If someone takes a leading role in shaping crime policy, and you politely disagree with them, that doesn’t make you bigoted against the group they belong to. But Congressman Dan Goldman (D-NY) claims that those who disagree with George Soros about crime are antisemites. On April 17, he wrote: “With antisemitic violence at record highs, today’s hearing confirmed that invoking George Soros’s name is nothing short of blatant antisemitism. I call on all Republicans to stop using this antisemitic trope immediately.”
George Soros is the nation’s most influential person on the subject of crime, and the biggest supporter of decarceral policies, which reduce the amount of time offenders spend in prison. He provides the lion’s share of campaign funding for many progressive district attorneys, as news stories in the Washington Post have revealed. He also publicly touts his support of those district attorneys, and their soft-on-crime policies, in high-profile ways such as a Wall Street Journal op-ed he wrote, titled “Why I Support Reform Prosecutors.”
But Congressman Goldman, and progressive journalists, consider it antisemitic to point out Soros’s influence, or even mention his name in discussing crime policy, even though Jewish law professors such as Eugene Volokh and David Bernstein have pointed out that it is not antisemitic to do so, and that it is only natural to discuss Soros’s activitism given the prominent role he plays in this area of public policy. As Professor Volokh put it, “Of Course It’s Legitimate to Criticize George Soros’ Spending to Influence American Politics.”