The Blogs: When They Come for the Jews, Everyone Should Worry

I wear two hats that sometimes seem very different.

I am a psychologist. I am also a rabbi.

As a psychologist, I spend a great deal of time thinking about how human beings perceive threats, construct explanations, divide the world into categories, and convince themselves that what they believe is true.

As a rabbi, I spend a great deal of time thinking about an even older question: What do we owe one another?

Lately, those two parts of my life keep leading me to the same disturbing conclusion.

When antisemitism becomes acceptable in a society, the Jews are rarely the only people who should be worried.

The rest of humanity should be worried too.

Not simply because antisemitism is immoral. Not simply because Jews deserve the same safety and dignity as everyone else. Both should be reason enough.

There is another reason, one grounded in both history and psychology.

Antisemitism is an early warning sign that something is going wrong with the society that tolerates it.

It tells us that conspiracy is becoming more acceptable than evidence. That collective guilt is replacing individual responsibility. That tribal identity is becoming more important than shared humanity. That intimidation is becoming an acceptable substitute for disagreement.

And once a society learns those habits, there is no psychological mechanism that guarantees they will remain confined to Jews.

Why Is It Always the Jews?

It is one of the strangest recurring stories in human history.

Jews have been accused of causing capitalism and communism. Of being too rich and too poor. Too clannish and too cosmopolitan. Too religious and too secular. Of refusing to assimilate and, at other times, of infiltrating society by assimilating too successfully.

We have been accused of killing Jesus and of not believing in Him.

Today, Jews can simultaneously be accused of being white colonialists and of being a foreign Middle Eastern people who do not belong in the West.

A psychologist looking at this immediately notices something.

These accusations cannot all be true. Unfortunately they do not need to be.

Antisemitism is remarkably adaptable because it does not begin with evidence and arrive at a conclusion. It begins with a conclusion and recruits whatever evidence is available to support it.

Psychologists have names for this.

Confirmation bias.

Motivated reasoning.

Illusory correlation.

Out-group homogeneity.

Scapegoating.

Conspiracy thinking.

Judaism has an older term for part of it: sinat chinam, baseless hatred.

Perhaps the hatred is never entirely without a psychological cause. Human beings usually manufacture reasons for what they want to believe.

But the reasons are often beside the point.

The hatred comes first.

What Happens in the Brain When We Create an “Other”?

Human beings are remarkably good at dividing the world into us and them.

Sometimes that ability is useful. Our ancestors needed to distinguish family from stranger and friend from threat.

But the same machinery can become dangerous.

Once people are categorized as members of an out-group, we become more likely to exaggerate differences, overlook individuality, remember information that confirms our expectations, and interpret ambiguous behavior through stereotypes.

Emotion intensifies the process.

Fear narrows attention.

Anger makes punitive responses feel justified.

Repeated exposure to demeaning language can make previously unacceptable descriptions seem ordinary.

Social norms matter enormously. When respected leaders, professors, celebrities, clergy, politicians, or peers use dehumanizing language without consequence, they are not merely expressing an opinion.

They are teaching everyone listening what may now be said.

And that permission of what may be said today can influence what may be done tomorrow.

This does not mean that an offensive joke inevitably leads to violence or that every antisemitic statement is the beginning of another Holocaust.

History deserves more seriousness than that.

It means something subtler.

Moral boundaries move.

Things that once produced shame stop producing shame.

Things that once provoked outrage become debatable.

Then normal.

That is how cultures change.

Judaism Has a Great Deal to Say About Bystanders

There is a verse in Leviticus that has always struck me as extraordinarily modern:

“Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.”

The Torah does not say merely: Do not spill your neighbor’s blood.

That would be easy.

Most decent people do not murder their neighbors.

The commandment is more demanding.

Do not stand there.

Jewish ethics recognizes a category of moral failure that occurs when I am not the perpetrator but have the ability to respond and choose not to.

The Talmud develops this idea further. Whoever has the ability to protest wrongdoing within his household and does not is held responsible for his household; whoever can protest within his community and does not is held responsible for his community; whoever can protest within the wider world bears responsibility at that level. I’m reminded of the case of Kitty Genovese, who was raped and fatally stabbed outside of her apartment building in Queens, NY, in 1964. Several neighbors watched from their windows, but did nothing to help. Public outrage over the neighbors’ lack of response ensued.

That is an astonishing moral psychology.

Silence is not always neutral.

Sometimes silence teaches.

Sometimes it gives permission.

Sometimes the person committing the offense is watching the bystanders more carefully than the victim.

He is asking: Can I get away with this?

The response of everyone else provides the answer.

Spain Chose Purity

In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella ordered practicing Jews to leave Spain unless they converted.

Jewish life had been woven into Iberian commerce, medicine, scholarship, finance, administration, and culture for centuries.

Spain did not collapse the following morning.

Indeed, Spain was entering an extraordinary period of imperial power.

