Antisemitism must be studied as a serious mental illness.
A hatred so irrational, so obsessive, and so resistant to facts and history should no longer be treated as mere prejudice. It should be diagnosed.
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Albert Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.1
If that’s true, then antisemitism — in all its historical, cultural, and political permutations — is perhaps the most enduring, global form of madness in human history.
It is the ultimate act of societal self-sabotage: a destructive fixation that has outlived empires, movements, and even reason itself. Despite leading to ruin time and again, antisemitism remains the one bigotry that elites rationalize, activists justify, NGOs encourage, and media companies subtly (or not-so-subtly) amplify. It should be studied as a mental illness — because it sure isn’t rational behavior.
Take, for example, the man who walked up to a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. last week, shot and killed two innocent people, and then screamed “Free, Free Palestine!” In doing so, he chose a lifetime in prison for a fictional nation to which he has zero meaningful connection. Not Sudan. Not Congo. Not Yemen. Not the Uyghurs. Just “Palestine.” That is not solidarity. That is cultic obsession. That is insanity.
Or consider Saudi Arabia, a country finally opening up to cinema and Beyoncé, but still unwilling to recognize the region’s most dynamic and vital country (Israel) because it’s fixated on the imagined statehood of a people whose national identity didn’t exist until the 1960s. Think about that: a country that defines itself by oil wealth and religious guardianship has contorted its foreign policy for 77 years around denying legitimacy to one small Jewish state. They didn’t do that for Kurdistan. Not for Tibet. Only for Israel. Insanity.
Germany offers yet another tragicomic example. In the 1930s, devastated from World War I, the Germans needed national rejuvenation — economic reform, education, perhaps a dash of humility. Instead, they rounded up and exterminated 6 million Jews and millions of others.
The result?
Another catastrophic war, their cities leveled, their national psyche shattered. Today, postmodern Germany has gone from genocidal nationalism to aggressive pacifism — but not peace. Rather than finally achieving a sane middle, they’ve bent over backward to support anti-Israel narratives, import millions of immigrants who openly hate Jews, and transform Munich (yes, Munich) into something that, as one local told me, “feels like Baghdad.” Same road. Same mistake. Different decade.
If this pattern wasn’t so violent and tragic, it would almost be comical in its absurdity.
Across the globe, there are humanitarian catastrophes so grotesque they defy imagination. Since April 2023 alone, over 150,000 have been killed in Sudan. Eleven million displaced. Twenty-six million face acute starvation. Women raped in front of their families. Whole villages wiped off the map.
Yet no hashtags. No protests. No angry students camping on lawns in Harvard Yard. No “Sudan Solidarity Weeks.” And certainly no celebrities declaring Sudan their personal cause.
Why? Because the suffering of Sudanese people offers no opportunity to hate Jews. Gaza, on the other hand — with fewer casualties and a genocidal regime that started the war — now tops the moral concern chart. The irrationality is staggering.
Want more proof? Consider the modern liberal’s favorite word: genocide. When you search for the word “genocide” paired with “Israel” in The New York Times during 2023 and 2024, you get more results than you would for Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, Myanmar, and the Yazidi massacre — combined.2
Think about that. Israel, a country with an army so ethical it warns civilians before striking a Hamas base built inside or under a hospital, is now the global face of genocide in the public imagination.
Let’s get real: Israel is expected to lose wars with grace. It is expected to suffer terrorism with restraint. It is expected to be better than its enemies in order to justify its own existence. No other people must be perfect in order to be safe. That’s not morality. That’s fetishized punishment.
Still not convinced? Why, then is Israel the only democracy dragged into the International Court of Justice for defending itself? Countries that run actual death camps or bomb hospitals on purpose are left untouched. Israel evacuates civilians and is accused of genocide. The double standard isn’t just immoral. It’s pathologically obsessive.
Never mind that Hamas uses its own people as human shields. Never mind that the only place in the Middle East where Arabs enjoy full political and religious rights is Israel. Never mind that Hamas recently told Gazans not to accept humanitarian aid (or there will be consequences) because it is now being distributed by Israelis. None of that matters when your hatred of Jews is so profound that it overrides truth, logic, and human decency.
