(JNS) What Jerry Seinfeld said was considered so bad that The Hollywood Reporter compared it to his awful Netflix comedy movie “Frosted.”

The 71-year-old creator and star of one of the most popular shows in television history is probably too beloved by his fans to be canceled by the entertainment industry and too rich (last year Bloomberg estimated his net worth to be more than $1 billion) to care. But there’s no question that his latest comments are likely to make him extremely unpopular among those in the creative arts.

The comedian caused a stir with remarks he made during an unscheduled appearance at Duke University with Omer Shemtov, an Israeli who had been abducted by Hamas terrorists at the Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7, 2023 and held hostage in Gaza for 505 days. According to The Chronicle, the university’s student newspaper, the event was sponsored by Chabad at Duke, as well as the Provost’s Initiative on the Middle East, university centers and Jewish student groups.

Be honest about your bigotry

As the newspaper reported, Seinfeld, who spoke prior to Shemtov, said the following about the ubiquitous phrase chanted by supporters of Hamas and those opposed to Israel: “Free Palestine is, to me, just—you’re free to say you don’t like Jews. Just say you don’t like Jews. By saying ‘Free Palestine,’ you’re not admitting what you really think. So it’s actually—compared to the Ku Klux Klan, I’m actually thinking the Klan is actually a little better here, because they can come right out and say, ‘We don’t like Blacks, we don’t like Jews.’ Okay that’s honest.”

This is apparently an utterance so terrible that Duke felt compelled to disavow it, denying responsibility for his presence and words. According to The New York Times, various leftist and Muslim groups voiced their outrage and, using the standard language of academic cancellation, accused him of fostering “a hostile environment for Muslim, Arab, Palestinian and allied students, leaving many feeling unsafe and unsupported on their own campus.”

The pro-Hamas Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) also weighed in and accused Seinfeld of “dehumanizing” Palestinians.

Though Seinfeld has long eschewed the conventional life of a star, this will also put him on the outs with what appears to be a majority of those working in movies and television. The most recent effort to organize a boycott of Israel has gained traction in the industry, with more than 1,300 filmmakers and actors, including some well-known names, signing a petition pledging to refuse to work with Israeli film institutions and companies that are “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people,” a category that is more or less defined as virtually anyone in the Jewish state or its Jewish supporters abroad.

A buzzword for Jew-hatred

The signers, as well as those condemning Seinfeld, all accept the blood libels that Israel is actually committing genocide and apartheid, though these are blatant falsehoods propagated by Hamas. The conflict in Gaza is a just war against a genocidal terror group that committed the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust and has vowed to repeat the atrocity “again and again” at the first opportunity. And far from an “apartheid state,” Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East where Arabs and Muslims enjoy equality under the law.

But contradicting these toxic myths is bad enough. Seinfeld is in trouble with the chattering classes because he denounced the slogan that sounds the most reasonable to those untutored in the realities of the Middle East. Unlike “From the river to the sea” or “Globalize the intifada,” which are easily understood to mean wiping Israel off the map and supporting terrorism against Jews wherever they live, “Free Palestine” sounds as if it just means wanting Palestinian Arabs to be free.

So, it’s likely that the attacks on him will intensify, with many denouncing him as a racist for sticking to his support for the Jewish state and open criticism of its detractors.

But not only was he right to say what he did about “Free Palestine;” he deserves enormous credit for saying it at a time when liberal public opinion has turned on Israel and antisemitism is back in fashion.

Disgust with P.C.

By Hollywood standards, Seinfeld has never been particularly vocal about his political opinions. While he contributed to both Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election cycle and various Democratic candidates in 2004, in many ways he never stood out as anything other than a conventional liberal. Indeed, he joined with other actors and comedians to make a tribute video to President Barack Obama when he left the White House in 2017, and said that knocking on the Oval Office window to get the president’s attention in the film was “probably the peak of my entire existence.”

On the other hand, it’s also true that by 2015, he was beginning to voice his disquiet with liberal political correctness. And he no longer performed, as he often had done previously, on college campuses, because students who had been indoctrinated in leftist myths were increasingly offended by jokes at which they once laughed. His taking issue with what he called “that P.C. crap” earned him a rebuke from Rolling Stone magazine in 2024 for saying in an interview in The New Yorker what some on the political right had long been noting.

Still, the real turning point for him came with the Hamas-led Palestinian assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. While most entertainers joined in the denunciation of the Jewish state’s efforts to eradicate Hamas, Seinfeld, whose television show and comedy routines often played off his identity, loudly refused to do so. Ever since then, he has been dogged by anti-Israel protesters at his performances and public appearances.

He’s been heckled by “Free Palestine” advocates at his shows, and last year when the Queens College graduate gave a hilarious comedic commencement speech at Duke (which both of his children attended), some students booed, waved Palestinian flags and walked out in protest. Luckily, the overwhelming majority stayed and laughed along with everyone else at his advice, which centered on the importance of not losing one’s sense of humor—something he called “essential” to survival amid the vicissitudes of life in the real world.

