Over yogurt at a restaurant across the street from his Los Angeles office late last month, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) reflected on the Anti-Defamation League’s finding that he is one of the Jewish members of Congress most targeted by antisemitism on Facebook.
“There are certainly four or five others who are as active and pro-Israel as I am,” he told JNS. “Maybe it’s because I’ve been doing it longer than anyone else.”
The Jew-hatred hasn’t changed his behavior, but it’s more difficult to hold town halls in person than it once was, he told JNS.
Conservative members of the Tea Party used to be the ones disrupting his meetings. “They were screaming and yelling, but not nearly as bad as the antisemites and the anti-Israel crowd,” he said. “They’ve reached a whole new level. I think we’re on a new plane.”
According to Sherman, who was recently named ranking member of the House Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee, there are three different “currents” of Jew-hatred: “old-fashioned” Nazis, “extreme” Islamic antisemitism and left-wing Jew-hatred.
“The far-left likes to think they have a kinship with extreme Islam, because they don’t know anything about extreme Islam,” he told JNS. He noted that Islamists have said that they would kill advocates who call themselves “queers for Palestine.”
Jewish culture, history
Sherman, who was born and raised in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley, attended Hebrew school twice weekly and studied “theological history” on weekends.
“I can’t say I could speak Hebrew or anything like that, but certainly I’ve focused on Jewish culture, especially Jewish history,” he told JNS.
“My interest in Middle East history is born of being Jewish,” he said. He added that he thinks he supports Israel more as a Jew than he would have if he weren’t Jewish, “although some of our best supporters are gentiles.”
“A few of our harshest critics are Jewish,” he added.
JNS asked if Jewish values guide the congressman today. “You always want to heal the world,” he said. “I view the best part of my job as having an infinitesimal impact on the most important things in the world.”
“I think in empathy for those who are at the bottom, and I think in support for foreign aid that my political consultants don’t necessarily recommend,” he said.
Sherman joked that his friends urged him to swap his accountant job for something “of lower public esteem,” and after he was a lawyer for a decade, they told him, “not low enough for you,” so he went into politics.
Serving on the California State Board of Equalization allowed him to be both “a politician and a tax collector,” he said.
As chair of the board, the first major issue he faced was almost Talmudic.
Pete Wilson, the then Republican state governor, had broadened the sales tax to include snacks, like crackers. There was a question whether matzah counted as a cracker. A rabbi told Sherman that the Torah refers to matzah as “bread” rather than “cracker” of affliction, but that when the Jews fled Egypt, they weren’t “popping bite-sized matzahs.”
Sherman recommended, therefore, that full-sized matzah is bread and mini-matzahs are crackers. (He later led the way to abolish the snack tax.)
He opted to run for Congress to “deal with the most important things in the world and for a chance to build the U.S.-Israel relationship,” he said.
Jewish security
At any Jewish event, there’s “security that certainly surpasses the House of Representatives, or is at least equal,” Sherman told JNS.
“Everybody realizes we need that security,” he said. “It’s a shame.”
Among his priorities in Congress are to obtain security grants for Jewish institutions and to codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred into federal law. (He and colleagues reintroduced an act that would call on the U.S. Education Department to use the IHRA definition to enforce federal antidiscrimination law.)
The main question with respect to the IHRA definition is whether it’s antisemitic to call for Israel to be destroyed, according to Sherman.
The congressman pointed out at a street corner and told JNS, “If you went there and start shouting, ‘destroy Albania,’ all these people are going to think you’re anti-Albanian.”
“We don’t have to write up a treatise about this,” he said.
The destruction of Israel “wouldn’t just be the end of the state,” the congressman told JNS. “All of its people would be pushed into the Mediterranean.”
“It’s close to calling for ‘genocide’ without explicitly saying so,” he added.
Sherman rejects what he calls “strawman” arguments that the bill would infringe upon free speech. “It’s not illegal to be antisemitic,” he said, but “when it interferes with education on a campus, the campus has to do something about it.”
