Antisemitism as Knowledge and Power
I recently came across an interview with Victor Vakhshtayn, the Russian-Israeli sociologist now at Tel Aviv University, in which he discussed new antisemitism. The new antisemitism, in his account, is essentially anti-Zionism and is a form of contemporary leftist rhetoric. Indeed, hostility to Israel today often shades into hostility to Jews, and any analysis has to take that seriously. But the diagnosis is too narrow. Anti-Zionism operates at a level beneath any single political alignment. To call it specifically a feature of leftist discourse is to make the concept do political work that increasingly shields the Israeli state from moral criticism by recoding that criticism as ethnic hatred.
The concept of “new antisemitism,” current in public debate since the 1960s, attempts to name a third wave (following religious and racial antisemitism) in which hostility to Jews appears under the guise of anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel. The label has been politically useful but conceptually treacherous. Two recent attempts to specify what antisemitism means today, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition (2016) and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021), expose the difficulty of the task: each tries to draw a line, and each demonstrates how easily the line moves under pressure.
The IHRA definition fails because it conflates three distinct levels: hatred of Jews, anti-Jewish conspiracy theory, and discourse about Israel. Because the levels are not separated, the definition becomes available for political instrumentalization. It correctly identifies some anti-Israel discourse as antisemitic, such as holding Jews collectively responsible for Israeli state actions. Defenders of the IHRA definition argue, fairly, that its examples were drawn from real patterns observed in contemporary anti-Israel discourse. The difficulty is that the formulations capture them without distinguishing them from legitimate political speech. It leaves room for the suspicion that any sufficiently sharp criticism of Israel is antisemitism unless it mimics criticism of “any other country” (whatever that means). Statements like “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” or “applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” are vague, and consequential in application: they license sanctions against speech that is, on any honest reading, political rather than antisemitic.
The Jerusalem Declaration is conceptually cleaner. It defines antisemitism as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility, or violence against Jews as Jews” and explicitly notes that criticism of Zionism, support for Palestinian rights, evidence-based criticism of Israeli policy, comparisons with settler colonialism or apartheid, and BDS are not in themselves antisemitic. This is an important correction: it protects the space of political analysis and debate. But the Declaration remains theoretically insufficient. It treats antisemitism as a harmful attitude or practice directed against Jews “as Jews” without explaining the deeper mechanism by which “the Jew” comes to function as an object of knowledge, causality, and world-explanation. It comes close when it notes that classic antisemitism links Jews to hidden power, global conspiracy, banking, media, and state-within-a-state fantasies, but it never elevates this insight into the structure of the actual definition.
Antisemitism, however, is not only hatred or violence. At its most dangerous level, it is an epistemological regime, and that regime is an instrument in a struggle over what counts as ethical reality. By ethical reality, I mean the lived horizon of moral intelligibility: which suffering is legible, which claims carry weight, which histories define injustice, whose pain is universalized, and whose is rendered irrelevant. This horizon is neither neutral nor given in advance; it is produced, contested, and policed. A serviceable definition must therefore distinguish at least three levels of antisemitism.
Level one: phenomenological animosity. The hostile perception of Jewish presence that translates as irritation, suspicion, disgust, resentment, or fear directed toward Jews as Jews (individuals or a group). This is the most visible layer, the one legal and ethical frameworks were designed to address. It is what surveys measure, what hate crime statutes prohibit, what falls under the heading of prejudice. It is real, it is dangerous, and it does not exhaust the phenomenon.
Level two: a degraded ethical posture in which the figure of “the Jew” and the political category of Israel are conflated. The conflation runs in both directions, and both are corrosive. In one direction, criticism of Israel or Zionism is treated as criticism of Jews as such. This is a move that retroactively transforms anti-Zionist Jews into antisemites, sweeping figures as different as Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and Moshe Hirsch (the Neturei Karta) out of Jewish history and into the camp of Jewish enemies. In the other direction, Jewishness is reduced to identification with the Israeli state, so that any Jewish person becomes a stand-in for Israeli policy and any Jewish institution becomes an available target of political attacks. Both directions depend on a category mistake: the inability or refusal to distinguish between Jews, Jewish collectivity, the idea of Jewish sovereignty, and the particular form that sovereignty has taken in the State of Israel.
The same conflation has reshaped Zionism too. Zionism was once a multi-faceted political phenomenon that included figures as different as Martin Buber and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the labor movement, cultural Zionism and political Zionism, religious and secular currents. In contemporary discourse, it has been progressively reduced to its right-wing and far-right form, such as the ideology of Likud and the parties further to its right. This reduced version is now treated, by partisans and opponents alike, as if it were the only Zionism that ever existed. The reduction cuts both ways: one side takes the most aggressive form of Zionism as the truth of all Jewish politics, while the other side takes that same form as the legitimate target of opposition to all Jewish politics. The plurality of Jewish political life disappears.
