Not Just Politics: A Field Guide to Antisemitism

It was that ad that made me want to write this. When I watched those actors in a grocery store blame the price of eggs on “killing Palestinians,” I thought to myself, “How in the world did these people agree to this? How could someone say these words and not realize they were enabling antisemitism?” It felt like soon people might question me in grocery stores – or that prices would simply be marked up for Jews, and others would look away. Not that my friends and neighbors were becoming Nazis, but that they might stand by and let them take us.

The biggest threat to Jews in America may very well be the twins of ignorance and apathy. Wolves in sheep’s clothing, with fangs made of chants like “genocide” and “apartheid.”

These slogans haven’t just been chanted around me. They were used as threats, and I was expected to agree with them. To be a “good little Jew.” As soon as I made my position on Israel clear, I got all sorts of slurs. You know the kind. From the people who say Jew like we should be ashamed. Alongside “Genocider,” “Miser,” and, I couldn’t believe it, “Nazi.” How did people go from recognizing the world was better without Nazis to charging the people who survived the very thing that almost destroyed us? And my personal favorite: “Go back where you came from.” Not realizing, of course, that that place is Israel. It has taken me years to accept the anger I feel, and to understand something: many of these people don’t know what they’re saying. They truly don’t see how it could be antisemitic.

Many of them were fooled by their own compassion, and have let a fear of being called Islamophobic turn into refusing to condemn Hamas and the Islamist movements that call for our destruction. They do this while eating the bagels we made for them. Using their smartphones to post watermelon emojis over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi that was made possible in part because of Hedy Lamarr. Even the word “genocide,” which they chant at Jewish businesses and at Jews who have nothing to do with Israeli politics, was coined by a Jew. More on that in a moment.

This is why I believe the most fundamental thing we can do is explain what antisemitic language is: what it sounds like, how it sounds to us, and how to tell it apart from legitimate criticism of Israel’s government. Every conversation is different. But this is how I do it.

The tool

Many of you know Natan Sharansky’s 3D Test. In 2004, the former Soviet political prisoner turned Israeli cabinet minister proposed a simple way to tell legitimate criticism of Israel apart from antisemitism: Demonization, Delegitimization, and Double Standards.

His point was that these are the same three tools used against us for centuries: blood libels, denying our right to exist as a people, and holding us to rules no one else had to follow. Today, the same tools are aimed at the Jewish state.

Before any of the three, though, there’s a claim you’ll hear first: that Israel and Jews are not the same thing, so none of this can be antisemitic. We know better. Judaism is one of the world’s oldest surviving ethnoreligions, not purely dogmatic or text-based, but an indigenous identity inseparable from the land of Israel and from Hebrew as our ancestral language. Across all Abrahamic religious texts – Jewish, Christian, and Islamic alike – we are referred to as the “Children of Israel” hundreds of times, while the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) mentions Israel over 2,500 times and Jerusalem or Zion over 800 times. Nearly every daily prayer we say mentions Israel or Jerusalem in Hebrew. This isn’t modern rebranding, and it isn’t a cover-up; it has existed and been known for thousands of years.

A few weeks ago at my wedding, I told my wife that by “this ring and the ancient laws of Israel,” she was consecrated to me. As my dad said the blessings over the wine and over us, he spoke in Hebrew. I know, and you know, that these things cannot be so simply separated. Yes, we know that the Israeli government is not the same thing as Jews or being Jewish. Yet the fact remains that Jews and the land of Israel are intrinsically tied together, and the people chanting at us need to hear that from us.

Those conversations can be difficult. So I’ve outlined some examples of how I answer the things I keep hearing, the things people across TikTok and Instagram keep repeating.

When you hear “Gaza is a genocide”: Double Standards

When someone tells me Gaza is a genocide, I start with the word itself. It doesn’t simply mean that many people died. A Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin coined it in 1944, from the Greek genos (people, tribe) and the Latin -cide (killing), to name what the Nazis did to our people. Forty-nine members of his own family, including his parents, were murdered in the Holocaust. In Poland before the Holocaust, there were about 3.3 million Jews. Roughly 90%, or 3 million, of them were murdered. That is genocide. Lemkin spent the rest of his life getting it recognized as a crime, and the UN adopted the Genocide Convention in 1948. Now a word born from the murder of Jews is chanted at us and at our state.

Then I explain what the word requires, because this is pivotal: the intent to destroy a people, in whole or in part. Israel is fighting a war Hamas started on October 7, 2023, when it murdered about 1,200 innocent people and took more than 250 hostages. The civilian death toll in Gaza is a genuine tragedy, made worse by Hamas’s deliberate use of human shields and the dense urban environment. That does not make it genocide.

Many wars with terrible civilian tolls – Syria, Yemen, the battles for Mosul and Raqqa, Ukraine – are not met with “genocide” chants by the same voices. When the harshest possible legal and moral label is reserved almost exclusively for the world’s only Jewish state, that is a double standard. Most people haven’t noticed it until someone names it for them.

Most of us know what Israel has done for Gaza during this war. They usually don’t, so say it. Humanitarian aid enters Gaza through Israeli crossings. In 2024, Israel agreed to pauses in the fighting so the UN could vaccinate nearly 560,000 children against polio, and the vaccines came in through an Israeli crossing. During COVID, Israel vaccinated more than 100,000 Palestinian workers. For years, Israel has supplied much of Gaza’s electricity and some of its water from its own infrastructure, and during the war it restored power to Gaza’s main desalination plant. We know how a country acts when it is trying to destroy a people. And this is not that.

