Jews are not paranoid enough.

We have spent much of our history being told that Jews were paranoid shortly before discovering that we were not paranoid enough. I suspect that is precisely the point we are at now.

The vocabulary changes, but the underlying architecture does not. (photo by Tristan Sosteric/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

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

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There is a peculiar stage in every antisemitic surge when the people noticing it are regarded as a greater nuisance than the people producing it.

Jews point to rhetoric becoming uglier, institutions becoming less reliable, political movements becoming more comfortable with antisemitic ideas, and respectable people finding increasingly elaborate reasons to excuse them. The response is reassuring: Calm down, stop catastrophizing, most people are decent, it is just a fringe minority, institutions are strong, this is not 1930s Europe, you are seeing patterns where none exist.

Then, occasionally, the patterns turn out to have been patterns.

Jewish history contains enough catastrophes that one might expect Jews to have earned a modest exemption from lectures about overreacting to warning signs. Instead, the opposite seems to have happened. Jewish vigilance is routinely offered as evidence of Jewish neurosis — itself an antisemitic trope.

Societies have an extraordinary capacity to normalize the obvious and recognize its significance only retrospectively. History is wonderfully clarifying once everybody is dead.

We can identify the warning signs of previous antisemitism eruptions with distressing confidence. We can point to the pamphlets, speeches, boycotts, discriminatory laws, street violence, conspiracy theories, and political movements. We know which newspaper articles mattered and which politicians should have been taken seriously.

Living through it is harder.

It arrives as an isolated incident. Then another. Then an unfortunate trend. Then an understandable reaction to current events. Then come the explanations: context, grievance, complexity. Eventually, Jews are told to stop talking about it because their complaints are becoming divisive.

Then somebody erects a museum.

Historical knowledge is vital to interrupt this sequence rather than become exceptionally knowledgeable about it afterward. It is obvious that many countries’ history syllabuses and civic lessons are as wanting as me in front of a piece of halva.

One reason people underestimate antisemitism is that they imagine persecution begins with persecution. Usually it begins with permission. Before a society becomes willing to mistreat Jews, it must become willing to think differently about mistreating Jews. Moral inhibitions have to weaken. Language has to change. Things previously considered disreputable must become discussable, then defensible, then fashionable.

Most importantly, Jews must gradually lose their presumption of innocence.

Today, that process is so great that it is visible from space. Jewish institutions require extraordinary security in cities where no other religious communities do. Jewish students discover that harassment can acquire an impressive amount of institutional ambiguity provided the perpetrators possess the correct politics. Israelis abroad increasingly think about whether speaking Hebrew loudly is wise. Jewish schools, synagogues, and community centers employ guards and install barriers as a routine feature of communal life.

Meanwhile, people chanting enthusiastically about Zionists, global influence, Jewish money, resistance, and the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state insist that Jews are being terribly sensitive.

The great mistake is to assess each incident separately. That is what idiots, denialists, and collaborators do. One antisemitic assault does not constitute a civilizational collapse; nor does one vandalized synagogue, one intimidated student, one nutjob politician trafficking in conspiracy theories, or one demonstration at which sickos celebrate terrorists.

The relevant question is what happens when these things begin moving in the same direction because that is how social permission changes.

The danger is not merely the number of antisemites. Every society contains lunatics, bigots, obsessives and psychopaths. The real question is whether the surrounding society remains healthy and confident enough to marginalize them. Increasingly, Western societies do something else. They elect them.

The bile extremists spout may dominate the headlines, but a more reliable warning is what moderates become willing to explain away. Antisemitism has developed an extraordinary modern advantage: It can frequently present itself as something else.

Hatred of Jews becomes opposition to Zionism. Intimidating Jewish students becomes political protest. Celebrating the murder of Israeli civilians becomes resistance. Conspiracy theories about Jewish influence become criticism of lobbying. Demanding that Jews uniquely surrender national sovereignty becomes anti-colonialism.

Think of all the people, many of them distinguished and influential, who have said one or more of the above — and you will begin to see the problem’s depth and scale. They exist on all sides of politics in slightly different forms, so Jews should resist the toddlerish temptation to imagine antisemitism exists only among the people you dislike.

Intellectual seriousness requires noticing when “criticism” begins behaving like an ancient hatred that has recently acquired a graduate degree. The vocabulary changes, but the underlying architecture does not.

Jews are still accused of possessing sinister power, corrupting governments, manipulating media, buying politicians, fabricating victimhood, and inflicting suffering for their own purposes. Jewish collective existence remains uniquely suspect. Jewish self-defense becomes aggression. Jewish vulnerability becomes propaganda. Jewish fear becomes manipulation.

The Jew, astonishingly, is again simultaneously omnipotent and endangered, except his endangerment is dismissed because everyone has been assured of his omnipotence. Europe has made this film before in different costumes.

