Amid the campus protests flaring up across the U.S. this spring, while involving legitimate concerns of many students reacting against the slaying of innocent civilians in Gaza, the ugly specter of antisemitism is erupting at levels unseen in the U.S. since before World War 2. While many demonstrating students aren’t involved in that, still others are and their ranks are growing. As foreign bad actors are surely trying to throw fire onto these flames, it cannot be ignored that this is primarily a domestic issue.

Donald Trump deserves blame for this eruption by enabling the hatred from the radical right. We saw it in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017, in the first months after Trump became president, when the chants of angry white fascists was “Jews will not replace us.”

Once again, our current President Joe Biden has not shied away from taking this on directly, delivering powerful remarks at the Capital to recognize the annual Jewish Days of Remembrance of the Holocaust, or Yom HaShoah, this week. I can’t top the words that Biden spoke this week, which included the following:

“In Germany 1933, Hitler and his Nazi Party rose to power rekindling one of the oldest forms of prejudice and hate: antisemitism. This didn’t begin with mass murder; it started slowly across economic, political, social and cultural life. Propaganda demonizing Jews. Boycotts of Jewish businesses. Synagogues defaced with swastikas. Harassment of Jews in the street and the schools, antisemitic demonstrations, pogroms, organized riots. With the indifference of the world, Hitler knew he could expand his reign of terror by eliminating Jews from Germany, to annihilate Jews across Europe through genocide, the Nazis called the final solution. Concentration camps, gas chambers, mass shootings. By the time the war ended, six million Jews — one of every three Jews in the entire world — were murdered.

“This ancient hatred of Jews didn’t begin with the Holocaust. It didn’t end with the Holocaust either. Or after — even after our victory in World War II. This hatred continues to lie deep in the hearts of too many people in the world and requires our continued vigilance and outspokenness. That hatred was brought to life on October 7 of 2023. On the sacred Jewish holiday, the terrorist group Hamas unleashed the deadliest day of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Driven by ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people off the face of the Earth, over 1,200 innocent people, babies, parents, grandparents, slaughtered in a kibbutz, massacred at a music festival, brutally raped, mutilated and sexually assaulted.

“Thousands more carrying wounds, bullets and shrapnel from a memory of that terrible day they endured. Hundreds taken hostage, including survivors of the Shoah. Now here we are, not 75 years later, but just seven and half months later and people are already forgetting. They are already forgetting. That Hamas unleashed this terror. It was Hamas that brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas who took and continues to hold hostages. I have not forgotten nor have you. And we will not forget.

“As Jews around the world still cope with the atrocity and the trauma of that day and its aftermath, we have seen a ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world. Vicious propaganda on social media. Jews forced to hide their kippahs under baseball hats, tuck their Jewish stars into their shirts. On college campuses, Jewish students are blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class.

“Too many people denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th, including Hamas’s appalling use of sexual violence to torture and terrorize Jews. It’s absolutely despicable, and it must stop. Silence and denial can hide much, but it can erase nothing. Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they cannot be buried no matter how hard people try.

“We know hate never goes away; it only hides. Given a little oxygen, it comes out from under the rocks. We also know what stops hate. One thing: All of us. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sachs described antisemitism as a virus that has survived and mutated over time. Together, we cannot continue to let that happen.”