The Ease of Antisemitism

How a decent congressional nominee reached for the oldest accusation

My brother posted something on Facebook about a fundraiser for Don Leonard, the Democratic nominee in Ohio’s 15th Congressional District. So I did my homework and read up on his campaign, and passed along what I found.

At first the homework went well. On paper Leonard is everything you would want a candidate to be. He served in the Peace Corps, spent a decade teaching at Ohio State, and is running a campaign about wages, childcare and housing. I liked him.

And then I watched him talk about Israel.

In his April 2026 interview with local political blogger D.J. Byrnes (“The Rooster”), Leonard, who won his primary with nearly 53 percent of the vote, begins exactly where a careful person should — he hedges. He invokes his international-relations training, weighs “act of war” against “crimes against humanity” against “genocide.”

In those early statements, you could nod along, because nothing seems unreasonable, but by the end, Leonard has traveled from cautious distinctions to the claim that Israelis are running a Warsaw ghetto. His route is so smooth that the distance covered never has to be acknowledged, least of all by an interviewer who shares the destination and helps him toward it.

The Proximate Jew as Alibi

“What brings me clarity is that my Jewish wife is telling me, yes, it is a genocide, right? Yes, it’s an apartheid state.”

Perhaps Leonard’s wife has reasons for her conclusion, such as things she has read or evidence she has weighed, but we never hear those reasons. Leonard introduces her as a credential, relying on her Jewishness to settle the question.

Imagine if she had said that it is not a genocide, and not an apartheid state — would Leonard say so?

I imagine not.

Because the “yes, it is a genocide” is received as a Jew bravely testifying against the interests of her own tribe; the “no” would be received as a Jew protecting it.

The same Jewishness that made his wife a witness would, in a sentence, be perceived as the bias that disqualifies her. A genuine authority points both ways and can be believed both ways. One that counts only while it agrees with you is a credential summoned to bless a conclusion already reached.

This maneuver keeps popping up: the proximate Jew as alibi.

First, the conclusion that comes before anything else, and then a Jew who confirms it is produced as proof. Meanwhile, a Jew who would dissent is neither sought nor believed. The function is exculpatory: it jumps ahead of the accusation it expects — “you think I'm being antisemitic” — and disarms it in advance.

I see it regularly on my Facebook feed. Liberal friends and acquaintances share an image of Bernie Sanders over one of his lines about Netanyahu or Gaza, and the sharing does something the words alone would not. Sanders is the most recognizable Jewish face on the American left, and the implicit caption is: “a Jew said it, so I’m in the clear.” His Jewishness is conscripted to pre-acquit the person clicking “share.”

Suppose a candidate announced he would vote against immigrant rights, and reasoned that his immigrant wife agrees with him. We would call it out instantly, and argue that her status is not an argument and producing her does not make a position justified (a spouse’s identity proves that the speaker is married, nothing more). The only reason this passes when the subject is Jews and Israel is because the maneuver has become reflexive.

A Jew vouching for a charge against Jews has been made to feel like proof instead of what it is, which is an alibi.

And here is what should trouble a Democrat watching another Democrat do this. Leonard holds a PhD in government from Cornell; he is a man who tells us movingly that he became “pro-Israeli” at thirteen, weeping over a Holocaust book, undone by the discovery that adults would sit back and let it happen.

Don Leonard is exactly the kind of person the phrase “should know better” was built for — a thoughtful man who said these things casually, as if they had been set out in advance for him to pick up.

The ease of his words is the scandal.

The Relay to “Yes”

If you listen carefully, you’ll notice that throughout the interview the escalation to “yes, it’s a genocide” happens as a relay — each speaker handing the next a license to go further.

Leonard says he has “admiration” for IDF soldiers, who are conscripts “being ordered to do horrific things.” This is a defensible sentiment, sympathy for conscripts in any war. But notice how the interviewer takes the handoff: “The ‘I’ve been ordered—just taking orders.’ It didn’t work out for the Nazis.”

There it is, set on the table — Nuremberg and the defense that famously failed there.

