Tag Archives: Jews

Three Multinational Antisemitic Arcs, And World Jewry

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Over the past century, pressure on Jews has scaled, shifting from borders to regions to institutions, changing form while carrying a familiar direction.

The story begins in Europe 1938 with the Anschluss. Persecution inside Germany extends outward as Austria is absorbed and its Jewish population is pulled into the same system. Expansion of antisemitic forces follows conquest. Poland, France, Hungary, the Netherlands become extensions of a single design as control spreads across the continent.

An den Fenstern j¸discher Geschfte werden von Nationalsozialisten Plakate mit der Aufforderung “Deutsche, wehrt euch, kauft nicht bei Juden” angebracht.

Policy matures into infrastructure. Collaboration, coercion, and indifference form a landscape in which Jewish survival is unlikely. At the Wannsee Conference, extermination is organized across borders, ministries, and railways. The Holocaust becomes a continental system aligned toward a single end: the genocide of Jews.

That system collapses with the war’s end but the pattern carries forward, reshaped and redirected.

After 1948, pressure reappears across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Jewish communities rooted for centuries in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco and elsewhere begin to unravel with striking speed.

Baghdad Iraq’s 1941 slaughter of Jews

Each country follows its own path. Laws restrict, property is seized, pressure builds, departures accelerate. In Iraq, the Farhud foreshadows a collapse that soon becomes mass departure. In Yemen, Operation Magic Carpet lifts an entire community into exile. In Egypt, the Suez Crisis accelerates expulsions. Across North Africa, uncertainty and nationalism press communities toward exit. By the 1970s, nearly one million Jews leave and a regional Jewish presence that endured for centuries nearly vanishes completely.

By the 1970s, the arena shifts again. The contest moves from territory into legitimacy itself.

In 1975, the United Nations adopts United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, recasting Jewish self-determination as a moral offense within the central forum of international diplomacy.

US Ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan reversing the Zionism is Racism resolution

The repeal arrives in 1991 through United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/86, yet the framing travels beyond formal votes. It resurfaces at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001 and diffuses through NGOs, campuses, and international forums, where evolving language carries forward an enduring challenge to Jewish sovereignty.

From there, the argument migrates into the civic fabric of Western democracies. In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, vile ideas become chants in universities, media, and politics.

The mechanisms differ from earlier eras, yet the effects shape daily life. Jewish institutions increase security. Synagogues that once stood open now operate behind layers of protection. Public expressions of Jewish identity carry new calculations. Debates about Israel expand into broader judgments about Jews, blurring lines that once held more clearly.

Across these shifts, the effect becomes visible in the map of Jewish life.

President Joe Biden’s Jewish liaison person suggests that Jews should hide their religious symbols in 2021

A century ago, Jewish communities spanned continents, anchored in Europe and present across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Americas. The destruction of European Jewry removed the largest center. The unraveling of communities across the Middle East and North Africa compressed what remained. Many moved to Israel. Others built new lives in the United States.

Today, roughly 85 percent of the world’s Jews live in those two countries. There are only seventeen countries with more than 25,000 Jews when there used to be dozens just a century ago.

That concentration follows a century in which environments that sustained Jewish life across dozens of countries collapsed, expelled, or eroded. Dispersion gave way to consolidation. Geography followed pressure.

The forces shaping that consolidation continue to evolve. As legitimacy is contested in broader arenas, communities orient toward places able to sustain security, identity, and continuity. The gravitational pull toward Israel strengthens under those conditions, even as the United States remains a central pillar of Jewish life.

While Yom Ha’atzmaut marks Israel’s independence, it also marks the emergence of a center of gravity forged through history rather than theory. Across a century, shifting forms of pressure reshaped where Jews could live, how they gathered, and where they anchored their future.

Three arcs across a century redrew the Jewish map. As the narrative arc is still underway, Israel’s percentage of world Jewry will likely become a majority from a plurality, in just a few years.