That is important because history should not be reduced to morality tales.

Spain’s later economic problems had many causes: warfare, fiscal policy, inflation, reliance on American silver, political decisions, and repeated financial crises.

But the expulsion still tells us something profound.

A society can become so convinced of the necessity of ideological purity that it willingly destroys human relationships, knowledge, commercial networks, and talent that took generations to build.

The danger is not merely the loss of the people expelled.

The danger is the thinking that made expulsion seem reasonable.

Russia Found Someone to Blame

Imperial Russia repeatedly restricted Jewish residence, education, employment, and economic activity. Pogroms devastated Jewish communities. Enormous numbers eventually fled.

Did persecuting Jews solve Russia’s problems?

Of course not.

Jews were not responsible for autocracy, poverty, inequality, corruption, military failures, or governmental dysfunction.

But scapegoats have a wonderful political advantage.

They make complicated problems simple.

Why are you suffering? Them.

Why is the economy failing? Them.

Why is the nation humiliated? Them.

Why aren’t your children prospering? Them.

Once you have found the villain, you no longer have to solve the problem.

That may be one of antisemitism’s greatest attractions.

And one of its greatest dangers.

Germany Expelled Its Own Future

Then there is Germany.

Before Hitler, Germany possessed some of the greatest universities, laboratories, physicians, mathematicians, chemists, physicists, musicians, and intellectuals in the world.

Then Germany decided that some of them were the wrong kind of Germans.

Jewish academics were dismissed. Jewish physicians were excluded. Jewish businesses were confiscated. Jewish citizens were progressively removed from German civic life.

And eventually human beings who had lived as Germans were transformed into vermin to be exterminated.

The enormity of the Holocaust makes economic calculations almost obscene by comparison.

Six million murdered Jews are not an economic statistic.

But there is nevertheless an extraordinary secondary lesson.

Germany’s loss became someone else’s gain.

Scientists and intellectuals driven from Europe enriched universities and laboratories elsewhere. Research has subsequently demonstrated measurable increases in American innovation in fields entered by émigré scientists.

Think about the perversity.

A nation obsessed with proving its superiority drove away some of the people who helped make it intellectually superior.

That is what happens when ideology defeats reality.

Pharaoh Understood the Politics of Fear

The Torah gives us perhaps the oldest Jewish account of how this begins.

A new Pharaoh arises.

He looks at a minority population living within Egypt and says: “The Israelite people are too numerous and powerful for us.”

Notice what happens next.

Pharaoh does not begin with murder.

He begins with a story.

There are too many of them. They are becoming powerful. They may side with our enemies. They are a threat from within.

Only after the story has been established do the policies follow.

Oppression. Forced labor. Then infanticide.

As a psychologist, I find the sequence chillingly recognizable.

Before people can be treated as a threat, someone must teach the population to perceive them as a threat.

Once that perception becomes established, actions that previously would have seemed immoral can begin to feel defensive.

We are no longer hurting innocent people. We are protecting ourselves.

That transformation may be one of the most dangerous tricks the human mind can perform.

A Live Example, Not a Historical One

I don’t need to reach back to Pharaoh to find this pattern. It showed up this year, in an argument between two people who have each held the same job.

In 2026, Mike Huckabee, the sitting U.S. Ambassador to Israel and a man who has spent decades as one of Israel’s most committed defenders, visited the West Bank town of Qusra after Israeli settlers besieged the home of a Palestinian American family. He didn’t equivocate. He called the perpetrators “terrorists” and their actions “acts of terror,” language American ambassadors almost never apply to Jewish Israelis. “Crime is crime, terror is terror,” he told reporters. “When people do it, they should have an expectation that they will have severe consequences.”

David Friedman, who held Huckabee’s job during the first Trump administration, disagreed publicly. He tweeted that “Qusra is not under siege, and Palestinian attacks against Israelis living in Judea and Samaria far outweigh Israeli attacks against Palestinians.”

I am not interested here in adjudicating the underlying dispute about the incident itself. I am interested in the shape of Friedman’s response, because I have seen that shape before, and so have you, in every example already discussed in this essay.

A specific family, in a specific town, had their home besieged. The response was not “let’s establish what happened to this family.” The response was a statistic about the group. Even if the statistic is accurate, notice what work it is doing: it moves the conversation from an individual, verifiable act of intimidation against identifiable people to the comparative record of an entire population, as though the second fact could settle the first.

I want to be careful here, because I am a rabbi who has spent this entire essay warning against exactly this kind of collective accounting. I am not going to build an exception into my own argument the moment it becomes politically inconvenient. If “Jews have a history of X” is not an acceptable response to a specific act of antisemitic violence, then “Palestinians have a history of Y” is not an acceptable response to a specific act of settler violence. The Torah’s commandment in Leviticus does not have a footnote exempting bystanders when the victim belongs to a group we consider, on balance, less sympathetic than its attackers.