I expected Leonard to push it away, but he didn’t: “We know from Nuremberg that it’s no defense. We know from the Geneva Convention on War that it’s not a defense.”

So the frame is now jointly held and Israeli soldiers stand where the Nazi defendants stood, and the only live question is whether individual conscripts can plead duress. Leonard did not introduce the analogy, but affirming it is its own kind of authorship.

The same relay goes for the apartheid charge.

Leonard hedges: Israel is “teetering right on the absolute brink of converging with South Africa in terms of being an apartheid state.”

Teetering. On the brink. Converging. Three words of distance, and the interviewer spends all three at once: “I would say it is.”

Then, they bond over it — “and nuclear weapons either,” the interviewer adds, riffing while Leonard never reclaims the ground he’d carefully marked off a sentence earlier. The hedge meant something when he said it: it marked a limit Leonard was not yet willing to cross… and it evaporated the moment the interviewer offered to cross it for him, and Leonard let the harder claim stand as if it had been his all along.

This is what permission structures look like from the inside. One speaker advances to a line and stops, and then the other crosses it. The first does not retreat; net motion: forward, every time, with no single person ever quite responsible for the distance covered.

The Inversion

Mid-sentence, inside a complaint about settlements, Leonard invokes the most extreme comparison available to a human being:

“Imagine how much it pisses me off when I see them treating the settlement — the Palestinian communities in the West Bank — like the ghettos in Warsaw. And now the Jewish people are being turned into the occupiers.”

He does not pause or seem to hear himself, and with no more effort than a man landing on the nearest word, he surfaces Jews as the new Nazis. This sentence that turns the descendants of the murdered into the murderers costs him nothing to say, and he says it while feeling tender.

He could have said so many other things — colonialism, occupation, and South African apartheid were all on the table, invoked just minutes earlier. But he went past all of them to the Warsaw Ghetto, and placed Jews in the role of their own exterminators — the West Bank as the ghetto, the Israelis as the SS, the Palestinians as the Jews of 1943.

This is antisemitism in one of its most recognizable modern forms: Holocaust inversion, in which the victims are reassigned the role of perpetrators and the perpetrators’ crime is turned against them. This is not a claim that criticism of Israel is antisemitic. Criticism of Israeli policy, including harsh criticism, is not antisemitic as such. The problem begins when that criticism takes the form of Nazi comparison, making the Holocaust itself the instrument by which Jewish action is condemned. The line is not subtle, and Leonard walked across it. The word antisemitism deserves to be said here, because the structure of the interview depends on keeping it out.

None of this required malice. Someone speaking from open hatred knows the sentence is ugly and says it anyway; Leonard does not appear to know. He arrived at it on a feeling of decency, the way you settle into a conviction you have held so long you no longer remember learning it.

Let me grant him everything a fair reader should. The suffering in Gaza is vast and a person of conscience watching it has every reason to be sickened; I take Leonard’s horror to be sincere. None of that is in dispute, and none of it is the point. Genuine horror at human suffering does not license the one comparison that turns Jews into Nazis to express it. That a man feels the suffering sincerely is how the oldest structure finds his mouth — not despite his conscience, but through it.

Leonard’s Evidence

The Film
The inversion is bracketed by sincerity. Just before it, the weeping thirteen-year-old; just after it, The Gatekeepers — the documentary in which every surviving former chief of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, is interviewed on camera.

The Shin Bet officers are made to stand in for an argument they did not make. In the film, they warn that the occupation endangers Israel. This is a security warning, with nothing in it about genocide or Warsaw ghettos. A documentary is a film with a thesis and an edit, not an evidentiary record, and a candidate who treats one as the foundation for a war-crimes determination is telling you how he reasons.

The UN
The same goes for the UN. A candidate who invokes “UN investigations” as a seal of reliability should be able to say which UN body he means, what authority it carries, and what its report actually establishes.

The finding he is leaning on comes from an independent Commission of Inquiry — a body that, as Reuters notes, does not officially speak for the United Nations — and “the UN said so” does far more rhetorical work in his mouth than the underlying document can bear. Someone who has done his homework knows the difference; someone performing a conclusion only needs the institution’s name to nod along, and Leonard reaches for it the second way.

