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By Jonathan Greenblatt, National Director and CEO
* Note: this article originally appeared in the times of israel.
There are no Starbucks in Israel.
Yet, over the past year since the horrific attacks of October 7th in which Hamas terrorists butchered 1,200 innocent men, women, and children, Starbucks locations all over the US — and the world — have been vandalized with anti-Israel graffiti. Calls to boycott Starbucks have been spray-painted on stores and spread online. The situation grew so serious that the company’s CEO addressed the situation in the company end-of-year letter to shareholders.
Ironically, Starbucks does have locations in Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and throughout the Persian Gulf, serving exponentially more Muslims than Jews.
In light of all the death and destruction these past 365 days and the 101 hostages still held in captivity in Gaza, the plight of a multinational, billion-dollar coffee chain might seem trivial.
Yet what happened to Starbucks is emblematic of the stakes of the conflict the Jewish community has found itself in since 10/7. Antisemitism has erupted across the US and globally. While some may see this strictly as a problem for the Jewish community, that is willfully myopic. Antisemitism is not just the oldest hatred, but a symptom of deep dysfunction below the surface of liberal democratic societies and a threat to the pluralism that makes these countries work.
In the years leading up to 10/7, antisemitism already had reached record heights. Since then, it has exploded. Antisemitic incidents increased 140 percent from 2022 to 2023, breaking all previous records. According to the most recent FBI hate crimes report, anti-Jewish hate crimes rose 63 percent to 1,832 incidents in 2023, the highest number ever recorded since the Bureau began collecting data in 1991.
Driving this surge is a concomitant increase in antisemitic attitudes. For nearly 30 years, ADL found that the percentage of Americans with intense antisemitic attitudes hovered at around 10 percent. In 2022, that jumped to 20 percent. And in 2024, it jumped to 24 percent — the highest level ADL has seen in six decades.
Surging antisemitism impacts Jewish Americans in many ways: the armed guards protecting every synagogue in America; the observant Jew who makes sure to cover his kippah with a baseball cap when out in public; the college student who hides her connection to the Jewish homeland in order to join a club or just get through the day without being harassed; the Jewish professionals – authors, investors, therapists, small business owners — targeted as “Zionists” and subsequently bullied by activists, shunned by confused clients and ignored by terrified customers.
But the broader world can’t afford the pipe dream that this disease can be contained. While the Jewish community certainly bears the brunt of antisemitism, it is a contagion. It ultimately will infect — and endanger – all of American society.
There are many reasons for its unprecedented spread. Despite rising standards of living, tectonic changes in the economy and society have generated widespread anxiety and massive uncertainty. Social media has played a part by reinforcing the sense that there is no empirical truth and any outlandish plot is possible. All of this creates a ripe environment for conspiracy thinking and scapegoating on all sides.
On the extreme right, this most prominently has taken the form of the “Great Replacement” theory, a conspiracy that posits that a cabal of Jews is opening the borders of the United States to let in non-white minorities to replace “real Americans.” This is why the tiki-torch marchers at Charlottesville in 2017 chanted “Jews will not replace us.” This is how the gunman who gunned down 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 justified the massacre. And this is what is spouted with increasing frequency by far-right personalities such as Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson.
For this group, toxic antisemitism is core to their ideology. As political theorist Eric Ward has written, their virulent white nationalism and its anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-Muslim views emanate from their conspiratorial hatred of Jews.
Radicals on the left start with a very different set of coordinates but somehow manage to land at the same destination. This doesn’t mean that every protestor who has taken to the streets since 10/7 is motivated by hate. Many are inspired by genuine concern regarding the civilian death toll in Gaza.
Nonetheless, it is increasingly clear that the dominant current propelling many of these protests is not enlightened universalism, but raw desire to eliminate the only Jewish country in the entire world – home to nearly half of the Jews worldwide. It is a radical ideology focused, not on ending the conflict or even achieving peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, but simply on destroying the Jewish state.
As this single-minded obsession with exterminating Israel has taken hold among the ranks of the activists, there has been an unmistakable embrace of conspiratorial views – for example, that Jews are part of an “oppressor” class responsible for the ills of the Middle East and of the United States and that Jews have undue amounts of power over universities and of the government. Like those on the right, such a worldview is impervious to facts and often leads to anarchic violence and rage against Jews, Israel, and increasingly America itself.
Numerous examples illustrate this point. To name a few, last May, activists broke into the President’s office at Stanford and poured red paint on his desk. At the same time, others defaced the university’s Main Quad with messages like “De@th 2 Isr@hell,” “Pigs taste best dead,” and “F*** Amerikkka.”
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington DC this past summer to deliver remarks before Congress, activists agitated across the city. In front of historic Union Station, they vandalized statues with phrases like “Hamas is coming!” Others burned Israeli and American flags.
This past September at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, protesters entered the historic Navy ROTC building, replaced the American flag with a Palestinian one, and spray painted the outside with “Death to the US” and “Burn it all.”
And so, this is why protesters target Starbucks. Not only is its founder, Howard Schultz, a prominent Jewish businessman, but the coffee giant also is among the most prominent American brands. It is a veritable symbol of capitalism itself.
Neither of these worldviews make sense, but both erode the very fabric of our country. You can’t have a reasoned argument with people who ignore history and facts. You can’t have the compromises necessary to make a multi-ethnic democracy work if people see some of their neighbors as the embodiment of evil. You can’t resolve conflicts peacefully if some believe that the stakes are literally life as you know it.
And yet, this is not surprising. As we have seen throughout history, no democracy with a severe antisemitism problem stays a democracy for long. As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, the hate that starts with the Jews never ends there. Antisemitism is an insatiable monster that consumes everything.
This is why the surge of anti-Jewish hate in America over this past year should be so troubling for all Americans regardless of where they pray or how they identify. This antipathy toward the Jewish community is setting the stage for a far larger fight in this country. Some might even call it a “battle for the soul of America.”
One day, the hostages will come home, the current conflict will subside, and perhaps there will be peace for both people: safety and security for Israelis and dignity and equality for Palestinians. I’m deeply committed to working towards this future.
But if we fail to stamp out the evil of antisemitism currently taking root on both sides of the political spectrum, it will fracture the very foundation of our country. And, if history is any indication, once that base is damaged, there is no guarantee that we will be able to fix it. It’s up to us to halt this trend before it’s too late.