Level three: antisemitism as an epistemological regime and as an instrument in the struggle for ethical reality. On this level, two distinct things are happening at once. First, antisemitism in its developed form operates beyond passion and posture as a system that produces “the Jew” as a knowledge-object. Where hatred names a feeling, prejudice a shortcut, discrimination an act, an epistemological regime is a way of producing knowledge with its own objects, methods, and modes of inference. Jewishness is treated as a hidden essence requiring decoding, the visible Jew always a surface beneath which the “real” Jew is presumed to lurk. Antisemitic inquiry moves from claim toward evidence, gathering whatever the world offers as confirmation of what was already known. The contradictions are the system; the Jew who behaves contrary to the script is simply taken to be hiding better. The three levels are not stacked from foundation to superstructure. Level three is the ground of the other two: the affect and the conflation operate on a knowledge-object that level three produces.
But the epistemological dimension does not stop at antisemitism’s own operations. It is also where antisemitism meets every other contested category in the broader struggle over which suffering counts as historically real. This is where the Israel/Palestine question becomes inseparable from any contemporary account of antisemitism. The conflict is organized by competing historical frames. For many Jews, Israel is understood through exile, persecution, the Holocaust, and the longing for return to the ancestral land. For many Palestinians and Arabs, Israel is understood through dispossession, the Nakba, occupation, and the continuing experience of territorial and political loss. These are not merely opinions or stories. They are competing historical narratives through which reality is interpreted, each with its own archives, memories, heroes, commemorative dates, legal claims, and moral arguments. Each side experiences itself as responding to historical injustice and collective trauma.
Call it the pluralism of historical worlds, but the Jewish and Palestinian narratives are rival historical worlds, each organizing the same set of events into different patterns of cause, salience, and moral weight. The disagreement lies further down than competing values and incorporates what counts as the event, which events are central, and how the same act gets named. Did the killings at Deir Yassin take place? The fact is established yet sits near the margin of Israeli national memory and at the center of Palestinian memory. Was the Six-Day War an act of aggression, a self-defense operation, or both? The same chronology of mobilizations, closures, and strikes supports both readings. Did Jewish influence shape the Balfour Declaration? Chaim Weizmann’s wartime leverage in London is a defensible historical claim that lives next door to an antisemitic conspiracy version about Jewish money buying a country, and their proximity is part of the difficulty. Historical events, even when factually settled, are received within incompatible narratives that determine their symbolic weight, their categorization, and their moral significance. Each narrative discloses a real historical world. Neither can be cancelled by the other, and neither exhausts the ethical reality of what happened.
Within this contest, antisemitism, just like genocide, like settler colonialism, like the language of existential threat, functions as more than a moral accusation; it becomes an epistemic filter—it regulates what may be said, who may speak, whose pain counts, and which interpretation of history is treated as dangerous or legitimate. Antisemitism occupies a particularly powerful position in European and American discourse because it is tied to the Holocaust, to the moral catastrophe of European modernity, and to postwar guilt and stigma. It carries immense symbolic authority. That authority is precisely what makes the concept available for instrumentalization because a category with such moral weight will inevitably be deployed in struggles over which suffering may be named, mourned, and politically recognized. We see this with the Norman Finkelstein–Alan Dershowitz conflict over Holocaust memory’s deployment in the Israel-Palestine debate.
This is why the question of antisemitism today cannot be separated from other questions: who is the victim? Who is the intruder? Who is indigenous, who is colonial? Who has the right to fear, the right to remember? Whose violence is defensive, whose is barbaric? Whose suffering is universalized? Whose is irrelevant? These questions define how the concept acquires its meaning and functional direction. The Holocaust has become central to Western moral consciousness; the Nakba has remained, in many Western contexts, marginal, contested, or denied. And the asymmetry runs in more than one direction: the expulsion of nearly a million Jews from Arab and Muslim countries between 1948 and the early 1970s remains, in much progressive discourse, equally marginal, a further instance of the same epistemic contest over which displacements register as history. The two events (Holocaust and Nakba) are not equivalent in magnitude, scope, or kind; industrial genocide and violent territorial displacement belong to different categories of catastrophe. But the asymmetry in their reception is a separate question from the equivalence of the events. It concerns the conditions under which different catastrophes become legible, or fail to become legible, to public moral consciousness. The gap is not a neutral background to the debate over antisemitism; it is what antisemitism, as an epistemic instrument, helps to maintain or contest.
A three-level definition, therefore, offers something neither IHRA nor the Jerusalem Declaration provides: a way of seeing that hatred, conflation, and instrumentalization are distinct phenomena that nonetheless support and feed into each other. The first level concerns affect and actions. The second concerns the categories through which Jewish life and Israeli politics get sorted into and out of identity with one another. The third concerns the production of moral reality, which catastrophes register in public consciousness, which are forgotten, and which carry the weight required to define what counts as injustice.
Naming these levels separately does two things. It allows us to recognize antisemitism as the powerful and dangerous phenomenon it is without reducing it to the level of attitude or act. And it allows us to see that the contemporary contest over the meaning of antisemitism, over what it includes, what it excludes, and who has the authority to apply the term, becomes a contest within the third level. The concept does not float above the conflict. It is part of the conflict and is one of the most powerful instruments by which the conflict is fought.
