Don't Fight Antisemitism; Fight Anti-Westernism
David walks a high-school hallway while his classmates snicker, a Post-it reading Dirty Jew stuck to his backpack, until a taller Black classmate named Bilal peels a small blue square from a pad and presses it over the slur. Do not listen to them, he tells him. I know how it feels. The two walk off together arm in arm.
The ad was the work of the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, part of a fifteen-million-dollar campaign against Jew-hatred funded by Robert Kraft, owner of the Patriots. The ad will not let the boy answer for himself. His safety arrives in another boy’s hand, his composure is coached in another boy’s voice, and the single flicker of agency he shows, the clenched fist, is the exact thing the commercial spends its money to talk him out of. The ad was panned within hours, and by Jews first, as a clichéd tableau of weakness, dated and disconnected from an antisemitism that now runs through screens and marches under the banner of anti-Zionism. Last week, in , wrote that he had “failed utterly.”
He had taught the archive, traced the pattern, warned that a grammar of blame becomes a politics of blood. Antisemitism came back anyway, faster, metabolized by the algorithm, Holocaust denial migrating from the fringe to the feed. Kraft threw money at it and Ferguson threw truth at it, and both were answering a charge no one had made.
The historian Ben-Ami Shillony, emeritus scholar of Japanese history at the Hebrew University, was himself handed the proof. After a dinner, the head of a visiting Japanese delegation gave him a gift, a book they had read to grasp the secret of Israel’s success. It was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the forged Russian handbook of Jewish world-conspiracy that seeded a century of murder. The gesture was sincere; to the Japanese, Shillony observed, the tract reads as a model for success and imitation. A separate encounter supplies the logic: when the American Jewish Committee’s Neil Sandberg met the leaders of the Japanese Book Publishers Association to protest their antisemitic catalogue, the publishers were puzzled by the objection, telling him that he belonged to a superior and successful people and they were surprised the material troubled him. Why would a Jew not be flattered to be thought so powerful?
So can antisemitism be fought at all? Bret Stephens told the room the effort was largely futile. The fight against antisemitism, he said, the one that “consumes tens of millions of dollars every year in Jewish philanthropy and has become an organizing principle across Jewish organizations,” is “well-meaning, but mostly wasted.” The disease is impervious, he argued, to appeals for tolerance, to recitations of Jewish and Israeli accomplishment, to mandatory Holocaust education. Head-on, the record agrees with him. Antisemitism has outlasted the sermon, the statute, the museum, and now the archive. It survives refutation because it was never a proposition in the first place; it is a hunger for a face to blame, and it will always find one. Stephens’s answer was to defund the fight and reinvest in Jewish life.
I agree and disagree that antisemitism can’t be fought. It can’t be fought as such, but it can be fought indirectly. Antisemitism is a proxy for anti-Western and anti-capitalist values. We can fight those values via education and policy, and we should. “Antisemitism is the socialism of fools,” goes the saying.
You do not cure a symptom by naming it louder.
Antisemitism is downstream of the resentment of merit, and the resentment of merit is downstream of a civilization that has lost its nerve about its own foundations.
Where a society still believes in earned achievement, in positive-sum exchange, in the rule of law over the rule of grievance, in the person as the author of his own life, the conspiracy theory of the hidden hand finds thin soil. Where a society decides instead that all success is plunder and all structure is oppression, the hidden hand is never far behind, and it always knows whose hand to draw. Anti-Western feeling and anti-capitalist feeling and antisemitism are not three moods that happen to overlap. They are one suspicion in three registers, the conviction that the visible order is a swindle run by someone you cannot see.
Which makes the true defense of the Jews oblique, a defense of the civilization the Jew is accused of secretly running. The values that render antisemitism unintelligible are the ones a confident West already claims as its own.
Observe them faithfully, for it is your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the peoples, who on hearing all these laws will say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people.” (Deuteronomy 4:6)
The commandments are handed a second audience in the same breath as the first. Israel keeps them, and the nations are meant to look and see a wisdom, to ask what other people has laws so righteous. Jews have an obligation both to model and to articulate a wisdom the world can appreciate. To be unintelligible to that outsider breaks the terms on which the law was given. The tradition holds things the world could actually use. It knows about time, in a Sabbath that fences a seventh of every life off from production. About law as the grammar of a civilization rather than its enemy. About argument as a form of love, and memory as a spur to build rather than a license to bleed.