Meanwhile, Jews (the victims of history’s most well-documented genocide) now need travel warnings to Canada. Canada! A nation once known for politeness and maple syrup now joins the list of countries where Jews are told to hide their identity.
On Sunday, Israel’s National Security Council was forced to issue a Level 2 warning to its citizens visiting Canada to avoid Jewish symbols in public. Is there any other group on Earth that needs to think twice before wearing their identity in Western democracies?
Or how about the young woman, Liri Albag — a former hostage of Hamas — who was detained for an hour at JFK Airport in New York by American security officers while coming to the U.S. for vacation. Let that sink in: a victim of terrorism treated like a threat, while media outlets still quote Hamas officials like they’re Gandhi reincarnated.
Could you imagine The New York Times quoting ISIS the way it quotes Hamas? Or giving Al-Qaeda op-eds the way it does to Palestinian spokespeople who still won’t acknowledge Israel’s fundamental right to exist?
Let’s run a simple sanity test. Ukrainians are being invaded. Do we see mobs attacking Russian embassies and randomly murdering Russians on the street? No. We see empathy for Ukrainians and condemnation for the aggressors. But when Israel is attacked — babies burned, women raped, civilians dragged into Gaza — the world’s instinct is to protest Israel. And in America’s capital, a man responds not with flowers for the victims, but with bullets — fired at Jews.
Here’s the truth: If Palestinians can avoid death by simply not killing Jews, they are not experiencing a genocide. But if Jews must spend billions on defense just to stay alive, they are.
Yet, somehow, in today’s age of identity politics, Jews (the most persecuted people in history) are now framed as oppressors. Jews, who make up just 0.2 percent of the world, are simultaneously accused of controlling the world and being responsible for all its moral failings. Jewish students are told they are too privileged to be victims and too tribal to be safe. It is ideological schizophrenia.
We don’t tell Black people to be less visible. We don’t tell gay people to be less proud. But Jews are told that peace will come if only Israel stops existing. If only they weren’t so “loud,” if only they weren’t so “Jewish.” That is the inversion of every moral rule of progressivism.
“You of all people should know better,” they say to Jews. Translation: Your Holocaust gives you no moral credit unless you die quietly. The world wants Jews to remember their suffering, but never act on it.
And, unlike other hatreds, antisemitism thrives in elite spaces: Ivy League professors, Pulitzer-winning journalists, Amnesty International reports. These people don’t look like racists. But they peddle thousand-year-old lies in the language of human rights.
In the Arab and Muslim world, antisemitism is a convenient distraction. Rather than face economic dysfunction, autocracy, or internal rot, blame the Jews. It’s easier to demonize Israel than to democratize Damascus; easier to rage at Zionism than to reform Riyadh.
Antisemitism is not a disagreement about Israeli policy. (Though, if you’re going to single out Israeli policies, that is 100-percent antisemitism. The other option is to develop a well-informed opinion about every single country’s policies.)
Antisemitism is a deeply irrational hatred, a spiritual illness, that makes people want stories about Jewish evil to be true, because it justifies the bile in their hearts. A UN official claims 14,000 babies died in 48 hours. The story turns out to be false. And rather than breathe a sigh of relief, the “pro-Palestinian” mob is angry that it’s not true — because it means they have one less stick with which to beat the Jew.
This is not activism. This is not humanitarianism. This is not justice.
This is insanity.
Antisemitism is the one hatred that survived the collapse of empires, the rise of reason, the fall of fascism, the liberal revolution, the digital age, and TikTok. It’s the oldest conspiracy theory, the most recycled hatred, and the most socially acceptable prejudice in “progressive” circles.
Every century, it finds new language. Blood libel becomes “apartheid.” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion becomes “settler colonialism.” But the tune remains the same: It is the definition of insanity.
And yet, despite it all, the Jewish People survive. That’s a miracle. But it’s also the sanest thing of all. Because choosing life, choosing light, choosing to keep going when the world has lost its mind — that, too, is a form of resistance. A form of faith. A form of defiance.
And it’s the only cure for insanity we’ve got.
Some people claim this was not accurately attributed to Albert Einstein, but that’s besides the point.
Zach Goldberg on X
The one thing all Jew-haters have in common is cowardice. They are all cowards--every single one of them.
Jew hatred is an evil based on jealousy from time of the Bible.