A David Frum response to Ro Khanna shows how hasbara culture has warped the Jewish community’s response to antisemitism

When Ro Khanna joked, “You guys still around?” at AIPAC, David Frum heard 3,000 years of Jew‑hatred.

That, in a sentence, is hasbara culture at work.

The exchange itself was simple. Khanna called on the DNC to release its 2024 election autopsy and “deal with the hard truths about the genocide in Gaza.” AIPAC quote‑tweeted him: “@RoKhanna isn’t seeking facts — he’s seeking cover to repeat a modern blood libel.” Khanna fired back, deadpan: “You guys still around?” 

Frum then quote‑tweeted Khanna and pronounced: “A question that has been repeatedly asked in dozens of now forgotten languages over the past 3,000 years.”

In other words: Khanna’s “you guys still around?” is not a dig at a powerful lobby that just smeared him with “blood libel.” It is, in Frum’s telling, the latest instance of the eternal question Gentile antisemites ask about “the Jews.” The remark is lifted out of American political reality and dropped into a 3,000‑year cosmic drama. AIPAC becomes “the Jews.” Political criticism becomes metaphysical Jew‑hatred. The actual human beings involved—Khanna, the staffers, the donors, the voters—disappear into an abstract idea.

If you actually look at what happened, this move makes no sense outside of hasbara culture. AIPAC, an American lobby with a long record of intervening in primaries and punishing dissent, calls a sitting Democratic Congress member a purveyor of “modern blood libel” for wanting an honest accounting of the role Gaza played in the Harris campaign. Khanna, who is backed by J Street, responds like any politician under attack by a legacy lobby: with a sharp, mocking jab at their relevance. There is nothing in his reply about Jews, Judaism, or Jewish existence. It is entirely about AIPAC as a political actor.

Frum’s response refuses to keep it at the level of politics. For him, Khanna is not needling a lobby; he is taking his place in an ancient line of Jew‑haters asking why “the Jews” are still here. The tweet reads like a moral X‑ray: whatever Khanna thinks he is doing, the deeper reality is that he is participating in the timeless hatred that has pursued Jews in “dozens of forgotten languages.” The human being and his context are gone; what remains is a pre‑existing idea about antisemitism that every incident must confirm.

This is exactly how hasbara culture replaces real antisemitism analysis. People who actually study antisemitism—historians, sociologists, scholars of racism—go case by case. They look at what someone believes, who they target, and how their words relate to structures of power and violence. Applied to Khanna, that kind of analysis would look at his alliance with J Street, his long record on Israel‑Palestine, his arguments about Gaza and U.S. complicity. It might still criticize him. But it would start from the person.

Hasbara culture does the opposite. It begins with a fixed, dramatic idea of “the antisemite” and searches for signs that a given critic fits the role. AIPAC’s “modern blood libel” language and Frum’s 3,000‑years tweet are two halves of the same operation. First, accuse Khanna of tapping into the oldest, most murderous anti‑Jewish myth. Then, when he pushes back, cast his pushback as another instance of the eternal Gentile sneer at the Jews’ survival. There is no attempt to understand what Khanna is actually thinking or doing; there is only the drive to slot him into the category “those who hate the Jews.”

Shaul Magid has been warning about this shift at the cultural level. Every year, he notes, more and more books about antisemitism pour out of presses and into Jewish discourse, and yet most of them are not written by people who actually study antisemitism. They are written by the same class of pundits and polemicists who inhabit hasbara culture, and they repeat the same story: there is one undifferentiated river of Jew‑hatred, from medieval blood libels to Hamas to campus protests to anyone who uses the word “genocide” about Gaza.

In that story, there is no meaningful difference between Nazis and people like Khanna. They all blur into a single category, “the antisemite,” defined less by what they believe or do than by their failure to stay inside the hasbara script.

This is the quiet coup I have been trying to describe: a new priesthood of “Never Again” journalists and organizations, often speaking as if they represent all Jews, has displaced the scholars who might help us think clearly. Instead of serious, empirical conversations about antisemitism, we get emotionally satisfying myths about eternal enemies. Instead of careful distinctions between Nazis, Christian Zionists, liberal critics, Palestinian nationalists, and genocide scholars, we get a flat moral universe in which anyone who seriously questions Israel, AIPAC, or the IHRA definition of antisemitism is suspect.

Frum’s tweet matters because it shows how deeply that universe has settled in. Here is a man who helped turn Netanyahu and his ideas sacred, and now styles himself a defender of Jewish safety, looking at a mainstream Democrat backed by a “pro‑Israel, pro‑peace” lobby and hearing the voice of the eternal persecutor. And many Jews will read him that way. They will not see Ro Khanna as a decent, conventional politician arguing that Israel has committed atrocities in Gaza and that the Democratic Party has abetted them; they will see him as a kind of David Duke in disguise, another person asking, “Are the Jews still here?”

This is how hasbara culture has benighted Jewish political culture. It has created a world in which AIPAC and “the Jews” are interchangeable, in which any real reckoning with Gaza is framed as blood libel, and in which the line between a J Street Democrat and an actual antisemite is almost impossible to draw. It is the same world that has treated Zohran Mamdani, Carter, Obama, and now genocide scholars themselves as participants in a campaign against Jewish existence, rather than people making arguments that might be right, wrong, or partly right.

Frum’s tweet is inexcusable, but it is not an aberration. It is a distilled expression of a culture that prefers myths to human beings. If we care about Jewish sanity, and if we want any hope of a serious conversation about Israel, Gaza, and antisemitism, we have to stop letting this kind of move pass as normal. We have to insist on the difference between criticizing a lobby and hating Jews, between a Khanna and a Nazi, between scholarship and hasbara dressed up as expertise. Until we do, we will go on mistaking our own fear and our own stories for reality—and we will go on empowering the very forces, and the very leaders, who have brought us to this disastrous moment.