Disclaimer: I'm trying to help GP understand the way they were being seen, and why that worldview might have arisen, not defending/endorsing that worldview.

A bit more than a century back, one branch of my family tree stems from somebody with the surname "Berlin".

Sometime in the vicinity of WW1, their ~dozen children each chose a different spelling variation and changed their names so that they wouldn't be directly associated with that city. Being seen as "German" went out of style.

You can call this some unique type of racism, or you could call it being dumb, or you could call it being... not nuanced. But generalization is a fundamental mode of human thought, and you shouldn't be surprised when something awful happens attributable to a group you happen to be a part of, that some significant fraction of the population generalizes their attitudes as your attitudes. This isn't some defensible ethical position I'm staking out, it's an observation that people were prone to make this ethnic generalization in the first place, and unlike in most cases in a liberal democracy, every authority figure in their lives have EMBRACED the generalization as a direct equivalence, at the request of the foreign ethnostate. Netanyahu wants to SPEND DOWN any social capital that the term "Antisemitism" has accrued, for short-term political gain, and both US political parties and media ecosystems have complied with this plan. If this causes harm abroad to non-Israeli Jews, Netanyahu only benefits because it drives Jewish refugees to seek Right of Return to the self-proclaimed Jewish ethnostate and its strongman leader who will provide you security.

J-Street and similar groups need to be out there on the streets, frankly, not just as a normative moral stance, but to protect themselves from Israel's blowback.

October 7th was many things, but the narrative these particular people focused on was of a prison break, by a prison gang, who was imprisoned by act of military conquest in a concentration camp, which has been periodically bombed and starved for as long as they've been alive. Israel's ruling coalition had grown increasingly right wing, incorporating people who were actively discussing a final annexation of this land and expulsion/extirpation of its people. It has also accelerated "Settlement" activity on Palestinian land. These acts drew harsh condemnation from the rest of the world... but not the US. The US has bent over backwards to support Israel despite any ideals it might have; We have sacrificed relationships with other nations and given away diplomatic priorities to extort them to support Israel. It's done so because Israel has corrupted the US legislature in a top-down fashion, going back to the 60's, using a combination of Cold War logic, captive military-industrial ties, espionage (Among the most salacious examples, Epstein/Maxwell), racism, evangelical rapture, and cold hard... uhh... lobbying. They dumped a hundred million dollars on our political establishment's primary campaign system this past election to secure their consent, and we are told growing up that this isn't something a foreign state actor would ever be allowed to do.

In the _days_ after October 7th, before the bombing started, those of us with a lot of exposure to media were watching nonstop war propaganda about things like hundreds of babies being beheaded, much of it in an Israeli accent; There was talk of the immediate urgent need to Solve the Hamas Problem by any means necessary. And we've watched this happen with Iraq/Afghanistan after 9/11 - we've seen these characters say these things before, played by an earlier generation but making the same "mistakes" to appeal to the same urges. But Iraq & Afghanistan are not one of the most densely populated cities on Earth, which was on the verge of starving in the best of times.

We were told growing up that "dual loyalty" was some kind of warped Nazi idea, while it was marketed to impressionable young American Jews by Israel as an ideal in all-expenses-paid Birthright tours. My largely apolitical friend in high school with an American sports scholarship staring him in the face ended up doing his IDF term of service in the Second Intifada instead because that was just what was expected of him in his family, and because of how Israel treats dual citizenship & Return. I don't think we should be surprised if some people just choose to believe what Israel says about Jews, and conclude that they should be generically opposed to Jews. It takes _effort_ to understand perspectives and _exposure_ to Jews that aren't ethnonationalists, to avoid these sorts of conclusions.

Your attitude of tolerance is admirable.

If you queried a hundred random people who knew this same Russian and were similarly opposed to his politics, do you believe that one hundred of them would share your perspective? Or would a handful give that guy dirty looks at the bar because they were not in the exact same headspace you are in?

I struggle with comparisons because I'm trying to illustrate for you what those people are seeing when they spontaneously start acting that way that is different from what you're seeing. It's difficult to find any comparable situation as lopsided as Israel's relationship with Palestine, and the almost inscrutable international response to that relationship. Liberal tolerance ethics takes deliberate effort (generalization is a natural cognitive bias), and all of the people who would typically provide guidance on normative ideals suddenly took on the unprecedented position that we should exterminate a couple million people in what is effectively a concentration camp because of a violent outburst against the people who put them there, that this was Good and Righteous Justice, that anybody who didn't want to exterminate them were dangerous fringe actors. People who rejected this propaganda storm found themselves ideologically adrift, latching on to whatever floats.