Antisemitism is a threat to us all – and to democracy
The history of antisemitism shows it to be devastating and a powerful tool of authoritarians, one we must fight as we struggle to preserve life and demand liberation in Gaza and the West Bank.
***A version of this essay first appeared in and is reprinted here with the permission of the Bucks County Beacon.***
We are living through a disturbing and dangerous rise in antisemitism.
While this represents a direct threat to Jewish communities, it has also been historically tied to discrimination, targeting, and crimes against other racialized groups in the United States. That’s in part because white supremacists in the U.S. have long trafficked in antisemitic conspiracy theories which claim that democratic norms and protections are in fact a secret Jewish plot to destroy white America. Targeting Jews offered a way to explain and justify attacks on a vast array of other groups.
Although these conspiracy theories are absurd lies that aren’t even compatible with white conservatives’ own myths about “the founding” of the U.S., they aren’t meant to be accurate, but to allow white conservatives to wield power.
It is no accident, after all, that the same white reactionaries clamoring for a renewed “Muslim ban” likewise claim that American Jews are orchestrating some “Great Replacement” of white America with [fill-in-the-blank racialized group].
So it should come as no surprise that the ongoing surge in antisemitism coincides with a rise in the targeting of American Muslims. While we often wrongly think of antisemitism and Islamophobia as representing competing, mutually-exclusive claims to rights and protections, the very opposite is true. Both are manifestations of a white supremacist ideology that forms the beating heart of today’s Republican Party.
What Antisemitism Isn’t
First, I know that ethnonationalists—both in Israel and the U.S.—claim that any critique of the Israeli occupation or its crimes against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza amounts to antisemitism. Their thinking is grounded in the belief that states should be ethnically homogenous (they aren’t and never were) and thus that to critique a state is to engage in violence against the ethnic group it allegedly embodies. That use of antisemitism is a racist lie, one with deadly consequences for Jews and non-Jews alike.
The ideology behind this right wing use of the term antisemitism is deadly and dehumanizing—we see it at work right now in the horrifying images coming out of Gaza and in the rising “settler” violence in the West Bank. These horrors offer an important reminder that we shouldn’t let the enemies of human survival and equality define our terms for us. Opposing the occupation and the ongoing genocidal war in Gaza is not antisemitism, but its exact opposite—a rejection of antisemitic lies about the relationship of Jews to Israel and of the racist regime that by law has disenfranchised and subjugated Palestinians for fifty years.
We should not shy away from the term antisemitism just because ethnonationalists intentionally misuse it to support their own projects of oppression. Rather, this misuse of the term illustrates its importance and why it’s our responsibility to use it correctly, grounded in history and in specific examples. Failing to do so only further empowers these bad actors.
So what should we mean when we denounce antisemitism in the U.S. and work to destroy it?
The answer to that question should, as much as possible, be grounded in historical and contemporary examples. This specificity is the very thing that right-wing users of the term hope to prevent and shut down by conflating state violence and Jewishness, an approach that is antisemitic in the full sense of the word. Adopting a more thorough approach by describing what we mean by antisemitism rather than broadly denouncing it as a way to prevent analysis also pays respect by showing the gravity of the term. Antisemitism is dangerous and horrible, we say, and we can show how and why.
Fighting antisemitism requires more than a slogan because, like other racialized and targeted groups, Jews and their friends, neighbors, and communities are people deserving our attention.
Antisemitism
Fighting antisemitism is important because it has long been a powerful tool used by fascists and authoritarians to undermine democracy. In the U.S., that has been especially true beginning in the 20th Century, when Jewish migration inspired vigorous antisemitism alongside anti-Catholic nativism. During the 1920s, this racist movement in the U.S. led to the targeting, harassment, and deportation of Jewish and Eastern European socialists and intellectuals by the federal government. It also helped inspire the racist Immigration Act of 1924 designed to prevent Jewish and Catholic immigration to guarantee that racialized groups could never hold power and that the U.S. would forever remain a white ethnostate.
