Antisemitism - yes, again
A village mob with pitchforks
A village mob with pitchforks
It’s like an avalanche of words and slogans: “occupier,” “colonizer,” “genocide,” “apartheid;” “it’s not antisemitism to criticize Israel;” “I have a Jewish friend;” “but all the women and children;” “Globalize the Intifada!;” “AIPAC,” “free speech, “settler colonialist,” “children of Satan,” “Netanyahu,” “war crime,” “not loyal to America;” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!,” “international law,” “starvation,” “the Jewish lobby,” “Jewish money;” “they killed Jesus;” “the ‘Holocaust’ is Zionist propaganda,” “Zionism is racism;” “organized Jewry” (More and More and More) Defining antisemitism
The end result of this avalanche of words is the dehumanization of Jews and the delegitimization of Israel.
The dynamics of a mob involve a loss of self-awareness and personal responsibility as individuals become absorbed by the group and emotions and behaviors rapidly spread through the group. A collective mindset forms and individuals are influenced by a herd mentality.
…[A]ll effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out. Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf[1]
And a statement on how antisemitism works, “These race libels—defamatory accusations leveled at Jews or other minorities—are not simply lies or misinformation. They are social technologies: They spread like wildfire, ignite moral certainty, and reshape institutions in their path. Their power does not come from proof, but from repetition, outrage, and a totalizing logic that shuts out contradiction.” - Mamdani and the New Racism
“If the presence of left-wing antisemitism is explained in part by identity politics, what explains the return of its cruder right-wing cousin…?”[2] That question was posed by Victor Davis Hanson, a conservative commentator, and a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution. He’s among the right-wing thinkers concerned about the emergence of antisemitism in significant conservative circles. Another voice is Republican senator Ted Cruz: “Ten years ago, antisemitism began rising on the left, and too many Democrats did nothing. …I think they probably viewed it as a fringe position that was not a danger, and it has all but entirely consumed today’s Democratic Party. …The same thing is happening on the right, and if we do not act to combat it, we risk losing the Republican Party.”[3]
The turmoil in conservative circles can be seen in the current fight within the Heritage Foundation. “An antisemitism task force [the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism or “NTFCA”] affiliated with the Heritage Foundation announced on Thursday that it would cut ties with the conservative institution, as the prominent think tank has come under fire for its defense of Tucker Carlson after the firebrand podcaster hosted neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes for a friendly interview. …The NTFCA will also now expand our work to fight the rising scourge of antisemitism on the Right, beyond our previous work combating the pro-Hamas movement on the Left.”[4]
And this, from The New York Times: “The task force’s departure underscored a deepening rift on the right between conservatives who have long embraced Israel and supporters of President Trump who oppose U.S. support for the country, seeing it as anathema to his ‘America First’ ideology. The tension is playing out at the Heritage Foundation, which has worked to meld its traditional conservatism with populist elements of Mr. Trump’s agenda.”[5]
Revisiting antisemitism
So, we’re going to revisit the issue of antisemitism specifically around both these right-wing and left-wing expressions. We have looked at the issue before in Antisemitism is like crabgrass, Antisemitism is a shape-shifting virus and other articles. Some might ask why we focus on antisemitism and don’t write about the various types of religious hatred out there, or hate crimes in general. One reason is that the FBI consistently reports that a significant majority of all religion-based hate crimes target Jews. In the last year alone, the FBI’s interactive data tool shows that anti-Jewish crimes were the second largest category of all hate crimes, representing about 13.5% of the 10,733[6] crimes reported. (Anti-Black crimes come in at #1, with about 26% of the total hate crime count in the last year.[7]) When you look at religiously-motivated crimes only, anti-Jewish crimes are the most prevalent, and represent about 62% of the 2,338 crimes reported.[8] Given that Jews are currently about 2.4% of the US population (and about 0.2% of the world’s population), something is clearly out of whack.
These statistics are borne out in the Jewish community. A majority of Jewish citizens express worry for their own safety and that of their families. Over half (56%) of American Jews changed their behavior in 2024 due to fear of antisemitism, with 40% avoiding wearing or displaying items that might identify them as Jewish.[9]
A more personally significant reason we write about this is that we don’t hear many Episcopalians focused on it, though they are deeply – and appropriately – concerned with other forms of hate, and with the subjective sense of persecution by members of many other groups. What we notice is that we often see church statements, church reporting, and comments from individual church members, that strike us as profoundly antisemitic and that contribute to the climate that may normalize hatred and suspicion of Jews. We find that painful, bewildering, and sometimes frightening. We’re also curious about it because the contrast between the Episcopal Church’s approach to antisemitism and its approach to other “isms” seems so clear to us behaviorally, but not philosophically, emotionally, or logically. Our hunch is that there are a number of reasons for the disconnect we perceive, and we hope that we can be helpful in illuminating a blind spot within our own tribe.
