When Hating Jews Becomes a Virtue

There is something more frightening than hatred.

It is hatred that believes itself to be righteous.

I kept thinking about that while watching Gloria Z. Greenfield’s bone-chilling, must-watch documentary, A Collective Descent into Evil: The Lethal Obsession with Jews and the Jewish State. I’ve known Gloria since we were teenagers. She is a gifted filmmaker, committed to expressing her strong voice to calling out antisemitism. This film examines the long history of Jew-hatred and the ideological currents that have converged in our own time around an obsessive hostility toward Israel.

But as both a rabbi and a psychologist, I found myself drawn to one word in the title.

Collective.

Because the most dangerous hatred does not begin with monsters. It begins with ordinary people who become convinced that their hatred is not hatred at all.

Instead, it is justice.

Nobody Wakes Up One Morning Evil

We like to imagine evil people as fundamentally different from ourselves. They are fanatics, terrorists, Nazis, psychopaths. We are decent people.

Psychology has spent much of the past century making that comforting distinction increasingly difficult to maintain.

Solomon Asch demonstrated how easily people can surrender their own perceptions to the judgment of a group. Stanley Milgram showed how ordinary people could inflict what they believed was serious harm when an authority assured them it was necessary. Albert Bandura described the mechanisms of “moral disengagement” through which people can participate in cruelty without relinquishing their image of themselves as moral human beings.

That last point is essential.

Human beings do not necessarily abandon morality before doing terrible things.

We rewrite morality.

The people we hate become oppressors. Their suffering becomes deserved. Violence against them becomes resistance. Intimidating them becomes activism. Silencing them becomes creating a “safe space.”

Once we accomplish that linguistic transformation, cruelty can feel remarkably like virtue.

Jews have seen this play out before.

The Jew has been reinvented repeatedly to fit whatever a particular civilization considered most contemptible.

In Christian Europe, the Jew was the Christ killer.

For racial antisemites, the Jew was a biological contaminant.

For communists, the Jew could be a capitalist exploiter.

For fascists, the Jew could simultaneously be the architect of communism.

Logical consistency was never required.

Only a villain.

Today the villain has acquired another name.

Zionist.

The Perfect Antisemite Is No Longer an Antisemite

Modern antisemitism has solved an ingenious public-relations problem.

In polite Western society, admitting that you hate Jews is unacceptable.

So don’t hate Jews.

Hate Zionists.

Insist that Zionism is uniquely evil. Describe the world’s one Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate. Hold Jewish students responsible for a government thousands of miles away. Demand that Jews publicly condemn Israel before being admitted into supposedly progressive spaces. Treat a Jewish desire for national self-determination as something sinister while recognizing national aspirations almost everywhere else.

Then say, “This has nothing to do with Jews.”

Sometimes that statement is true.

Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism. Israel is a democracy whose citizens criticize their government loudly, relentlessly and sometimes creatively. No government should be immune from criticism, including Israel’s.

Palestinian suffering is also real. The death of an innocent Palestinian child does not become less tragic because Hamas is a terrorist organization. Jewish ethics does not permit us to stop seeing human beings merely because doing so would make our politics easier.

But criticism crosses a line when the Jewish state is assigned a unique malevolence, Jews everywhere are made responsible for it, terrorism against Israelis is romanticized, or Jewish national existence itself becomes the offense.

The old antisemitism said, “The Jew is evil.”

Its contemporary cousin has discovered a more socially acceptable formulation:

“I have nothing against Jews. I merely oppose everything associated with Jewish collective existence.”

Prejudice is most dangerous when it no longer feels like prejudice.

October 7 Was a Moral Test

October 7, 2023 should have been an easy moral test.

Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel and murdered, tortured and kidnapped human beings. Young people were slaughtered at a music festival. Families were attacked in their homes. Hostages, including children and elderly people, were dragged into Gaza.

One could condemn those atrocities without endorsing Benjamin Netanyahu.

One could condemn Hamas and still advocate passionately for Palestinian rights.

One could mourn murdered Israelis and subsequently mourn Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza.

These positions are not contradictory unless ideology has destroyed our capacity for moral complexity.

Yet something extraordinarily terrifying happened.

Before some Israeli bodies had even been identified, people in Western cities were celebrating.

Not protesting Israel’s military response.

There wasn’t one yet.

Celebrating.

That distinction matters.

October 7 exposed something that years of political argument had obscured. For a portion of the anti-Israel movement, the issue was never merely Israeli policy.

The massacre itself could be reframed as “resistance.”

That should have been a moment of moral clarity.

Instead, it became a demonstration of moral inversion.

The victim became the oppressor before the blood had dried.

It was unabashedly evil.

When Education Does Not Protect Us

Perhaps the most disturbing part has been watching this unfold within universities.

Universities are supposed to complicate and challenge our thinking.

Instead, parts of academic culture have embraced an extraordinarily simple moral universe divided into oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, privileged and marginalized.

These categories can illuminate genuine inequalities.