When you hear “Free Palestine” or “Apartheid”: Demonization

“Free Palestine”

I usually start by agreeing with the part I can: I want Palestinians to live in freedom and dignity, too. But Israel is not to blame for Palestinians’ lack of freedoms. So I explain what the slogan does. It casts Israel as a jailer and the sole villain of the story. It erases Hamas’s rule over Gaza, the history of rejected statehood and peace offers, and Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, after which Hamas won elections in 2006 and seized control by force in 2007. Too often it recasts October 7 as “resistance.” Rape is not resistance. Murdering babies is not resistance. Burning families alive is not resistance. Hamas’s founding charter calls for killing Jews. And we have seen the phrase spray-painted on our synagogues and shouted at Jews who have nothing to do with Israeli policy. When a slogan turns terrorists into freedom fighters and paints the Jewish state, and the Jews linked to it, as uniquely evil, that is demonization.

“Apartheid”

This one is easier to answer than it sounds, because the facts do most of the work. Apartheid was South Africa’s system of racial separation, in which Black South Africans were stripped of rights in their own country because of their race. Israel’s Arab citizens – about 21% of the population – vote, serve in the Knesset, and sit on the Supreme Court. In a recent Israeli election, Arab parties won a record 19 seats, with turnout among Arab citizens around 80%.

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza do not vote in Israeli elections because they are not Israeli citizens. They live under a mix of Palestinian Authority (or Hamas) civil control and Israeli security control – an occupation that has lasted far too long and involves real injustices, including settlement expansion. They do vote in their own elections, though there have been no Palestinian national elections since 2006, and not because of Israel. The Palestinian Authority has postponed them again, to 2027. That is not the same as the South African system in which a racial majority was stripped of rights inside their own country solely because of race. Sharansky himself named the apartheid comparison as classic demonization: taking the name of one of history’s most notorious racist regimes and pinning it on the Jewish state while erasing the actual legal and political distinctions.

When you hear “From the river to the sea”: Delegitimization

Most people who chant this can’t tell you which river or which sea. So I tell them plainly: the river is the Jordan and the sea is the Mediterranean. The land between them is Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. A “Palestine” that is free across all of it leaves no room for Israel. Hamas wrote the phrase into its 2017 charter as a goal. Calling for the end of the singular Jewish state in existence, while every other indigenous people’s right to self-determination goes unquestioned, is delegitimization.

To be consistent, I say the same when Israeli politicians use the phrase to deny Palestinians a state or to sweep settlement expansion under the rug. Erasing either people’s right to self-determination is wrong, and saying so is what makes people keep listening. We are indigenous to Israel dating back more than 3,000 years. Our very name, Jew, comes from Yehudah, Judah, the tribe and kingdom whose land became known as Judea. Our ancestors lived in Israel centuries before Islam was founded, and Israel will still be there long after we’re gone.

Why it matters now: let’s come back to the grocery store ad

Recently, Rebellion PAC, a group run by commentator Cenk Uygur, ran an ad in Michigan to support Senate candidate (now Senator-elect) Abdul El-Sayed. In it, a couple at the grocery store complains they can’t afford eggs or bananas because that money is “set aside for killing Palestinians.” They also claim American tax dollars pay for Israel’s universal health care.

The facts I present are simple arithmetic: Standard U.S. military aid to Israel under the current memorandum of understanding is about $3.8 billion a year – less than half of one percent of U.S. military spending, and well under a tenth of one percent of the federal budget. Most of it must be spent with American companies, so it largely stays here. Roughly half a billion goes specifically to missile defense systems that intercept rockets aimed at Israeli civilians.

Even when you add the supplemental packages and related U.S. regional operations since October 2023, Brown University’s Costs of War project puts the cumulative total at about $31 to $34 billion. By comparison, the Kiel Institute estimates the U.S. has allocated roughly $120 billion to Ukraine since 2022. No serious person claims Ukraine is the reason American families can’t afford groceries.

The ad uses all three D’s at once. It singles out the Jewish state from everything else the government spends money on, which is a double standard. It casts Israel as a killer taking food off their table, which is demonization. And it revives one of the oldest antisemitic tropes there is: that we are the reason ordinary people can’t make ends meet. That lie has come before violence against us for centuries, if not millennia.

El-Sayed’s campaign said the ad wasn’t affiliated with them. After pressure from his party, he said “I do not agree with the contents of that ad,” but notice he stopped short of calling it antisemitic. Distancing yourself after immense pressure isn’t the same thing as direct condemnation.

This is what it looks like when antisemitism gets waved off as “just politics.” A trope that preceded pogroms, running as a campaign ad for a man who is now headed to the United States Senate. It isn’t a difference of opinion, and it isn’t something we can brush aside.

Where the line is

We lose people when every criticism of Israel is cast as antisemitic, so it’s worth being specific. They can criticize Israel’s government. The way it conducts a war – not whether or not it’s committing genocide. The way the state functions – not if there should or shouldn’t be a state. Many Israelis criticize their government, and do it loudly. But words matter, and these words carry a history worth knowing.

Why I’m writing this

I’m scared. And not just for myself but for my unborn children. I know I have to do right by them. To teach them our ways. To sing blessings over them. To be a Jew they would be proud of, one I would be proud of, and to model that for them. I also know I have to protect them, and that seems harder every day. If we don’t stand up for ourselves now, at one of the most inflammatory times in our lives, and push back against the antisemitic vitriol in our world, how will I be able to protect them? And if I don’t model civil conversations, honesty, and clear argument, how will they learn to protect themselves?

This language is not harmless. It isolates Jews, excuses violence, and makes ordinary life more dangerous. I’m not asking anyone to forgive the people who know exactly what these words mean and say them anyway. But most of the people repeating them don’t, and for them, it is not too late. Explaining it clearly is how we tell the difference. It is not optional. It is necessary.