Victor Davis Hanson’s article, quoted earlier, offers a starting point. “Right-wing antisemitic remnants were thought to be confined to a few fringe groups online or paltry, ossified Klan-like cabals. Given the history of European pogroms, the nightmare of the Third Reich, and its unapologetic racial and religious hatred, right-wing antisemitism had always been a more easily identifiable, cruder variant than the insidious and now more frequent left-wing antisemitism. The latter, especially commonplace on campuses and entrenched within the base of the Democratic Party, has cloaked itself in idealistic social justice causes. It is embedded into diversity, equity, and inclusion identity politics, and ‘humanitarian’ outrage over supposed Israeli ‘settler-colonialism,’ ‘genocide,’ and ‘apartheid. After all, who in 2025 could not be against ‘settler-colonialists’ who practice “genocide?” We’ll unpack some of these issues as we go on.
On the right
On the right, we see what many understand to be traditional antisemitism. For example, it’s common to see suggestions that the Jews control large segments of society. Some go so far as to say that President Trump is controlled by his Jewish supporters. There are vague allusions to globalism. They also confuse themselves. For example, the isolationist wing was furious when the United States bombed the Iranian and nuclear facilities, and that anger morphed into an increase in hostility to Jews in general, with some comments along the lines of, “so maybe the Jews do control the President.”
Hanson writes of an earlier expression of antisemitism rising from the America First movement prior to World War II, when there were accusations that President Roosevelt was taking the country into war against Nazi Germany because of Jewish advisors and donors. Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins’s had been aiding Jewish immigrants. She was accused of hiding a secret identity and of actually being a Jewish immigrant. Perkins issued a statement: “If I were a Jewess I would make no secret of it. On the contrary, I would be proud to acknowledge it.”
Now, apparently, some on the right assert that US support for Israel is because of illegitimate Jewish influence. Hanson sees several forces in the growth of right wing antisemitism including: (1) an alignment of the present-day efforts with the America First efforts of Father Charles Coughlin (the hugely influential, antisemitic radio broadcaster in the 1930s) and Charles Lindbergh that suggested powerful American Jews were trying to drag the United States into the Second World War. Anti-AIPAC is among the new ways to attack American Jews without mentioning antisemitism or antizionism. It’s an obsession with an American based lobby while ignoring larger lobbies from hostile foreign governments. The Episcopal Church has a lobby in DC but few use that as an excuse to hate Episcopalians; (2) in analyzing what had been happening on American campuses some on the right saw people on the left getting away with such acts as chasing Jews into libraries and restricting their movement on college campuses, and some assumed they could follow suit and also get away with it; and (3) that the popular oppressed-oppressor binary would offer antisemites on the right the same cover it provided the left. (More on that binary below.)
In Tablet, David Reaboi wrote, “The new antisemitism speaks the language of patriotism, faith, and anti-elitism; it arrives disguised as cultural critique. It’s a theory of how the world works. To an audience conditioned by cable news, it sounds insightful rather than bigoted. Inside the ballroom, there was no framework for understanding this shift. Politicians could condemn hate, but they couldn’t recognize it when it wore their party’s colors.”
In The New York Times’ Bret Stephens drew a comparisons between the antisemitism within the GOP to past iterations of right wing antisemitic thought. He offered the idea of how some views can be “antisemitic-adjacent.” “The MAGA movement is not antisemitic. But many of its core convictions are antisemitic-adjacent — that is, they have a habit of leading in an anti-Jewish direction. Opposition to free trade, or to a welcoming immigration policy, or to international law that crimps national sovereignty, are legitimate, if often wrongheaded, political positions. But they have a way of melding with hoary stereotypes about ‘the International Jew; working across borders against the interests of so-called real Americans.”
Social media and outrage politics has increased the volume and reach of extremism. It has also provided many opportunities for those nursing grievances to easily band together. Most distressingly, for a meaningful percentage of conservative (including younger people) it has become acceptable to explicitly and publicly dehumanize Jews.
