As antisemitism spikes, how can America tackle the hate? | The Excerpt
On the Friday, July 17, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast: Antisemitism is spiking in the U.S. and around the world. Will Carless, USA TODAY national correspondent and host of Extremely Normal, talks to two experts about hatred against Jews and how to combat rising violence and hate speech.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Will Carless:
Antisemitism is on the rise. Antisemitic rhetoric promoting stereotypes and conspiracy theories against Jews is going viral online. And in the real world, experts say antisemitic violence is at the highest level in 30 years. This is all happening at the same time as more and more young Americans are shifting their views on the relationship between the US and Israel over the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.
Hello and welcome to USA TODAY's The Excerpt. Today is Friday, July 17th, 2026. My name is Will Carless and I'm a national correspondent here at USA TODAY. I cover extremism and emerging issues, and I'm the host of Extremely Normal, a series where I examine how extremist movements are gradually becoming mainstream in America. Our latest episode is out now, and it takes a look at the recent surge of antisemitism amid the ongoing conflicts between Israel and Gaza, Iran and Lebanon.
We'll include a link to the full video in the show notes, and we've included a trailer for you at the end of this conversation. To keep this conversation going on this important and complicated topic, I wanted to talk to a couple of experts on the subject of hatred against Jews and the geopolitics of the Middle East. So we sought out two thinkers in this space. First, we have Judge Roy Altman. Altman's a federal judge in Southern Florida. Altman, who's Jewish, was appointed by President Donald Trump. He recently published a book titled Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law. Judge Altman, thanks for joining me.
Roy Altman:
Thank you for having me.
Will Carless:
Young people on both the left and the right are deeply questioning America's financial and military relationship with Israel. What's wrong with that? I mean, isn't that sort of scrutiny healthy for a functioning democracy?
Roy Altman:
Absolutely. We should always question what our politicians do with our money. The question is whether we get for our money more than we put in. It's important to remember that we give lots and lots of money, billions of dollars, to other countries and organizations that we get a lot less from than we get from Israel. So for example, we give billions of dollars to Turkey, billions of dollars to Egypt, billions of dollars to countries all over Africa and Asia and South America. I don't see any protests on college campuses about the amount of money we give to Egypt despite the fact that Egypt is an autocracy, despite the fact that Egypt doesn't allow free speech or minority rights and oppresses its Christian minority population that's on the verge of extinction. I don't see any protests on college campuses about the money that we give to other countries that, likewise, are tyrannical and don't allow free speech or religious expression.
Will Carless:
Let's talk about antisemitism. I mean, in your career, do you think antisemitism, have you watched it become less of a taboo in this country?
Roy Altman:
Oh, for sure. I went to Columbia and Yale Law School. By any stretch of the imagination, these are some of the most liberal places in the country. I don't mean that as a pejorative thing, that's just a reality in terms of their faculty, in terms of the student body. And by the way, I always felt at home there and I felt very happy there. And at Yale Law School, for example, in three years, and graduated in 2007, never once saw a single person wearing a keffiyeh. And so that tells you that one of the most liberal law schools on the planet, not one student thought it was appropriate to wear a scarf that is a symbol of terrorism and the deaths, the violent deaths of thousands and thousands of innocent Jews. Now you see all over college campuses, not just the most liberal campuses, not just the most liberal students, although oftentimes the most progressive, wearing a keffiyeh as a matter of course.
Will Carless:
Do you consider that antisemitic as a Jew?
Roy Altman:
I don't know that I consider it antisemitic, but I do think that if you think to yourself what we hear on campus a lot, which is I want to do things that prevent my fellow classmates from feeling afraid or in pain or offended. One of the, I think, controversial aspects of speech on college campuses over the last 10 or 20 years has been the extent to which faculty, the schools, and often the student bodies were maybe overly solicitous of not offending speech that creates safe spaces. We don't want other people to feel insecure on campus. Well, if that's at all your view, I'm not saying it's the right view, but it should apply equally to everyone.
We know, because we've had surveys done, that Jewish students primarily understand the keffiyeh to represent what it always has, which is a symbol worn by Yasser Arafat, an arch-terrorist designated by the United States for many years as a terrorist who founded a terrorist movement that killed thousands of Jews by blowing up their school buses and their pizza parlors and their bar mitzvahs and their weddings and killing children and septuagenarians alike. So we have to recognize that.
Will Carless:
There's no doubt that the amount of antisemitic rhetoric, the amount of antisemitic-
Roy Altman:
Incidents.
Will Carless:
... hate crime incidences is increased. And there's no doubt about that.
Roy Altman:
It's not just increased. It's increased 100, 200 fold to the point where crimes against Jews, especially violent crimes against Jews, now increase so exponentially that there are more crimes against Jews in the United States than there are against all other religious groups combined, even though Jews are only a teeny tiny fraction of the population. I think it's about 2% of the population.
Will Carless:
What do we do? What do we do to shift that back? What do we do to shift back the Overton window? What do we do to redress the balance here?