People understandably demand evidence before accepting alarming claims. They should. Civilized thinking requires skepticism. Yet there is a giant bear trap into which people who should know better often wade: If Jews wait until the evidence of serious danger becomes overwhelming, the information has arrived too late to be useful. Risk is managed under uncertainty or it is not managed at all.

Nobody purchases fire insurance after the house has burned down. Doctors do not demand that a suspicious tumor become terminal before investigating it. Governments maintain militaries against wars they hope will never occur. Only when Jews assess danger are they expected to build a time machine and return with proof from the future. Warn early and we are hysterical; warn late and everyone asks why nobody saw it coming. Usually, somebody did. They were simply considered unpleasant company.

Here Jews must resist our own historical habits. Not every discussion of antisemitism requires Hitler references. Constant Holocaust invocation can obscure more than it illuminates because it creates an absurdly high threshold for concern. Unless brownshirts are marching down the street and governments are preparing deportation lists, apparently everything is going splendidly.

Jewish persecution did not begin in 1933, and Jewish catastrophe is not measured exclusively against Auschwitz. Jews have faced expulsions, pogroms, discriminatory taxes, occupational restrictions, forced conversions, residential restrictions, confiscations, blood libels, and periodic massacres. Jews have experienced societies in which they were tolerated but insecure, prosperous but vulnerable, legally protected but socially hated.

That is the more useful historical frame.

The question facing Jews in the West and elsewhere is not whether these countries are becoming Nazi Germany. Let us assume they are not. It is whether conditions are developing in which Jewish life is becoming more constrained: where Jews conceal visible symbols, avoid particular neighborhoods, remove children from certain schools, think twice about mentioning Israel, require increasingly elaborate security, and gradually accept as normal precautions their grandparents would have recognized immediately.

A civilization can deteriorate greatly without reaching its worst imaginable destination.

Another historical Jewish weakness deserves harsh examination: Some Jews have been, and many remain, reluctant to take their ideological enemies literally.

Fanatics announce that they hate Jews and some Jews join the manhunt for the socioeconomic explanation. Islamists say they want to destroy Israel and obliging interpreters explain that this is probably metaphorical. Zealots praise the murderers of Jews and someone inevitably appears to explain that they are expressing frustration. Jihadists glorify violence and distinguished experts translate their words into something reassuring enough for prime-time television.

Interpretation has its uses. So does listening.

When movements repeatedly tell you that Jewish sovereignty is illegitimate, that Israelis are legitimate targets, that terrorists are martyrs, that “resistance” should be globalized, and that Israel should disappear, there comes a point when the intelligent response is to believe them. Not taking them seriously is not a sign of intellectual sophistication. It is more akin to denial with footnotes.

The so-called civilized world repeatedly makes this mistake with totalitarian movements. Liberal societies have difficulty comprehending people who genuinely mean monstrous things because liberal people themselves do not think monstrously. So they translate fanaticism into grievance and ideology into rhetoric. Jews have too much solid data to afford this luxury.

There remains goodwill toward Jews across much of the democratic world. There are governments that protect Jewish communities, police officers guarding synagogues, university administrators trying to confront harassment, journalists exposing antisemitism, and millions of decent ordinary people who regard Jew-hatred with disgust. They matter. Yet so do trajectories.

None of this is an argument for useless panic. The alternative to paranoia is not complacency, but vigilance. Strengthen Jewish institutions. Build political relationships across ideological lines. Support organizations documenting antisemitism rigorously rather than theatrically. Invest in Jewish education. Strengthen ties between Israel and the diaspora. Demand that governments enforce existing laws. Stop treating Jewish security as embarrassing. Stop apologizing for noticing threats.

On an individual level, stop making antisemitism socially cost-free. Challenge it. Ridicule it. Expose it. Make respectable people embarrassed to associate with it and institutions embarrassed to tolerate it. Antisemites should encounter friction, not accommodation.

Perhaps most importantly, recover the Jewish capacity to believe your own eyes.

We do not need permission from people who have never worried about entering a synagogue to decide whether synagogue security is a problem. Nor do we require someone who has never removed a Star of David before entering a particular neighborhood to certify that Jewish anxiety is reasonable. And we certainly must never allow people participating in antisemitism’s normalization to determine how worried we should be about it.

There is a difference between fear and threat assessment, and it is definitely time for the latter.

Jewish history does not teach that catastrophe is inevitable. That would be terrible and untrue. It teaches something subtler: Civilizations change gradually until, suddenly, people discover how far they have traveled. Social prohibitions weaken. Language coarsens. Extremists test boundaries. Institutions hesitate. Moderates rationalize. Jews adapt. Each individual adjustment appears manageable, and that is precisely what makes the accumulation dangerous.

Perhaps the present surge of antisemitism will recede. Maybe democratic societies will rediscover their immune systems. Israel’s existence is certainly a 2,000-year game-changer that we must cherish and nurture. It could be that people like me warning about the direction of travel will eventually look foolish.

I sincerely hope so. There are worse things than looking foolish.

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