The Oldest Hatred, Rebranded

It’s often said that antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred. But less often acknowledged is how good this hatred can feel—how deeply satisfying it is to direct righteous indignation at a group long marked as a moral pariah.

For much of Western history, Jews functioned as the negative moral compass of Christian civilization: the people one must not be like. This association was so normalized that it hardly registered. Even the Brothers Grimm—whose fairy tales became Hollywood staples—collected one known as Der Jude im Dorn (“The Jew Among Thorns”), where the Jewish character was little more than a mythic villain, interchangeable with goblins and giants.

And yet the genius of antisemitism has always been its adaptability. In capitalist societies, Jews were branded as communists. In communist societies, they were bourgeois exploiters. Nationalists viewed them as rootless cosmopolitans, while cosmopolitans scorned them as tribal. No matter the prevailing ideology, the Jew fit the role of antagonist.

That pattern has been revived in today’s progressive movements, particularly in academia and the arts. The “evil Jew” has been replaced with the “evil Zionist.” Israel now plays the role of “the Jew among the nations”—a unique object of condemnation, accused not just of wrongdoing but of embodying everything that is morally corrupt in our world: colonialism, racism, imperialism, white supremacy, ecocide.

What’s striking isn’t just the persistence of the trope, but how deeply pleasurable this inversion of moral clarity can be. It feels good to hate Jews—especially when that hatred is dressed up as solidarity with the oppressed. “Anti-Zionism” serves as a convenient release valve: a way to indulge in hostility that would otherwise be taboo, under the guise of standing up for human rights. For an American Left that is still reeling from Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential elections of 2024, hurting “Zionists” offers a form of symbolic compensation – a way of landing punches that, unlike Democratic efforts at home, actually do some damage.

This helps explain the surreal alliance between intersectional activists and Islamist movements like Hamas or Hezbollah—groups whose theocratic, misogynist, and antisemitic values stand in stark contrast to progressive ideals. The alliance is not based on shared values but on shared enemies. What binds them is the moral thrill of confronting the Jew, now recast as “the Zionist.”

The perversity of this dynamic was laid bare on October 7. Efforts to label Israel’s war against Hamas as “genocide” are not just misrepresentations of a complex and tragic conflict; they are calculated moral inversions. Ask yourself: What could Armenians have done in 1915 to stop their murder by the Ottoman Empire? What could Europe’s Jews have done to prevent their systematic extermination by the Nazis? What could the Tutsis have done in 1994 to avoid being slaughtered by machete-wielding mobs in Rwanda? The answer in each case is painfully clear: nothing. They were powerless victims of genocidal regimes that sought to erase them.

Now ask: is there anything Hamas could do to stop the death and destruction in Gaza that have resulted from the war it launched on October 7, 2023? The answer is equally obvious: It could acknowledge defeat and surrender, release the remaining hostages, and send its leadership into exile. These are real, immediate steps that could end the bloodshed. So why aren’t they being demanded—by progressives, major activist movements, and institutions who claim to speak for Palestinian rights?

Answer: it would end the fun!

History has repeatedly shown us the paradoxical and self-defeating consequences of this phenomenon. In societies where it has been fully normalized—the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany come to mind, as well as in much of the contemporary Muslim Middle East—Jew-hatred, with its attendant conspiracy theories about Jewish or Zionist power, sows distrust in institutions (e.g., “we have to conceal what we are doing because the Zionists control education and the government”), experts (especially if they are Jewish or Zionist), and the very concept of verifiable truth. This can further destabilize political environments and augment illiberal climates in which the public and political leaders may actively support measures to suppress what is deemed “disinformation,” “hate speech,” or “subversive ideas.”

In short, the very free speech that allowed these individuals to enjoy and share their Jew-hatred and conspiracy theories is then curtailed. The “free speech absolutism” that was once a shield for their beliefs becomes a casualty to the illiberal political climate that their actions helped to create. The ultimate irony is that as the state consolidates power and truth becomes subjective, the exhilarating “high” of shared conspiracy and group solidarity is replaced by the fear and silence of a truly totalitarian system, undermining the very source of their initial satisfaction. This is precisely what the philosopher Karl Popper had in mind when he wrote about the paradox of tolerance.

Of course there are other, very good reasons for opposing Jew-hatred and the updated “evil Zionist” trope favored within so many progressive circles. The charge of genocide against Israel does more than mislead. It flips historical memory on its head. To equate Jews with Nazis is not just offensive—it’s dangerous. It injures Jews already reeling from the trauma of mass murder, and it breathes new life into old antisemitic tropes. If Jews can be Nazis, then perhaps—so the implication goes—those who hated them weren’t entirely wrong. That is the poisonous subtext, and it must be confronted directly.

Worse, such rhetoric trivializes real genocides—against Armenians, Jews, Tutsis, Yazidis, and others—by turning genocide into a political slogan. It also obscures the genuinely genocidal ambitions of groups like Hamas, who, on October 7, gave us a horrifying preview of what they would enact if given control over all of Israel and Palestine.

There’s another complicating layer. A small but prominent number of Jews have joined in this moral crusade. In elite academic and cultural spaces, denouncing Israel—and by extension mainstream Jewish communities—can be a form of social currency. For Jews estranged from Jewish communal life, or those simply seeking to avoid professional fallout, rejecting Zionism becomes a loyalty test. Passing it can mean acceptance, applause, even acclaim. Failing it means suspicion and exclusion.

Let’s be clear: not everyone hates Jews, and holding all governments (including that of Israel) to account is legitimate. Most people oppose terrorism. Wars, particularly in urban settings, are horrific. But the proliferation of explicit Jew-hatred in North America and Europe—on campuses, in protests, even in city councils—is real. So is the institutional paralysis in confronting it.

This moment demands moral clarity. Enlightenment values—pluralism, reason, liberal democracy—have made Western societies places of refuge for people fleeing repression elsewhere. But they are fragile, and defending those values isn’t always fun. When hatred is dressed up as justice, and when bigotry finds moral justification, those values are at risk.

We should not be afraid to name what we see. There is nothing progressive about antisemitism. And there is nothing moral about a hatred that, no matter how it is disguised, always finds its way back to the Jew.