The Eras Tour Theory of Antisemitism

Every generation of antisemites insists they are not the last one. They have a new sound. A new look. A new vocabulary. Don’t be fooled — the songwriter has not changed.

I have been to the Eras Tour twice.

The first time was in Tampa. Raymond James Stadium, April 2023. I wore a Speak Now-coded lilac dress, traded friendship bracelets with strangers, cried through “champagne problems” next to a woman whose name I never got.

The second time was in Amsterdam. Johan Cruijff ArenA, July 2024. Different friends. Same artist. Same arena that, four months later, would host Maccabi Tel Aviv versus Ajax — and after the match, the Jewish fans who had filled that stadium would be hunted through the streets of Amsterdam by coordinated mobs. Beaten. Kicked into the canals. Dragged out of rideshares. Asked for their passports before the punches landed.

Many called it a pogrom. The first one in Amsterdam since the Nazis.

I sat in that arena. I sang along. I have not stopped thinking about it since.

This piece is about that arena. It is also about a quieter version of it, because most of the time antisemitism does not arrive in the form of a stadium hunt. Most of the time it arrives in the form of a conversation.

A quick note before we get into it. My regular readers know I usually write with the analytical posture of a civil rights attorney explaining federal law. This piece is something else. This is the Swiftie cut — same diagnosis, same disease, different metaphor. The rigorous doctrinal version of this argument lives in Crash Course[1] and is one tab over if you want it. Stay here for the friendship-bracelet version.

The Reputation Era Rebrand

There is a particular conversation I keep having — in green rooms, at dinner parties, in the comment sections of my own articles — and it goes like this.

A person, usually well-educated, usually progressive, usually visibly straining to be reasonable, explains to me that her objections to Israel, to Zionism, to AIPAC, to the ADL, to whatever the proximate noun has become this week, are not antisemitic. She has evolved past antisemitism. Her critique is structural. Materialist. Decolonial. Brand new.

I have come to think of this as the Reputation Era rebrand.

In the fall of 2017, Taylor dropped a single called “Look What You Made Me Do.” The chorus contains a phone call. I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, ’cause she’s dead.

The narrator is a brand-new Taylor. She has nothing to do with the old Taylor. Her enemies forced her to evolve. The aesthetic is darker. The sound is industrial. The receipts are new.

In pop terms, it is a stroke of marketing genius.

In every other terms, it is a near-perfect description of how every iteration of antisemitism has announced itself for the better part of a thousand years.

The old hatred can’t come to the phone right now. Oh, ’cause it’s dead. I’m something else now. Don’t compare me. I’m new.

Quick disclaimer before the chorus kicks in. There are good-faith critics of Israeli policy — including Jewish ones — and the cheap move of calling everyone a Nazi is one I have spent a career declining to make.

The harder version is the one you cannot shake off.

I have written elsewhere about why antisemitism is best understood as a structure rather than a feeling, and why the same architecture has been running on Western servers for two thousand years.[2] What I want to add now is this: the structure is also a song. There is a songwriter. The songwriter has been working in the same key the whole time. The eras change. The chord progression — hidden power, dual loyalty, parasitism, conspiracy, blood libel— does not.

If you cannot hear it, it is not because it is not there. It is because you have stopped listening for it.

There is a song on Taylor’s latest album called “Cassandra.” It is about a woman who warns and is dismissed. They killed Cassandra first, ’cause she feared the worst. Every Jew I know who has tried to name what she is hearing in the last two years can relate to Cassandra. I told you so. Did anybody else? Apparently not.

The Discography

A short walk through the catalog.

The debut album: religious antisemitism. Medieval Europe through the Enlightenment. The Jew as Christ-killer, host desecrator, poisoner of wells, kidnapper of Christian children for ritual murder. Conversion is, in theory, the cure. The country-album era. Acoustic. Folkloric. The kind of song people will be sampling from for centuries — and they will.

The pop pivot: racial antisemitism. 19th and early 20th century. The Jew as biological category — the secret organizer of finance and revolution simultaneously, somehow both Rothschild and Trotsky, the contradiction never landing because the contradiction is not the point. The Protocols. Henry Ford. The Holocaust as logical terminus. Conversion is no longer the cure. The problem, now, is the blood. The 1989 of the catalog. Crossover. Mainstream. Tragically catchy.