NY Times Issues Warning About “Resurgence” of “Far-Right” Jews

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The latest The New York Times piece on a JDL-linked murder plot tells a very specific story—and then stretches it into something much larger than it is.

Start with the facts. One individual in a fringe offshoot movement, often described as a ghost of the old Jewish Defense League, allegedly plotted a murder that never happened because law enforcement stopped it. That is the entire event. Not a movement. Not a wave. Not a trend. A single actor orbiting a marginal group.

And the target was not randomly selected. This was not an attack on “Muslims” or a civilian population. The alleged target was a highly visible anti-Israel agitator who celebrates violence against Jews and calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. That context matters. It does not justify anything but explains a motive. Erasing that distinction flattens reality into propaganda.

Yet from this narrow incident, the long article pulls a wide arc—Meir Kahane, Baruch Goldstein, decades-old ideology, insinuations about modern Israel. The reader is led to see not one unstable actor, but a resurfacing Jewish extremism problem.

“apparent resurgence of far-right Zionism” – The New York Times

That framing collapses under the weight of what is actually happening.

2025 saw the highest number of Jews murdered in antisemitic attacks in over thirty years. Not plots—killings, specifically because they are Jews. Across cities and continents. In New York, Jews remain the primary target of hate crimes by a wide margin. Assaults are not hypothetical. They are routine. Visible Jews are attacked on the street, not in theory but in daylight.

So the inversion becomes obvious.

A stopped act by one fringe Jewish extremist becomes a sweeping narrative. A global surge in antisemitic violence becomes less than background noise.

“a disturbing message to New York City: the ideology of the Jewish Defense League has resurfaced.” – The New York Times

This is not balance. It is misdirection.

Every society has extremists at its edges. Jewish communities are no exception. They should be confronted early and without hesitation. But scale matters. Sequence matters. When coverage elevates a single fringe actor into a defining story while minimizing the sustained targeting of Jews, it sends a clear signal about whose fear counts and whose does not.

“voted for President Trump,” – The New York Times non-sequitur about member of the JDL, seemingly painting all Jews who voted for Trump as a potential extremists

And it feeds something deeper: the growing belief among Jews that institutions—from media to politics—are more comfortable scrutinizing Jewish reaction than confronting antisemitic aggression.

The real story is not that somewhere on the margins there are Jews capable of violence. Every people has that margin.

The real story is that Jews, in New York and across the diaspora, are once again living with a level of threat that is measurable, visible, and rising—and that too many prefer to mock the real security fear of Jews and cast Jews as the crux of the problem.

Campus Jewish Life Needs a Mainstream Voice

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On elite campuses, something more consequential than protest is unfolding. Jewish life is being redefined by extremists.

Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and “Jews for Liberation” present themselves as the authentic moral voice of Jewish students. They speak in the language of justice, liberation, and equality that resonates with their peers. But strip away the branding and the position is blunt: the Jewish state is illegitimate and cast as a project of racial supremacy, apartheid, even genocide.

That is not critique. That is an argument for erasure.

The danger is not only that these claims are false. It is that they are being laundered into the mainstream through the fig leaf of Jewish identity. When anti-Israel activism is voiced by non-Jews, it is political. When it is voiced by Jews, it is marketed as moral truth. Then the fringe becomes credible and slogans become scholarship. Eliminationist ideas acquire the authority of internal dissent.

That shift matters.

Once Israel is no longer seen as a flawed state – much like others – but as an illegitimate one, every boundary collapses. If the state itself is the crime, dismantling it becomes justice, and whatever follows can be rationalized as liberation.

This is how language is turned into a weapon.

Mainstream Jewish campus institutions have not met this moment with equal clarity. Groups like Hillel are focused, rightly, on building Jewish life: community, ritual, continuity. They create space. They avoid litmus tests. They keep doors open. But when the central attack is not on Jewish practice but on Jewish legitimacy, generality reads as hesitation.

When others define Zionism as racism, it is not enough to respond with programming and belonging. The argument has moved to first principles. It demands an answer at that level.

And so a vacuum has opened.

