Redemption hastened: Antisemitism in the age of acceleration
If you think the Western world has gone secular, think again. In the supposedly secularized West, antisemitism and terror have rekindled a mythical flame. Religious fundamentalism and terror have activated a theological switch in certain progressive circles, legitimizing and sanctifying violence as a moral imperative. To that end, the recent “Sumud” flotilla was not merely a political act but an example of political theology, enacting an almost biblical narrative of breaking the siege through a symbolic parting of the sea and offering deliverance.
Antisemitism has never been only a prejudice. It is a worldview that casts Jews as the obstacle to redemption, an impediment that must be removed for others to be saved.
The twenty-first century has given this old grammar a new engine: acceleration. Digital platforms compress events into moments, emotions into memes, and conflicts into slogans. Wars are livestreamed, mobilizations ignite within hours, and images outpace reflection.
In this hyper-speed environment, impatient theologies of redemption thrive. They do not wait; they demand. And in that demand, the Jew, often through the metonym of Israel, once again becomes the obstruction between a broken present and a redeemed future.
The massacre of October 7, 2023, and the reaction that has followed over the last two years show how combustible this framework has become. Islamist movements framed the assault in explicitly cataclysmic terms, calling it the “Flood of al-Aqsa.” Parts of the Western left translated the violence into secular idioms of the struggle for decolonization and justice.
For centuries, Jews have been portrayed – by both religious and secular movements – as obstacles to universal order. Christian theology turned Judaism into the emblem of stubborn particularity. Modern ideologies secularized the script, making Jews stand for capitalism, communism, cosmopolitanism, or cultural decay. In the twentieth century, this logic reached its most lethal form in what Saul Friedländer called “redemptive antisemitism”: the fantasy of human renewal through the erasure of Jews.
The twenty-first-century iteration recycles the same template in overlapping ways. Islamist movements merge “Jew,” “Zionist,” and “Israeli” into a demonic category whose elimination is a sacred duty. Parts of the Western left reduce Israel to the symbol of colonial domination. Progressive accelerationists treat Jewish insistence on limits as sabotage of a boundless future.
Visions of technological utopia
Acceleration is not only a tempo; it is a theology of time. When the next feed “refresh” is the horizon, patience looks like complicity, and compromise like betrayal.
Traditional messianic visions deferred fulfillment; they trained communities to endure imperfection. Hyper-speed culture reverses the expectation: if justice is imaginable, it must be immediate. If the future is available, it must be accessible now. That shift elevates purifying violence. If history’s obstacle is an institution, topple it; if it is a people, dissolve them.
Judaism, with its emphasis on law over ecstasy, particular bonds over abstraction, and traditions remembered over utopian erasure, embodies the very limits acceleration finds intolerable. Antisemitism, recoded as anti-Zionism, presents itself as the shortcut to a universal dawn. The secular left’s version arrives dressed in emancipatory language. Criticism of Israeli policies is legitimate, but when it denies Jewish nationhood or treats Jewish particularity as a betrayal of universalism, the discourse slips from politics into myth.
That slip is marked by outcomes: Jewish suffering is admissible only if it fits a prefabricated narrative; memory is suspect; self-defense is aggression. The plot remains millenarian: a universal dawn that arrives only after the Jew is sacrificed. A similar logic flows through post-humanist imaginaries. In visions of technological utopia – data without memory, biology without limits, intelligence beyond the human – Judaism’s insistence on law, national bonds, and sanctified time appears as a provocation.
Particularity looks like sabotage, and the most ancient people once again becomes the last obstacle to a purified world.
The task in combating antisemitism is to break the spell. That means recognizing how political theology fuels antisemitic discourse and how technology quickens its appetite for redemption. It means defending Jewish life – diasporic and national – not as an exception to universality but as a reminder that universality worth having is built from thriving particular communities. And it means recovering the civic virtues that acceleration erodes: patience, distinction, memory, responsibility.
There is no algorithm for that work. There is only the deliberate pace of institutions, the imperfect craft of politics, and the recognition that the human future will not be improved by erasing the people long cast as its obstacle.
In an age that glorifies rupture, the most simple and effective act may be to protect what binds: law over chaos, persons over symbols, traditions over deconstruction, and lives over myths.
