Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer Passionately Seeks Solidarity on Senate Floor in Condemning Antisemitism

By Yehudit Garmaise

Can the United States stand strong against the latest tide of irrational, misinformed, and violent antisemitic words that replaced what we might have thought or at least hoped would be the smallest bit of sympathy for Jews after Hamas’s October 7 massacre?

“I believe the answer can and must be a resounding, yes,” said U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer today as he articulated Jews’ darkest fears and feelings of isolation in a 45-minute, impassioned speech on the Senate floor.

“All Americans of goodwill can come together and do a better job of condemning such views and behavior,” said Schumer, a Brooklyn native.

After expressing gratitude for the “tolerance, openness, opportunities” in America that allowed him to “stand before you as the highest elected office a Jewish person has ever attained in the history of this country,” Schumer reminded his colleagues of the horrors that resulted from widespread antisemitism just one generation ago.

“When I was still a young boy, I was told why many branches of our family tree stopped growing forever,” Schumer shared. “In 1941, when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, then part of Galicia, they asked my great-grandmother, the matriarch of the family, and the wife of a locally revered rabbi, to gather her children, her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren on the porch of her home, which was in the town square.

“As more than 30 people gathered on the porch, aged 85-years-old to 3 months, the Nazis forced the remaining Jewish citizens of the town to gather around and watch. When the Nazis told my great-grandmother, 'You are coming with us,' she refused, and they machine-gunned down every last one of them. The babies, the elderly, and everybody in-between.”

To those who perhaps have forgotten or who were never familiar with Jewish history, Schumer explained the tragic but oft-repeated historical pattern in which many different countries have “ostracized, expelled, and massacred [Jews] over and over again.”

In stark terms, Schumer laid out the truth for American senators, whose families know nothing of regularly paying for private car services instead of risking violent confrontations on public transportation, as Yidden regularly do, not to mention not being familiar with the horrors of concentration camps, death marches, and ovens.

“Other people of good will,” merely regard antisemitism as  “merely a problem, a matter of concern, but to us, the Jewish people, the rise of antisemitism is a crisis: a five-alarm fire that must be extinguished.”

While Schumer’s success in reaching out to his colleagues in the Senate will remain to be seen, Schumer’s powerful words “should be required listening for all: especially our young people,” Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein shared on X.