The Reputation era: Soviet anti-cosmopolitanism. After 1967, an enormous Soviet propaganda campaign — workshopped at state-funded conferences across the Third World, then shipped translation-ready to every left-wing movement on earth — that rebranded the Arab-Israeli conflict as colonial oppressor versus indigenous liberation movement.[3] Settler-colonialism. Apartheid. Genocide. The vocabulary you are hearing on every American campus this fall did not arrive last Tuesday. The masters were cut in 1967.

The folklore era: contemporary anti-Zionism. The Soviet Union collapsed. The propaganda did not. A zombie ideology, in Izabella Tabarovsky’s phrase, walking through Western institutions long after the empire that birthed it turned to dust.[4] The accusations are once again about hidden power, dual loyalty, disproportionate influence. The conversion question gets a 21st-century update: the Jew can be redeemed by sufficiently loud denunciation of the Jewish state. The indie-prestige era. Cottagecore. Cardigan-coded. With its own merch line.

This is the era where the lyrics get acted out in real time. The fans who hunted Maccabi supporters through Amsterdam in November 2024 had been workshopping that songbook for months. Different friendship bracelets. Same chorus.

The evermore era: the woke right. A few months after folklore released, Taylor surprise-dropped its sister album. Same indie-prestige aesthetic. Different woods. Folklore had cottagecore. Evermore had murder-mystery.

The woke right is folklore’s evermore.

It used to be that right-coded antisemitism announced itself in tiki torches and “Jews will not replace us” — clean, clear, debut-album energy. Then it watched the folklore era for a few seasons and learned something. The young men of the Owens-Carlson-Fuentes axis discovered that the indie-prestige aesthetic worked. That you could borrow the vocabulary of victimhood, of identity, of oppression — words workshopped by the progressive left in the last cycle — and apply them to right-wing grievance.

Same intimate aesthetic. Same cardigan-coded victim posture. Same identity-grievance framing. Different season, different woods, different costume.

Where folklore says decolonize, evermore says globalist. Where folklore says settler, evermore says replacement. Where folklore says the Jewish lobby, evermore says… the Jewish lobby. The slot does not change. The framing does.

The woke right discovered that “just asking questions” sounds enough like “speaking truth to power” that you can sometimes get away with it. Folklore released first. Evermore came shortly after. Pretending they are not the same songwriter requires not having listened to either album.

Each era denies the previous one. Each era picks up the same chord progression and lays a new instrument over it. I think I’ve seen this film before, Bon Iver sings on folklore. So have we. Same songwriter. Different costumes.

The Tour

You have already met the Eras Tour. One stage. One arena. The eras cycle through in sequence, costume changes between sets, fans rotating their friendship bracelets to match whichever Taylor is on stage. Same artist. Same show.

That is exactly where we are.

Post-October 7 has been the Eras Tour of antisemitism. The medieval blood libel takes the stage. Then the lights drop, the costume changes, and the racial pseudoscience set begins. Then the Soviet template plays its hits. Then the folklore reboot pulls in the loudest fans. Then the evermore companion-set takes the stage to a growing crowd. Different fans cheer for different sets. The chorus is the same. The arena does not empty.

If you are Jewish, you have been in this arena for about two and a half years. You have noticed.

I have noticed because, as it happens, I was literally there.

Taylor’s Version

In 2021, after a dispute over the master recordings of her early albums, Taylor began re-recording them as “Taylor’s Version.” Same songs. Same lyrics. Same melodies. New ownership.

This is exactly what contemporary antisemitism does with the old material. Re-records. Repackages. Sells the inventory back to a generation who would never have bought the originals.

Blood libel — 2026 Version: Israel is harvesting Palestinian organs. Killing Palestinian children for medical research, or clinical trials, or sport. Bad Blood, indeed.

Dual loyalty — 2026 Version: AIPAC controls American foreign policy. The Jewish lobby has captured the State Department, the White House, the press. (The slot stays the same. Only the noun changes.)

Hidden cabal — 2026 Version: A Mossad-CIA joint operation orchestrated [insert recent unexplained event here]. The whole thing is a false flag. Who benefits?

Christ-killer — 2026 Version: Israel is committing genocide, and any Jew who fails to denounce it loudly enough is complicit. Silence is violence. The Jew is once again uniquely culpable for crimes the Jew is presumed, by default, to have committed.

The melody is unchanged. The producer is new.

And the Jew who declines to sing along — who refuses to recite the right denunciation in the right cadence — gets cancelled. It’s easy to love you when you’re popular, Taylor sings on her newest album. The optics click, everyone prospers. But one single drop, you’re off the roster. Ask any Jewish progressive who has tried to explain, in a Brooklyn living room or a faculty Slack, that the hostages still matter. The roster is exact. The drop is small.

