I Asked A.I Why the World Hates the Jews?

After yet another synagogue shooting, I found myself returning to the same question I have asked my whole life: Why do people hate Jews so much? And if your first instinct is to answer, “Well… because Israel,” then you are about to prove my point before I have even made it.

I have never received a satisfying answer, so I found myself thinking: if humans have not solved antisemitism after all this time, maybe AI can at least explain why it persists.

So, because I now use AI for almost everything, I typed the question into ChatGPT: “Why do people hate Jews, and how do we solve antisemitism?” What struck me first was how long it took to answer. Even that hesitation felt revealing, as though the question itself carried too much history, too many contradictions, too many centuries of recycled hatred.

Eventually it answered: “That is a painful question. The world does not universally hate Jews, but antisemitism has existed for centuries because Jews were repeatedly turned into a convenient target for fear, politics, religion, and conspiracy thinking.”

Jews have known this forever: antisemitism constantly changes in its language but rarely changes in essence. In one era, Jews were accused of killing Jesus. In another, of controlling banks, media, revolutions, capitalism, communism—sometimes opposite accusations at the same time. Too left, too right, too powerful, too foreign, not indigenous enough, yet somehow always blamed. It is maddening because the accusation changes, but the conclusion stays the same: blame the Jews.

Today, I see people condemn antisemitism and then, in the very next breath, explain why Jews were targeted—as though there is ever a reason to murder Jewish children in America, or any children anywhere. Once explanations for violence against a Jewish community begin, they often drift dangerously close to justification. Let’s not waste time here—history has already taught us where that logic leads.

The point is simple: Jews have been targeted long before modern politics, and the hatred remains real, dangerous, and fatal.

And to those who excuse violence as an inevitable response to trauma: human suffering does not inevitably become violence. My grandmother lost her entire family in the Holocaust, and she did not answer that horror by harming innocent people. Not because she had to restrain herself, but because she was not a terrorist, and she valued life. That’s why: suffering does not license cruelty.

Jews know injustice intimately, and that history has often compelled us to stand with others in the struggle for dignity and freedom. From civil rights to women’s equality, Jews have pursued justice not because it is incidental to Jewish life, but because it is commanded: Tzedek, tzedek tirdof (Deuteronomy 16:20) – justice, justice shall you pursue. These words are woven into the very fabric of who we are.

And yet when antisemitism rises, many Jews feel the world often arrives too late. Support often comes cautiously, politically filtered, and only after too much damage is already done. So before you say, “But Israel…” a reminder: antisemitism existed long before the modern state of Israel. The issue is simpler than politics. No children should need armed guards to attend school. No synagogue should require fortress-level security just to pray. And while there is nothing normal about it, this has become our norm.

We Jews know how to organize, raise money, protect one another, mourn, and rebuild. But antisemitism is not a problem Jews can solve alone. It cannot be confronted only by those who endure it; it must also be rejected by those outside it.

So this is my call to the “other”—to those watching from the sidelines: prove my grandmother wrong. She used to say, “Either you’re a Jew, or you’re an antisemite.” I always wanted to believe she was wrong. I still do. But that will require more people to stand beside Jews clearly, publicly, and without hesitation.