While Chuck Schumer accuses Trump of antisemitisim, he himself undermines Jewish safety

Every time Chuck Schumer, the top-ranking Jewish politician in America, gives a talk to a Jewish audience, he likes to share the following corny observation: My name, he says with a soft smile, means “guardian” in Hebrew, and my job is to protect the Jews.

As anyone with a second-grade Hebrew education will tell you, the quip is grammatically ridiculous: a guardian is a shomer; Schumer means fennel.

But even those of us who could forgive the gentleman from New York this bit of fakery should have nothing but contempt for his latest betrayal of the Jewish people: As The Post and others reported this week, Schumer was chatting privately with Minouche Shafik, Columbia University’s former and disgraced president, advising her to do absolutely nothing about the jaunty jihadists waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags on campus and assaulting their Jewish peers.

We know this because the House Committee on Education and the Workforce just issued a 300-page report, the fruit of more than a year of interviews and more than 400,000 pages of internal documents reviewed, including the private messages of executives at Harvard, Columbia, Yale and the rest of our elite universities.

One of the most damning bits of correspondence comes from Shafik, who resigned her post in August. Writing to the co-chairs of her school’s board of trustees, David Greenwald and Claire Shipman, Shafik reported that she had spoken with Schumer and that the senator had some reassuring words of advice.

Schumer, Shafik relayed, “was very positive and supportive (and quite the storyteller) . . . He also said universities [sic] political problems are really only among Republicans. His staffer was of the view that best strategy is to keep heads down!”

A Schumer spokesman called the report “flat-out false” and “hearsay.” And you may choose to believe that a university president, communicating in private, would make up, out of whole cloth, a statement and attribute it to a sitting senator.

But, judging by the very, very, very little Chuck Schumer has done to crack down on the Hamasniks on the quad, it makes much more sense that, as a Jewish Columbia student had his head smashed in by a terror enthusiast, Schumer told the adults in charge to keep their heads down because such attacks only upset Republicans.

I never thought I’d say this, but here goes: I agree with Chuck Schumer.

These days, only Republicans care when Jews are assaulted.

When a Jewish man was shot in Chicago last month on his way to synagogue, for example, the city’s progressive mayor released a statement that did not once mention the attacker’s motive. His police force similarly obfuscated, even though the shooter, an illegal migrant from Mauritania, was caught on video shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

In New York, a Jewish man was slashed in the face in broad daylight.

In Oakland, a father wearing a hat with a Star of David on it and his 5-year-old boy were accosted and thrown out of a café whose owner refuses to serve Jews.

The list goes on.

And while Republican lawmakers have convened scores of hearings on antisemitism — we owe the recent crop of revelations to the brave moral leadership of Reps. Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx — Schumer did . . . absolutely nothing.

Or, more accurately, he did something that’s somehow even worse than nothing: According to reports, the senator has done everything in his power not to bring to a vote the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which is sponsored by 14 Democrats in the Senate, including New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand.

Why won’t the Jewish Senate majority leader support a bipartisan bill to fight Jew-hatred at a time when Jew-hatred is rampant, real and dangerous?

Now we know: Because his main interest is not keeping Jews safe but keeping Republicans out of power, and because he knows that the act — which points out, for example, that singling out the world’s only Jewish state for harsh criticism may, you know, be antisemitic — just doesn’t appeal to The Squad and the Democrats’ growing Jew-hating base.

All of this is upsetting enough. But there’s icing yet on this putrid political cake: Chuck Schumer has a new book coming out next spring.

Its title? “Antisemitism in America: A Warning.”

Let me save you $24.99: The most acute warning you need if you truly care about antisemitism in America is realizing that while he repeatedly accuses Donald Trump of anti-Jewish bigotry, America’s leading Jewish Democrat is actively undermining Jewish safety, security and well-being for fun and profit.

Want to fight antisemitism in America? Just do exactly the opposite of whatever Chuck Schumer does.

Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.