The Anti-Hero Problem

There is a line on Midnights, in a song called “Anti-Hero,” that I have not been able to stop thinking about since I started writing this piece.

Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism, like some kind of congressman?

That is the song. That is the entire song. That is, in fact, the entire problem.

I have, by now, a stock set of questions I ask the well-educated, well-meaning progressive who needs me to know that her critique of Zionism is structural, materialist, decolonial, and absolutely not antisemitic. She has read Judith Butler. She has Jewish friends. She wants to know why I keep conflating the two.

Three questions.

Can she name a single Zionist she finds intellectually serious? She thinks for a long moment. She cannot.

Does she reach for the same vocabulary — apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing — when describing China’s conduct in Xinjiang, Turkey’s against the Kurds, or Russia’s in Chechnya? She starts to answer. She stops. She moves on.

In the catalog of states created through the 1940s partition of the British Empire — India, Pakistan, Jordan, Israel — does she oppose the existence of any of the other resulting states? She does not.

It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.

There is a song on folklore called “mirrorball.” I can change everything about me to fit in, Taylor sings, in what is supposed to be a sad confession about contorting oneself to please. It is also, accidentally, the most accurate self-portrait of the contemporary progressive in a Jewish room I have ever heard. She has changed everything about herself. The right books, the right friends, the right vocabulary, the right hashtags. She has shown me every version of herself.

There is a companion song on evermore called “tolerate it.” I sit and watch you, Taylor sings, I notice everything you do or don’t do. That is the relationship every Jewish progressive I know is currently in with the movement she has spent twenty years calling home. The Jew who has to perform the right denunciation to retain her seat at the table is in a relationship she is tolerating, that is, at best, tolerating her — and barely.

The only thing she has not changed is the chord progression of the song still playing underneath.

That is not a coincidence. That is the songwriter.

While she is processing all of this, the fans outside the arena in Amsterdam are still moving. The friend I went to that show with is still on her phone, scrolling images from the same neighborhoods we walked through to get to the venue. The conversation in this Brooklyn living room is taking place against the muffled background of an actual pogrom that everyone in this room is treating as ancient history when it is sixteen months old.

That is the moment I keep returning to. That is the part the song does not let me forget.

Dear Reader

The closing track of Midnights, in its 3am edition, is called “Dear Reader.” It is one of the few moments in the catalog where Taylor breaks character and addresses the audience directly. Dear reader, you don’t have to answer just because they call. Dear reader, the greatest of luxuries is your secrets.

So. Dear reader.

You do not need a PhD in Jewish history to recognize the song. You have been hearing it your whole life. Everyone has. The only question is whether you are willing to admit, when it comes on, that you know the words.

When someone tells you their critique of Zionism has nothing to do with old hatreds — ask whether the chord progression is, actually, original. Hidden power. Dual loyalty. Disproportionate influence. Who benefits? If the chords are the same, the song is the same.

Ask them to name a Zionist they admire. Ask them to name an Israeli policy they consider defensible. Ask whether the critique survives the substitution test: would they apply it, in the same vocabulary, with the same intensity, to any other country, any other people, any other diaspora? If the answer is consistently no, you are listening to a re-record.

When someone tells you to shake it off — that you are being dramatic, that the comparisons to historical hatred are themselves the offense — do not shake it off. That is the song asking you to stop hearing it. Do not give it the courtesy.

There is a track on evermore called “right where you left me.” It is about a woman frozen in a moment everyone else has moved on from. Help, I’m still at the restaurant. Still sitting in a corner I haunt.

Two and a half years after October 7, that is where Jewish people are. The world has paid the check. We are still at the table. The song is still playing. The arena is still half-full. The friends we came in with have left.

I have sat in that arena twice. So, in a way, has every Jew alive today.

The eras change. The costumes change. The producers change. The songwriter does not.

The least we can do is recognize the artist.

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[1]See Jaclyn S. Clark, A Crash Course in the World’s Oldest Conspiracy Theory, The Times of Israel; for the historical sweep, see David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (W.W. Norton & Co., 2013).

[3]Izabella Tabarovsky, Demonization Blueprints: Soviet Conspiracist Antizionism in Contemporary Left-Wing Discourse, Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism (2022); Zombie Anti-Zionism, Tablet Magazine (July 30, 2024).