On the left
If we take a look at Soviet practices, we can see a precursor of today’s left-wing antisemitism. The law in the Soviet Union said that expressions of antisemitism were prohibited. In practice, however, discrimination occurred nonetheless through use of euphemisms such as “anti-Zionism,” or in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, the “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign.[10] After the Six-Day War (1967) Soviet propaganda escalated an “anti-Zionist” campaign using traditional antisemitic stereotypes that included portraying Jews as part of an “international Zionist cabal” or an “imperialist” threat to the state. The more current expression that “we are on the right-side-of-history” has philosophical roots in the historical determinism of Hegel and Marx. It aligns with the Marxist view of history as an unavoidable moral or social evolution. In many ways, this view is consistent with the left’s history of wanting to see itself as morally pure. That tendency can lead to a kind of absolutism that may fail to grapple with practical complexities or to accept the need for trade-offs between bad and less-bad choices.
Antisemitic rhetoric on the left has been bolstered by a common human tendency to project one’s own experience onto others. America’s history of slavery, followed by years of legalized segregation and oppression of Black people continues to reverberate in the US today. The struggle against racism has been a major part of the left’s contribution to social progress. And for many Christian churches, including the Episcopal Church, that fight has been central to Christian identity.
Many in the West translate their understanding of white supremacy and Black oppression onto the Israeli-Palestine conflict, assuming inaccurately that Israel is full of “white” people who want to racially oppress the Palestinian Arabs, who are coded as “Black” or “Brown” in this narrative. This of course ignores, among other things, the fact that about half of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi Jews, whose ancestors were forced to emigrate to Israel from Jewish communities in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Many of these supposedly “white” people have black or brown skin. It is probably much more accurate to say that the Israeli—Palestinian conflict is rooted in religious disagreement that in turn fuels claims about who gets to possess the land and whether it’s acceptable for Jews to have control of any of it. One of the problems with that, though, is that for many on the far left, religion is not something they can take seriously. Race is serious business, but religion can mostly be dismissed.
The other key element of left-wing antisemitism is a tendency to view almost everything through the lens of oppressor/oppressed. This lens is central to much of the left’s analysis of race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. When applied to Israel and Palestine, Israel becomes the “oppressor” because they are understood as “white,” and because they have been successful in extraordinarily trying circumstances. Despite the country’s strongly socialist roots and many years of economic privation, they eventually emerged as a financial success story. Despite being surrounded and outnumbered by hostile countries, they have been successful militarily, warding off constant threats, including years of near-daily missile attacks from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and even from Iran itself. Yet the Palestinians are, by definition, the “oppressed” because they have suffered at the hands of the Israeli “oppressor.” This kind of approach may be what we see in the routine statements of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship Palestine Justice Network which has now come into conflict with the Presiding Bishop.
This is a pretty flat and reductive analysis, yet it lends itself to demonization of Israel and, through the “anti-Zionist” shorthand, to Jews more generally—especially those Jews in the diaspora who maintain a religious and cultural connection to Israel. There are, of course, real things to criticize about the relationship between Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, and the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Israelis themselves—including the 20% of Arab Israeli citizens—have significant disagreements about the right course of action.
What virtually all Israeli Jews are clear about is that they are not willing to be killed or conquered because they don’t take their own security and their own defense seriously enough. Those in the West who are most concerned with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians are generally not remotely sympathetic to the existential questions that Israelis face. Sometimes they simply don’t understand the issues, sometimes they have unrealistic hopes, and sometimes they think the existential question is best served by eliminating the only Jewish state and replacing it with another Muslim one. All of this has obvious policy consequences for those who want a voice in improving the status of Palestinians. Israel will simply not pay attention to “solutions” that don’t realistically address their security concerns.
And, as with the right, all of this has been amplified by social media, weakened institutions and human connection, and the reduction of complex issues to slogans and sound bites.
How do they get away with it?
Fear
In the Free Press interview with Senator Cruz the reporter asked the Senator “how many of his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill share his feelings about right-wing antisemitism—at least, behind closed doors.” Cruz said, “The vast majority—almost everyone.” Then he addressed why so many remain silent, what are they afraid of? Cruz said, “People with large megaphones who can speak to millions of people.”
