The surge in antisemitism caught a lot of commentators off guard. After the horrors of the 20th century, Western societies erected strong taboos against ethnic hatred, in particular against the oldest hatred. For a time, those taboos worked. By being sensitive to early-stage antisemitism (stereotyping, for example, or hinting at conspiracies), we made pogroms unthinkable.
Then, as if from nowhere, mobs were picketing and vandalizing Jewish shops, demanding that their Jewish neighbors condemn Israel and chanting, “Gas the Jews!” The Anti-Defamation League says antisemitic incidents are up by 30% and that the number of Americans with “highly antisemitic attitudes” has doubled. Human Rights Watch finds an equivalent rise in Europe, where synagogues and Jewish schools are routinely given armed guards.
One reason many commentators are nonplussed is that new-wave antisemitism comes largely from the Left. In the United Kingdom, the Campaign Against Antisemitism looked at all recorded cases of anti‑Jewish prejudice in British political parties. It found that 61% came from Labor and fully 80% from parties of the Left. The United States caught up on Oct. 7, when academics and hip students declared that decolonization was not a metaphor.
For those who have built their political identity around the facile assumption that left-wing means compassionate and right-wing means nasty, all this is deeply unsettling. How can their side be lining up with people who kidnap toddlers? Antisemites should be shaven-headed thugs, not “woke” students or oppressed peoples!
Identity politics has been disastrous for Jews. As long as they were seen as downtrodden, they had the sympathy of a swathe of the Left. But the state of Israel exists precisely because its founders had had enough of playing that role. Now, Jews are again demonized as powerful and furtive oppressors.
Antisemitic conspiracy theories should fall at the first hurdle. If there really were a Jewish lobby controlling finance, politics, or the media, wouldn’t it arrange things to have less Jewish persecution? But conspiracy theories are perennially popular with a certain type of person, often one who likes to imagine himself as a champion of the underdog.
There is nothing new here. Indeed, left-wing antisemitism has an old and cruel history. Did you know, for example, that the man who (approvingly) popularized the word “socialist” was an antisemite? And that the man who (approvingly) popularized the word “antisemite” was a socialist?
The former was the 19th‑century French radical Pierre Leroux. “When we speak of the Jews,” he wrote, “we mean the Jewish spirit — the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, of speculation; in a word, the banker’s spirit.” The latter was a German leftist called Wilhelm Marr. “Antisemitism is a socialist movement,” he pronounced, “only nobler and purer in form than social democracy.”
It is a measure of the Left’s cultural ascendancy that those words now seem jarring. Yet they were, if not typical of their time, certainly not exceptional.
This leftist tradition inspired the most malign antisemite of all. “How, as a socialist, can you not be an antisemite?” Adolf Hitler asked his party members in 1920. (The way in which we have repressed the memory of Nazism’s socialist origins is another demonstration of the modern Left’s cultural ascendancy.)
True, there were also socialists who loathed prejudice. True, there were plenty of right-wing antisemites. True, Karl Marx himself was the grandson of a rabbi. But listen to the way the odious sponger wrote about the religion that his father had abandoned.
“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”
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I could go on — I haven’t even started on the antisemitic campaigns in Communist Eastern Europe — but I’m finding all this as distasteful as I hope you are. My point is that as long as you see the world as a pyramid of hierarchy, you are bound to engage in categorization and group identity. Some of those groups will be treated as oppressed and given a pass. Others, necessarily, will be treated as oppressors and condemned.
Before Oct. 7, this was hidden from most people. Even those who disliked identity politics tended to see it as an intellectual fad, dangerous only to academics who got on the wrong side of it. But the reaction to the Hamas atrocities revealed the lethal nature of what we are dealing with. If we want to root out antisemitism, we need to dismantle the apparatus of racial grievance that has grown up across our public bodies. There is no time to waste.