The Tree of Life shooter espoused an antisemitic version of the “white genocide” conspiracy theory that is among a whole host of antisemitic conspiracy theories promoted by the Republican Party in its “globalist,” “antifa,” and QAnon conspiracies. The basic logic of these racist conspiracy theories is that a shadowy cabal headed by Jews (often George Soros) is behind a plot to destroy “traditional” white America; this is a direct descendant of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic conspiracy that became an important part of Nazi propaganda in the 1930s.
While these conspiracy theories are bogus and absurd — democracy is obviously not a Jewish trick but a struggle towards a better future for all — antisemitic lies take aim at the institutions that ought to create a free and fair society for everyone.
The danger in antisemitic conspiracy theories lies not only in the direct threat they pose to Jewish communities, but also in the way fascists and authoritarians have used them as tools to undermine democracy. The Jim Crow regime gives a decent indication of how these worked in the U.S., with similar mechanisms targeting Black, Asian, and Jewish Americans along with other ethnic groups that varied based on local demographics. These led to the targeting and persecution of Jews in New York, where the police commissioner claimed that they were responsible for half of all crime, charges similar to those levied at Black Americans in the Deep South and Asian Americans in the western U.S.
As a historian who studies white supremacy, its impact on the state, and ways to combat it, it is clear not only that antisemitism harms Jewish communities, which it does, but that it is almost universally tied to larger efforts to remake the body politic. We can look not only at the eugenic ethnostate of Jim Crow as an expression of this principle, but also as one that shows its reach in the ways that it inspired the Nuremberg Laws and “final solution” in Nazi Germany.
And in fact, this point that antisemitism undermines democratic protections more broadly is not lost on Jewish civil rights activists themselves — either historically or in the present — who have been among the most outspoken civil rights activists of the last century.
The Shifting Boundaries of White Supremacy
The nature and meaning of antisemitism is bound up with white supremacy, the dominant ideology governing immigration, citizenship, and the state in the U.S. As my friend Eric Morgenson argued after the Tree of Life massacre in 2018, “America’s racial color line generally put Jews in the ‘white enough’ category.” For Morgenson, the Trump administration and the racist conspiracy theories animating today’s GOP caused a critical rupture between American Jews and whiteness, sparking a rise in antisemitism “during a nationalist presidential administration with little patience for minority rights.”
When white Americans have shifted the historical boundaries of whiteness — and especially when they have embraced overt antisemitism — that has historically led to mass violence against racialized groups.
We saw the relationship between antisemitism and antidemocracy after the rise of the second Klan in a wave of racist hysteria, which inspired lynchings and mass violence events across the U.S., especially targeting Black Americans. It is also clear in the deportations of Jewish activists, the racist 1924 Immigration Act designed to prevent Jewish and Catholic immigration, and especially in the rise of explicit fascism in the 1930s United States.
When we permit antisemitism to rage before us, we invite systems of dehumanization and torment and the demolition or further destruction of rights and systems of governance designed, in hope if not fully in practice, for the protection of all. The rise and normalization of antisemitism by public figures like Elon Musk represents a grave threat to us all. It is one we must recognize and repudiate as an attack on the premise of a society with rights and protections of any kind—an assault on our very survival.
The bombing, starving, and invasion of Gaza and portions of the West Bank by the Israeli state only heightens the urgency of rejecting a binary vision of rights that lies at the heart of antisemitic conspiracy theories. This hollow version of rights asks us to choose just recipients of violence — to embrace as justified attacks on apartments, schools, hospitals, churches, and mosques in Gaza (or to blindly dismiss them as ‘collateral damage’). It also asks for uncritical consent to what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, even the U.S. State Department classifies as an occupation regime that has bound Israelis and Palestinians for more than 50 years. Or, on the other hand, to claim that Jews have a hidden agenda to overwhelm white countries with “hordes of minorities,” the Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory popularized by conservative pundits and mass shooters alike. This is a false choice that can only end in mass death, and in fact already has.
What we must never permit, what we can never allow, is this zero-sum vision of rights that asks us to justify, or even celebrate, the nefarious and grotesque. As the terrible history of antisemitism and white supremacy reveals time and again, the only way forward is together.