Anti-racism isn’t morality. It’s a power play.

A system that constantly reclassifies Jews reveals far more about power than about prejudice.

photo: Hasan Mrad/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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On the surface, the term “anti-racism” sounds great.

Who, exactly, is going to stand up and argue for racism?

The term “anti-racism” is engineered to feel morally self-evident — clean, righteous, beyond debate. It suggests action, progress, and moral clarity. To be “anti-racist” is not merely to reject prejudice, but to actively dismantle it. In theory, it represents a higher standard.

But in practice, “anti-racism” often functions less as a consistent moral framework and more as a political instrument — applied selectively, bent to fit narratives, and abandoned when it becomes inconvenient.

Nowhere is this inconsistency more obvious than in how “anti-racism” frameworks treat Jews.

In many contemporary conversations, Jews are classified as “white.” This classification is not neutral; it places Jews into a category of relative power, privilege, and even complicity in systems of oppression. Once Jews are placed into that box, they are no longer a vulnerable minority in need of protection, but part of the dominant group that “anti-racism” seeks to critique or dismantle.

Of course, this categorization is unstable.

When it becomes inconvenient to treat Jews as a race or ethnic group — when acknowledging Jewish peoplehood would complicate a political narrative — Jews are suddenly reduced to a religion. Not a people. Not an ethnicity. Just a set of beliefs.

And religions, unlike races, are seen as voluntary. Optional. Criticizable in ways that race is not.

This creates a convenient double standard: When Jews are “white,” they are stripped of minority status and folded into systems of power. When Jews assert collective identity, especially in the context of Israel, they are reframed as a religious group defending an “ethnostate,” a term that would be unthinkable to apply to dozens of other nation-states built around shared language, culture, or ancestry.

The same framework that insists identity is complex and socially constructed suddenly becomes rigid when applied to Jews — and then fluid again when needed.

That’s not moral clarity; it’s opportunism.

Jews should push back against “anti-racism” or any other non-Jewish framework because it allows other people to define us, whereas Jews (and only Jews) should define ourselves. Indeed, virtually every other group of people is allowed to define themselves — except Jews.

In modern discourse, identity is treated as something deeply personal and socially constructed. Groups are encouraged, even celebrated, for articulating who they are on their own terms. We are told to respect how communities define their race, their ethnicity, their history, and their lived experiences. Outsiders are warned not to impose categories, not to erase nuance, not to overwrite identity with convenient labels.

Unless the group in question is Jews.

Jewish identity is uniquely subject to external reinterpretation. It is constantly being redefined — not by Jews themselves, but by whoever finds it politically useful in the moment.

If Jews emphasize our history as a people (an ancient nation with shared ancestry, language, and collective memory), we are told this is illegitimate, or worse, dangerous. Our peoplehood is reframed as exclusionary. Our indigeneity is questioned. Our claims to collective identity are treated as suspect in a way that would be considered offensive if applied to almost any other group.

But if Jews emphasize vulnerability — centuries of persecution, expulsion, and genocide — we are often told that this no longer applies. That we are now “white,” now “privileged,” now part of the dominant power structure. Our history is compressed, outdated, or selectively acknowledged.

One of the less discussed reasons Jews are often classified as “white” in contemporary discourse has little to do with a simple question of skin tone or ancestry. That explanation is too shallow on its own, especially when “whiteness” is not applied consistently to all light-skinned or European-adjacent groups.

The more important factor is that “whiteness” in modern social frameworks is not just a description of appearance. It functions as a proxy category for perceived social positioning: economic mobility, institutional integration, and relative influence within Western societies. In that sense, “white” becomes less a racial category and more a shorthand for perceived structural advantage.

And once that shift happens, classification becomes fluid.

Jewish communities, in many contexts, are placed into this category not because they fit neatly into a biological or historical definition of “whiteness,” but because they are perceived as having achieved a high degree of educational, professional, and institutional success in many Western countries. That perception then influences how they are situated within broader narratives about power and perceived inequality.

But this is where the framework becomes unstable: Once “whiteness” is tied to success and institutional proximity, it stops being a stable identity category and becomes a moving target. Groups can be reclassified depending on whether they are useful as examples of privilege or as examples of marginalization. The result is not a coherent theory of race, but a flexible hierarchy model in which group classification shifts depending on what is being explained.

This also creates a paradox: Jews can be simultaneously framed as part of a dominant category in some contexts and as a vulnerable minority in others, depending on which dimension of identity is being emphasized — economic, cultural, historical, or political. The inconsistency is not incidental. It comes from trying to use a single framework (power-based analysis of inequality) to explain groups whose histories and social positions do not map cleanly onto that model.