The Clinic
The IVF clinic is the clearest case of the same habit, because here you can watch an uncertain record calcify into a settled fact in the space of a sentence. Leonard tells it cleanly: an Israeli tank fired a shell into a clearly marked fertility clinic and destroyed four thousand embryos, and that act of preventing future Palestinian generations is what makes it genocide.

Look at what actually stands under that.

The UN Human Rights Council made the Al-Basma clinic a centerpiece of its September 2025 genocide report, and the report rests on a single ABC News article published more than four months after the supposed December 2023 strike.

In that reporting the clinic’s own embryologist says plainly that he does not know whether the lab was deliberately targeted, and Israel says it has no record of the specific strike. No fragments were recovered and no trajectory or forensic analysis was done. The Commission itself does not claim certainty; it says the clinic was “most probably” hit by an Israeli shell. Out of that — a secondhand account, an unfixed date, the lab’s own staff disavowing knowledge of intent, a “most probably” — Leonard builds a deliberate, intent-laden act of genocide and states it as fact. The weakest link in the chain becomes the thing he is surest of, because the charge has no weight without it.

Consider it as a military proposition for a moment, since Leonard invokes his international-relations training. To destroy embryos on purpose, you would send a tank and its crew into a contested building, spend the intelligence required to locate the one room holding the nitrogen tanks, and fire a single precise round. Why would a state do that — one that could level the structure from the air or kill more people with that same round than the strike destroyed embryos? The means contradict the motive, and a campaign to extinguish a people’s future would choose almost any other method over this one.

Leonard does not pause on any of this, because pausing would cost him the conclusion.

The Definition
Notice, too, what the same fact is made to mean as the subject changes.

When Israel fired the shell, the embryos were a prevented generation, lives whose destruction makes the act genocidal — vivid enough that Leonard invokes his own IVF-conceived daughter to feel their loss. A breath later, attacking Mike Carey’s abortion politics, the same frozen embryos are reproductive material a woman must remain free to discard.

This is not an argument about abortion; it is about evidentiary elasticity. The embryo’s moral status is not fixed and then reasoned from — it is set, each time, by which reading damns the party Leonard has already chosen to damn. That is the architecture in miniature: the conclusion fixed first, the facts assigned afterward to fit.

So, step back and look at what Leonard offers as the basis for the gravest charge in international law. A documentary, his wife, a single incident at an IVF clinic (which he uses to redefine genocide so the definition fits), and “UN investigations by independent UN agencies,” which he cites as though the phrase settled the matter.

A Man Who Knew Better, Once Before

None of this began with Leonard, and the structure he stepped into was poured long before there was an Ohio congressional race for him to win or lose.

To see it clearly, it helps to find it somewhere far enough away that no one’s current loyalties are at stake — in a man who loved his own country exactly as much as Leonard means well, and who fell into the same trap attempting to defend it.

On a single day in July 1941, in the German-occupied Polish town of Jedwabne, hundreds of the town’s Jews were rounded up and driven into a barn that was then set on fire. For half a century the Germans were blamed, and a monument even said so. Then in 2000, the historian Jan Tomasz Gross published Neighbors, which exposed the killers as the Jews’ own Polish neighbors.

Gross’s book forced Poland to confront that ordinary Poles had murdered their Jewish townsmen with their own hands. One of the country’s most respected wartime historians, Tomasz Strzembosz, became a prominent scholarly voice in the public roundtable that convened on the massacre. He argued that Gross had gone too far.

The two men share almost nothing. Strzembosz was a resistance veteran defending the self-image of his own nation; Leonard never served and has no national myth of his own at stake. Their lives do not rhyme, and I am not claiming they do. I am claiming something about the discourse that operates through both of them — the way certain gestures become available to educated, well-meaning people and are taken up almost without decision, in voices that could not be more different.

At that roundtable the moderator tried to hand Strzembosz the conclusion directly: hadn’t he suggested the killing might have been revenge for Jewish collaboration?

He refused it: “I never said that,” he answered. “I do not link the burning of the Jews in Jedwabne to what happened there before.”

