NEW YORK (AP) — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will have a book out next winter that draws in part upon his own life and religious faith for what he calls a “warning” about antisemitism.
Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, announced Wednesday that Schumer's “Antisemitism in America” will be released Feb. 18. The 73-year-old Schumer, a Democrat from New York, will trace his journey from Brooklyn in the 1960s to Harvard in the '70s to his decades in Washington, including the Jan. 6 siege in 2021. Schumer also will write about the recent wave of conspiracy theories about Jews and attacks against synagogues and Jewish students.
“If America fails to understand the context and history of antisemitism, if America’s darker impulses ultimately overwhelm its better angels, an age-old truth will prove true once again: that antisemitism inevitably leads to violence against Jews and a rise in bigotry in our society at large. Jewish Americans never thought it could happen here in America,” he said in a statement. "Now, for the first time, they’re worried it could. As the Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien once said, ‘antisemitism is a light sleeper.’”
Schumer previously wrote, with Daniel Squadron, “Positively American: Winning Back the Middle Class One Family at a Time,” which came out in 2007.