Into that vacuum have stepped the loudest voices, not the most representative ones. The result is a distorted picture of Jewish opinion, one in which the extremes are visible and the center is absent.

That center needs a voice of its own.

Not a mirror image of the anti-Zionist fringe. Not a reaction that turns legitimate security concerns into collective hostility toward all Arabs. But a clear, unapologetic articulation of what most Jews actually believe, and what a sustainable future requires.

That position is not complicated.

The Jewish people have a right to sovereignty in their historic homeland. Israel must remain secure and capable of defending itself against those who seek its destruction. Terrorism and the glorification of violence are disqualifying, not contextual. No serious political future can be built on a culture that celebrates October 7 or teaches that murder is resistance.

The “two-state solution” is treated as moral doctrine, as if repeating it resolves the conflict. It does not. Self-determination is not a slogan tied to a single map. It can take different forms across different political arrangements. Millions of Palestinian Arabs have held Jordanian citizenship. Others live under varying structures of autonomy. The real question is not whether self-determination exists in theory, but whether any proposed structure can produce stability rather than violence.

A future Palestinian state, if it is ever to emerge, must come after a profound transformation: demilitarization, institutional reform, and an educational shift away from incitement and toward coexistence. Statehood is not an entitlement. It is a responsibility.

This is baseline reality, yet it is rarely stated plainly on campus.

A new kind of Jewish student group is needed, one that is explicit where others are cautious and disciplined where others are reckless. A group that centers Israel not as an abstraction but as a living, embattled state. One that can say, without hedging, that Jewish self-determination is legitimate, that its delegitimization is dangerous, and that moral seriousness requires both strength and restraint.

Such a group would do three things differently.

  • It would reject the language trap. Words like apartheid and genocide would be treated not as serious analysis but as distortions that inflame rather than illuminate.
  • It would refuse the false binary. Supporting Israel does not require abandoning moral judgment. Rejecting terror does not require rejecting an entire people.
  • It would re-anchor the conversation in reality. Israel exists. Threats are real. Peace requires conditions, not just intentions.

The goal is not to win an argument in a seminar room. It is to prevent a generation from being taught that the existence of the world’s only Jewish state is a moral error to be undone.

Campus Jewish life needs a mainstream voice that is willing to speak clearly – and be heard.

Savannah Guthrie Times 250

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Savannah Guthrie tried to describe the indescribable.

Her 84 year old mother was taken from her home, with signs of violence left behind, a masked man on camera. And then nothing. A void where a mother used to be. She spoke about sleepless nights, about imagining fear she cannot reach, about a word she kept returning to: unbearable.

That word should end the conversation. It should strip away everything else.

Because everyone understands what it means when someone you love is taken.

Now Multiply That by 250

What Guthrie is living through is devastating.

In Israel, it happened at scale.

Over 250 people were abducted violently—children, parents, grandparents—dragged from homes, shoved into vehicles, disappeared into tunnels by jihadi terrorists. The same questions Guthrie now asks became a national condition: Are they alive? Are they suffering? What are they thinking?

The same agony. Multiplied. Multiplied. Multiplied.

Where the World Breaks

Here is the dividing line.

When Guthrie speaks, there is no debate. No one justifies it. No one says her mother deserved it. No one rallies in defense of the abductor.

The reaction is immediate and human: bring her home.

But when Israeli families faced the same horror, the reaction in too many places—especially on college campuses—was not sympathy.

It was celebration.

Not confusion. Not distance. Celebration of the very act Guthrie calls unbearable.

The Only Question That Matters

Her interview removes every excuse. No politics, no slogans—just a daughter describing what it feels like to have a mother taken.

If you can feel that—and then justify or cheer when it happens to someone else—you are not misinformed. You are choosing evil.

And that is the part that is unbearable to civilized people.

The Fight Against Antisemitism Is Being Filled With Harmful Catchphrases

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The fighters of antisemitism are rushing to the front with silly catchphrases. Perhaps even toxic.

Take the line: “What starts with the Jews doesn’t end with the Jews.”