Strzembosz would not say the one sentence that turns the murdered into the authors of their own murder. Yet while he refused the utterance, he would proceed to build the entire case around the belief that the Jews wronged the Poles and got what was coming.

Auschwitz and Majdanek survivor Israel Gutman read Strzembosz’s article and named what it was doing. When Strzembosz replied to Gutman, he opened by insisting he did not wish to justify any crime against Jews; then, he spent the rest of the letter doing just that by repeating the old charge that the Jews had welcomed the Soviet occupiers and helped ship Poles off to Siberia.

Strzembosz also found an alibi in Jan Karski, a Polish hero honored for trying to save Jews during the war. He quoted Karski saying that Jews had informed on Poles.

Now set Leonard beside that.

Strzembosz’s unimpeachable witness, produced to license the accusation, decades before a Jewish wife in Ohio.

Offered the Nazi frame by a friendly interviewer — “just following orders didn’t work out for the Nazis” — Leonard took the handoff.

When the interviewer offered to take it further, he let his disclaimer-first structure go — the teetering, the brink — and the harder apartheid claim stood as if it had been his all along. The Warsaw ghetto came from him alone.

As with Strzembosz, “righteous” witnesses were pressed into service — the Shin Bet chiefs of The Gatekeepers, the Jewish wife — each one a “Karski,” summoned to prove the man could not possibly mean what he was saying. This is how distortion gets coated in the certainty that what is happening has something to do with conscience.

Again, these are different men with different motives: Strzembosz was defending the honor of his nation against a wound to its self-image. His permission came from a politics of memory in which “the Jews had it coming” was the comfortable answer, and even declining to say the worst part out loud cost him something with his own side. Leonard is a candidate trying to walk a thin line into office. His permission comes from a primary coalition in which the genocide charge is the applauded position, the safe one, the thing that earns a nod from the voters he needs.

But when you strip away the biographies, the same structure remains — assign the Jew the role of power, invert victim and perpetrator, let the disclaimer trail the damage. Once it was filled with the old Polish myth of the Jew as Soviet collaborator, now it’s filled with Netanyahu’s Israel. Each time, the narrative is taken up by a sincere man who feels he reasoned his way to it, and how far he goes has nothing to do with his decency, only with what refusing would cost him.

The Hard Thing

It would be easy, and wrong, to read this as a piece about one candidate’s bad afternoon on a podcast. The candidate is almost incidental.

What Leonard’s interview documents is how antisemitism hides in plain sight — genocide, apartheid, and Nazi comparison assembled so frictionlessly that a sincere liberal can lay all three on a Jewish state in a single sitting and feel himself growing more moral as he does it.

I am not going to tell Leonard’s coalition they should be afraid of this, because they will not believe me. They do not see themselves as people who traffic in antisemitism; they see themselves as the opposite, and a warning that they are becoming the thing they oppose slides off a self-image like that without leaving a mark.

So I will ask something else of them instead:

Set aside whether this costs you Jewish voters. Ask the simpler thing: is this who you want to be — the kind of person who takes the comparison that turns Jews into Nazis because the room is nodding?

Because here is what history actually teaches: There were very few Righteous Gentiles, and the reason there were few is that it was never easy. To see the structure for what it is while everyone around you calls it something else, and then to refuse it at a cost to yourself has always been the hard thing, the thing almost no one does.

Strzembosz is what the common path looks like: a decent, learned man who never saw it, who built the case and came away feeling wronged. Leonard is on that same path over two decades later, a different myth in his mouth and the same certainty that he is being reasonable. Both had every tool to see it and didn’t — because for each of them the charge was the rewarded thing and refusing it was the thing that cost. That is the apparatus, and it is running again — on a ballot, in Ohio, now.

My brother will vote for Leonard, and so will my mother. He is running against a Republican who backs Trump, so they will vote blue because they believe the alternative is worse. This is the bind a lot of Jewish voters are in right now, and Leonard is counting on it — counting on people like my family who feel they have no other choice.

I am in another district, and I will tell you honestly that I do not know what I would do in their place.