Silence of the Moderates: Breeding Antisemitism

Why decent people look away while the oldest hatred returns

The puzzle is not why antisemites speak. Fanatics, conspiracists, and revolutionaries of one kind or another have never lacked for words. The puzzle is why so many of the educated, the humane, the self-described ‘allies’ fall suddenly quiet when Jews are the target. Whole professions that can mobilise instantly against bigotry of almost any other sort become strangely philosophical the moment an old caricature of Jewish power appears. One begins to suspect that the silence is not an absence of conviction, but a conviction of another kind.

To understand this, one must first accept a discomfiting fact: in the modern moral marketplace, Jews are perceived as a low-prestige minority. Not numerically, of course, and certainly not in the death lists of history, where they rank at the top. But in the current hierarchy of causes, Jews are imagined, lazily and wrongly, as ‘white’, ‘privileged’, and globally influential. It is difficult to rouse courage on behalf of those who are falsely cast as the fortunate. Antisemitism benefits from this distortion. It appears not as an assault on the vulnerable, but as a blow against the powerful. That lie drains the moral energy that might otherwise come to the defence.

Into that distortion steps the moderate. They know, if pressed, that talk of ‘Jewish control’ is poisonous. They know that graffiti on synagogues does not belong to the realm of legitimate political anger. Yet they are also alert to the subtle economy of prestige in their own circles. They can feel which causes confer social honour and which bring only trouble. There is a quiet knowledge that to speak loudly for Jews will not increase one’s standing in almost any contemporary milieu. If anything, it risks suspicion: ‘Are you defending them because you are one of them?’ This whisper is enough to make many people decide that someone else can take this particular stand.

Then there is the ideological pressure. In academic and activist environments especially, antisemitism rarely presents itself with an armband. It arrives draped in the language of liberation. It speaks of ‘decolonisation’, of ‘global justice’, and smuggles into that attractive vocabulary a set of ancient fixations. Jews are no longer ‘Christ killers’ but ‘settler colonisers’. The Jewish state becomes the convenient screen upon which old hatreds can be projected in rebranded form. The moderate senses something wrong, but to oppose it means challenging not just a remark, but an entire doctrinal package on which their professional or social life may depend. Many lack the appetite for that confrontation.

There is also a more intimate failing: the desire for a clean conscience at a discount. The West has produced a ritualised memory of the Holocaust that allows people to condemn dead antisemites with great fervour while hesitating to contradict living ones. Schoolchildren are taken to museums; politicians read solemn speeches once a year. It is all deeply moving and almost entirely risk-free. But when the hatred returns in altered costume, the message of ‘never again’ proves to have been confined safely to the past. The moderate can comfort himself: he is against that kind of antisemitism. This kind, the contemporary, ambiguous sort, he prefers to file under ‘complex matters’ and move on.

Fatigue plays its part. Our age demands opinions on everything, all the time. Outrage is a daily obligation. Many people, feeling exhausted by the constant summons to react, retreat into a selective muteness. They choose a small number of issues upon which they will spend their courage. Others will, they assume, cover the rest. Jews, being stereotyped as resilient and resourceful, are imagined as least in need of assistance. ‘They always land on their feet’, as the poisonously admiring phrase goes. It is a striking thing: the very stereotype that once justified exclusion from universities and guilds now serves as one of the excuses for leaving antisemitism unchallenged.

Underneath all these motives is another, darker calculation. Speaking against antisemitism threatens to expose hypocrisy in one’s own camp. For progressives, it may require admitting that movements they otherwise support have leaders or slogans that are indefensible. For conservatives, it may mean confronting the fact that among those who share their resentments about immigration or globalisation there are also people who mutter fondly about ‘the Rothschilds’. To object, in either case, is to risk fragmentation of your tribe. Many quietly decide that the price is too high. They prefer to keep coalitions intact, even when it means accommodating a little Jewish question on the side.

All of this produces that familiar, suffocating atmosphere Jewish communities recognise at once. Not mobs on the street, but friends in the room who avert their eyes. Editorial meetings where a grotesque cartoon is defended on ‘free speech’ grounds that somehow never apply to other minorities. Student forums where a Jewish participant must choose between staying silent or being cast as the representative of a hated abstraction. It is in those small scenes that the real work of normalisation is done.

The question returns in sharper form. When a civilised person hears an old hatred rehearsed in new slogans and chooses not to speak, what exactly are they doing? They are not simply ‘avoiding conflict’. They are, whether they admit it or not, quietly ranking harms. They have decided that the discomfort of being thought unfashionable, disloyal, or “on the wrong side of history” outweighs the harm of allowing one more drop of poison into the well. That is the moral arithmetic of the age.

Cowardice is not unique to our time. What is distinctive is the story we tell ourselves about it. We prefer to imagine that silence is mere absence: empty air between louder voices. It is not. It is a presence. It tells the antisemite, in effect, ‘You may proceed. I will not interfere.’ And it tells the Jew, ‘You are on your own.’ In the end, the most disturbing aspect of antisemitism in the present is not that it still exists, but that so many of the decent have arranged their lives in such a way that they can watch it and remain, with a clear conscience, strategically quiet.