In Colorado antisemitism runs rampant. On both sides of the aisle. 

On June 16, the Adams County Republicans of Colorado drew from the age-old well of antisemitic tropes on their Facebook page, sharing out an AI-generated image of Jewish Democratic State Rep. and Adams 12 Board of Education President Lori Goldstein portrayed as a mythical troll-esque monster, “indoctrinating” children during a story time. The caption reads that she was, “Explaining how she will refer the kids to the police if they misgender another student or complain about a boy in the girls’ bathroom.” They re-shared that image on June 27, this time with a longer missive torpedoing the National Education Association’s “radical progressive agendas.”

The image is one that has endured for literal centuries — a subterranean troll or goblin-looking monster with a heavily exaggerated, hooked nose and long, pointed ears. And it’s far from subtle. These days, it’s become easier than any other time since the Holocaust to dehumanize Jews online or off as we’ve become, once again, a symbol of everything our current society defines as a social ail. 

Screenshot of Adams GOP Facebook post, June 27, 2026.

For the right side of the Overton Window, here in the west Jews represent the evils of a changing power dynamic, the secret puppet masters who are ushering in the Great Replacement to ensure that traditional American values are upended with our dark money campaigns to open the borders and allow a flood of mass migration in order to bolster the Democratic voter rolls, and dethrone white people as the dominant demographic in the U.S. For many Americans, the Great Replacement Theory first came to mainstream public consciousness with the “Unite The White” rallies of the White Nationalist and Neo-Nazi organizations in Charlottesville in 2017. The chant, “Jews will not replace us!” was heard ‘round the world, as these groups united to protest the proposed removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee from what was then still called “Lee’s Park” in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

That event popped the proverbial seal on what had long been seen only in 4Chan chat rooms and the darkest corners of the Web, where Jew-haters stoked each others’ flames of hate but largely stayed anonymous. The mainstream at large still seemed to recognize that antisemitism is a relic of the Nazi era and Nazi-adjacent white supremacists who were afraid of public derision and losing their jobs if exposed. 

However, thanks to right-wing pundits with enormous online followings like Myron Gaines, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and many others, that’s no longer the case. Jew-hating is en vogue again. Pick any conspiracy theory the far-Right likes to wrap themselves in, and regardless of where it starts, it’s a very short swim to an antisemitic undertow:

And on and on. But don’t get too excited, my liberal friends. Turns out that when it comes to antisemitic conspiracies, there’s no daylight between you and the “far-right nutjobs” you detest so much. 

On the Left side of the Overton Window, however, the veneer comes with its own en vogue terminology that allows the Left to maintain a self-righteous sense of moral relativism while pretending they’re not antisemitic at all: Anti-Zionism. 

“Anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism!” they proclaim loudly and proudly, reminding everyone within earshot how many Jewish friends they have who “also” hate the State of Israel, just like they do! “We denounce antisemitism in all its forms!” they’ll remind us in the same breath as they educate us on why Jews have no right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

They’ll even lecture us on why the cold-blooded murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim in May of 2021 were perfectly justifiable. As long as it can be framed as “Political violence” as opposed to a disgusting act of antisemitism, it’s totally cool. No Jews were harmed in that murder. Just genocide-supporting Zionists. And that appears to be especially true for far too many folks in Boulder. 

It was less than a month after Hamas staged its terror incursion into southern Israel, slaughtering 1,200 people and kidnapping another 250 more. Israel had not yet begun its campaign into Gaza yet to prosecute its fight against Hamas. Survivors from the terror attack were still undergoing treatment. Bodies were still being identified. The horror was still fresh. 

In Boulder, the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado published a rambling word-salad of social justice-related catch phrases that, out of context, seemed almost satirical in the amount of vocabulary spaghetti they threw at the screen:

“As a department whose work is informed by intersectional, anti-racist, and decolonial feminist, queer, and trans scholarship and activism, we join the scholars and activists of the Palestinian Feminist Collective in affirming Palestine as a feminist issue,” is just one example. In their nearly 900-word manifesto on the Israel/Hamas war — which hadn’t seen a single IDF troop set foot in Gaza as of yet — there wasn’t a single mention of the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023 (violating a ceasefire that had been in place since May of 2021) that ignited the conflict anew. Only a screed riddled with buzzwords and accusations against Israel that would have made the Third Reich jealous. 

At the time, it was a shockingly one-sided, a-historical, uneducated stance that the department revealed in its missive. A result of the privileged mindset of a group of people with little-to-no actual connection to the Levant, rife with a self-righteous binary perspective that read as nothing more than Islamist propaganda aimed at setting up a very specific narrative: Israel is evil incarnate and all of the world’s social justice-related ails must be fit to the Jewish State. 

