Here’s the thing about antisemitism.
It has always been a shapeshifter.
And that’s way more than a metaphor; it’s the mechanism that allows it to endure. It changes in response to the moment, to the cultural and political language of the time, reshaping itself just enough to remain plausible. In the Middle Ages, we were God-killers. In the Enlightenment, we were too insular, too tribal, too resistant to assimilation. When we assimilated, we became too successful and too powerful. When we were stateless, we were a rootless, destabilizing force, but now that we have a state, that state itself is cast as the problem.
The pattern is hard to miss once you’re willing to see it; there is no version of Jewish existence that falls outside the reach of the accusation. The charges are not generated by what we do. What we do is simply recruited, adapted, and reframed to fit the charges that already exist. The conclusion comes first; the evidence is assembled afterward. The Jews…never belong.
And that’s mostly true. For a brief time, we were acceptable as victims…as long as we were victims of the right kind of perpetrators. Jews as victims of European fascism fit neatly into an existing moral framework. Jews as victims of something that could be framed as resistance or liberation do not. In that context, our suffering becomes inconvenient, deniable, or somehow our own responsibility.
And that’s nothing new at all. We are always being killed for our own good.
Even today, to quote Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun. The steady drumbeat of accusations, canards, straw men, half-truths, and zero-truths reinforces the same ancient conclusion: somehow, this, too, is our fault.
So, here is what I want to say to us.
Stop waiting for Bibi to fall. Stop imagining that the next election, the next government, or the next diplomatic concession will fix the way the world sees us. It won’t. It won’t because the hatred doesn’t live in Israeli policy; it lives somewhere older and darker and more durable than any policy. It survived the shtetl and the ghetto and the gas chamber and 50 years of a Jewish state that has been, depending on the week, too weak or too strong, too secular or too religious, too Western or too Middle Eastern. It will survive whatever comes next.
The good news is that so far, so have we.
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