Collective Responsibility in Modern Practice

In a recent essay, I interrogated collective responsibility as one of those dangerously predictable historical mechanisms that keeps returning, not through scattered anecdotes but through patterns that reappear under shifting political language. Since that piece appeared, two unrelated news stories have provided a clear window onto the same mechanism at work in our own time.

The first comes from a recent New York Times report. Across Europe, Jewish museums have seen attendance fall, security threats rise, vandalism increase, harassment grow more common, and staff exhaustion set in, all in the years since October 7, 2023. Directors describe a stubborn public misconception: institutions dedicated to documenting centuries of Jewish life in places like Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and Austria are now being treated as if they were outposts of the State of Israel. These are museums funded mostly by local taxpayers and focused on local history, yet some people now stay away because simply walking through the doors is read as an endorsement of Israeli government policy.

The second story took place thousands of miles away in San Francisco. California State Senator Scott Wiener, who is Jewish and one of the country’s leading voices on LGBTQ+ rights, has openly criticized Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, backed a ceasefire, opposed unconditional military aid to Israel, and even described Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as genocide. 

None of that spared him. 

While trying to join the city’s annual Trans March he was surrounded, followed, touched, shouted at, and personally berated until he left for his own safety.

Among the accusations thrown at him was the claim that he had “Zionist handlers.” Whatever one’s views on Palestinian statehood, the march itself, or Wiener’s politics, the episode stood out precisely because his easily verifiable public record did not matter. 

He was treated not as an individual officeholder but as a convenient stand-in for a state. At first glance the two stories seem unrelated. One concerns cultural institutions and local heritage; the other, electoral politics in California. One stretches across several European countries; the other unfolded in a single American city. 

Yet as a historian I am less interested in whether the settings match than in whether the underlying mechanism does. Both raise the same question: under what conditions does a Jewish institution or a Jewish public figure stop being judged on its own actions and instead become answerable for the policies of a government it is presumed to represent collectively?

The irony is hard to miss. Many of these European museums exist to document Jewish communities that were not merely disrupted but shattered by the Holocaust. Jewish populations across much of Europe remain only a fraction of their prewar size. The museums in Brussels, Frankfurt, Vienna, Copenhagen and elsewhere are not foreign embassies. They record communities that endured expulsions, ghettoization, deportation, extermination, and long decades of demographic collapse.

To treat them as political proxies for today’s Israeli government is to erase exactly the distinction those institutions were created to preserve: the difference between historic Jewish life in Europe and the actions of a modern nation-state. The drop in attendance is therefore more than an economic or cultural issue. It is evidence that a certain kind of associative thinking has taken hold. Anyone who believes that entering a museum about Jewish life in Denmark or Belgium equals support for Israeli policy has already accepted the premise that Jewishness itself is politically collective. 

The museum need not issue statements about Likud or the IDF. Its exhibitions need not touch the contemporary Middle East. Its funding, governance, and mission can have no connection to Israel. Yet public psychology can still punish it. Once the category “Jewish” is enough to imply political affiliation, the normal distinctions between cultural institution, religious community, historical archive, and sovereign government start to dissolve. Senator Wiener illustrates the same process applied to an individual. 

His record is public and clear: repeated criticism of Netanyahu, early support for a ceasefire, opposition to unconditional American aid, and the conclusion that Israel’s campaign amounted to genocide. One can agree, disagree, or debate the reasoning. That is beside the point. The point is that a politician with that record was still pursued and accused with language about “Zionist handlers” until he no longer felt safe remaining at a public event. His actual positions ceased to matter because the accusation had already shifted from policy to identity, folding him into an older pattern of scapegoating and collective responsibility.

None of this, as I wrote in the earlier essay, is historically new. Medieval charges that Jewish communities as a whole caused plagues, ritual murders, or economic ruin never required proof against specific individuals. The Judeo-Bolshevism myth did not demand that every Jewish family back the revolution. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was not convicted on the basis of his own conduct but because antisemitic culture had prepared a ready category for him. The vocabulary changes, but the structure remains. Individuals and institutions stop being judged on what they actually do and become answerable for a collectivity they neither govern nor control.

Collective responsibility is not just a philosophical mistake or rhetorical overreach. It is a simplifying technology that replaces political complexity with categorical association. It spares people the trouble of distinguishing governments from populations, institutions from states, public officials from imagined conspiracies, and personal conduct from inherited identity.

The museum director who must explain yet again that her institution is funded by Belgian taxpayers and preserves Belgian Jewish history, and the Jewish legislator who must once more list his criticisms of policies for which he is still held responsible, are doing the same exhausting work. They are trying to reassert distinctions after the category has already swallowed them.

One need not defend every action of the Israeli government, nor to condemn every action of that government to recognize antisemitism when it appears. One need not be Jewish to recognize and demand opposition to that antisemitism, either. These all remain separate questions of political view and identity. Legitimate criticism of a sovereign state does not require assigning collective responsibility to Jews living elsewhere, just as opposing antisemitism does not require agreement with every decision made in Jerusalem. Political disagreement is normal. Collective attribution is something else.

The historical record is depressingly consistent here. Once Jewishness alone is taken as proof of political loyalty, personal or political validity, or responsibility, once Jewish museums become stand-ins for a foreign government, once Jewish officials or public figures face talk of hidden “handlers,” and once ordinary Jews are expected to answer for decisions they never made, the issue has moved beyond policy. It has become about the category itself. It becomes discourse about collective responsibility.

Historians have seen this structure before. Only the political vocabulary changes, but the mechanism stays the same.

Selected Further Readings

• California State Senator Scott Wiener harassed, forced to leave San Francisco Trans March — Shimon Prokupecz (June 29, 2026) https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/29/us/scott-wiener-gaza-israel-california
• Jewish Museums in Europe Say They Are Being Treated as Outposts of Israel — Catherine Hickley (July 2, 2026) https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/02/arts/design/jewish-museums-europe.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vFA.0-UL.134uJ2TGapCr&smid=url-share
• Our Framework for Fighting Antisemitism — Jewish Voice for Peace (September 7, 2016) https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2016/09/07/fighting-antisemitism/
• The Problem of Collective Responsibility — Kelsey Maurine Brickl (July 2, 2026) https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-problem-of-collective-responsibility/
• Jewish leaders rally in Scott Wiener’s defense over harassment — Cayla Labgold-Carroll (June 29, 2026) https://jweekly.com/2026/06/29/jewish-leaders-rally-in-scott-wieners-defense-over-harassment/
• Wiener Driven From Trans March — GrowSF Report (July 1, 2026) https://growsf.org/news/2026-07-01-wiener-chased-from-march/