While that might have seemed new and novel at the time (it wasn’t), it’s certainly become a platform for the far-left. Worse, rather than being an anomalous perspective of a fringe-group of wingnuts, we’ve come to realize that the vein of moral superiority reflected in that statement was shared by more than just the CU Dept. of Ethnic Studies. 

On June 1, 2025, Egyptian national Mohamed Sabry Soliman attacked a group of Jews on their weekly walk to bring attention to the dozens of hostages that were still being held captive by Hamas terrorists in tunnels underneath Gaza. His weapon was fire; he lobbed molotov cocktails into the group, sending several to the hospital with egregious burns, one of whom succumbed to the wounds a few weeks later — 82-year-old Karen Diamond. Soliman pleaded guilty to murder last May and was sentenced to life in prison. 

Predictably, the Boulder-based Students for Justice in Palestine chapter (currently barred from CU campus) revisited the fertile land of hate previously sowed by the CU Dept. of Ethnic Studies. They released a “statement” in support of Soliman, referring to the victims of his attack as “the Zionist death cult festering in our city.” Not only did they retread the ugly path carved by the Dept. of Ethnic Studies, they ratcheted up the bile.

I guess it should come as no surprise, however, that the children in Boulder are listening to all of this, and learning the wrong lessons. 

Last week, the Anti-Defamation League filed a Title VI complaint with the U.S. Dept. of Education alleging that an 8th grade student had been subjected to a disgusting antisemitic campaign of bullying, slurs and physical assaults that had gone unaddressed by the Boulder Valley School District despite being notified repeatedly. And it had gone on for a full year, at least. 

From the ADL’s statement regarding the suit: “In April 2025, students in Student A’s (the victim) PE class attempted to play a game called “Jew touch tag” and said Jews were “dirty” and “contaminated.” Then, in December 2025, a classmate allegedly fashioned a Chromebook charging cord into a lasso, threw it around the student’s neck and dragged him backward from a chair while calling him a “stupid kike” — conduct so severe that the Boulder Police Department was called in to investigate. In April 2026, another classmate allegedly told the student: “Hitler should have killed all the Jews when he had the chance.” As a result of these incidents and the pervasive antisemitic climate, Student A no longer wears a Star of David necklace and does not share his religious identity with anyone.

“The record here is overwhelming: written pleas from the student’s parents, formal school reports and a police investigation all point to the conclusion that antisemitic harassment at Southern Hills Middle School was pervasive, escalating and severe,” said James Pasch, ADL Vice President of Litigation. “Despite the family’s pleas for help to stop the harassment, the school district failed to effectively address it, a clear violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. No family should have to fight this hard to ensure a Jewish child’s safety at school, and certainly no Jewish student should face the threat of assault or harassment because of their Jewish identity.”

For what it’s worth, thestatement released by the BVSD in response does accept accountability and pledges action, and while that’s the right approach, it shouldn’t have taken the ADL’s Title VI complaint and the resulting press to instigate the response. I’ve been that kid. I was bullied for being Jewish. I know what that kid went through. And it’s beyond inexcusable that at least a full year went by with nothing curbing his bullies’ behavior. 

“We have placed our community in an extremely difficult situation,” said BVSD Superintendent Rob Anderson in his statement, “…questioning their trust in the ability of our school district to keep their students safe. This is unacceptable. We are committed to ensuring acts of antisemitism are identified, investigated and addressed through appropriate education, restorative practices and discipline when necessary.

“I will present a plan for implementation in the 2026-2027 school year to our Board of Education at our next meeting on August 11th with recommendations for system-wide improvements.”

I look forward to seeing the BVSD’s plans for curbing antisemitism in its classrooms. I grant that it’s clearly an uphill battle today more than it’s been in decades, thanks to the environment Boulder seems to be cultivating — where social justice is defined by people who would champion terrorists and murderers as long as it aligns with their own warped world view. Because as long as they continue to rationalize violence as an appropriate response to conflicting opinion — and let’s be clear, neither Karen Diamond nor any of the other victims of Soliman’s attack ever dropped a bomb on Gaza — the example they’re setting for their children is reprehensible.

When you can provide an enemy to fit the bill of all the problems you think you see, it becomes easy to dehumanize them to the point of exterminating them altogether—either as a goblin policing how people use pronouns or an evil Zionist, bloodthirsty for Gazan children. 

And it’s the same cycle we’ve seen before, generation after generation. 

CORRECTION: Due to an editing error, this opinion column was previously categorized as a news article. That classification has been corrected. This opinion does not reflect the views of the Colorado Times Recorder.