It is meant to elevate the issue. To make antisemitism feel urgent to those who might otherwise ignore it. But it carries an uncomfortable implication: that what happens to Jews matters most because it might eventually happen to someone else.

Why?

Why is the attack on Jews not sufficient on its own? Why must Jewish suffering be reframed as a warning signal for others before it earns attention?

It is already evil when Jews are targeted and that should be enough. Jews are not canaries in a coal mine for the protection of others. They are millions of innocent people living with threats, violence, and fear. That reality does not need to be universalized to be taken seriously.

Then there is the fallback line: “I condemn antisemitism, but…”

The sentence always breaks in the same place. Everything before the “but” is obligation. Everything after it is the real message.

No one says, “I condemn racism, but…” without immediately undermining themselves. Only with antisemitism does the moral clarity feel negotiable, conditional, open to context. The phrase signals that antisemitism is wrong in theory, but explainable – even understandable.

Or consider the most common defense of Israel: “Israel has a right to exist.”

It sounds firm, but it collapses under even a moment’s scrutiny.

No country has a “right to exist.” Not Singapore. Not Spain. Not South Sudan. Countries exist because history, peoplehood, and political will bring them into being and sustain them.

The real point is that the phrase is uttered because people want to destroy it. Not Montenegro or Guyana. The sole Jewish State.

This isn’t a hundred year old debate about political Zionism and the reestablishment of a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland but a discussion about the genocide of millions of Jews. Why is such phrase ever used? The defenders of Israel should condemn the premise that forced the urge to utter the words.

The more careful phrase “Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism” often lands the same way.

It is true, of course. But it is almost always deployed at the exact moment when the line is being approached, if not crossed. It functions less as clarification and more as insulation, a way to reassure the speaker that whatever comes next cannot be antisemitic, because it has already been declared not to be.

It pre-clears the argument.

All of these phrases share something in common. They take a situation that demands moral clarity and replace it with moral positioning. They allow people to sound serious and defensive while adopting the framework of the accuser.

Attacking Jews is evil. Threatening Jews is evil. Justifying targeted harm against Jews—whether through politics, ideology, or euphemism—is evil.

It is time for anti-antisemites to stop using catchphrases that feel emotionally empowering but are soaked in the lexicon of antisemitism.

Portable Colonialism: the anti-White Movement

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Spain now admits “abuse” in Latin America over hundreds of years, while the United Nations praises France for its legacy, as it elevates 2 billion Muslims dominating dozens of countries.

Same actions. Different judgment.

What disappears in all three cases is the simplest word: invasion.

We prefer a softer story that cultures blended, languages spread, religions were adopted. But that story falls apart on contact with reality. Spain did not grow into the Americas. France did not organically merge with Africa. Arab armies did not quietly diffuse ideas across continents. They came from the outside, took control by force, and reshaped the societies they conquered—imposing language, religion, and identity.

That is not exchange. It is replacement.

Over time, something happens to memory. The longer the outcome lasts, the more natural it feels. A forced language becomes simply the language. An imposed religion becomes tradition. Conquest becomes history and eventually, heritage.

But modern outrage does not follow history evenly. It clusters around the United States as if European expansion began and ended there. The rest of the Americas, reshaped just as profoundly – perhaps more – by Spanish and Portuguese conquest, rarely draw the same sustained scrutiny.

Part of this is power. The United States is the dominant global actor today, and criticism follows visibility. Part of it is recency. But another part—rarely stated outright—lies in how colonialism is now framed.

In today’s discourse, colonialism is implicitly coded as a “white” phenomenon. The category is no longer just historical but visual.

Where power is perceived as Western and white, the language of colonialism sharpens. Where societies are seen as non-Western or part of the Global South, even when shaped by earlier conquests, the language softens into history or identity. Entire regions transformed by Spanish and Portuguese expansion or Islamic invasions are broadly framed as “indigenous,” while the United States becomes the central exhibit.

That same lens is applied even more aggressively to Israel.

