The fourth mutation of antisemitism

“Antisemitism is a virus,” declared Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Like a virus, it has always managed to mutate and adapt to the prevailing zeitgeist. And now, as the moral imagination of the West shifts yet again, we are witnessing the terrifying emergence of a new and deeply insidious strain: antisemitism in the name of equity.

Rabbi Sacks traces the ideological history of antisemitism through three phases. For centuries, it was religious in nature. Jews were accused of deicide. It was righteous to despise the Jews, for they had murdered the son of God.

Next came the racial turn. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, with the rise of pseudoscientific theories of racial hierarchies, Jews were cast not as heretics, but as an inferior and dangerous race, irredeemable by conversion or assimilation. This mutation culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust.

The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 saw antisemitism mutate once again. No longer religious or racial, it became territorial in nature. The Jewish people’s return to sovereignty became the object of a level of scrutiny and demonization no other nation endures. Israel was now accused of being a colonial outpost, an aggressor, and a perpetual wrongdoer in the family of nations.

And while this territorial strain of the antisemitism virus remains as sickening as ever, in the 21st century we are witnessing yet another mutation. We live in a time when morality is framed not by theology, race, or nationalism, but by equity and identity.

The new creed of the West is intersectionality: the belief that justice is measured by outcomes, and that moral status is determined by one’s place on the spectrum of marginalization. In this framework, power is inherently suspect. Victimhood conveys virtue.

Consequently, Jews find ourselves miscast yet again, this time not as heretics or racial threats, but as oppressors. As “white-adjacent.” As beneficiaries of privilege. As participants in colonialism. Zionism, once the proud liberation movement of an exiled and persecuted people, has been rebranded as apartheid.

Jews are told that we are too successful, too influential, too secure. And yes, even too “white” — despite the significant number of Jews hailing from the Middle East and North Africa, often expelled by the countries they called home for many centuries. In short, Jews are simply too powerful to be welcomed into the club of victimhood.

This inversion is as absurd as it is dangerous. Jews remain one of the most targeted minorities in hate crimes per capita in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Synagogues require armed guards. Jewish students on university campuses are harassed, ostracized, and silenced. Rabbi Sacks called antisemitism “the world’s most reliable early warning sign of a major threat to freedom, humanity, and the dignity of difference.”

The fourth mutation of antisemitism is not only a danger to Jews. It is a distortion of the very values it claims to champion. When victimhood becomes the currency of moral legitimacy, and when Jews are excluded from the ledger of suffering, it results in a perversion of true justice.

In every era, antisemitism mutates, adapts, and reinvents itself. In every generation, it must be unmasked. Yesterday, it spoke the languages of spirituality and biology. Today, it speaks the language of equity and identity. And tomorrow, it will speak another tongue. We must call it out for what it is: hatred of Jews, plain and simple. And in the words of Rabbi Sacks, “The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.”

Daniel Friedman of Teaneck is a professor of political science at Touro University.

opinion

comments