Roy Altman:
I think it's important for people who have authority, people who have a microphone, people who have a pedestal, to go out, whether that's in the field of sports like Lionel Messi has done, whether that's in the field of politics, in the field of the law, in the field of movies and entertainment, to come out and say, "This is wrong. If we don't do it, it will swallow our society whole." I'm an American who came to this country from Venezuela as a little boy with nothing, knowing no one, in search of the American dream and found it because this is the greatest force for good the world has ever known. I believe that we have a moral imperative to root out this Jew hatred whenever and wherever it may be found because if we don't, it'll bring the entire edifice of our country, the entire home of our civilization tumbling down on all of us, not just our Jews.
Will Carless:
Let's talk about Zionism for a minute. The popular internet streamer and commentator, Hasan Piker, makes a pretty controversial claim about what he thinks Zionism is. That's the clip I'm going to show you here.
Hasan Piker:
Zionism is the ethnoreligious supremacist ideology that is exterminationist in principle born out of the wrong assessment that this was a land without people for a people without land. It required the extermination of the indigenous population. And that's precisely what has happened since its inception. And its final iteration of that has been the Gaza genocide that we watched unfold.
Will Carless:
What's your reaction to that?
Roy Altman:
All right. So I don't know this person at all. I mean, I've heard his name, but I don't know him at all. The claim that Zionism is an exterminationist ideology that wants to exterminate the indigenous people of the land-
Will Carless:
But a lot of people believe, a lot of young people in America believe that.
Roy Altman:
This is very important. Zionism is a simple idea, which is that Jews have the same rights, not more rights, but also not fewer rights, than every other people on earth have to sovereignty in their national homeland. So just like you think that Palestinians might have the right to sovereignty in their homeland, just as you might think that Bulgarians have the right to sovereignty in their homeland, Japanese people, Korean people, German people all have the right to sovereignty in their homeland. Zionism is just the idea that Jews should be treated the same. By the way, this is the charter, a charter that is the foundation of the state of Israel. In that document, you would look in vain for anything, first of all, the word extermination of course would never appear there, but anything that even remotely resembles that word or idea is foreign to any of the early laws or that document.
In fact, the document says precisely the opposite. The document says that one of the purposes of the state of Israel is to allow Jews and Arabs alike to live in peace and to flourish together in the land of Israel. That's what the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel says. And by the way, that's what the State of Israel has proven more so than what it said in 1948 in the decades since.
Will Carless:
You watched that documentary. What struck you most about it? Did you learn anything from it that you didn't know before?
Roy Altman:
I guess what struck me most is the extent to which people are just willing to say things that are totally factually and legally false, that are belied by all the available evidence. And then to go on and, when they're called out on it, to try to finagle their way out of it. In an era where everyone has a cell phone, you would think that it would be easier to understand that, for example, what happened in Gaza was the opposite of a genocide, that it was an army doing everything in its power, including risking the lives of its own sons and daughters, to protect the civilian population by getting them out of harm's way. People are going to bristle when we say, "Oh, we want to protect our Jews." Let's not focus on Jews. Let's focus on what this level of conspiracy theory and falsehood peddling has done to civilizations in the past.
Do we really want to go down the route of Nazi Germany? Do we really want to go down the route of the Czar's Russia? Do we really want to look like Lebanon, Algeria, Libya, and Tehran? We don't. We want to have all the things that we love about America, and those things don't come for free. To be honest with you, I'd much rather be in my courtroom handling my cases and not out here talking about all this stuff. But I see civilization collapse in the future and I am concerned about it. And so people like you, I commend you for going out there, going out on a limb, and fighting for all the things that we believe about and care about.
Will Carless:
Well, thank you very much for your time, Judge Altman.
Roy Altman:
Thank you, Will.
Will Carless:
We really, really appreciate it. For a different perspective now, we also spoke with Ahmad Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian-American advocate and writer, and the founder and director of the Realign for Palestine Project at the Atlantic Council. Thank you for joining us, Mr. Alkhatib.
Ahmad Fouad Alkhatib:
Thanks for talking to me.
Will Carless:
Let's start here. The word Zionist is understood by a lot of young Americans, not simply to mean the right of Jews to self-determination, but is used to specifically call out Israeli expansion into the West Bank and the ongoing conflict in Gaza. What do you understand Zionism to mean and how, if at all, is the term being misused, do you think?
Ahmad Fouad Alkhatib:
Well, I grew up in the Gaza Strip around my parents and grandparents, and particularly grandparents who experienced the 1948 displacement during what Israel calls the war of independence, what Palestinians often call the Nakba, which is the loss of their ancestral homeland during the formation of the state of Israel. And what we grew up with was that Zionism is a modern political movement with a religious slant, if you will, that believed in establishing a Jewish homeland at the expense of the Palestinian people who were there.
Once I left the Gaza Strip, once I began doing more investigation, I started understanding that the picture is a lot more complex. The picture is a lot more nuanced, and that there were different types of Zionism and flavors and orientations, if you will. And that to many early Zionists, the original intent was not inherently meant to just be based upon the displacement of Palestinians, but as events unfolded, as more militant forms of Zionism have emerged, and as the violence between the Arab inhabitants of mandatory Palestine and the rising number of Jewish immigrants increased, that violence led to confrontations that resulted in the displacement.
