Making Sense of the Fight Against Antisemitism

In the midst of false allegations of antisemitism we are also seeing a slew of real antisemitic incidents. How are we to parse these out, and how can we build a real movement to confront it?

As Jews around the country were ramping up for a rather fraught 2023 Hanukkah season, those in Williamsburg, Virginia were notified of a sudden and unexpected cancellation: the Second Sundays Art and Music Festival shuttered their December 10th candle lighting celebration. The festival’s founder, Shirley Vermillion, said that it would be “inappropriate” given Israel’s unprecedented slaughter in Gaza– which by this point has claimed nearly 20,000 Palestinian lives– and that allowing this Jewish religious ceremony to take place at their event would read as “siding with one group over the other.” The logic of Vermillion’s decision is rather opaque: it assumes Judaism and Israel are one and the same, and assigns responsibility for Israel’s actions to Jews at large and, by association, Jewish religious expression as well.

The decision was roundly condemned as antisemitic, and rightly so. And, sadly, it has been far from the only antisemitic incident to make headlines in the two months since October 7th. We have seen a string of antisemitic attacks, from vandalism of Jewish religious and cultural sites to threats against Jewish students and even violent assaults. But when decrying this startling rise, organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) do not speak only of what writer Keith Kahn-Harris has called “consensus antisemitism,” the kind of incidents most people can agree are unambiguously antisemitic. Nor do they take care to distinguish these clear anti-Jewish acts from principled criticism of Israel, or parse with nuance the often ambiguous and context-specific cases that fall in between. Instead, pro-Israel organizations, politicians and media leaders are smearing the entirety of the growing protest movement against Israel’s horrific violence in Gaza: a movement which challenges the seventy-five year history of Palestinian dispossession that has led to this cataclysmic moment. 

As Israeli bombs and troops continue to pummel Gaza and settler and soldier violence rips through the West Bank, millions of people have taken the streets around the world, demanding an end to the violence and a future without displacement and occupation. Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) are among the leaders of this movement in the U.S., holding historic building occupations in New York City and Washington D.C. and hundreds of major rallies, marches, and blockades around the country. In response, pro-Israel groups have singled out these movement organizations and gone after their members: student activists have lost job offers and faced doxxing, while JVP and SJP campus chapters have been banned and threatened with reprisal for providing “material support” for terrorism, a groundless charge that carries the threat of severe state repression and curtailment of speech rights.

In this McCarthyite climate, Congress has rallied to pass a resolution that "clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” once and for all. Activist slogans like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are misportrayed as genocidal anti-Jewish aggression in congressional hearings, leading to the resignation of an Ivy League president. Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), tweeted that Jewish anti-Zionists were “hate groups'' and the "photo inverse of white supremacists," while Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lior Haiat, railed against Amnesty International as simply "an antisemitic organization that is biased against Israel" after the human rights group reported “serious violations of international law, including war crimes'' from both parties in the escalating conflagration. The ADL has reported a staggering 337% increase in antisemitic incidents, but the organization’s methodology has  also been called into question: it has mapped many ceasefire rallies, including some led by Jewish groups, alongside its tally of antisemitic incidents, and labeled some rallies as antisemitic, leading to a fuzzy picture of the actual threat. 

Whether it’s those fearful to keep a mezuzah on their doorpost, or those facing retaliation for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza, the issue of antisemitism is front and center on everyone’s mind. But without a clear sense of what the word even means, or what could be done about it, it becomes nearly impossible to parse out what is happening. Did a Palestine solidarity demonstration in Philadelphia target a local Israeli-owned restaurant because organizers had collapsed any distinction between Israel and world Jewry— which would be antisemitic—or because the Israeli owner had recently raised funds for an Israeli medical relief organization that had provided support to the Israeli army, and fired two staffers for wearing pro-Palestine pins at work? When some activists cheered Hamas’s October 7th attack- minimizing or excusing the horrific murder of Israeli civilians in the process- was this due to animus against Israelis as Jews, the ‘world’s oldest hatred’ rearing its ugly head? Or should it rather be understood primarily as a callous,  maximalist decolonial posture? Can one feed into the other and, if so, how should we respond? 

