In January, Joe Rogan, the hugely influential podcast host, had Gad Saad as a guest on his show. Saad, according to cursory internet research, is a Canadian marketing professor at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University and hosts his own podcast, “The Saad Truth.”
The topic of Jews came up and Saad asked Rogan if he knew how many Jews there are in the world.
“There are seven billion people in the world, I would guess that there would be something in the neighborhood of a billion Jews,” Rogan responded, then amended his answer to “500 million.”
“You’re going to be shocked,” Saad informed Rogan, and said that “there’s something between 13 to 15 million Jews.”
“There’s more than that in New York,” Rogan shot back. “You’re out of your f**king mind.”
Saad was likely in the ballpark with his figure — some sources put the number of Jews at 15.8 million or about .2 percent of the global population, as per the Pew Research Center. Rogan, who endorsed Donald Trump for president in 2024, doesn’t know what he’s f**king talking about.
Rogan and Saad continued the palaver about the disproportionate number of Jewish Nobel laureates, Jewish conversion, etc. They didn’t mention the preponderance of great Jewish songwriters — from Irving Berlin to Bob Dylan — a topic that I’ve belabored over the years in these pages. American popular music wouldn’t amount to much if the Jewish contribution was subtracted.
It’s interesting that many goyim think that there are a billion or more of us on planet Earth. If that were the case, the American Jewish World might have a much larger circulation. And I could be driving around town in a Bentley.
Seriously, we are hearing much lately about the precipitous rise in antisemitism. Historically, antisemites have cast Jews as both wealthy puppet masters manipulating political and economic affairs and as Untermenschen, subhumans, in the parlance of the German Nazi Party. In the latter case, Jews were depicted as vermin to be exterminated. We all know how that ended up.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) issued a report in early May that catalogued antisemitic incidents in 2025, “the third-highest year on record for antisemitic incidents” — however, lower than in 2024 — since the ADL began tracking them in 1979. Readers should keep in mind that critics say that the ADL figures are misleading in that they lump in pro-Palestinian protests into the heap of antisemitic incidents. For example, a protester shouting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — that’s antisemitic, even though no one knows exactly what’s meant by such a statement.
The Hamas attack on communities in the Gaza envelope, Oct. 7, 2023, “fundamentally transformed the landscape of antisemitism in America,” according to the ADL.
In recent years, we have seen attacks on Jews perpetrated by far-right lunatics, including the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh, Oct. 23, 2018, in which a gunman murdered 11 worshippers on Shabbat — the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history. Robert Bowers, the perpetrator of the mass murder, had targeted Tree of Life because one of the constituent congregations in the building had sponsored an event with HIAS, a group that advocates for immigrants.
The “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which ultimately blames Jews for nonwhite immigration into the United States and replacing white voters with brown immigrant voters, has been popularized by figures such as Tucker Carlson and the late Charlie Kirk.
Since Israel launched its devastating attack on Gaza, the nature of antisemitic violence has changed somewhat. Among the attacks on Jews in the Diaspora motivated by anti-Israel sentiment were the May 21, 2025, murders of two Israeli embassy employees near the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Dec. 14, 2025, Bondi Beach attack on a Hanuka celebration in Sydney, Australia, which killed 15 people and wounded around 30 others. There have been other instances of carnage sparked by anger over Israel’s actions against Palestinians.
The ADL breaks down antisemitic incidents between “antisemitic white supremacist propaganda and events” and incidents “related to Israel or Zionism.” The latter category “made up slightly less than half of all incidents in 2025 (2,847 or 45 percent). … By comparison, between 2020 and 2022, only about 10 percent of antisemitic incidents were Israel- or Zionism-related.”
We can conclude that Israel’s actions make Jews in this country unsafe. Or is there another conclusion to be drawn?
In discussions of antisemitism, I have noticed that “Jews” and “Israel” are often conflated. But American Jews are not Israelis; as an American Jew, I have no suasion over the benighted policies of the Israeli government. Over the years since Oct. 7, 2023, I and many Jews have been repulsed by the carnage and destruction wrought by Israel in Gaza, along with the continuing repression and ethnic cleansing on the occupied West Bank, where the IDF works hand in glove with deranged, messianic Jewish settlers.
I have no notable academic credentials, but my viewpoint was reflected in an essay titled “A Hard Tisha B’Av,” by Rabbi Dr. Ismar Schorsch, chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the flagship rabbinic training institution of the Conservative movement. Dr. Schorsch wrote, on July 6, 2025, about the two 24-hour fasts in Judaism, on Yom Kippur and on Tisha B’Av.
“They are meant to be equal, comprising the totality of Judaism as it emerged from Abraham and Moses,” Schorsch wrote. “It is that equality that perpetuated the deep attachment to the land of Israel during its long exile. Our immediate challenge as Jews is to retain that balance, to make sure that Judaism qua religion is not submerged and shredded by the power of the Jewish state. The unremitting violence against helpless Palestinians in Gaza and their wholly innocent coreligionists on the West Bank will saddle Jews with a repulsive religion riddled with hypocrisy and contradictions. The messianism driving the current government of Israel is sadly out of kilter with traditional Judaism — and an utter moral abomination.”
There’s much more to say about the predicament of Judaism vis-à-vis the abhorrent conduct of the Israeli government. I will welcome civil contributions from our readers to an ongoing colloquy.
Mordecai Specktor / editor [at] ajwnews [dot] come
(American Jewish World, June 2026)
