Strategic Antisemitism™

You don’t have to hate Jews. You just have to recognize that hating Jews is useful

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Sometimes hatred isn’t an emotion. It’s a business model.

Sometimes prejudice isn’t a principle. It’s a strategy.

Antisemitism has always been unusually adaptable to the ambitions of the people exploiting it.

I call this Strategic Antisemitism™. Scholars might call it instrumental antisemitism. We might refer to it as antisemitism of convenience, or opportunistic, transactional, or expedient antisemitism.

Whatever we call it, Strategic Antisemitism™ is what happens when someone discovers that antisemitism is useful — economically, politically, socially or personally — whether or not hatred of Jews is their starting point.

The clearest example may be those Germans, Austrians, Poles and others who denounced their Jewish neighbours to the Gestapo and their collaborators not because they were antisemites, per se, but because they wanted the Jews’ apartment or they wanted to eliminate a Jew as a business competitor.

The motive was the apartment or the profit. Antisemitism was merely the mechanism.

In the social realm, Jew-hatred has sometimes been less a creed than a growth strategy: a way for movements to gain traction, politicians to mobilize resentments, and ambitious individuals to find an in.

There is a distinction between antisemitism as conviction and Strategic Antisemitism™.

The first says: I hate Jews.

The second says: I can use the fact that other people hate Jews to get something I want.

History is full of the latter.

Guilds excluded Jewish craftsmen, simultaneously satisfying religious prejudice and reducing competition. Jewish merchants could be boycotted by competitors who were undoubtedly delighted to discover a moral-sounding justification for taking somebody else’s customers. Universities and professional organizations imposed Jewish quotas that conveniently left more places for everybody else’s children (and, perhaps not incidentally, excluded Jewish professors and their infamous Yiddishe kops, “Jewish heads” filled with centuries of esoteric knowledge).

When rulers expelled Jews, other people acquired their property. When Jewish moneylenders were dispossessed, debts disappeared with them. When pogroms erupted, ideological hatred mingled very efficiently with looting, robbery and the settling of personal scores.

Antisemitism was useful. Antisemitism is useful.

The hatred may not be the driver. Antisemitism may simply be the instrument.

Someone does not have to hate Jews to participate enthusiastically in antisemitism once they learn that antisemitism pays.

The coalition held together by contradiction

Strategic Antisemitism™ helps explain some of the strangest alliances in contemporary activist politics. As a unifying force, antisemitism and antizionism can be too valuable to discard. (Are antisemitism and antizionism the same thing? It doesn’t matter here. They operate the same way for the purposes of this discussion.)

Consider some of the political juxtapositions produced by contemporary anti-Israel activism.

Queer activists march alongside movements sympathetic to regimes, organizations and “allies” that would rather see them dead.

Feminists march in coalitions that include defenders of Islamist movements and governments that treat women as second-class humans or, as in the case of Afghanistan, far worse. Organizers of the SlutWalk defend regimes where women’s identities and bodies are content hidden by administrator.

Activists who spent years insisting that allegations of sexual violence must be taken seriously outright deny sexual atrocities committed during the October 7 attacks.

Anti-racists somehow rediscover collective guilt when the collective is Jewish.

Anti-colonial activists erase millennia of Jewish indigeneity and history to make Jews fit a European-colonizer template.

Liberation movements align with authoritarian regimes.

Pacifists romanticize people who sadistically torture civilians.

None of this means everyone at an anti-Israel demonstration believes every one of these things. Coalitions are messy. People join movements for different reasons.

The question is what happens (or doesn’t happen) when antisemitism appears inside a coalition — and the coalition repeatedly finds reasons not to confront it.

That is where Strategic Antisemitism™ enters.

Never waste a good hate-object

Nothing builds solidarity like a shared enemy.

Building a movement around detailed economic policy, conflicting theories of justice, religious pluralism, competing national claims and the messy compromises of real life is difficult.

A hate-object is easy.

Everybody does not need to agree on what they are for if they can all decide on what they are against.

Israel is the most politically useful hate-object on earth.

The revolutionary left sees capitalism. Islamists see infidelity. Nationalists see foreign influence. Anti-Western activists see colonialism. White supremacists see Jews. Race theorists see hyperwhiteness.

What can possibly unite these disparate forces into a cohesive global movement?

Strategic Antisemitism™.

This also explains one of the most maddening features of contemporary antisemitism: the furious insistence that it cannot possibly be antisemitism.

If antisemitism or antizionism has become organizational glue — if hostility toward Jews or Israel provides recruitment, solidarity, moral certainty, social status and a common vocabulary across otherwise incompatible movements — acknowledging antisemitism threatens the very viability of the coalition itself. Denial of the problem becomes existential.

To preserve the irreplaceable usefulness of Strategic Antisemitism™ requires outright self-suppression, against all logic. Antisemitism must be defended without appearing to defend antisemitism. Willing suspension of disbelief is the only response. The emperor’s nakedness must be explained without explanation because the evidence is irrefutable. Dumb denial is the only recourse.

As a result, activists can acknowledge antisemitism perfectly well in every century except their own, in every political movement except the one they belong to.

When they say they are not antisemitic, they may be correct. They look inside themselves (albeit rarely very deeply) and declare themselves Bigotry-Free™ (an exoneration progressives seem to grant ourselves only in this sole instance of discrimination).

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t part of a movement that is using antisemitism as a tool.

The contradictions and moral compromises are infinite. The paradoxes are undeniable. The defenses are insupportable.

Feminists, LGBTQ+ movements, trade unions, liberal churches, progressive politicians and the entire Palestine-industrial complex of the West are engaged in a mass exercise in moral laundering, a collective act of ideological self-exoneration, a campaign of rampant cognitive dissonance management.

Call them out on it and they will deny they harbor any animosity to Jews. They will deny antisemitism exists in their movements. They will express solidarity with Jews and trumpet their loathing of antisemitism.

This is possible because they don’t rationally or consciously support the causes they have misaligned with (Islamism, misogyny, homophobia, racism, totalitarianism, violence, annihilationist antizionism, overt antisemitism).

They just can’t quit something so successful.

They will not – they cannot – surrender the rhetoric, alliances and tactics that keep reproducing antisemitism. They will not relinquish the very mechanisms through which antisemitism keeps entering their movements. They cannot abandon the tropes, exceptions and double standards that give antisemitism its political utility.

To abandon the machinery that keeps transfiguring antisemitism into solidarity, strategic success and political power would be to undermine everything they have struggled to build.

Eradicating antisemitism would destroy the unity across irrational divides, the global recruitment tool that has created a tsunami around tangentially related causes like climate justice, Indigenous decolonization, defunding the police, anti-capitalism, queer liberation, feminism, migrant rights and organized labour.

Holding these raucous forces in line, corralling them all in one tent, would be impossible without convincing them that the assorted roads to their miscellaneous ends all run through Gaza.

And just like the unifying uses of shared hatred in the past, this one relies on Strategic Antisemitism™.

Like the most despicable forces of the past, today’s activists have learned that one thing unites and mobilizes like no other.

And that thing is just too damn valuable to give up, no matter what it says about activists’ larger principles, integrity or moral coherence.