According to Jewish folklore, in the late 16th-century the Czech city of Prague was threatened with antisemitic attacks. In response, Chief Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel created an early Jewish superhero in the attic of what has become known as the Old-New Synagogue.

The story goes that the rabbi received a divine order in a dream: “You shall create [a] Golem from clay and may the malicious anti-Semitic mob be destroyed.” So he fashioned a powerful giant creature called a golem “out of clay from the banks of the Vltava River and brought it to life through rituals and Hebrew incantations,” per Kayla Green’s “The Golem in the Attic.”

At first, the Golem defended the ghetto’s Jews, but, through the rabbi’s oversight, the powerful creature ran amok and had to be destroyed.

Responding to the horrific Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks on Israel, large Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the Zionist Organization of America have unintentionally created a similar monster — which has similarly run amok.

Within the North American Jewish community, leaders such as ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt and the Zionist Organization for America’s Mort Klein have successfully conflated any criticism — however justified — of Israel’s Gaza and West Bank policy with antisemitism.

Through creative bookkeeping (as I have written previously) in calculating yearly totals of antisemitic incidents, the ADL counts as equal a trivial event — such as a social media slight — and the Tree of Life synagogue killings in Pittsburgh. The result is ginned up hysteria among American Jews and congressional opportunists.

Serious, worldwide antisemitism is real but is in “sharp decline” according to a recent Tel Aviv University study, even including criticism of Israel.

By contrast, the ADL recently reported 9,354 U.S. antisemitic incidents in 2024, a 5 percent........

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