The Daily
'The Interview': Chuck Schumer on Democrats, Antisemitism and His Shutdown Retreat
Sun, 16 Mar 2025
The Senate minority leader discusses the backlash to his vote on the Republican spending bill, how he sees his role within the party and his new book.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What did Chuck Schumer discuss in his new book on antisemitism?
The direction of his party, how Democrats are communicating their opposition to President Trump, and also, on a more personal note, his fears about the rise of anti-Semitism in America. Schumer's written a new book on that topic. It's called Anti-Semitism in America, A Warning. It's part history, part memoir.
And in it, he tracks the long record of prejudice against Jews in the world and its recent surge here at home. That was Monday. When we spoke again on Saturday afternoon, it was after an extraordinary few days in Congress where Democrats had to decide whether or not to vote for a Republican federal spending bill or allow a government shutdown.
House Democrats had voted in near unanimity against the bill. Schumer initially said that he would as well, but in a shocking about-face on Friday, he joined Republicans and it passed. The aftermath has been brutal and led to open warfare in the party and questions about Schumer's future as its leader. So when I called him back, we had a lot to discuss.
Chapter 2: Why did Chuck Schumer change his vote on the Republican spending bill?
Here are my two conversations with Senator Chuck Schumer. Senator Schumer, in your book, you write that you rarely faced anti-Semitism when you were growing up in Brooklyn. What was the moment that you felt that things changed in this country that made you want to write the book now?
So I was born in 1950. And for the first 50 years, it was sort of what you might call the golden Medina, the golden age for Jewish people, not only in America, but forever. Because we had never seen... Such acceptance. We were accepted in ways we never thought.
I was so proud when I was, I guess, about 12 years old that Sandy Koufax, a Jewish pitcher, not a scientist or a teacher, didn't play ball on Yom Kippur. And that made us so proud. I experienced a little anti-Semitism. There was a moment, for instance, when I was eight years old and we were driving home from my grandma's house.
And someone rolled down the window and said to my nice, decent father, you fucking Jew. I think of that almost every week, but it didn't happen very much. And the Jewish people, all the kinds of discrimination that we had seen, Jews couldn't work here, Jews couldn't do that, even the sort of innuendos went away.
And there was one reason above all, the Holocaust hung over a curtain, not only for Jewish people, but of course us, we always thought about it. I get a little emotional. People on my block, older ladies would come and roll up their sleeves. and show us the numbers on their arms that the concentration camp made them do because they were just a number, you know, probably scheduled to die. Okay.
When did that change? It began changing in the beginning of the 21st century. And what I've written in the book is when things get bad or a little rough, that's when anti-Semitism sort of bubbles up and then can get worse. Conor Cruz O'Brien, the great Irish poet, said anti-Semitism is a light sleeper. So in 2001, for the first time after 9-11, we saw these conspiracy theories.
Oh, the Jews did it. All the Jews evacuated the building, etc. But okay. It was not good, but it didn't lead to a huge spread of anti-Semitism. 2008 got a little worse because of the financial crisis and the international conspiracy. And there were all kinds of theories, George Soros,
30 years earlier, they never would have dared use George Soros as the sort of way to talk about the international conspiracy, because he was Jewish and because of the Holocaust. But it was October 7th that changed it all. And all of a sudden, anti-Semitism explodes in ways we've never seen, and overt anti-Semitism.
Jewish bakeries being called Zionist bakeries and rocks thrown through their windows. People who wore yarmulkes or Jewish stars being screamed at, yelled at, vilified, even punched and cursed. All the kinds of things that we had not seen in America for a very long time. And it shocked us.
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Chapter 3: How does Chuck Schumer view the Democratic Party's direction?
I was wondering, how would I be accepted as somebody who was obviously Jewish, although I didn't go talk about it a lot? I was Jewish. I was. It was very gratifying. You know, very little anti-Semitism. And when I got to Congress, the same. There was some anti-Semitism. One of the senior guys when I got on the Judiciary Committee said, Schumer, welcome to the Judiciary Committee.
So there was some of that.
Who was that?
Can't say. He's dead. He's from Texas. That's all I'll say. You can figure it out. But it was not the thing that I was most known for in any way at all.
You just mentioned this idea of inauthenticity when you were talking about recruiting. And you wrote that in the book. You said voters can smell inauthenticity the way bloodhounds track assent. Yeah. And it did bring to mind the situation Democrats find themselves in at the moment. Do Democrats have an authenticity problem?
I don't think we have an authenticity problem. We have a real direction now. I feel good about it. It's this. First, you got to look at who the Democratic Party is and who the Republican Party is, who they really are. We are the party of working people. We feel that very, very strongly. That's who we have always been. The Republican Party is a dramatic contrast to that.
In the last 20 or 30 years, in my judgment, they have been taken over by a cabal of greedy, very wealthy people. And their whole goal is to reduce taxes, cut their own taxes, even though they're extremely rich, and get rid of any government regulation.
But you know that's not how the American people views the Democratic Party right now.
That's where we're moving. That's where we have to move. So the contrast is real. What are we saying? And this is not just Chuck Schumer. I've talked to my whole caucus. I've talked to Hakeem and his caucus. I've talked to Martin, the new head of the DNC. I've talked to some of the others. It's a sort of a simple, it's a simple little phrase.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do Democrats face with authenticity and messaging?
