The Curious Phenomenon of Secondary Antisemitism

Picture of desecrated Jedwabne Massacre memorial; this particular desecration had two slogans: 1) I’m not sorry for Jedwabne and 2) they were flammable. Sent to author by staff at Auschwitz Jewish Centre.

Last night, I was speaking to a dear friend of mine who is completing her doctorate at NYU and she expressed how two colleagues of hers stopped speaking to her immediately after October 7th. Not when the war began, not when Gaza was blown apart in search of tunnels; while Israelis were still actively being murdered in their homes. Her social media became replete with simultaneous accusations of Israeli “genocide and terrorism” and celebrations of the orgy of death and rape that was being broadcast on TV and by Hamas Go-Pros. By October 9th, when people returned to school, long before Israel began its retaliation against Hamas, the battle lines had been drawn, and the hatred and anger directed at her was already kindling for the apparent sin of being a liberal Zionist. It didn’t get better. When someone in the program noticed that she had stopped coming to school (she was also in mourning for friends who had died at NOVA), within a few days, she was called into a professor’s office asking if she had actually described one of them as a “pro-Hamas terrorist” (which, if you know her, is laughable). It’s curious: why, when Jews are being actively victimized, does that generate more anger and hatred towards them? When a Jew, who is actively scared of people who are pictured on social media calling for her death in the streets sitting next to her in a classroom, is accused of being “anti-Palestinian” for feeling that fear? Unfortunately, this is hardly novel and demonstrates a curious phenomenon: that of “secondary” antisemitism. 

Poland, which was the subject of my doctoral dissertation, is perhaps the most interesting example of this: in 2001 when scholarship began to emerge that publicized a widely-known and yet carefully suppressed fact — that many Poles were active participants in the murder of their Jewish neighbours — the backlash was immediate and swift. It was immediately reframed as Jewish violence against the Poles, that was apparently both happening at the time of the war and at the turn of the millennium. In this version of history, revealing the history of a rash of pogroms in Eastern Poland led by locals in 1941 was twisted to be a Jewish plot designed to re-victimize the Poles who had “suffered under the thumb” of the Jews. Not only was this history of graphic and horrifying violence against innocent Jews apparently “factually inaccurate” and “concocted by the Jews in their search for money and power, aka ‘Shoah business,’” if it was true, the Jews were responsible for their own suffering for oppressing the Poles who murdered them. The cognitive dissonance (or frankly, cognitive contortions) that it takes to get to this point is reflective of this concept of secondary antisemitism, where feelings of hatred and anger towards Jews is rooted in the psychological process of guilt-deflection. In this version of history, the story of the Holocaust becomes the ultimate example of Jewish anti-Polishness. 

This was also seen in postmortem reports by Nazis, both leaders and functionaries, who participated in the Holocaust. While many displayed little more than antipathy to the Jews, and whose actions seemed to be more motivated by patterns of human behaviour (“just following orders,” negation of personal responsibility, response to dehumanization, Jews being seen as outside their “universe of obligation”) than antisemitism specifically, almost every report describes how they began to hate the Jews who cowered in fear and begged for the lives of their children. When faced with the realities of the face-to-face murder of men, women and children, a sense of humanity was not heightened — many SS report truly starting to hate the people for being in the position forced by the Nazis. To hate the person you’re about to murder for being murdered by you may be the ultimate example of guilt-deflection. 

This secondary antisemitism is demonstrating itself here in North America now too, particularly through the inversion of Holocaust history and consistent gaslighting that makes antisemitism a gordian knot that Jews are unable to either effectively fight or escape from. Hatred of Jews is as systemic in Western society as it is misunderstood. The trauma of the pogrom of October 7th has been followed by assaults on the Jewish community all over the world, but those assaults are often reframed as being “justified” and therefore “not antisemitic” — even though attacks on synagogues, Jewish schools, and Jews broadly cannot be understood as anything else.

In Toronto, antisemitic violence has skyrocketed since October 7th (up 93%, with over 60% of hate crimes reported being antisemitic despite 1% of the population being Jewish, per the Toronto Police), and yet the TDSB responded with enshrining measures against “anti-Palestinian racism” and an annual commemoration of “Naqba day” (Yom Ha’atzmaut was never acknowledged)  — despite the fact that anti-Palestinian violence has jumped only 7% during the same time period. While of course anti-Palestinian racism is completely unacceptable, the focus on it isn’t reflective of statistics of who is actually the target of said racism and violence in the city the TDSB services. While it’s unfortunate that these two forms of racism are seen entirely in relation to the other, there are certain realities to this conflict that put them in opposition. For what it’s worth, the Toronto Police report that over 60% of hate crime targets are Jews, with a distant second being the LGBTQ+ community members, then anti-Black hate, then anti-Asian hate, and then anti-Palestinian/ Islamophobic. 

And when Jews point out antisemitism, they are often accused of being anti-Palestinian or asked why they’re not speaking out against Islamophobia. Or when Jews express sadness for the death of their friends and family in the Gaza Envelope or in the North, we’re often told that we should be speaking out for Palestinian civilian casualties. Or if we point out that Holocaust inversion is becoming de rigour, we’re advised that Jews talk about the Holocaust too much and it creates anti-Jewish sentiment. Or in an era of DEI everything, wherein your “status” is governed by “how much of a victim” you are, the arguably most systemically and historically victimized group in Western society and the most famous victim of white supremacy has been twisted into being white supremacists themselves. 

It’s as if the history of antisemitic violence and the presence of antisemitic tropes in reactions towards Jews the world over makes people so uncomfortable in its immorality that one has to twist it into an expression of morality.

That the scenes of Jewish men, women and children being rounded up and burned alive in 2023 — not 1943 — should engender empathy and sympathy, but instead is twisted into an accusation of the violence being mere “resistance” against a genocidal government itself. Or when people on social media describe the taking of Israeli hostages is “justified” by Israelis holding “Palestinian hostages” in jail — and that October 7th was merely an attempt to rescue them. (Yes, this has actually been said to me repeatedly). This secondary antisemitism is statistically the highest in Europe at this point, most often related specifically to Holocaust memory, education and commemoration. (Bilewicz, 2013 & 2022) After all, almost all European societies and peoples in some way either participated in, benefited from, or turned a blind eye to the mass deportation and murder of Jews in their midst. The knowledge of that guilt though only appears to make a great number of people hate the victims even more. 

Anna Bikont, in her book The Crime and the Silence, interviewed someone from Jedwabne, Poland about the wartime massacre of Jews. In his version of history, not only did the Poles not participate at all, they were shouting at the Jews to “get out of there” and “away from the Germans” and then at church that weekend described that the Jews were “wrong for not having it in [them] to turn on the Germans; they were “in the wrong” for not defending themselves.” That was 2001. Today Jews are accused of being genocidal for defending themselves against a genocidal death cult who successfully killed 1200 citizens in one day with such excessive brutality that it defies description. 

The gordian knot of antisemitism in a nutshell.