To those who say adopting IHRA’s definition would prevent criticism of the Israeli government, Sherman said, “Have you ever met an Israeli that can go a full 30 minutes without criticizing the government of Israel?”
Another bill that Sherman introduced would sanction the Popular Resistance Committees, a terror group in Gaza. He told JNS that the group has committed “numerous” terror attacks, participated in the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks and targeted Americans.
The Trump administration should sanction the PRC unilaterally and “we’ll keep pushing both ways, legislatively and administratively,” he said. (The bill passed the House last year and awaits action in the Senate, according to Sherman.)
‘Not doing their job’
Sherman told JNS that “Israeli voters are not doing their job” when it comes to the public relations “war” that he thinks Israel is losing, as its military wages a multi-front war.
U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration have referred to Israeli responses to Hamas’s ceasefire violations in measured tones, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have used harsher language, according to Sherman.
“The Israeli voter is going to reward those who spoke like Netanyahu,” he said. “That makes his job easier. His job is to be popular with voters who, unfortunately, vote with their gut. It makes our job tougher.”
He thinks Israelis would do better to frame the strikes as necessary and limited, with great efforts taken to limit civilian casualties. Sherman also thinks that Israel should have kept some of the Palestinian security prisoners whom it released as leverage to respond to Hamas’s refusal to return all of the bodies of hostages. Efforts to “limit food supplies or engage in kinetic action” hurt Israel’s image, the congressman said.
Sherman told JNS that he has been “fighting the anti-Israel forces in the Democratic Party since at least the 1980s.”
“It’s an increasingly difficult job,” he said.
In the 1980s and 90s, most Americans didn’t see Israel-related news on the front pages of newspapers. “AIPAC could be particularly effective because they’d say, ‘We want to talk to you about this issue, and we’ll help you. We’ll make the arguments. We’ve got folks in your district who are organized,’” Sherman said.
“It’s very peculiar because this is not the biggest conflict in the world,” he pointed out. “From a humanitarian standpoint, from an economic standpoint, this is number six or seven—and most Americans couldn’t name number three, four and five. But there we are, we’re on the front page. Jews make news.”
Qatari money, which Sherman said is the “number one source of foreign aid” to U.S. colleges and universities, “doesn’t get exposed as much as it should,” he said. He called for “clear disclosure” in school contracts with Qatar. He told JNS that he is working on bills related to the matter.
“The very far-left has way too much sway, particularly in our campuses,” he said. He added that an anti-Israel problem in the Republican Party “has a better chance of being successful.”
The far-left’s argument that Hamas is morally superior to Israel will never be a majority opinion in the United States, because it is so “fundamentally stupid,” according to Sherman. The argument against Israel on the right is different in that it “starts with a compliment,” he said. “It’s disarming.”
The far-right, to Sherman, says that countries like Israel and Ukraine are “beautiful,” but “we shouldn’t get involved.”
“Isolationism is not inherently stupid. I think it’s wrong, but it has been the policy of the United States for at least half of our history,” he told JNS. “It’s certainly a lot less stupid than saying that Israel is morally inferior to Hamas, so we have to worry about that.”
Though Sherman supports a two-state solution, he doesn’t think it’s viable this decade.
He thinks that the Palestinians are the main roadblock, but says there are “forces in Israel,” who build “settlements,” that are working against it. He thinks Israel pays a price for that.
“Whether it’s viable or not, the whole world wants a two-state solution,” Sherman said. “If you’re the side that says, ‘We want it, and we’ll get there when we get there,’ then you are viewed as right.”
He added that the Palestinian Authority only supports a two-state solution if Israel agrees to accept Palestinians in a way that would result in two Palestinian states. It’s hard to convince people that Palestinians are the barrier to a two-state solution, because “it’s a fundamentally irrational objective for the side that has less power,” Sherman said.
“But no one should accuse Hamas and its friends of being logical,” he told JNS.
If Palestinians get a vote at the United Nations, the congressman isn’t particularly concerned. “They’re probably going to get a vote in the U.N. anyway,” he said. “Who cares? So the vote against Israel will probably be by 183 instead of 182.”