Despite a massive infrastructure of “anti-antisemitism” organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, and various task forces and governmental positions like the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, our public discourse reveals little capacity to explore these and other nuanced questions with the political depth they require. Far from it, much of the mainstream discourse on rising antisemitism, in moments like this, has a transparently political effect: it ends up distracting attention from Israel’s brutality in Gaza, while misportraying protest movements challenging this brutality as brimming with Jew-hatred. Even more troubling, by framing largely Arab and Muslim protesters as terroristic and beyond the pale, these narratives help foment the precipitous rise in Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian bigotry that has also gripped the US since October 7th. Muslim and Arab folks have been shot and murdered, harassed and attacked on the streets, visited by the FBI and slandered by politicians and media figures, with advocacy groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations noting a “staggering” spike in bias complaints.

The equation, in the public imagination, of Palestine solidarity protest with antisemitism is a predictable result of the Israel advocacy movement’s politically opportunistic and disastrous campaign, over the past fifty years, to promote what groups like the ADL have often called the “New Antisemitism” thesis: a formulation which suggests that opposition to Israel stems not from reasoned critique of the state’s own behavior but because Israel is conceived, in the antisemitic public imagination, as an embodiment of “the Jew”, and so widespread condemnation of Israel is, in fact, thinly-veiled antisemitism. Over the last decade, Israel advocates have weaponized the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) definition of antisemitism— which prioritizes anti-Zionism as the centerpiece of modern antisemitism– into binding policy in organizations, universities, and governments around the world. Ironically, many of these same political leaders who were grilling university presidents about campus antisemitism were themselves innovators in bringing conspiracy theories into Congress, particularly the antisemitic “white genocide” conspiracy theory that suggests a covert group of “elites” is engineering non-white immigration to replace working-class whites. Indeed, the antisemitic Right is positioning itself as the stalwart protector of Jewish safety with one hand, while fomenting antisemitism alongside Islamophobia, anti-Blackness and other forms of bigotry with the other.

To begin to unravel this tragic and deadly entanglement we must establish some baseline clarity of what social force we are talking about. Antisemitism is a modern conspiracy theory that sees Jews as a uniquely powerful, malevolent, and duplicitous conniving cabal— one which controls modern society and seeks the downfall of noble, everyday working people. Antisemitism emerged specifically from Christian Europe: both from the “supersessionism” of Christianity as it sought to explain how Christians replaced Jews as God’s “chosen,” as well as the economic conditions of Europe that forced many Jews into intermediary roles between the peasantry and the powerful. These ideas secularized as modernity transformed Europe, placing the responsibility for emerging capitalism and modern social alienation on Jews in the minds of many. 

Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory meant to divert the anger of the oppressed away from those responsible for their oppression, and onto a false mirage instead. The Right’s populism is entirely based on misdirecting the rage of portions of the working class, and fomenting fear among white Christian men and other groups terrified of losing what little privileges they can maintain amidst the wreckage of our fast-decaying social order. As the crisis of neoliberalism accelerates, the political center continues to collapse, and the Right seeks increasingly novel and desperate ways to effectively channel the mass, multi-layered anger that boils to the surface amidst widespread cynicism, anxiety and despair. To do this, they need a conspiracy narrative, and antisemitism is one particularly popular folk narrative that has driven populist politics since the emergence of modern capitalism. Modern antisemitism is deeply connected to anti-Blackness, anti-immigrant xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, Islamophobia and other systems of oppression in our crisis-ridden society– making it more important than ever for social movements to understand and, ultimately, defeat it.