No, we feel it, but we never, we talked about legislation and passing legislation. Now, one of the liabilities we have is a lot of the good things that'll come out of this legislation, take a few years to happen, you know, to build the road, to build the bridge, et cetera. But frankly, when we did talk about it, it worked. We had five battleground states that we had to win in the Senate, okay?
And every week I met with each of the senators about implementing legislation. We called it implementation. If we said that to the public, that would be a bad idea, but it was a concept. And they did. So Jackie Rosen was in Las Vegas saying, that infrastructure bill, I am now getting you the thing we've dreamed of in Nevada for a long time. Las Vegas has about three quarters of their population.
a high-speed rail from Los Angeles to Las Vegas so people could get on the train, spend their money in Las Vegas, and go home. Tammy Baldwin delivered this bridge that northern Wisconsin had been dying for for 30 or 40 years.
So all these things helped them win.
We won. We won in four of those five. I don't think the presidential campaign did enough of it. And I don't think Democratic Party as a whole did enough of it. We just assumed we were on the side of working people so they would just naturally assume it. And it didn't happen. We lost them because they didn't think we cared about them enough. We always did care about them, but we didn't convey it.
So now, as you said, we're learning to convey in different ways. I put Cory Booker. and Tina Smith in charge of the social media. We had like 60 influencers at the State of the Union, and again, learning how to communicate, not just Chuck Schumer talking about the legislation we passed, but I brought people there who were affected by what's happening.
I brought a veteran, and they went on all the social media, and according to the people tell me, because I get all these reports, it had millions and millions of views. And the bottom line is, I think the party as a whole neglected how the social media has become so much more important, but we're learning it quickly and we're doing it much better and we're going to do it better still.
As you know, you got a rough ride because of your protests that you had. I know.
That's in the past.
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Chapter 5: How does Chuck Schumer plan to address Trump's influence in politics?
That happened with Bush in 2005. It happened with Trump in 2017. When it happens, I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will resume working with us. And I talk to them. One of the places I told them to go in the gym, you know, when you're on that bike in your shorts panting away next to a Republican, a lot of the inhibitions come off.
I'm sure. Yes, it's not a sight you want to see. Before we move on from this, I do want to ask you about the last election, especially around President Biden's decision to run for a second term. Yes. Did you know about President Biden's declining faculties before that disastrous debate?
No. Let me tell you the little... I dealt with Biden and his staff often. And whenever I dealt with him, you know, the right wing was saying, oh, he's mentally declined. He wasn't. He had rational, good, strong conversations. Did he ramble from time to time? He's done that when I knew him when he was 45 years old. Did he sometimes forget a name? Who doesn't? But he was fine.
I didn't realize, I didn't, because of my dealings with him, we're just fine. And we worked on many things and had a lot of success. 2022 was regarded as one of the greatest legislative sessions we had. And we did it together, Senate and him, until the debate. And then I realized he couldn't win. Now, I did think the fact that he spoke lower a little bit and he walked slower,
allowed the right wing to portray him incorrectly as, you know, not competent. But I didn't find that.
And if you didn't know, why didn't you know? Was it because they were keeping him secluded?
I can't give you the answer to that. When I dealt with him, he was fine.
There have been allegations of a cover-up. What do you say to those allegations?
They're just BS. Just BS. There was no cover-up.
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Chapter 6: Is there a shift in Jewish political alignment in America?
There's an incident on the New York subway and a bunch of people got on, you know, protesters or whatever, and said, all the Zionists get off the, who's a Zionist? Raise your hand. Get out of the subway car.
When the head of the Brooklyn Museum, who was Jewish, or the chairman of the board she was, but the Brooklyn Museum had nothing to do with Israel or taking positions on Israel, her house is smeared in red paint, that's antisemitism. And a lot of the slogans that people use either are or slide into antisemitism, okay? So, from the river to the sea, which is a Hamas expression.
Well, what does Hamas believe? People don't pay enough attention to the evilness of Hamas in this whole discussion. What does Hamas believe? That there should be no Jews living from the Jordan River to the ocean. And their view, in their charter, they cite an old Arab proverb. Is that a Jew behind the tree? Chop him down and shoot him.
So when people say from the river to the sea, it edges on anti-Semitism, even though some of them may not know it. How about by any means necessary? Does that mean kill any Jew by any means necessary? Okay? And the one that bothers me the most, which I want to take a minute on, is genocide. Okay? Genocide is described as... This is the definition.
A country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So if Israel was not provoked... and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, that would be genocide. That's not what happened. In fact, the opposite happened. And Hamas is much closer to genocidal than Israel, even when you have disagreements.
And again, I told Netanyahu, I told, I said to him what I thought, you got to reduce the number of casualties and make sure aid gets in and stuff like that. Here is the difficulty. Hamas has a different way of waging warfare. of using innocent Gazans as human shields. And they do. They put rockets in hospitals. They put their military supplies in schools.
What is a country just supposed to do when rockets are being fired from a school? Sinwar, the head of Hamas, who was killed, you know what he said? Dead Palestinians and maimed Palestinians are a necessary sacrifice. His words, according to the Wall Street Journal, which got his documents. So Israel's been in a much more difficult position because of what Hamas did.
And it's not that Israel is above criticism. Of course it is not above criticism. But Hamas, well, I just, Hamas is never, wait, can I just finish? I'm sorry, it matters so much to me. I feel so deeply about it. Sorry.
No, please.
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