Not having to pay a price
A recent Dispatch article by Jonah Goldberg[11] looked at the game on the right and the left of “speaking truth to power.” He starts out by going after the left in their comparison of George W. Bush to Hitler:
The much more important point is this: If Bush was Hitler—or even Hitlerish—very few of these people would say boo about him, because they’d be terrified. It was precisely because Bush was not anything like Hitler that people could criticize him without paying any price at all. Martin Niemöller was sent to a concentration camp. Naomi Wolf got a book contract, Michael Moore got another movie deal, etc.
He takes note of the fact that there’s a significant effort, especially by the left, but increasingly by the right, to attack Israel while strenuously objecting to being labeled as antisemitic:
It’s amazing how often we hear people whine that any criticism of Israel is labeled “antisemitic.” “You can’t say” this or that about the perfidious bagel-snarfers and their illegitimate country or you’ll be “canceled.” And yet, most of what one reads and hears about such matters in the mainstream media, from the U.N., from podcast bros, is highly critical of Israel. Whole courses are taught in elite schools about Israel as a “settler-colonial” outpost of the American empire or some such. Pat Buchanan made such claims into a lucrative cottage industry.
He then got to his main point and focused on the right.
Goldberg sees the roots of much modern-day right-wing demonization of Israel in Patrick Buchanan’s 1990s antisemitism. Some of Buchanan’s statements include,[12] “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory,” and “Jews would never fight America’s wars, unlike kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown,” and “Israel and its fifth column.” The same themes are picked up in the work of Tucker Carlson as he echoes Buchanan’s desire for an investigation of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and with wanting the group to be registered as a “foreign lobby.”
It’s also in Candace Owens’ efforts.[13] “Our foreign policy is dictated by Israel. Trump will continue to do as he is told by Netanyahu. If you want to know what America will do, spare yourself the fake White House press briefings and start listening to Bibi. We are a colony of Israel. Your politicians are bought and paid for.” Goldberg then explains how this new set of right-wing antisemites has recently made an effort to avoid direct criticism of Trump’s support for Israel.
According to Goldberg, the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts condemns antisemitism while affirming Buchanan because he is “convinced that the right desperately needs the energy and passion of those who heroically speak truth to power against the strawman of organized Jewry but lack the courage to pick a fight with the President of the United States. Because that might actually require paying a real price.” He sees the same pattern with Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and adds, “To be fair, they have offered moderate criticisms. In June, Tucker whined that the attack on Iran made Trump “complicit in an act of war”—which was kind of true. But then he called Trump to apologize. How much credit you get for speaking to power when followed up with an apology I’ll leave to others.”
Related background - Today’s Far-Right Antisemitic Influencers Draw Inspiration From Pat Buchanan.
Moral confusion
The left wing of the Democratic Party has been relentless in its effort to claim the high moral ground of claiming they are against antisemitism while engaging in acts that feed the delegitimization of Israel, the Jewish homeland. Members of the left contribute to hostility toward Jews in the diaspora by consistently sympathizing with, supporting, or excusing the “anti-Zionists.” Why does most of the outspoken resistance to antisemitism and support for Israel among Democrats come from Jewish Democratic politicians, while others appear vague and confused? Maybe it’s the traditional left-wing problem of getting caught in word games to obscure what’s really going on. Notable exceptions are New York Representative Ritchie Torres and Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman.
The logic of anti-imperialism leads many on the left to support or indulge nations and groups that are totalitarian and given to terrorist activity, yet somehow categorized as “oppressed” and thereby deprived of agency and excused of all responsibility This is done even when those nations and groups have shown themselves to be racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. This logic leads to the denial of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish homeland, that the Jews have the right to national self-determination. This is a right that other ethnic groups are granted as a matter of course. And yet, when was the last time you heard someone truly exercised by the terrible religious ethnostate of Greece? Or Pakistan?
A helpful framework for thinking about anti-Israel statements is to evaluate them in light of the “three Ds”—double-standards, demonization, and delegitimization. As just one example, how often do you feel disappointed or angry about the actions of the United States? We can certainly cite numerous instances of bad behavior by our own country. We can do the same thing with France, and Spain, and Russia, and Ukraine, and yes, Israel.
