisemitism, one that I explore in my forthcoming book, American Intellectual Antisemitism. According to this ideology, Jews are not an indigenous people returning to their ancestral homeland. Instead, they are recast as White settler-colonialists who conspire to cleanse Palestine of its indigenous people in order to establish a Jewish supremacist ethnostate through dispossession, apartheid, and genocide. At its core, American Intellectual Antisemitism strips Jews of their peoplehood, the Jewish people of their right to self-determination, and the Jewish state of its right to exist.

Presenting itself as a form of social justice, American Intellectual Antisemitism recasts Jews as privileged oppressors, treats Jewish self-determination as uniquely illegitimate, and transforms hostility toward Jews, Israelis, and Israel itself from prejudice into a moral virtue. Most importantly, it teaches people that nearly anything is justified—including screaming at people in front of their four-year-old daughters—in the name of resistance.

This is not criticism of Israel’s policies. It is rejection of Israel’s legitimacy as the homeland of the Jewish people.

The ideas of American Intellectual Antisemitism may have originated in American colleges and universities, yet these are not the only institutions responsible for spreading them. The media helped normalize these ideas. Politicians amplified them for political gain. Social media platforms ensured they reached millions. Once unleashed onto the world, these ideas helped create an environment in which Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were murdered in Washington, D.C., Jewish demonstrators were firebombed in Boulder, Colorado, Jewish celebrations were attacked in Bondi Beach, Australia, and where a stranger felt comfortable rolling down his car window and screaming obscenities at a family walking to synagogue.

The man in the car may not have been the source of this ideology, but he was one of its many adherents.

As we approached the synagogue, my son asked me how some people can be so bad. It was the same question I had been silently asking myself—and one I had hoped he would never ask.

“The truth is,” I told my son, “that I do not think the man in the car was a bad person. I’m sure he loves his family, is kind to his friends, and believes in many of the things that we do.” What made him the way he is, I told my son, was not his lack of humanity. It was the ideas he had been taught to believe.

If hatred can be taught, it can also be untaught. That is why education remains our most powerful defense against hatred—not teaching students what to think, but teaching them how to do so.

Long before that man in the car decided to scream at me and my children, the ideas that shaped his worldview were being created and propagated on American college campuses. To fight such hatred, we must demand that our institutions of higher education return to their most basic purpose. They must become places where curiosity, dialogue, and empirical evidence matter more than ideological conformity, dogma, and emotional reactions. They must become places where students learn to question assumptions, weigh evidence, and grapple with complexity—places where disagreement is treated as an opportunity for learning and intellectual courage matters more than ideological certainty.

Curiosity undermines hatred. If we want fewer people screaming at strangers and their children on the way to synagogue, we need institutions that cultivate curiosity rather than certainty, inquiry rather than indoctrination, and education rather than ignorance.

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