Israel is often cast as a project of Western, even “white,” power. But that framing collapses under even modest scrutiny. The largest share of Israel’s population descends from Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa, whose skin is as dark as their neighbors.

More fundamentally, the Jewish return to the land of Israel is a decolonization movement. It is not an external power projecting control into a foreign land. It is dispersed communities reconnecting to a shared origin and reviving their language and restoring their cultural framework in the place it began.

And yet it is falsely framed as colonial.

While the clearer cases fade into history, the exception is forced to fit the rule.

That contrast reveals something deeper. Colonialism is no longer a historical description. It has become a moral label which is applied unevenly, shaped by contemporary perceptions of identity, power, and alignment.

Histories that fit a “white West imposing on others” framework are foregrounded and moralized. Histories that do not fit as neatly are softened, reframed, or absorbed into the past.

European and Islamic invasions took over the Americas and Africa, but universities and progressive media only showcase the interlopers with whiter skin. The blind rage infects reason to such a degree, that even anti-colonial movements such as the Jewish State, cannot be addressed by fact and reason.

The colonial-imperial lens at work today is shaped by an anti-White racist Global South. Its mission is portable colonialism – to extract wealth and power from White societies and redistribute them to non-White communities.

The United Nations Prioritizes “Islamophobia” Over All Religious Persecution

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In 2022, the United Nations created the International Day to Combat Islamophobia, observed each year on March 15.

The date commemorates the victims of the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, where worshippers were murdered during a terrorist attack in 2019.

Hatred directed at any religious community deserves condemnation. But the decision raises an uncomfortable question: why is Islam the only religion granted a dedicated global day to combat hatred?

Islam is hardly a marginal faith. With roughly two billion followers, it is one of the largest and fastest-growing religions in the world and the majority religion across dozens of countries stretching from North Africa through the Middle East and into Asia. Within the UN itself it is represented by a powerful diplomatic coalition, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of 57 states that frequently coordinates its positions inside the General Assembly.

Yet Islam is the only religion singled out for a specific UN observance addressing prejudice against its followers.

Other religious communities facing persistent hatred receive no comparable recognition.

There is no UN day dedicated specifically to combating antisemitism today, despite the fact that Jews are the most frequently targeted religious minorities per capita in many countries. While the UN does observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day each January to commemorate the genocide of Jews during The Holocaust, that observance focuses on crimes committed eighty years ago. There is no equivalent UN day focused on antisemitism in the present.

Nor is there an observance addressing anti-Christian persecution, even though research by organizations such as Open Doors and studies by Pew Research Center consistently show that Christians face some of the largest levels of religious persecution globally in absolute numbers.

The UN does maintain a broader commemoration—the International Day Commemorating Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief—but that observance focuses on victims after violence occurs, not on confronting the ideologies that fuel it.

Except in one case: Islam.

The religion which dominates the countries where Christians are most persecuted, including: Somalia, Libya, Eritrea, Yemen, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan and Iran.

Violence the UN Does Not Mark

The choice of March 15 highlights another inconsistency.

Deadly attacks on synagogues have occurred repeatedly in recent years.

In 2018, eleven Jews were murdered in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue, the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. In Germany, a terrorist attempted to massacre Jews during Yom Kippur in the Halle synagogue shooting.

And in October 2025, a Jewish man was fatally stabbed outside a synagogue in Manchester, England, in an attack carried out on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, when Jews gather in synagogues around the world for prayer and reflection.

Synagogues across Europe and North America have repeatedly been targets of shootings, stabbings, and attempted massacres.

Yet no comparable United Nations observance exists dedicated specifically to combating antisemitism tied to those attacks.

If the UN can create a global day tied to violence against mosques, why has it never created one tied to attacks on synagogues?

Politics Behind the Principle

The explanation lies less in theology than in politics.

For decades the powerful Organization of Islamic Cooperation has used its diplomatic weight to advance religious protection initiatives inside the UN system. Beginning in the late 1990s, the bloc pushed resolutions condemning what it called the “defamation of religions,” efforts widely understood as attempts to restrict criticism of Islam.