But we face another challenge. A people whose founding text is a running argument does not resolve into a easily scaled message, and the room senses it the instant a Jew opens his mouth. Which Jew? The Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) grandfather in Borough Park who has never owned a television, the staffer, Jewish enough for Hitler, but 3/4 WASP, at Jewish Voice for Peace who narrates his own people as colonizers, the center-left liberal who voted for Obama, Biden, and Harris, the Modern Orthodox dentist who votes Republican, the hilltop settler who reads Itamar Ben-Gvir as a prophet, the Tel Aviv secularist who reads Haaretz and would leave the country before he let his son near a yeshiva. Each is certain the others are embarrassments or heretics. And every antisemite points to whichever Jew he detests as evidence that Jews, as a group, are detestable. Nick Fuentes doesn't hate all Jews - he just blames Jews for woke liberalism.
Haman, the vizier who talks Ahasuerus into the first scheduled genocide in the Jewish canon, needs only one sentence to frame his target:
There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom, whose laws are different from those of every other people, and who do not obey the king’s laws. (Esther 3:8)
One people and a dispersed one, everywhere at once and alien everywhere, the charge built to be filled in with whatever the listener already fears. Scattered and dispersed, מְפֻזָּר וּמְפֹרָד. The modern antisemite shops an argument, and our division is his buffet.
The left builds its enemy from the traditionalist, the Zionist, and the affluent. The right builds its enemy from the cosmopolitan, the champion of open borders and social liberalism, the Jew as rootless agent corroding nation and faith. Each flank finds its perfect Jew.
This is also why Kraft’s appeal cannot land where he aimed it. He asked the progressive coalition to add Jews to the roster of the protected, and that coalition’s own theory of power had already filed the Jew under the oppressor.
The reflex is to end the vulnerability by crowning one Jew the real one and disowning the rest. That reflex is a category error, and a surrender, since it performs the enemy’s editing for him. The older answer gives up the search for a winning ideology and reaches instead for a standard that cuts across all of them. Authority is earned by sacrifice. The weight of a Jew’s voice tracks the weight of his stake, and the right to speak for a covenant is proportional to what he has paid into it.
A mamzer who is a Torah scholar takes precedence over a High Priest who is an ignoramus. (Mishnah Horayot 3:8)
The mamzer, a child of forbidden union who carries lifelong disabilities in Jewish law, outranks the Kohen Gadol, the hereditary High Priest at the summit of inherited holiness, the moment learning is set against birth. Standing, in the tradition’s own accounting, is something a person earns. You can make that unsentimental. Ask of anyone who would speak for Jewish values what he has kept, learned, risked, and handed on, and let it be scored. Ten questions, one point each. This is not meant to be definitive, but directional. One can quibble with the list, but it's meant to show that commitment has multiple dimensions.
- Do you keep the Sabbath as sanctified time: the table, the blessing, the guests, the hours walled off for prayer and study and family?
2. Do you keep the Sabbath as restraint, holding back in a real way from the week’s labor and commerce and machinery?
3. Basic literacy: do you know the stories of the Tanakh, the shape of the calendar, the meaning of the festivals, the words of the core prayers?
4. Advanced literacy: can you read the sources in the Hebrew, work a page of Gemara (the Talmud’s record of legal argument), follow a halakhic or philosophical case on its own terms?
5. Transmission: are you raising children who identify strongly as Jews, or, lacking children, teaching and building continuity for the next generation in some serious way?
6. Communal service: do you carry the Jewish people beyond your own household and faction, in a school, a shul, a burial society, a campus, a relief fund?
7. Physical burden: have you served in the IDF or a security role that defends Jewish life, or otherwise put your body between Jews and harm?
8. Cross-faction responsibility: do you show up for Jews outside your own camp, the secular for the religious and the religious for the secular, the diaspora for Israel and Israel for the diaspora?
9. Public courage: do you accept social, professional, or physical cost for being visibly Jewish when silence would be cheaper?
10. Institution-building: do you give money, years, or leadership to the durable structures, the schools and presses and welfare networks and defenses, that outlast you?
Set the line at seven. Beneath it a Jew speaks as a Jew, but not for the Jews. At seven or more a Jew gains standing to speak for the community, to say this is what we value.
By setting a high bar, the conversation can shift from a desperate defense against external haters to a demand for internal self-understanding and self-articulation. If antisemitism is a symptom of a civilization that is afraid of change, the response cannot be a PR campaign; it must be a community that recovers its own confidence and then helps the West recover its own. The world will always find a face to blame, but it is powerless against a people who choose to be a wise and discerning nation. When we know that we are a wise and discerning nation, we can begin to share.
![Amitav Krishna](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="48" height="48"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)