At the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills this week, the concern animating many Jewish executives and philanthropists was not a panel topic — it was the hallway conversation, Jewish Insider reports.
Said TD Bank Vice Chair Jeffrey Solomon: "Antisemitism is a manifestation of extremism and populism. Extremism on the left and extremism on the right, neither one of those is good for us as Jews, but it's not good for a lot of people."
He added: "The policies that have gotten us to this place have not been inclusive enough for enough people."
The pattern Solomon is describing is not new. It is one of the most reliably recurring sequences in the history of democratic societies under economic stress — and American history is no exception.
The last time American populism reached this pitch — the late nineteenth century, the 1930s, the early 1950s — antisemitism traveled with it. Not as a coincidence, but as a structural feature. When economic anxiety looks for a human face to attach itself to, it has historically reached for the figure of the cosmopolitan financier, the rootless intellectual, the global operator who owes loyalty to no particular soil. That figure, in the American imagination, has repeatedly been coded as Jewish.
The Milken conference is, in a certain sense, the material embodiment of everything that kind of populism targets: global capital, cross-border cooperation, professional elites solving problems through institutional means. Steven Weitzman, director of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, made this explicit from the conference stage: “Not only is antisemitism the hatred of the Jews — it’s also opposition to globalization, it’s opposition to what this very conference represents, which is peaceful cooperation across national borders.”
That framing is historically precise. The antisemitic imagination has never been purely about Jews. It has always been a theory of the world — one in which hidden, cosmopolitan forces corrupt the authentic nation. That theory is portable across left and right, and it becomes more available whenever the legitimate grievances of working people go unaddressed long enough to need a villain.
Solomon’s diagnosis is worth sitting with: “Our job isn’t necessarily to just cure antisemitism. The job is to get at the root cause of what’s causing there to be stress in society.”
This is not a deflection. It is the historically correct read. The Weimar Republic did not fail because antisemitism was insufficiently condemned from podiums. It failed because the institutional center could not deliver material security to enough people, and the space that opened was filled by those with a ready explanation involving Jewish bankers and global conspirators.
The American parallel is not exact — it never is — but the structure is familiar. Real wage stagnation, a retirement system that excludes gig workers, AI-driven labor displacement without a policy cushion: these are the actual conditions that Solomon’s peers were discussing between the salmon bento boxes. The Trump Accounts being floated behind the scenes — $1,000 government contributions to children’s savings — represent one attempt to close that gap. Whether such instruments reach the scale required is a separate question.
American history offers two responses to this convergence, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is to name antisemitism plainly and refuse the false equivalence that treats it as merely one bias among many — it is a specific ideological system with a specific historical function. The second is to actually address the distributional failures that make scapegoating available.
The New Deal did not end American antisemitism — Father Coughlin’s radio audience numbered in the millions well into the late 1930s. But the institutions built in that decade — Social Security, labor protections, bank deposit insurance — gradually reduced the reservoir of desperation that demagogues draw from.
The executives gathered in Beverly Hills have more direct influence over wages, AI deployment, and labor conditions than almost anyone else in the country. Solomon said as much: “The people that can make that happen are at this conference.” The historical record suggests that the outcome of this moment depends less on what those people say at panels and more on what they do when they get home.