Western democracies resisted those proposals on free-speech grounds, and by around 2010 the campaign stalled.

So the strategy evolved.

Instead of defending religion from criticism, the focus shifted toward defending believers from discrimination under the banner of Islamophobia.

Opposing the initiative could now be portrayed as defending prejudice against Muslims, even if the broader debate still involved questions of speech, ideology, and religious critique.

In 2022 the effort succeeded with the creation of the UN’s International Day to Combat Islamophobia.

When Institutions Reflect Power

The episode reveals something fundamental about how the modern UN operates.

The organization does not function as a neutral body weighing global injustices. It functions as a political arena shaped by large voting blocs.

In the General Assembly—where every state has one vote regardless of size or political system—coordinated coalitions wield enormous influence. The 57 countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation represent a significant force in that system, often aligned with broader coalitions such as the Non-Aligned Movement.

Together these alliances can shape the symbolic agenda of the institution. They determine what the United Nations chooses to highlight and what it chooses not to see.

A Test of Moral Consistency

The United Nations was founded after World War II to defend universal human rights. But institutions derive legitimacy not only from their ideals, but from their consistency.

When some hatreds receive global recognition, others historical remembrance, and still others little acknowledgement at all, the institution begins to reflect political influence more than universal principle.

Combating religious hatred is a noble goal. But when that effort becomes selective, it reveals the farce and the forces controlling the United Nations.

Religious Antisemitism and the Stiff-Necked Nation

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There are many forms of antisemitism. This review is about religious antisemitism, specifically from Christians and Muslims.

As a clear disclaimer, not all Muslims or Christians hate Jews. Or the Jewish State. But there are undeniable fundamental differences in how religions perceive each other which are sometimes caustic.

The world often describes the three great monotheistic religions together: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But lumping Jews with the other two faiths leads people to falsely put the three on the same plane. There are roughly 2.2 billion Christians and 2.0 billion Muslims today, compare to only 15 million Jews. To give the scale some perspective, if people of the three faiths were in a stadium, all the levels of half the stadium would be Christians while the other half would be Muslim, with Jews only wrapping the entrance portals for the players.

Christianity and Islam are global religions – they have brought their faith to the far corners of the world by sword and missionaries. But Judaism is more akin to a local tribal religion in Africa or South America. The faith is tied to a specific piece of land – the land of Israel. Jews do not seek to convert people or believe non-Jews are destined to eternal damnation unless they follow the same belief system.

When Muslims and Christians conquered / invaded / colonized the Americas and Africa, they believed they were helping people by spreading a faith the locals had never heard of. One cannot blame an Amazonian tribe for not believing in Jesus when they never heard of him. One cannot immediately hate the local African tribe for not believing in Mohammed when the name and faith were brand new.

But Christians and Muslims cannot say the same of Jews. Their faiths share a common history.

Jesus was a Jew who lived in the land of Israel. Mohammed was an Arab, a descendant of the same forefather Abraham who is also the forefather of Judaism.

For devout Christians and Muslims who feel that spreading their faith is integral to their belief – a form of religious supremacy – Jews are forever a stiff-necked people who refuse to join the global masses and appreciate the true prophets.

So how, when and why did the Jews become so stubborn?

In the biblical parsha of Ki Tisa, the Jewish nation was called a stiff-necked people several times – by God. When the people became worried that Moses had disappeared and made themselves a golden calf idol, God said to Moses:

“I have seen these people,” the Lord said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people.” – Exodus 32:9

The Adoration of the Golden Calf by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665)

The phrase is meant as a criticism that Jews cannot get out of their old habits and will not be able to adopt the new laws that God has set out for the nation. The phrase appears repeatedly, including:

  • “Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way.” – Exodus 33:3
  • For the Lord had said to Moses, “Tell the Israelites, ‘You are a stiff-necked people. If I were to go with you even for a moment, I might destroy you. Now take off your ornaments and I will decide what to do with you.’ – Exodus 33:5
  • “Lord,” he said, “if I have found favor in your eyes, then let the Lord go with us. Although this is a stiff-necked people, forgive our wickedness and our sin, and take us as your inheritance.” – Exodus 34:9

The last quote is from Moses to God, in which he uses the same language God invoked. But Moses argues that the trait should be and will be their salvation. He argues that they need more of God’s compassion than others because of their nature, and once they know God and learn the commandments, they will become affixed forever.