This is precisely what makes the mechanism dangerous. It doesn’t require malice. It only requires the quiet substitution of a group’s aggregate record for an individual’s claim to protection. Once that substitution feels natural, it will be available for use against anyone, including us, whenever someone decides our collective record is the more relevant fact.

Amalek and the People at the Rear

There is another Torah story that deserves attention.

Amalek attacks the Israelites in the wilderness.

But Deuteronomy remembers something specific about the attack.

Amalek struck those who were straggling behind.

The tired. The weak. The vulnerable. Those least able to defend themselves.

Jewish tradition does not remember Amalek simply because Amalek fought us.

Ancient peoples fought one another constantly.

Amalek became a symbol of evil because of how Amalek chose its victims.

A society reveals its character by what it permits to happen to those who are easiest to attack.

That remains true.

The real moral test is rarely how society treats the powerful when everyone is watching.

It is how society treats the person who has suddenly become socially permissible to hate.

The Bystander’s Brain

Psychology has taught us something uncomfortable about bystanders.

We look to other people to determine how serious a situation is.

If something disturbing happens and nobody responds, each person sees everyone else’s silence and concludes: Perhaps this isn’t as bad as I thought.

The result can become collective paralysis.

Everyone is waiting for everyone else.

But social influence works in the opposite direction too.

One person objects. Then another realizes that objection is permitted. Then another joins.

The norm begins to move.

This is why calling out antisemitism matters even when you know you will not change the antisemite’s mind.

You may not be speaking primarily to the antisemite.

You may be speaking to everyone else in the room.

You are telling them: This is not normal. This is not acceptable. You do not have to pretend it is.

That is how moral norms are defended.

The Jewish Question That Isn’t a Jewish Question

We Jews understandably ask: Are Jews safe here?

Perhaps everyone else should be asking a different question: What does the treatment of Jews tell us about the kind of society we are becoming?

Because the mechanisms used against Jews are remarkably portable.

Conspiracy. Collective blame. Dehumanization. Political intimidation. Selective enforcement of rules. Excusing hatred when it comes from one’s own political tribe. Deciding that some people’s fear matters and other people’s fear does not.

Once those principles are accepted, why would anyone imagine they will remain neatly restricted to Jews?

The identity of the next target can change.

The mechanism remains available.

I Don’t Need You to Love Jews

Perhaps this is where we Jews sometimes make the wrong appeal.

We ask people to oppose antisemitism because antisemitism hurts Jews.

That ought to be enough.

But apparently, sometimes it isn’t.

So let me make another appeal, as both a rabbi and a psychologist.

Oppose antisemitism because you care about yourself.

Because you care about your children.

Because you care about the society in which they will live.

Fight antisemitism because societies governed by conspiracy eventually make terrible decisions.

Fight it because scapegoating prevents societies from solving their real problems.

Fight it because governments that selectively remove protection from one group have created machinery that can later be used against another.

Fight it because universities that tolerate intimidation of Jewish students have weakened the principle protecting every student.

Fight it because political movements that discover demonization works rarely use it only once.

Fight it because the habits of mind required for antisemitism — stereotyping, conspiracy thinking, collective guilt, dehumanization — are habits that poison democratic societies.

And fight it because Judaism insists that standing nearby while someone else is degraded is not always innocence.

So What Should You Do?

You don’t have to become an activist.

You don’t have to attend a rally.

You don’t have to agree with the Israeli government.

You don’t have to agree with me.

But do something.

When someone says “the Jews” control the media, banks, universities, government, or whatever institution has been selected this week, don’t smile awkwardly.

Say something.

When a Jewish student is threatened or excluded, stand beside them.

When a synagogue is vandalized, show up.

When someone excuses antisemitism because the person expressing it shares your politics, call it what it is.

And apply the same principle when hatred is directed at Muslims, Christians, Black people, immigrants, Asians, LGBTQ people, or anyone else who has been turned into a convenient abstraction rather than encountered as a human being.

That last part matters.

Jewish memory does not give Jews permission to care only about Jews.

It demands the opposite.

“You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger.”

We know what it feels like to become the them in someone else’s story.

Our obligation is therefore not merely to demand that others speak for us.

It is to speak when someone else becomes them.

Don’t Stand There

There is an old Chassidic teaching that asks why human beings were created with two eyes.

One answer is that we need one eye with which to look inward, examining our own faults, and another with which to look outward, seeing what another person needs.

That is not a bad prescription for our moment.

Look inward.

What hatred have I excused because it came from my side?

What language have I tolerated because the target was someone I disliked?

When have I remained silent because speaking would have been uncomfortable?

Then look outward.

Who is standing alone?

Who has become acceptable to mock?

Whose fear have we decided doesn’t count?

Who is at the rear of the camp?

As a psychologist, I know that human beings are extraordinarily capable of rationalizing cruelty once our group tells us that cruelty is justified.

As a rabbi, I know that Judaism refuses to let us hide behind the group.