The result is a kind of identity whiplash. Jews are a race when it’s useful to assign us power. We are a religion when it’s useful to deny us peoplehood. We are a minority when we are victims. We are a majority when we are successful. No other group is subjected to this constant reclassification.

You would not tell an Indigenous group that their identity is invalid because they have achieved economic success. You would not tell a diasporic community that they are “just a religion” when they assert shared ancestry or nationhood. You would not redefine a group’s identity based on whether it strengthens or weakens your political argument. But with Jews, this happens routinely — and often without scrutiny.

This isn’t just inconsistency. It reveals something deeper: a discomfort with Jewish self-definition that predates modern politics. Jews have always occupied a category that doesn’t fit neatly into the sociopolitical frameworks of any given era. And instead of expanding the framework to accommodate that complexity, the framework is often bent to contain (or dismiss) it.

Here’s the uncomfortable reality underneath many frameworks like “anti-racism”: They present themselves as moral systems, but in practice they often operate as tools for redistributing power.

That doesn’t mean the moral claims are fake. It means the application of those claims is shaped by who is seen as powerful, who is seen as vulnerable, and who is worth defending.

In theory, “anti-racism” is about opposing prejudice and discrimination wherever they appear. In practice, it often prioritizes certain injustices over others based on a hierarchy of power. Groups perceived as marginalized are centered; groups perceived as powerful are scrutinized, challenged, or deprioritized.

Again, the issue isn’t that power matters. Of course it does. Any serious attempt to understand inequality has to account for it. Instead, the problem is what happens when power becomes the primary lens through which everything is interpreted.

When that happens, moral clarity starts to erode. Harm is no longer judged consistently; it is filtered. The same action can be condemned or excused depending on who commits it and where they fall in the perceived hierarchy. Principles that sound universal in theory become conditional in practice.

This is where the framework begins to drift. Instead of asking, “Is this wrong?” the question quietly shifts to, “Who has power here?” Instead of asking, “Is this prejudice?” it becomes, “Which direction is the prejudice flowing?”

And once those substitutions take hold, the system stops functioning as a set of stable moral standards. It becomes situational — responsive to context, yes, but also vulnerable to bias, politics, and selective enforcement.

You can see the consequences in how certain groups are discussed. If a group like “the Jews” is widely perceived as powerful, there is less urgency to recognize Jewish vulnerabilities. Jewish experiences are minimized, reframed, or explained away. If acknowledging Jewish victimhood complicates a broader narrative about power, that acknowledgment often doesn’t happen.

Any framework that centers power as its organizing principle will, over time, struggle to treat all forms of harm with equal seriousness. It will elevate some injustices and downgrade others.

And that’s the tension at the heart of “anti-racism” and other so-called social justice initiatives. They aspire to universal moral clarity, but they often operate through a lens that is inherently selective.

The result isn’t a coherent ethical system. It’s a framework that can feel moral in tone, but uneven in application—clear in its intentions, yet inconsistent in its judgments.

And once a moral framework becomes selectively applied, it stops being a moral framework and becomes a tool.

Look what’s happening in New York City: This year, on day one of his mayorship, Zohran Mamdani’s administration rescinded the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. When asked this week what New York City’s definition of antisemitism now is, executive director of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism said they have no codified definition for antisemitism and no plans to introduce one.

Translation: We’ll decide on the fly what we consider antisemitism and what we don’t, based on what is politically useful for Mamdani and his administration.

Once a society no longer agrees on how to define antisemitism in a consistent way, the concept becomes situational. It becomes dependent on interpretation, context, and institutional discretion. What counts as antisemitism — and what does not — can begin to shift depending on setting, speaker, and political climate.

And when definitions become fluid, accountability becomes harder to establish.

This is the broader pattern: Moral language becomes increasingly elastic. Principles remain in place rhetorically, but their boundaries are no longer stable. They expand in some contexts and contract in others, depending on how they intersect with prevailing narratives about power, identity, and legitimacy.

The result is a proliferation of competing moral frameworks, each applied inconsistently, each claiming authority, and none fully shared. For any minority group, that instability matters. Because protection depends not only on goodwill, but on clarity of agreed definitions that do not shift depending on circumstance, and on consistency to apply the same standards to all groups of people.

If antisemitism can be undefined, if Jewish peoplehood can be reclassified depending on context, and if moral frameworks shift depending on who holds institutional authority, then Jews will effectively become second-class citizens in more and more places not named Israel.

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