Just as the Jews were becoming a nation, God was worried about their stubborn nature, but Moses assured God that the same trait will make them a holy nation forever that deserved forgiveness and the promise of internal inheritance. That same stubborn trait has kept the Jews alive, distinct, and small, for thousands of years, an easy group to ignore or appreciate on a global scale, or a perpetual irritant for those who cannot enjoy humble faith, and demand religious superiority over this small ancient people.

New York Times Shows How To Mainstream Antisemitism

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Michelle Goldberg, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, wrote a piece called “How Israel Lost America,” which made it sound like a country actively did something to turn Americans on it. She wrote:

“Conspiracy theories about Israel manipulating America into another Middle Eastern conflict are bound to flourish, especially because there will be a grain of truth to them.”

Pause there.

The claim that Israel manipulates America into war is not new. It echoes dual loyalty accusations against Jews who support Israel. It echoes the suspicion of hidden influence. It echoes the charge that Jews entangle great powers in foreign conflicts.

To say such conspiracies will flourish is observation.
To say they contain “a grain of truth” is validation.

That sentence does not merely predict antisemitic rhetoric. It lends it credibility.

The column builds toward that moment.

Goldberg wrote:

“Israel, by behaving appallingly and then trying to silence any condemnation of its appalling behavior as antisemitic, gives ammunition to Jew haters.”

Israel behaves appallingly – seemingly against America’s values and/or interests – and then pulls out the antisemitism card to try to silence critics, and that combination arms the Jew haters.

The causal arrow points away from the antisemite and toward the Jewish state. Hatred becomes consequence. Antisemitism becomes reaction. And it becomes so, because Israel itself decided to flag it, not the Jew hater.

To give credence to her theory, Goldberg quotes Jeremy Ben-Ami of the left-wing group J Street, warning of “blowback” when antisemitism is invoked in political disputes:

“You’re going to get some blowback against the people doing that.”

Again, antisemitism is framed as backlash. The focus shifts from the existence of anti-Jewish hostility to whether Jews and Israel are provoking it.

Layer these claims together and the pattern emerges:

Israel behaves badly.
Antisemitism claims are overused.
Blowback follows.
Conspiracies flourish.
There is “a grain of truth.”

The article never touches upon the truth of Gazans slaughtering Jews. The column doesn’t write about the antisemitic genocidal Hamas Charter. Goldberg doesn’t discuss the anti-Israel mobs in America celebrating the slaughter of elderly Jews, raping of Jewish women, and the burning of Jewish families alive. Other than to validate their feelings.

But the most consequential move in the column is quieter.

Israelis are discussed in ways readers instinctively map onto Jews. Israeli Arabs are transformed into “Israel’s Palestinian citizenry”, separating them rhetorically from the category of “Israelis.” Roughly a quarter of Israel’s citizens are not Jewish, yet that demographic fact disappears from the frame. Israeli Arabs are no longer part of the “Israel” that is “losing America” because they are really part of the counterparty in the war. That means that only Israeli Jews are the problem. The contrast is especially stark as the world cannot conceive of a “Palestinian Jew.”

The result is a subtle transformation. The conflict shifts from a dispute between a sovereign state (Israel) and a national movement (Stateless Arabs from Palestine, SAPs, seeking a new state) into something older and more volatile: Jews versus non-Jews in the Middle East.

Once that transformation occurs, every Israeli policy becomes Jewish policy. Every American alignment becomes Jewish influence. The state and the people fuse.

Now return to the “grain of truth.”

If Israel has already been rhetorically collapsed into Jews, then the suggestion that conspiracies about Israeli manipulation contain truth does not land on a neutral government. It lands on a people historically accused of secret power.