Yet his comparison of the pro-Hamas mobs to the KKK is likely a bridge too far for most in the entertainment world, since by extension, he’s claiming that most of the people in his business are Jew-haters but afraid to admit it openly. There will likely be pressure on him to apologize and concede that those who say “Free Palestine” are, as most liberals claim them to be, merely idealists supporting an oppressed people yearning to be “free.”

Except Seinfeld was, as he often is with his wry observations about the small things in life that have always been the core of his comedic schtick, right on target with his calling out of those who use the phrase.

Anti-Zionism is antisemitism

It’s possible that some of those American students who say “Free Palestine” may just mean they want equality and self-determination for Palestinian Arabs, just as some of them may have no idea of the meaning of “From the River to the Sea” or are able to identify either of the bodies of water in question.

But those words have a very different meaning in the context of Palestinian politics and the groups that represent the Arabs living in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Moreover, those pro-Palestinian organizations, like Students for Justice in Palestine and CAIR, for that matter, make no bones about what the phrase symbolizes: the eradication of Israel by, as they also say, “any means necessary.”

For them, “Palestine” does not mean just Gaza or even the “West Bank” where the Palestinian Authority autonomously rules the Arab population. It constitutes all of the territory of what from 1922 to 1948 was the British Mandate for Palestine and all of the land on which the State of Israel exists.

As such, it is not advocating for a two-state solution in which Israel and a putative state of Palestine would exist side by side in peace. It is the catch-phrase of anti-Zionists who oppose the existence of the one Jewish state on the planet, no matter where its borders might be drawn. It is an echo of the consistent position of the Palestinian Arabs, who have repeatedly rejected a separate state so long as it would mean accepting the legitimacy of a Jewish one next to it.

Like Hamas, whose objective is the genocide of the Jewish people as well as Israel’s destruction, those who say “Free Palestine” are just saying they don’t think the Jews ought to have a state in their ancient homeland, and are tacitly endorsing the “any means necessary” used by the terrorists to advance that goal.

This is not a stretch or a misinterpretation of their positions. Most of those who have either newly embraced or reaffirmed the above position, did so only in reaction to the orgy of mass murder, rape, torture and kidnapping of Israelis that took place on Oct. 7. There is no better proof of the fact that anti-Zionism is antisemitism than this brutal fact.

It’s a hard truth that even many Jewish organizations whose job it is to defend the Jews and Israel either don’t understand this or refuse to say it, out of deference to the feelings of many of their erstwhile allies in liberal political or minority groups who have abandoned Israel and the Jews since Oct. 7. They seem to fear that calling the “Free Palestine” crowd by their right name as Jew-haters will offend too many people and further isolate the Jewish community. But whether the antisemites or the fearful mainstream Jewish leaders are willing to admit it, what Seinfeld said was the truth.

Fashionable toxic myths

How did this euphemism or buzzword for Jew-hatred that none save the uncancellable like Seinfeld or conservative commentators fear to denounce become part of the politically correct lexicon?

It happened in the same way that the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which enshrines racial divisions as permanent and is the opposite of equal opportunity, became a sacred cow of the academy, the arts, the corporate world and even government during the administration of President Joe Biden. Progressives captured the culture and began the indoctrination of generations of students in toxic left-wing myths. These includecritical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that denounced America and the West as irredeemably racist and also branded Jews and Israel as “white” oppressors.

But just as the Trump administration has begun the herculean task of rolling back the grip of woke ideology on the nation, so, too, is it necessary to tell the truth about the antisemitic nature of the mantras of what some have called the new leftist religion of “Palestinianism.”

While all comparisons to the KKK are invidious by definition, the comedian was entirely correct to assert that the eliminationist and prejudicial goals of the “Free Palestine” movement are just as despicable as the racism and bigotry of the Klan. The only difference between them lies in the fact that, like the antisemitism of European intellectuals of the early 20th century that led to the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust, the pro-Hamas and anti-Israel mobs are largely made up of the educated and chattering classes, not the lower and middle-class thugs that joined the Klan. It is, as the eminent historian Niall Ferguson aptly noted, a case of “The Treason of the Intellectuals.”

It’s long been clear that many of those Jews in pop culture, publishing and the arts that are sympathetic to Israel fear to say so publicly lest they be ostracized. The shunning of people like Israeli actor Gal Gadot, whom The New York Times reports has suffered a downturn in her once successful career since Oct. 7, provides a sobering example of how the efforts to boycott artists, if not Israel’s economy, is gaining support.

It’s hard to say what impact this bout of truth-telling will have on Seinfeld, who is no longer dependent on Hollywood fashion to continue his career. We can only hope he will inspire more Jewish entertainers to speak out on behalf of their own people, rather than joining the “as a Jew” crowd to denounce Israel along with their “enlightened” colleagues.

Whether they do or not, Seinfeld’s stanceis not merely praiseworthy; it’s vital to rolling back the tsunami of antisemitism that has been sweeping over the globe in the last two years.

We shouldn’t be afraid of labeling a phrase that is nothing but shorthand for Jewish genocide as what it is. The way to combat the effort to isolate Israel and to silence and intimidate Jews who might speak up for Jewish rights—and against the Marxist, Islamist and even some far-right extremists who are united in their antisemitism—is to tell the truth about them. Pretending that they are just well-meaning idealists merely legitimizes that which should be denounced as hate.

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