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This is a guest essay by Lucas Gage, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and author.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
I was one of the most prominent and viral antisemites in the world.
Swattings and attacks on my family didn’t pull me out of it. They pushed me deeper.
What helped pull me out was a two-hour conversation over coffee with a religious Jew who was never once offended by anything I said, and I think the people fighting antisemitism need to hear why that worked.
For a long time, the standard approach to people like me was to label and shame but not to engage. For example, many Jewish organizations and scholars hold a firm policy of refusing to debate Holocaust deniers. I understand the reasoning: A debate can make the other side seem legitimate. But in practice, what replaces the debate is the label, the boycott, the censorship, and the public example. Seek and destroy.
My argument, from my own experience, is that this gets the order backwards. The first response to an antisemite should be to de-escalate, debunk, and deradicalize. Destroying someone’s life should be the last resort to prevent violence, not the first. I’m not writing this from a position of arrogance. I’m writing it as someone the first strategy created, but I was deradicalized by the second.
We always hear that antisemitism is a unique form of hatred. I agree, because Jewishness itself is an unusual identity: ethnic, religious, and national at once, and Jews don’t even agree among themselves on how those strands fit together. A Jew can be secular and a Zionist or religious and an anti-Zionist. That matters, because the entire antisemitic worldview depends on Jews being a malevolent monolith, wearing different masks to fool the goyim.
Jews, especially Ashkenazi Jews in the West, have excelled in fields like mathematics, science, finance, and media, so they are disproportionately visible wherever they live, in good things and, unfortunately, in bad things.
What antisemites, my former self included, fail to notice is that this isn’t unique to Jews. Europeans are majorities in the West but a global minority, disproportionately represented in both great achievements and great crimes, and you can see the same logic in Black Lives Matter-era rhetoric against White people.
The pattern forms whenever a minority is disproportionately successful and still looks like an “other.” I expect Indian-Americans, who have risen quickly to lead major corporations, to face the same kind of resentment, and online you can already see the early shape of it.
For most of history, antisemitism was religious. Christians condemned Jews for killing Christ. In theory, a Jew could escape that by converting, but even that door kept closing: Spain’s conversos converted and were hunted by the Inquisition anyway. Racial antisemitism, which emerged in the late 1800s and peaked with the Nazis, offers no door at all. That’s the kind I subscribed to. I believed Jews had a proclivity for certain behaviors and that whether an individual Jew was good or bad, Jews as a whole were bad for my people.
Once you accept that premise, the “solution” to the so-called Jewish problem can only be expulsion or extermination. I was never an exterminationist. Even at my worst, I told myself the peaceful answer was for us to live apart. I’ve since had to face that it was the same premise with a gentler ending. I do think we can all get along, but we must share the same values and be honest with each other.
People fighting antisemitism often explain it as jealousy. But from someone who was on the inside, it never was about any sort of jealousy. When a race realist looks at Jews in positions of power, he feels he’s lost sovereignty over a country his ancestors founded. If these Jews in positions of power are able to effect massive changes to his society that he deems negative, he’s naturally going to blame them.
Imagine if Arabs, who are a minority in Israel, dominated its media, academia, and financial system. Imagine if these Muslims promoted laws against Islamophobia and pursued special interests that harmed the majority of the Israelis. Even if those Arabs were benevolent, Israeli Jews would feel they no longer had sovereignty over their own land. That’s what I felt.
But that feeling rested on a premise I never examined: Racial antisemites see all those Jewish names as a group with one will. The secular Zionist and the religious anti-Zionist, the senator and the donor funding his opponent.
So, it was never about jealousy but about sovereignty; not seeing the average American Jew as a fellow American made them an other, even when they suffered under the same rule of the political elite. The average Jew doesn’t get special benefits just because some of the elites are Jewish billionaires. That’s like thinking the average White person benefits just because there are White billionaires.
I was the kind of racial antisemite who was all-in. The frame I lived in predicted I’d be attacked, so every attack confirmed it. The boycott, the censorship, the label, the public example: Every one of those confirmed exactly what I already believed about a powerful, coordinated group.
Shame only works on people who share your values. It works inside a community, on someone who cares what the people shaming him think. But an antisemite already sees Jews and Jewish organizations as the enemy, so their condemnation doesn’t register as shame. It registers as a badge of honor. The louder they condemned me, the more the people around me took it as proof I was over the target, and the more I believed it too. You can’t shame someone out of a movement whose values are defined against you.
When Kanye West’s antisemitic rants cost him an Adidas partnership and his other major deals, those were companies deciding they didn’t want their names next to his. Inside the movement, nobody saw it that way. They saw a billionaire silenced overnight, and they filed it as proof. When Elon Musk, after his fight with the Anti-Defamation League over advertisers, apologized publicly and then visited Israel and Auschwitz, antisemites said, “Look, even the richest man in the world has to bow to them.”
The label “anistemite” itself is being worn down, too. When Greta Thunberg, known for her anti-Israel activism, lands on the same top-10 antisemites list as Dan Bilzerian, the word stops meaning anything specific. She may be an anti-Zionist. Whether that makes her an antisemite is exactly the distinction a list like that waters down.
Anti-Zionism deserves to be confronted on its own terms. Once a state exists, with millions of people born there, calling for its dismantlement isn’t a policy disagreement. It’s a demand that those people lose their country. But when every anti-Zionist and every antisemite gets the same label, people inside the movement conclude the word just means “anyone Jews don’t like.” Then they stop listening when it’s used on someone who has actually earned it. I was someone who earned it. Diminishing the word doesn’t reduce antisemitism; it makes more antisemites.
What pulled me out wasn’t Holocaust lectures or shame. It was a conversation based on facts after all the attacks stopped and the dust settled.