This is how respectable language normalizes ancient suspicions. The words are measured. The tone is analytic. The effect is corrosive.

Criticizing Netanyahu is legitimate. Opposing war is legitimate. Debating American foreign policy is legitimate. People do it all of the time about leaders and policy for all countries all over the world.

Yet people don’t turn the vile behavior of Iran into criticism of all Muslims. People don’t say Catholics run the drug cartels of Colombia, where a greater percentage of the country is Catholic than Israel is Jewish. People do not make people of faith the subject, unless it’s Jews.

Framing antisemitism as a foreseeable reaction to Israel’s – which we are informed should be read as “Jews'” – conduct while granting partial legitimacy to manipulation conspiracies crosses a line. And it leads to a public that no longer wants to combat antisemitism, as it has become conditioned to rationalize the ancient hatred.

The Third Type of Israeli For Diaspora Jewry

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Since October 7, diaspora Jews have met three types of Israelis: traumatized, empowered and lonely.

The traumatized arrive as witnesses.
The empowered arrive as proof of resilience.
The third variety is one of performance – asked to explain a country while still trying to understand their own experience.

In Jewish communities, the first narrative is familiar. Israelis describe rupture.

October 7.
The hostages.
Reserve duty.
Funerals.
The knowledge that Iran sits behind the horizon.

This is testimony. The Israeli leaves seen as wounded.

A second narrative follows.

Israel adapted.
The army responded.
The economy continues.
Restaurants are full.
Startups are built.

This story stabilizes the room. The Israeli leaves seen as resilient.

Between these narratives lives daily life.

Relief and dread coexist.
Normal life returns without feeling normal.
Laughter sits beside background tension.

Public conversation prefers clarity. Experience offers contradiction.

So Israelis adapt to the room.

They speak trauma when trauma is needed.
They speak strength when reassurance is needed.
They translate Israel in real time.

The performance is neither optimism nor trauma.
But it is performance, a derivative removed from feelings.

Psychology defines loneliness as the gap between experience and recognition, not the number of relationships. This is emotional loneliness – social connection without feeling fully known.

A related idea is self-discrepancy, the distance between lived reality and presented identity. When that distance persists, people function well while feeling internally unseen.

Connection forms around the role while the person remains partially hidden.

Diaspora encounters intensify this.

Israelis become representatives of war, resilience, survival. Conversation pulls toward clarity. Ambiguity has little space.

So ambiguity moves inward.

This produces what researchers describe as invisible loneliness: being embedded in strong relationships yet recognized mainly through narrative.

Outwardly, this looks normal.

Travel resumes.
Humor returns.
Good news is shared.
Life is described as continuing.

Much of this is regulation.

Many Israelis instinctively manage diaspora anxiety: softening uncertainty, emphasizing stability, offering reassurance before they fully feel it.

People compress their own ambiguity to protect others. Emotional labor strengthens connection while quietly increasing distance.

The loneliness that follows is subtle.

These Israelis are seen as strong and seen as wounded, but rarely seen as both at once. Explanation is recognized faster than contradiction.

Fluency becomes the demanded role.

But that fluency creates distance.

The most adaptive Israelis can tell every story correctly. They sense what the room needs and provide it. They move between testimony and reassurance without hesitation.

This is competence. And compression.

At home, without an audience, the unperformed experience lives: pride and exhaustion, relief and uncertainty, normal life alongside persistent tension.

Psychology frames this as the cost of sustained self-discrepancy: the larger the gap between experienced reality and presented reality, the greater the risk of loneliness inside connection.

Diaspora Jews are not doing something wrong and Israelis are not being inauthentic. This is what prolonged uncertainty does when communities need clarity.

Narratives travel easily. Complexity moves slowly.

The role of the Israeli has become easier to understand than the experience of being Israeli. Can diaspora Jewry enable them to feel truly connected simply by listening, or does the off-ramp from loneliness require sharing the barrage of antisemitism in their own daily lives.