Fighting antisemitism is no longer useful if we don't go inward.

If we define ourselves predominantly through the fight against antisemitism, we risk reinforcing the very image they project onto us.

photo: Levi Meir Clancy/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Adam Louis-Klein, who is completing his PhD in Anthropology at McGill University in Montreal. This essay also appeared in Canadian Zionist Forum.

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

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We are living through a turning point in Jewish history.

The attacks of October 7th were not just another round of violence between Israel and Gaza. They marked a rupture — both a shift into a new era and a reopening of old, unfinished histories.

As Yardena Schwartz recently wrote in her book on the 1929 Hebron massacre¹, Hamas’ actions echo back to the earliest days of the Muslim Brotherhood and figures like Haj Amin Al-Husseini, an early Islamist who collaborated with the Nazis. October 7th was not simply terror; it was a continuation of a century-long war on Jewish existence.

What’s different now is that the old division of labor — where antisemitic violence was “outsourced” to the Middle East — is breaking down. Today, it’s being extended and mirrored by the ideological “anti-Zionism” of the West.

But I believe something else is emerging too — on our own side. A shift and a return.

Today, I want to take up a challenge posed by journalist Matti Friedman at the recent American Jewish Committee Global Forum. In a powerful talk, Friedman described how much of the legacy media has been compromised by institutional “anti-Zionism.” He noted that reporters today often no longer ask, “Is this true?” Instead they ask, “Who does this serve?” That’s not journalism; it’s Stalinist logic. And it began on university campuses.

Friedman made a provocative claim. He said: Given this capture, maybe it’s no longer even useful to fight antisemitism. What did he mean by this?

I think, at minimum, he was naming a deeper truth: that antisemitism is not a set of ideas to debate, but a structure of power. It mobilizes majorities to redefine what’s real — so that Jewish resistance, Jewish speech, Jewish life itself becomes not just wrong or criticizable, but illegible.

Former Israeli politician Einat Wilf has called this the placard strategy: the relentless attempt to pin every negative accusation onto the word Israel. And today, in the age of social media, that strategy has gone algorithmic. It circulates lies, libels, and incitement at astonishing speed.

The result? Antisemitism mutates into “anti-Zionism” not by shedding its past, but by burying it. Anti-zionism’s own roots in Nazism, Stalinism, and Islamism aren’t gone; they’re just hidden beneath a new surface, the language of “justice.”

So, what is Friedman’s response, then?

He says: Go inward. Don’t fight antisemitism. Learn Hebrew. Study our texts. Deepen our identity. Because if we define ourselves through the fight alone, we risk reinforcing the very image they project onto us — the defensive Jew, the defiant Jew, the Jew always on trial.

Because that’s what they want: not a conversation, but a courtroom. They want the spectacle of judgment, the performance of guilt. And simply standing in the dock can make the accusation seem plausible.

Now, I don’t believe we should stop fighting antisemitism and “anti-Zionism.” On the contrary, we must — but not as a standalone battle. What we face now is a single, deeper imperative: to reclaim who we are and to tell the truth about what we are up against.

I’ve felt the force of this calling in my own life. In the months before October 7th, I was living deep in the Amazon, with the Indigenous Desana people. My work there was centered on their own peoplehood. I was asking: Who are the Desana? What is their sacred story? What defines them — from within, not from without?

And that’s when it struck me. This is exactly what’s being taken from us Jews. In our absence, others have rewritten our story. We’ve been recast white colonists, Right-wing “racists,” generic “Zionists.” Our indigenous connection to the Land of Israel has been erased. Our peoplehood flattened. Our story silenced.

And here’s the irony: The very anti-colonial critique I studied in the academy — and that I still affirm in my work with the Desana — has been twisted. From a tool of affirmation, to one of erasure.

While I was with the Desana, I felt something else too: a strange kinship. A shared position that cuts across the binary of “white” and “indigenous.” They saw it too. I’ve seen it among other Indigenous peoples who recognize the Jewish story as their own, before activist networks impose a different script.

That’s where the myth of the Lost Tribes of Israel still lives. And in my own return to Jewish life after October 7th, I’ve come to feel like I’ve been walking my own Zoharic path — out of exile, and toward renewal.

But now, we face a new kind of exile. It’s not only the exile of past centuries; it’s a present-day estrangement. A sense of foreignness even here, in the West. Our right to be here is questioned. Our right to exist in Israel is attacked. And now it’s clear: The two are linked.

“Anti-Zionism” attacks its displaced image of Israel, and then incites violence against Diaspora Jews in its name. We are being exiled from institutions we helped build: the academy, liberalism, the Left. Once, we were cast as the model minority: the ideal diasporic intellectual, the archetypal victim. But that role was always conditional. As Arab political thought author Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has shown, it eventually flips. When the Jew is but the symbol of victimhood, rather than ordinary people, the next day the Jew becomes the symbol of oppression. And the old exclusions return.

So, what do we do?

We must reclaim our language. We do not cede the ground. We are an oppressed people fighting a system of institutional racism whose shape we know in our bones.

Yes, the academy has devolved into ideological mob-rule. But we can still return it to its center. We must rebuild the space of reason — where tsedek (justice), emet (truth), and chesed (loving-kindness) regain their authentic meanings.

To speak from a place of Jewish dignity then is not in conflict with being a light to the nations. Quite the opposite. In a world of distortion, exclusion, and libel, we must fight for the truth — not only for ourselves, but for what is true in all of us.

We are not survivalists. We are not fighting just to persist. Our survival today is now bound to the survival of truth itself, in a world where it is once again under siege.

So I would suggest, then, in response to Matti Friedman's challenge: To fight “anti-Zionism” and to reaffirm the deeper meaning of our peoplehood are not two paths. They are one. We are now on our own masot, our own journeys through the desert, with many stations ahead before we arrive at redemption. Like the Book of Numbers, the path is uneven.

But we know what we’re fighting for. And that’s what matters.

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1. The Hebron massacre was the killing of 60-plus Jews on August 24, 1929 in Hebron, Mandatory Palestine. The event also left scores seriously wounded or maimed. Jewish homes were pillaged and synagogues were ransacked.