And yet, we don’t assume that these other countries somehow shouldn’t exist because of their imperfections. Of course, a few Americans—especially on the left—advocate for our own country’s destruction, but that’s not a remotely mainstream position. When it comes to Israel, though, it’s very common to respond to bad Israeli actions by treating the state as illegitimate because it is imperfect. This ideological trick has characteristics of all the three Ds – it represents a double-standard, in that we do this with no other country; it demonizes Israel by treating it as uniquely evil; and we delegitimize when we jump to questioning the nation’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
Minimizing the problem
On the left and the right many well-intended people do not understand the nature or size of the problem. One reason is that the antisemites of the right and the left are skilled at blowing smoke. Apparently reasonable arguments are made that serve the purpose of distracting attention from the explicit or implicit hatred of the Jews. So, let’s talk about imperialism instead. Let’s focus our attention on Jews who are wealthy or powerful in institutions. It’s all flak thrown into the air to distract us. It’s a way of avoiding responsibility.
In his interview with Senator Cruz, Peter Savodnik wrote. “How had the United States, in the third decade of the 21st century, become so vulnerable to the antisemites and snake-oil salesmen? How had this country that had, not so long ago, liberated Europe from the fascists, faced down Soviet totalitarianism, and helped spread democracy and capitalism across the globe, forgotten what it was supposed to be? Become so unsure of itself, so easily distracted—so unserious? Cruz added a factor in addition to the “charismatic and really effective communicators.” He said. “isolationism has always been a powerful strain in American politics. You go back to Father Coughlin…there is a very good chance America would not have gotten involved in World War II were it not for Pearl Harbor.”
This exchange points to the fact that we have, as a group, very short memories. Those who lived through World War II have largely died out. And those who most viscerally understand its consequences are in their 70s, and 80s. Jews have a stronger collective memory and as a group they remain more likely to recognize antisemitism and its consequences.
An unholy convergence
In a short 2009 working paper,[14] Canada’s former attorney general Irwin Cotler describes historical and modern manifestations of antisemitism, and offers a bit of clear thinking:
What is intrinsic to each form of antisemitism—and common to both—is discrimination. All that has happened is that it has moved from discrimination against Jews as individuals in their respective host societies—a classical Antisemitism for which there are indices of measurement [e.g., discrimination against Jews in education, housing or employment]; to discrimination against Jews as a People—and Israel as the collective Jew among the nations—a new antisemitism for which one has yet to develop indices of measurement.
In a longer 2002 article[15] that seems quite current, Cotler expands on these issues:
…Israel is the only state in the world today, and the Jews the only people in the world today, that are the object of a standing set of threats from governmental, religious, and terrorist bodies seeking their destruction. And what is most disturbing is the silence, the indifference, and sometimes even the indulgence, in the face of such genocidal anti-Semitism…
This involves the discrimination against, or denial of, the legitimacy, if not the existence, of the State of Israel. Indeed, it may be regarded as the contemporary analogue of classical or theological anti-Semitism, which discriminated against and denied the very legitimacy of the Jewish religion. In other words, if classical anti-Semitism was anchored in discrimination against the Jewish religion, the new anti-Jewishness is anchored in discrimination against the Jews as a people—and the embodiment of that expression in Israel. In each instance the essence of anti-Semitism is the same—an assault upon whatever is the core of Jewish self-definition at any moment in time—be it the Jewish religion at the time of classical anti-Semitism, or the State of Israel as the “civil religion” of the Jewish people under this new anti-Jewishness.
In his “Wanderland” newsletter, Dispatch writer Kevin D. Williamson gets at the same nasty convergence of the left and the right:
Anti-black racism plays as down-market, as “redneckery” of the lowest kind. Antisemitism, on the other hand, can be presented as sophisticated, and it has bipartisan appeal: There are antisemites among the Marxists and among the progressives, from the Ivy League campuses to the American Friends Service Committee. There are antisemitic appeals to be made to Catholics (Caeca et Obdurata Hebraeorum perfidia!) and to evangelicals, to secularists (who chafe at the notion of a state with a religious identity), to modernists who recoil from the traditional dress and large families characteristic of some Orthodox communities and to antimodernists who see the Jews as indigestible gristle preventing their daffy dream of an “integrated” neo-medieval social order. Antisemitism is infinitely plastic. And from the point of view of the social media entrepreneur, antisemitism is a surefire source of engagement.[16]
Antisemitism is a poison. We are committed to the view that this is not a partisan issue, and that rejection of antisemitism is a Christian obligation. Full stop. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly acceptable in public discourse, regardless of political party. We invite you to join us in rejecting antisemitism wherever you find it. And we invite you to engage the important political and social questions in front of us, including the best ways to alleviate human suffering, and encourage human flourishing, with the seriousness, humility, and prayerfulness those enormous challenges require.
This abides,
Sister Michelle, OA & Brother Robert, OA
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