American antisemitism is having its “thoughts and prayers” moment.

Whenever there is a mass shooting in the United States, the immediate reaction has become something of a meme. “Sending thoughts and prayers,” politicians — mostly Republicans — will inevitably write in a social media post expressing grief at the murder of innocent people at an elementary school, in a bowling alley or at a Walmart.

Gun violence prevention advocates roll their eyes. They see the oft-repeated sentiment as disingenuous, given how little action Congress has taken to enact gun control measures.  During the 2018 March for Our Lives, when hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets to demand action after 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Fla., scores of people carried signs with the words “thoughts and prayers” crossed out, and the phrase “policy and change” written underneath.

A similar phenomenon was on display after a heavily armed man drove a car into a synagogue in suburban Detroit on Thursday. He was killed by a security guard before he was able to enter the building, where 140 preschool and kindergarten students were locked down in their classrooms. 

Afterward, politicians with a history of promoting antisemitic tropes began bemoaning antisemitism. And Jewish politicians and activists in the Democratic party who had grown exasperated over the hypocrisy of it all started calling them out.

Noah Arbit, the Jewish state representative whose district includes West Bloomfield Township, where the attack took place, called out Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for his “crocodile tears” expressing concern about the shooting. Arbit grew up attending Temple Israel.

“Amazed by the crocodile tears from someone who’s done more than most to stoke & inflame hatred against Jews. It’s a very small logical leap from ‘AIPAC controls the US government,’ ‘Israel is committing genocide,’ ‘Zionists kill Arab babies’ to ‘kill Jews in West Bloomfield,’” Arbit, a Democrat, wrote in a post on X replying to El-Sayed. 

El-Sayed, a progressive running a campaign with an anti-Israel message, sent a fundraising email on the two-year anniversary of Oct. 7 accusing Israel of genocide and calling out AIPAC. “If you’re asking yourself, ‘Why on Earth are politicians in Washington continuing to add fuel to the fire?’ The answer is money. AIPAC is funneling millions into campaigns in exchange for loyalty,” El-Sayed wrote in the Oct. 7 email, referring to the war in Gaza. 

As the attack was unfolding, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) took to social media to respond to a message by a junior staffer at the centrist think tank Third Way that called for Democrats to do more to address antisemitism within their ranks. Rather than taking the criticism seriously, Khanna said he was “proud” to stand by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and far-left antisemitic streamer Hasan Piker, and took aim at “neocons” in the party. (Forty minutes later, Khanna condemned the shooting and said “antisemitism and violence have no place in America.”)

“What the hell is wrong with you? 48 hours ago two men were beaten in your district for speaking Hebrew. Earlier today there was a shooting at a Jewish school in Michigan. Is it politics? Lack of empathy? Are you actually racist?” Ethan Agarwal, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur challenging Khanna in this year’s Democratic primary, wrote in response. 

Earlier in the day, Khanna had tweeted in defense of Pat Buchanan, President Ronald Reagan’s communications director who has a lengthy history of making overtly antisemitic arguments. 

“The same Pat Buchanan who wrote that Hitler was ‘a man of great courage’? Who called Capitol Hill ‘Israeli-occupied territory’? Who said there was ‘No evidence exists that any Jews were gassed at Treblinka’? Pretty sure he was antisemitic,” said Shannon Watts, a liberal activist who started the advocacy group “Moms Demand Action” after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, when 26 students and teachers were killed at a Connecticut elementary school. 

Khanna doubled down afterward.

Later, Watts — who has called Republicans’ “thoughts and prayers” framing a form of gaslighting — said Democrats need to do more to combat antisemitism among members of their own party. 

“The Democratic Party has been infected by antisemitism and it’s spreading. It isn’t (yet) as virulent as it is on the right, but it’s insidious and we have to stop pretending it doesn’t exist,” Watts wrote on X. 

In West Bloomfield, tragedy was averted, miraculously, because of the actions of a security guard who quickly put himself in harm’s way. 

But if the response to rising antisemitism begins to resemble the country’s response to gun violence — expressions of outrage followed by little introspection — the result may be a familiar one: condemnation after the antisemitic incident, but little reckoning with the permissive culture that helped create the danger in the first place.