Will Carless:
So Ahmad, I know you've had personal experience of tragedy at the hands of the Israeli government. How do you separate the actions of the Israeli government from the actions of Jewish people at large? And what advice would you give people who are working to make that distinction?
Ahmad Fouad Alkhatib:
I mean, in the same way that I don't believe Muslim people worldwide should be held accountable for the actions of Saudi Arabia or for the actions of Pakistan or for the actions of Hamas or ISIS or other different groups, whether it be non-state actors or state actors, I do believe that the same standard should be applied. And I can already hear the counterargument from others, which is that, well, Israel supposedly speaks on behalf of all Jews. Israel represents all Jews. Israel and the Jewish people worldwide have an inseparable connection to the land as represented by the modern state of Israel. But while that may be true in a variety of ways, it is inaccurate to say that that connection to Israel is synonymous with wholehearted support and endorsement of every single Israeli action.
To look at seven or eight million Israelis and to say that they're all synonymous with the Netanyahu government or with the actions of Israeli settlers or with the actions of rogue Israeli officers or soldiers, it's fundamentally at odds with how we think about everything else in the world, how we think about the behavior of many other nation states and groups and religious entities. I want to emphasize, I am speaking about this not as someone who's pro-Israel. I am deeply pro-Palestine. I care about my people. That is my focus. But I think we not only elevate our morality, not only do we actually start from a better position, but we need allies on the other side.
Will Carless:
We're having this in-depth conversation and you are engaged in near constant debate and discussion on these issues. But let's face it, most people now get their news from short, clippable videos on Instagram and TikTok and things like that, which often don't provide enough context on these very complex issues. Do you think it's possible to have a nuanced view of these issues without being deeply invested in researching them?
Ahmad Fouad Alkhatib:
Very much so. Very much so. I mean, I and others, but I'll speak for myself, have tried to really shorten some of these talking points to just narrow things down. I'll give you examples. To the issue of Hamas, I speak a lot about Hamas in Gaza and how it is not resistance. It is not a form of resistance. Hamas is a nefarious, terrorist, Islamist, jihadi organization that harmed the Palestinian people far more than it harmed Israelis. It set back the Palestinian people. It sabotaged the national project. It destroyed the two-state solution. But more importantly, Hamas has been a useful idiot and it empowered the far right in Israel. I don't believe the rightward shift in Israeli society is inseparable from elements in Palestinian society like Hamas and the mistakes that were done.
I've gone to hundreds of college campuses. And unfortunately, I think the horrendous levels of manipulation, propaganda, incitement, disinformation, and activism by some university administrators, some professors, has led to a situation where I, who's largely deaf in my left ear from an Israeli bombing that almost killed me and killed two of my friends, who's lost over 34 of my immediate and extended family members, lost both of my childhood homes in this current war, people show up and protest me and call me a Zionist collaborator, a shill for Israel, and all sorts of names, and have put out hit pieces saying Israel is paying me $30 million to promote genocide, and done unspeakable levels of malign acts against me for simply sharing very oversimplified talking points about Hamas, about the humanity of Israeli hostages, about basic history elements like the mistakes of the Palestinian national leadership throughout the past 80 years and how we need to correct course.
Will Carless:
Well, once again, Ahmad Fouad Alkhatib is the founder and director of the Realign for Palestine with the Atlantic Council. Thank you for your time, Ahmad.
Ahmad Fouad Alkhatib:
Thank you.
Will Carless:
As I mentioned earlier, we have a new episode of my USA TODAY show, Extremely Normal, out now, that takes a deeper look at antisemitism. Here's the trailer:
Will Carless:
The conflicts in the Middle East are changing the way that young Americans look at Israel. But the political debate is also leaving the door open for extremist views to enter the mainstream. From the far right...
Dan Bilzerian:
I think that Jews are causing a disproportionate amount of problems in the United States.
Will Carless:
To the far left.
Hasan Piker:
You (expletive) baying pig! You bloodthirsty baying pig-dog!
Will Carless:
Anti-Semitism is resurging around the world and it's reaching dangerous levels.
Jonathan Greenblatt:
2025 was one of the most violent periods we've seen in memory. Over 200 acts of violence committed against Jewish people.
Will Carless:
I'm Will Carless and I've made it my mission to examine how extremist movements are gradually becoming mainstream in America. This is Extremely Normal. To learn more about the rise of antisemitism, we encourage you to watch our latest episode of Extremely Normal on USA TODAY's YouTube channel. We have a link in today's show notes.
Thanks to our senior producer, Kaely Monahan, and producer Lamar Salter, for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm USA TODAY national correspondent Will Carless. We'll be back on Monday morning with another episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: As antisemitism spikes, how can America tackle the hate? | The Excerpt
Reporting by Will Carless, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect
This story was originally published July 17, 2026 at 1:55 PM.