'Jews control America' makes hatred feel heroic.
The lies work by turning Jewish participation into domination, Jewish success into guilt, and antisemitism into resistance.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
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.
There is something almost absurd about arriving at a synagogue in the United States and being greeted by a security guard.
You walk past concrete barriers. You look for the person checking names at the entrance. At some Jewish schools, parents cannot simply wander inside. At community events, volunteers are taught to watch the doors, identify exits, and report anything unusual.
This is the ordinary reality of Jewish life in the country Jews supposedly control.
According to one of the oldest and most persistent conspiracy theories in American life — which I heard again this weekend from a 24-year-old young man from Wisconsin — “Jews control America.”
The details change depending on the speaker: the government, the media, the banks, the universities, Hollywood, American foreign policy, or perhaps all of them at once. The Right may talk about globalists, financiers, immigration, and cultural subversion. The Left may talk about Zionist donors, media influence, colonial power, and the Israel lobby.
The vocabulary changes. The structure remains remarkably familiar.
Behind the institutions they distrust, there are Jews. Behind the politicians they hate, there are Jews. Behind the wars, economic crises, social changes, and cultural trends they cannot explain, there are Jews. The theory presents itself as an investigation into power. In reality, it is a way of avoiding the difficult work of understanding power.
America is a vast country shaped by hundreds of millions of citizens, countless institutions, competing industries, religious organizations, unions, activist groups, corporations, political parties, wealthy donors, voters, journalists, academics, bureaucrats, and interest groups. Its government is often divided against itself. Its media organizations compete with one another. Its universities disagree. Its business leaders fight for market share. Its voters repeatedly produce contradictory outcomes.
This is messy. It is complicated. It is sometimes frustrating.
It is much easier to imagine that a small group is secretly directing everything. That is the first attraction of the conspiracy theory. It replaces complexity with a villain. But its deeper purpose is more dangerous.
The myth that Jews control America does not merely exaggerate Jewish influence. It transforms Jews from a small and frequently vulnerable minority into an omnipotent ruling class. Once that transformation is complete, hostility toward Jews can be presented not as prejudice, but as resistance. Antisemitism begins to feel like justice.
This is why the language of Jewish power matters so much. People generally understand that attacking a vulnerable minority is wrong. But if the minority can be reimagined as the hidden master of society, the moral equation changes. The person spreading hatred no longer sees himself as attacking downward. He imagines that he is punching up.
The Jew is no longer a neighbor, classmate, shopkeeper, writer, doctor, teacher, or fellow citizen. The Jew becomes a symbol of the system itself. And symbols do not receive sympathy. They receive blame.
The simplest way to dismantle the theory is to ask what the word “control” means.
Control is not the same as participation. It is not the same as visibility. It is not the same as success. It is not even the same as influence. Control means possessing the reliable ability to produce the outcome you want. By that standard, what exactly do American Jews control?
A group that controlled the government would presumably be able to guarantee its preferred policies. Yet American Jews disagree intensely about those policies, support opposing candidates, fund competing movements, and regularly lose political battles.
A group that controlled universities would presumably be able to ensure that Jewish students felt secure and that Jewish concerns were treated seriously. A group that controlled the media would presumably be able to control how Jews and Israel were portrayed. A group that controlled the culture would not spend so much time worrying about how easily antisemitic ideas spread through it.
A people that controlled America would not need guards outside its houses of worship.
Of course, conspiracy theorists always have an answer. When Jews achieve something, it proves Jewish control. When Jews fail, the failure is supposedly staged. When Jewish organizations agree, it proves coordination. When we disagree, the disagreement is dismissed as camouflage. Every outcome becomes evidence. That is how conspiracy theories protect themselves. A serious claim must contain the possibility that it is wrong. It must be possible to imagine evidence that would disprove it.
The theory of Jewish control contains no such possibility.
If a politician supports Israel, Jewish influence supposedly explains it. If the same politician pressures Israel, that too can be interpreted as part of a deeper Jewish strategy. If a newspaper publishes an article favorable to Jewish concerns, that proves control. If it publishes something hostile, that supposedly proves the conspiracy is hiding itself more carefully.