Over the past decade the far-right has become a globally ascendant force, leading to the dramatic growth of nationalist and populist parties around the world and the revival of explicit white nationalism across the social movement landscape. These fascist activists have shifted the overton window of acceptable discourse, and not only have they returned explicit racism and queerphobia to the table: they have also made “naming the Jew” an increasingly familiar and tolerated enterprise. The tacit “Judeo-Christian” alliance, and the reliance on whiteness that Jewish establishment organizations have long believed keeps American Jews safe is fraying at the edges— even while from some angles it appears stronger than ever—and a new generation of Jewish activists are seeing that the dual safety-nets of liberal centrism and Israeli nationalism are not providing our people with any kind of dependable safety. 

Antisemitism is a constitutive force for the ascendant far-right, driving the rise in conspiracy theories and murderous attacks on Jewish communities. But it can also appear wherever folks are fed up and misled by easy answers– including, at times, on the Left. While antisemitism on the Left is never as frequent or severe as the Right claims, it isn’t surprising that it does exist, like any other form of bigotry that persists even inside of movements dedicated to building a more just world. In the early 20th Century, portions of the Left had a more vibrant critique of antisemitism, but organizers also had their missteps, buying into “Jewish banking” conspiracy theories or reproducing the narrative that Jews were too particularistic to participate in universal emancipation. Today, antisemitism on the left can emerge from many sources, including an absence of education and knowledge of Jewish issues; from conspiracy theories about finance capital or global “Zionist power”; or from collapsing the distinction between Israel and world Jewry that it remains essential for us to maintain, even while Israel advocates, including many Jews, show no such scruples. Because the Left has shied away from taking on antisemitism with consistency and integrity, we have ceded that terrain to the Right, which has made accusations of antisemitism one of its primary strategic attacks. But many progressives are now choosing to fight back and to reclaim this issue as our own.

Groups like the anti-occupation IfNotNow and the progressive Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) have made education and organizing against antisemitism a key part of their work, bringing Jews into alignment with other people marginalized by white Christian nationalism. Jewish Palestine solidarity groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Independent Jewish Voices found that when they offered their own definitions of antisemitism, it helped undercut the Right’s attempt to manipulate antisemitism accusations. The joint project Jews Against White Nationalism, serving as another example, was built to parse through the antisemitic implications of the rising far-right and to help educate the Jewish community about its threat and prevalence. Organizations like Outlive Them NYC brought a uniquely Jewish perspective to antifascism, noting the role that antisemitism plays in neo-Nazism and white nationalism and highlighting the stake that Jews have in this fight. More than anything, Jews want to see themselves in the Left’s fight for collective liberation, and that means bringing an analysis of antisemitism into the Left’s broader intersectional vision for human emancipation.

But what is at stake here goes beyond Jewish inclusion, visibility or even safety as immediate goals, vital as these are. Rising white Christian nationalist movements are positioning themselves as leaders in the fight against antisemitism, and valiant protectors of Jews in order to use Jews, and Jewish issues, as a shield and a fig leaf in their incessant march to power. And until the Left understands the key role antisemitism plays in driving the rise of the nationalist Right and upholding all the systems of oppression we struggle against, we won’t be able to build movements big, bold and visionary enough to win our demands, and to get free. We see how these issues are connected, how antisemitic conspiracy theories are used to prop up anti-Black racism, to attack trans healthcare and LGBTQ communities, to demonize immigrants, undermine demands for economic justice, and to confuse the public as to where the persistent harm and deprivation they face is coming from. Antisemitism remains an essential tool for the ruling elite, protecting the powerful and maintaining the structures of oppression that hold all communities back, and so it is in everyone’s interest to confront it. None of us can become free until all of us are.

This was the thinking that started us on this project, which led to our upcoming book, a series of trainings, and this newsletter. Here we will be sharing commentary on current events, theoretical analysis, historical deep-dives, and front-line interviews from progressive organizers, positioning the fight against antisemitism in the broader struggle for collective liberation. We will keep you updated as we move into both digital and in-person events, conversations with organizers and faith leaders, and collaborations with organizations around the country to help bring the fight against antisemitism back into radical movements for social change. Along with our forthcoming book, Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, we hope this newsletter can be one among many useful resources, helping to navigate the uncharted waters of our troubled times.