Glenn Loury’s Antisemitism

How a once-respected voice became an enabler of modern bloodless bigotry

Last Friday, the Manhattan Institute fired Glenn Loury for hosting the oldest hatred and calling it dissent.

Let us dispense with the fiction first. And by that, I mean the narrative Tucker Carlson is peddling: “ For decades, conservative think tanks celebrated and supported black economist Glenn Loury. Then he expressed an unauthorized opinion on the Middle East, and they (the Manhattan Institute) dropped him in a second.”

In fact, Glenn Loury joined the Manhattan Institute as a senior fellow in December 2020. In this role, he focused on the economic, political, and social analysis of issues relating to persistent racial inequality. Loury brought his extensive academic expertise and public commentary to the Institute, contributing to its mission of promoting free-market policies and individual responsibility.

In August 2021, the Manhattan Institute expanded its collaboration with Loury by partnering with his long-running podcast, The Glenn Show. This partnership included support for production and marketing, aiming to amplify Loury's voice on matters of race, culture, and politics.“

What he presents as moral inquiry is, in fact, a carefully curated showcase of anti-Zionist fervor—sanitized through academic tone, made palatable by Jewish guests, and excused by the coward’s refuge of “curiosity.” This is not intellectual honesty. It is ideological laundering. Delegitimizers are given microphones. Eliminationists are treated as sages. And antisemitism, draped in tweed and couched in nuance, slips by under the banner of “open debate.”

Birds of a Feather??

Since 2023, and particularly after Hamas' murderous October 7 assault on Israel, Loury has written and talked about Israel and Zionism no less than 25 times. By comparison, the UN Human Rights Council criticized or censured Israel 11 times through adopted resolutions from October 2023 to April 2025.

Much like the UNHRC, Loury became obsessed with Israel’s misdeeds. To paraphrase Israeli journalist Matti Friedman, Loury was steering his audience toward politically correct conclusions, casting Israel as the embodiment of Western sins like racism and colonialism. Israel was disproportionately covered and consistently villainized through selective facts, historical erasure, and reversed causality. Loury reinforced this narrative by posing as a neutral expert when, in fact, he was creating an insular echo chamber that presented bias as truth.

Loury was not offering balanced commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was conducting a sustained campaign of rhetorical delegitimization against the world’s only Jewish state—and doing so with a shrug of plausible deniability. His method is simple: summon anti-Zionist Jews like Peter Beinart and Omer Bartov to do the dirty work, remain “curious” when they question Israel’s right to exist, and then wave off criticism by pointing to his guests’ Jewish heritage.

This cascade of anti-Israel canards isn’t analysis. It’s a carefully orchestrated ideological laundering operation. And it is antisemitism by every standard that matters—especially by Natan Sharansky’s now-famous 3D Test: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization.

Demonization

Loury repeatedly features voices who liken Israel to apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany. He offers no pushback, only passive nods of agreement.

In April 2025, Peter Beinart questioned Israel’s right to exist. Loury didn’t challenge him. He listened, nodded, and moved on.

Loury has repeatedly hosted voices who liken Israel to apartheid South Africa, to colonial settler states, and—increasingly—to Nazi Germany. In an April 2025 episode of The Glenn Show, Peter Beinart openly questioned the legitimacy of Israel’s existence. Loury did not flinch. No rebuttal. No clarification. Just nodding engagement.

On May 19, 2023, Norman Finkelstein appeared on The Glenn Show in an episode titled “Norman Finkelstein – The 'Triple Scam' of Wokeness. During the podcast Finkelstein compared the plight of Palestinians under Israeli occupation to the horrors experienced by Jews under Nazi rule.

After October 7, Finkelstein wrote that Hamas’ actions “warm [sic] every fiber of my soul” and compared the attacks to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising:

“If we honor the Jews who revolted in the Warsaw Ghetto, then moral consistency commands that we honor the heroic resistance in Gaza. I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul—the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled.” Finkelstein was also banned from Israel because he met with Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and expressed solidarity with them.

Yet, Loury described Finkelstein as a “happy warrior,” highlighting his unwavering commitment to his beliefs despite controversy.

Double Standards

Sudan. Ukraine. China. Not one episode. Not one essay.

But Israel? He cannot stop. As noted, Loury has invoked Israel or Zionism in dozens of posts and episodes: What Is Campus Life Like for a Jewish Zionist?, The Moral Challenge of Gaza, Things Left Unsaid about Gaza, The BDS Mess, and so on. Has Loury hosted an in-depth discussion on Sudan’s civil war? China’s forced sterilization of Uyghurs? The mass graves in Ukraine? No. The moral microscope is reserved only for the Jewish state. Israel is held to an ethical standard not applied to any other democracy or dictatorship.

Zionism is dissected and denounced. Jewish sovereignty is examined with suspicion. And Jewish identity—when it aligns with the state—is treated as complicity.

That’s not journalism. That’s an obsession.

Delegitimization

Zionism, the belief that Jews have the same right to national self-determination as every other people, is constantly framed by Loury’s podcasts as racist, colonial, and outdated. His formula is as cynical as it is effective: outsource the assault on Israel to anti-Zionist Jews, then point to their surnames as proof of moral legitimacy. Peter Beinart questions Israel’s right to exist—Loury nods. Omer Bartov calls Israel a racial state—Loury affirms. Norman Finkelstein compares Hamas to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising—Loury smiles and calls him “stimulating.” The tactic is transparent: weaponize Jewish dissent to launder delegitimization. The message is clear—“It can’t be antisemitism if a Jew said it.” But of course, that’s a lie. Antisemitism doesn’t become noble just because it arrives with a yarmulke and footnotes.

In November 2023, Loury signed a faculty letter at Brown University blaming U.S. support for Israel for “one of the great moral challenges of our time.” It made no mention of Hamas. None. As if October 7 never happened. Instead, the letter asserts: “We cannot and should not support fanning the flames of war by inflicting collective punishment on innocent Palestinian civilians with American weapons and technology.”

In April 2024, Loury praised Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blistering essay comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa and accusing it of genocide. Rather than challenge the factual distortions or the grotesque moral equivalence, Loury nodded along, calling the work “brilliant” and “essential reading.”

He treated Coates’s denunciation of Jewish self-determination as if it were a fresh insight, not a reheated ideological screed. In doing so, Loury once again demonstrated his signature move: outsource the vilification of Israel to others, then sanctify it with the language of literary admiration.

And when critics finally confronted Loury’s one-sidedness, he did not reflect. He ran to Tucker Carlson—whose own record includes platforming Holocaust minimizers and anti-Israel demagogues—for a sympathetic audience. It was not an accident. It was a homecoming.

Charles Krauthammer put it plainly: “The willingness to condemn the Jewish state for things others are not condemned for—this is not a higher standard. It is a discriminatory standard. And discrimination against Jews has a name. The word for it is antisemitism.” The true aim of anti-Zionism is not reform—it’s erasure.

So no, this is not about “difficult conversations.” It is not about “academic freedom.” Glenn Loury has become an intellectual enabler of antisemitism. He has used his platform not to clarify but to camouflage—to make eliminationist rhetoric appear thoughtful and to treat Jewish statehood — and survival — as optional.

That doesn’t make him better. It may make him worse.