They can also become intellectually dangerous when treated as complete descriptions of human beings.

Once someone has been placed into the category of “oppressor,” empathy becomes optional.

Once Israelis are classified exclusively as “colonizers,” centuries of Jewish history become inconvenient. Jewish indigeneity becomes irrelevant. Mizrahi Jews disappear. The Holocaust becomes a footnote. The expulsion and flight of Jews from Arab lands vanish.

History is flattened until it fits the slogan.

And slogans are psychologically powerful precisely because they relieve us of the burden of thinking.

“From the river to the sea.”

“Globalize the intifada.”

“Resistance by any means necessary.”

Ask what these words mean and conversations can become surprisingly uncomfortable.

That is the point at which education should intervene.

Too often, ideology has intervened first and critical thinking is thrown out.

The Brain Loves a Good Tribe

None of this should surprise psychologists.

The human brain is exquisitely designed for tribalism that once held evolutionary significance.

We rapidly distinguish between “us” and “them.” Group membership influences attention, trust, threat perception and empathy. Confirmation bias then helps protect the beliefs of our tribe. We notice evidence supporting what we already believe and find reasons to dismiss evidence that threatens it.

Social media has industrialized this ancient vulnerability.

Anger attracts attention. Moral outrage attracts engagement. Algorithms learn what keeps us staring at screens, and few things hold human attention more effectively than an enemy.

Nuance never stood much of a chance.

A conflict involving thousands of years of history, competing national movements, colonial powers, wars, refugees, terrorism, religion, trauma, failed negotiations, settlements, security concerns and legitimate Palestinian aspirations becomes a meme.

Then the meme becomes a worldview.

Eventually the worldview becomes an identity.

And once a belief becomes part of identity, questioning the belief can feel like an attack on the self.

Judaism’s Radical Alternative

The Torah begins its understanding of humanity with a revolutionary assertion:

God created the human being b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.

Not the Jew.

Not the Israeli.

Not the Palestinian.

Not the person whose politics we share.

The human being.

The rabbis ask why humanity began with a single person, Adam. Among their answers is that no person should ever be able to say, “My ancestor is greater than yours.”

Before our tribes, there was one human being.

That places a demanding obligation upon Jews as well.

Our history does not give us permission to dehumanize Palestinians. Antisemitism does not make every Israeli policy wise. The barbarism of Hamas does not erase Palestinian suffering.

But universal compassion does not require moral blindness.

Judaism does not teach that everyone is equally innocent.

Cain murdered Abel.

Pharaoh murdered Hebrew children.

Haman planned genocide.

The Torah knows that human beings possess both yetzer hatov and yetzer hara, fundamental capacities directed toward good and toward evil.

Seeing the humanity of another person does not require pretending that evil does not exist.

That distinction has become strangely difficult to articulate.

The Descent Is a Staircase

Perhaps this is the warning contained in A Collective Descent into Evil that we most need to hear.

Societies rarely descend into evil by jumping from a cliff.

They take the stairs.

First comes the stereotype.

Then the accusation.

Then repetition.

Then collective guilt.

Then moral exclusion.

Then intimidation becomes acceptable.

Then violence becomes understandable.

Then violence becomes justified.

And finally, violence becomes something people cheer.

The terrifying part is that those descending the staircase may believe they are climbing toward justice.

That is why antisemitism has never been merely a Jewish problem.

Jew-hatred is a warning sign of something larger: a society losing its capacity to distinguish evidence from conspiracy, individuals from groups, justice from vengeance, and morality from ideology.

There is a remarkable teaching in Pirkei Avot:

“In a place where there are no human beings, strive to be a human being.”

Perhaps we should hear those words today as a warning about crowds.

There will be moments when everyone around us seems certain.

When the slogans are intoxicating.

When our social group rewards agreement and punishes doubt.

When hatred of the correct people earns applause.

That is precisely when Judaism demands that we think.

And remember.

And refuse to surrender our conscience to the crowd.

The Torah’s repeated command to remember is not merely an instruction to look backward.

Memory should teach us to recognize patterns when they return.

Antisemitism rarely returns wearing the same uniform.

It adapts to the moral language of every age.

And in an age that prizes antiracism, liberation and social justice, we should not be surprised if the oldest hatred in the world learns to speak the language of antiracism, liberation and social justice.

That may be the most disturbing lesson of all.

The great danger is not merely that human beings are capable of evil. We have known that since Cain raised his hand against Abel.

The greater danger is that human beings possess an extraordinary capacity to rename evil until it sounds like justice.

So call hatred hatred.

Call terrorism terrorism.

Call antisemitism antisemitism, even when the person expressing it insists that he cannot possibly be an antisemite.

Call the suffering of innocent Palestinians suffering.

Call the murder of Jews murder.

And never allow a political movement, university, government, professor, rabbi, activist, algorithm or chanting crowd to do your moral thinking for you.

Because the moment we surrender that responsibility, the collective descent has already begun.