The Coat of Many Colors, The Senator, and The Professor: A Weekly Torah Portion as a Guide to Modern Auto-Antisemitism
There’s something oddly comforting about “Parshat Vayeshev” it reminds us we’ve been excellent at one thing for millennia: fighting ourselves in the name of morality, justice, and truth. Long before X, before academia, before ethics committees, there were brothers, a striped coat, and internalized hatred that knew exactly how to justify itself. Jacob’s sons don’t hate Joseph because he’s annoying—they hate him because he’s a “values problem”: favored, dreaming, disrupting hierarchies. They craft an entire moral narrative where the pit becomes almost inevitable. Not murder (they tell themselves), but family correction. Not violence (obviously), but collective responsibility. And here, unfortunately, the Torah portion meets 2026.
Auto-antisemitism describes Jews adopting anti-Jewish discourse against their own people, sometimes from moral superiority, sometimes for universal values, sometimes simply because it’s more comfortable sitting in the accusers’ stands than defending in the arena. Not all criticism is auto-antisemitism, but not all criticism is just criticism.
Take, for example, Bernie Sanders’ appearance this week at Zohran Mamdani’s swearing-in ceremony. Sanders, American senator, Jewish, child of Holocaust survivors, repeatedly criticizing Israeli policy while politically aligned with figures like Ilhan Omar. Sanders emphasizes: “Criticism of Israel isn’t antisemitism.” He’s right (logically), but logic doesn’t always trump context. When every moral arrow points inward, when security complexities vanish, and Israel is repeatedly framed as a uniquely moral problem in the global landscape, something starts sounding familiar. Too familiar. Like brothers explaining why Joseph must come down from the stage. Academia joins the story too. Prof. Omer Bartov, a significant Holocaust and genocide scholar, levels harsh criticism at Israel using particularly extreme terminology. Some see brave moral compass; others ask how someone so deeply familiar with historical delegitimization mechanisms chooses to deploy them against the Jewish nation-state. Again, it’s not about “allowed or forbidden to criticize” it’s the deeper question: When does criticism become alienation? When does alienation become self-hatred wrapped in scholarly citations?
Hard to ignore the pattern: Communities worldwide weaken not from external enemies, but when internal discourse shifts from repair to dismantling. Sibling hatred, as Parshat Vayeshev teaches, is always sophisticated. It almost never presents itself as hatred. It masquerades as values, justice, foresight. But in the end, there’s a pit, a brother at the bottom, and a family that doesn’t understand how it got there.
The irony? In the name of moral resilience, some of us are willing to dismantle collective resilience. In the name of “never again,” we adopt discourse explaining why Jews (again) have no right to self-defense, only to perpetual self-interrogation.
The bottom line from this week’s portion: Not everyone speaking in morality’s name is Joseph. Sometimes they’re one of the brothers.
Before sending another sibling down the pit, worth checking if we haven’t wrapped sibling hatred in an intellectual striped coat.
Shabbat Shalom