When I told everyone I decided to abandon antisemitism in February of this year, Jake Turx (an Orthodox Jew and former senior White House correspondent) left a comment on my post and asked to meet up. My initial plan was just to make peace with Jews and vanish, to go on and focus on philosophy and self-improvement. When he reached out, I was hesitant at first, but I decided a meet up couldn’t hurt, and I wanted to actually build bridges like I said I would.
We met up for coffee. He started by asking how I was feeling and how I was doing. Then we went through everything: Israel, 9/11, Gaza, and the conspiracy theories I still held. For about two hours, every topic we could think of about antisemitism was on the table. It was cordial the whole way through. He was never offended. He didn’t accept my claims, and he didn’t just deny them either. He asked, “Why do you think that? What makes you think that?”
This approach was the key. Think about it: How would the conversation have gone if Jake used shaming tactics and brought up the Holocaust? The old playbook would have driven me away. More importantly, he didn’t deny history as it’s actually recorded, including the uncomfortable parts, like Jewish overrepresentation among early communist leaders. He just dealt with the points. But he also taught me how those things also led to Jewish persecution in Russia, how religious Jews were treated, and other things I didn’t know.
I brought experience as an antisemite to the table. I told him about the hypocrisies and contradictions I’d caught in the Jewish Question movement. The movement demanded that every Jew answer for the worst Jew and never held itself to that standard. Once I saw that the rule only ran in one direction, I couldn’t help but snap out of it.
That coffee led to my first podcast interview, on “Living Lchaim” with Yaakov Langer, with Jacob there on camera as the friend who introduced us. The episode reached a lot of people, and it led to more private conversations with both of them afterward. That’s when I really got to see these two religious Jews up close and how kind, forgiving, and honest they were. They weren’t arrogant. They weren’t supremacists. They were nothing like what I’d been taught they would be. In fact, we shared the same issues with the same people because we actually shared, for the most part, the same values.
This meeting didn’t have to take place, but it did. Part of it came from Jews who had a curiosity about me; the other part came from me wanting peace after 14 years of fighting with Jews. The conservation cost us nothing, and a bridge was built between peoples.
This meeting led to more conversations with more Jews, both in private and on other podcasts, with rabbis, and even making peace with former enemies. Speaking to both American and Israeli Jews led me to learn more history about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, bringing more nuance to it, rather than the one-sided story I received after October 7th.
So, peaceful and cordial conversations. That’s the approach I’m asking Jewish people and organizations to adopt.
Conversation only works if you can answer what you hear. When I was inside, most of what I believed about Jews came from a handful of claims passed around the Internet, antisemitic books I read, and figures in the movement I trusted. Almost nobody I knew had fact-checked any of them. Neither had I. I believed Jews were behind 9/11 for years without once opening the 9/11 Commission report. When I finally read it, after I had already left, what I found was al-Qaeda’s plot, documented in detail.
Take, for example, the various Talmud quotes that circulate online. Some are outright fabrications or misunderstandings, such as the claim that the Talmud allows marriage to a 3-year-old. This is absolutely false and is easily debunked. But be honest about the hard parts, too. If you tell someone there’s nothing difficult in the Talmud and he finds one real passage, you’ve lost him, and you’ve confirmed his suspicion that you were hiding something. It’s far more convincing to say, “Yes, that line is real, here’s what it’s actually discussing, here’s how Jewish commentators have read it, and here’s why it doesn’t mean what you were told.”
Answer the claim; attack the belief, not the man holding it, and do it with compassion. That takes a particular kind of patience: knowing who you’re talking to and answering false claims without hostility. It can be learned, and I think it’s worth cultivating. Someone who has been told for years that Jews will try to destroy him has nowhere to put a Jew who simply answers his question. If Jews run away from debates and refuse to engage with antisemites, it seems like they have something to hide, which fits the “subversive, lying Jew” trope.
I’m not saying conversation works on everyone. Against those who truly want to harm Jewish people, defend yourselves with everything you lawfully can. When people treated my rhetoric as a threat, they were right to. Although I knew I would never harm a Jew, my rhetoric was indistinguishable from the rhetoric of someone who meant it. But not everyone who says those things is that person.
I’ve tried to live by what I’m asking of you. When you leave a movement, like I did with the Jewish Question movement, the people you left have a lot to say about you, and a lot of it is ugly. I haven’t answered any of it, and I don’t intend to. I know how that frame works from the inside, and contempt can’t break it. If I answered them the way they expected, they would hate me more, and it would only reinforce their beliefs. That is why the only thing I’ve been doing is posting the facts I’ve discovered and ignoring all the personal attacks and lies being spread about me.
There are many people I’ve turned into antisemites who I still want to reach. If they’re ever going to leave it, it will be through the same kind of conversation that reached me: honest, calm, with no covering up uncomfortable history and no excuses for anyone’s bad behavior. The order matters. De-escalate first, debunk the claims, and give the person room to deradicalize, because destroying the ones who could still be reached turns them into the ones who can’t.
I changed when the dust settled and the people across from me were willing to talk. If the censorship and the attacks had never stopped, when would I have been calm enough to even consider that I was wrong?
Thanks to Future of Jewish for featuring my article.
I appreciate all the comments. Since there are so many, I just wanted to thank all of you here at once. Now that I've woken up to all the lies and psyops, I will do my best to undo the damage I've done to everyone—to you, my family, my friends, my fellow Marines, and my country—during the darkest years of my life.
It's always been in my nature to correct myself and make things right.
I am always searching to find a better way to engage with prejudice. The guest column by Lucas Gage is both interesting and encouraging. However, the experiences described in the column all took place after Lucas, on his own, had decided to leave the antisemitic movement and made that decision public. How would this approach actually work for someone, who on their own, had not already decided to leave the antisemitic world.