Kill a Jew; Get a Cookie
There is a grotesque simplicity to antisemitic violence. It often arrives dressed in ideology, grievance, revolution, religion, geopolitics, or madness. Yet beneath these costumes lies something far more primitive: the permission structure that tells a person he may harm a Jew and be rewarded for it. Not necessarily rewarded with money, medals, or official applause. Sometimes the reward is softer and more poisonous, like online admiration, ideological belonging, heroic self-imagination, a momentary feeling of grandeur, the thrill of becoming someone. Kill a Jew; get a cookie. That is the childish moral economy of modern antisemitism.
The recent attack in Golders Green was not merely an attack on two individuals walking through London. It was an attack on visibility itself, on Jews who were identifiable, present, ordinary, and alive in public. It was an attack on the right to be recognizably Jewish without becoming a target. The horror is not only in the knife, but in the mental pathway that precedes it. A man does not simply wake up and decide that strangers are metaphysical enemies. He must first be taught, seduced, or permitted to see them as symbols rather than people, by others and by his own mind.
This is where Dostoevsky remains terrifyingly relevant. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov does not murder only because he is poor, resentful, or unstable. He murders because he has come to believe in a theory of exception. He imagines that some people are ordinary, bound by law and conscience, while others are “extraordinary,” entitled to step over moral boundaries for a supposed higher purpose. Napoleon becomes the symbol of this fantasy, and the man of destiny who may spill blood because history will later justify him. The problem is, of course, that every antisemitic attacker thinks like this.
The antisemitic attacker is often a degraded version of this same fantasy. He is not Napoleon, but he may feel like one for a moment. He is not a revolutionary, but he imagines himself as history’s instrument. He is not brave, but he mistakes the vulnerability of his victims for proof of his own power. The Jew becomes his shortcut to significance. By attacking a Jew, he believes he has entered a cosmic struggle. He has not. He has only attacked a human being.
Societies too often search for explanations that relieve them of responsibility. We are often told the attacker was mentally ill, under the influence of drugs, alienated, radicalized, angry, unstable, manipulated, online too much, failed by institutions, or consumed by foreign conflicts. Some of this may be true in particular cases. But none of it is sufficient. Mental illness does not naturally produce antisemitism. Alienation does not automatically choose Jews. Political anger does not inevitably become a knife in Golders Green. Something has to direct the rage. Something has to name the target. Something has to whisper that Jewish blood is meaningful.
That whisper is now everywhere. It circulates in memes, chants, Telegram channels, protest slogans, conspiracy theories, influencer monologues, AI-generated propaganda, and respectable euphemisms. It tells the unstable that their violence is insight. It tells the mediocre that their hatred is courage. It tells the criminal that he is a soldier. It tells the lonely that he belongs to a cause. And when the attack happens, the same ecosystem immediately begins its second labor: explanation, minimization, contextualization, distraction. The victim disappears; the attacker becomes the object of fascination.
This is another form of reward. The antisemite receives narrative attention. His biography is studied. His grievances are decoded. His alleged suffering is centered. The Jew, meanwhile, becomes scenery. Merely a body on the pavement, a community told to be resilient, a headline absorbed into the endless statistics of hate crime. The moral order is inverted. The attacker is complicated; the Jewish victim is symbolic.
A decent society must refuse this inversion and must be capable of saying two things at once: that every accused person deserves due process, and that antisemitic violence is not an abstraction. It is not merely “tension,” “backlash,” or “spillover.” It is a direct assault on citizens because they are Jews. It is the ancient permission renewed in modern language.
The title of this piece – “Kill a Jew; Get a Cookie” – is deliberately ugly because the phenomenon is ugly. It captures the infantilized entitlement of those who believe that Jewish pain will buy them status, meaning, attention, or redemption. The attacker imagines himself extraordinary. The ideology flatters him. The crowd excuses him, the algorithm amplifies him. But there is nothing extraordinary in stabbing the vulnerable, burning ambulances, threatening synagogues, or turning Jewish life into a test of public courage.
The real test belongs to everyone else. Not only to police, governments, or Jewish security volunteers, but to the societies that keep asking why Jews are afraid while tolerating the conditions that make fear rational. Antisemitism is not only hatred of Jews. It is a machine for transforming small men into imagined heroes. And every time that machine is excused, aestheticized, or rewarded, it teaches the next one the same lesson – choose a Jew, perform your violence, and wait for your cookie.
