No, Antisemitism Is Not to the Left of the Left
(meanwhile, fascism got smarter)

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig · Jerusalem · 2025

1. Visibility ≠ Structure

We see banners, posts, headlines, and slogans. Some of them are stupid. Some painful. Some — overtly antisemitic. But what we see is not the source. It’s the leak.

What truly traps us today is not “leftist antisemitism,” but a technologically armored, algorithmically curated, corporatized fascist exclusion system masquerading as neutrality.

2. The machine no longer needs to speak

Modern antisemitism doesn’t shout. It filters. It doesn’t say “Jews out.” It simply:

• removes Jewish voices from circulation,
• reduces them to “white privilege” or “Zionist colonizer,”
• replaces them with more useful containers of outrage.

This isn’t prejudice. This is bio-algorithmic eugenics:
Black, queer, disabled, Jewish, Palestinian — not erased, just rendered inaccessible.

3. The left as scapegoat of filtration

Blaming the left is like blaming a mirror for the shape of your face. Today’s “left” is a specter — postliberal, structurally hollow, visible mostly because it serves as regulated opposition.

Israeli left? Hollowed out. Ashamed. Functionally irrelevant. It doesn’t drive antisemitism. It barely drives itself.

The real engine lies elsewhere: in the systems that decide who gets to speak, who appears, who gets promoted — and who disappears from the conversation before it begins.

4. The Israeli right: engineers of the cut

Let’s not be naïve. The Israeli far right — Smotrich, Ben-Gvir and the like — know what they’re doing.

They monetize antisemitism. They embrace European fascists. They flirt with evangelical messianists. They welcome Christian Zionists who dream of Jewish conversion at the end of days.

They don’t defend Jews. They police Jewishness.

A leftist Jew who critiques the army? No longer “ours.”
A Mizrahi critic of state violence? A traitor.
A Palestinian citizen? A tolerated malfunction.

5. Eugenics, upgraded: the filtration of life

The most dangerous antisemitism today isn’t on college campuses. It’s in the code.

It’s the same machine that:

• makes disabled people algorithmically invisible,
• de-prioritizes Black creators unless their content is “aesthetic,”
• erases trans voices unless they’re “palatable,”
• filters out Jews who don’t align with geopolitical convenience.

This isn’t ideology. It’s ontology-as-service.
Access, visibility, meaning — all pre-scripted.

6. America as Albania, Israel as membrane

Trump wanted to rename AI as “American Intelligence” — not out of pride, but to occupy the name before difference appears. It was linguistic preemption.

Israel does the same:

• “Are you pro-Israel or pro-Palestine?” — a moral trap disguised as a question.
• “Do you support Jews or human rights?” — as if they were mutually exclusive.
• “Are you a real Jew?” — asked only when you question the military.

This isn’t public debate. It’s ontopolitical filtration.
Preemptive. Infrastructural. Ruthless.

7. So what now?

Stop chasing phantoms of “leftist antisemitism” while infrastructures of exclusion are being built behind you.
Stop demanding politeness while brutality is being codified.

Start asking: who gets to differ without being deleted?
Start rupturing the membrane — not to destroy, but so difference can breathe.

8. Final Cut

Antisemitism is not to the left of the left. It is woven into the exclusion machinery that governs culture, media, and politics today.

It doesn’t always shout. It doesn’t always kill.
Sometimes, it just makes you disappear before you are heard.

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist,
but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

And if we don’t recognize that, we may soon be speaking only to ourselves — in rooms we no longer built.

— Y. Schimmelpfennig