A theory that explains every possible outcome does not explain anything. It is not an analysis of power. It is a closed belief system.
There is another obvious problem with the idea that Jews control America: Which Jews?
The conspiracy requires Jews to behave like a single political organism, operating with common interests, shared instructions, and coordinated objectives. Anyone familiar with Jewish life should find this proposition almost comedic.
American Jews disagree about religion, politics, Israel, capitalism, socialism, assimilation, tradition, education, marriage, foreign policy, and the future of Jewish life itself. Orthodox Jews and secular Jews may inhabit entirely different cultural worlds. Jewish conservatives and Jewish liberals often regard one another with open contempt. Zionists argue with each other. Jewish institutions compete for funding, influence, members, and attention.
The existence of prominent Jews in opposing movements should be enough to collapse the fantasy of a unified Jewish command center. Yet it does not. That is because conspiracy thinking does not treat Jews as individuals. It treats them as interchangeable representatives of an imaginary collective.
A Jewish executive, journalist, donor, professor, or politician is not allowed to be simply an executive, journalist, donor, professor, or politician. Our Jewishness becomes the hidden explanation for our actions. Individual motives disappear. Professional competition disappears. Personal beliefs disappear. Disagreement itself disappears. Every Jew becomes evidence against every other Jew.
This is one of the most dehumanizing features of antisemitism. It denies Jews the right to be ordinary. Other people are allowed to act out of ambition, ideology, self-interest, patriotism, vanity, conviction, stupidity, generosity, or greed. Jews are imagined to act as Jews, on behalf of Jews, under the direction of Jews.
An individual success becomes a collective operation. An individual failure becomes a deception. An individual opinion becomes an ethnic agenda.
The conspiracy theory often begins with something real: Jews have been visibly successful in certain areas of American life.
Jewish individuals have made major contributions to business, entertainment, law, medicine, academia, journalism, science, literature, and politics. It is foolish to deny this visibility. Denying obvious reality only strengthens those who believe they have discovered a forbidden truth. The question is not whether successful Jews exist. The question is why individual Jewish success is so quickly transformed into evidence of collective Jewish control.
No one looks at successful people from most other backgrounds and automatically assumes that they are part of a coordinated ethnic operation. Their accomplishments are generally understood as personal, familial, cultural, educational, or historical. With Jews, the leap is immediate. A Jewish person succeeds. Another Jewish person succeeds in the same industry. Our presence is counted, connected, and presented as proof of a plot.
Competition between us is ignored. Our different beliefs are ignored. The non-Jewish majorities surrounding us are ignored. The institutions that hired, elected, promoted, funded, watched, read, or supported us are ignored. Only our Jewishness remains. This is how achievement becomes evidence of guilt.
The assumption is not merely that Jews are successful. It is that Jewish success must be illegitimate because it must have been coordinated. That idea has a long and ugly history. Societies often begin turning against minorities by declaring that their success could not have been earned honestly. Achievement is reframed as infiltration. Participation becomes capture. Visibility becomes domination.
The minority is told it has done too well. Then it is punished for having done well at all.
Jews, like every other community in America, organize around our interests.
We build institutions. We form advocacy groups. We support candidates. We donate money. We publish newspapers and magazines. We lobby elected officials. We participate in universities, industries, cultural life, and political movements. This is not a secret conspiracy. It is American democracy.
Churches organize. Labor unions organize. Technology companies organize. Environmental activists organize. Gun-rights groups organize. Arab Americans organize. Evangelical Christians organize. Cuban Americans organize. Teachers organize. Oil companies organize. Pharmaceutical companies organize.
America is not a political vacuum. It is a contest among interests. Yet when Jews participate in that contest, ordinary civic activity is often recast as evidence of sinister control. A non-Jewish organization advocates for a policy and it is called lobbying. A Jewish organization advocates for a policy and it is called manipulation. A wealthy non-Jewish donor supports candidates and it is called political spending. A wealthy Jewish donor does the same and suddenly his ancestry becomes the story.
The double standard is clear: Jewish influence is not merely criticized, it is ethnicized.
The implication is that Jewish Americans are not fully entitled to participate in the country we belong to. Our citizenship is treated as conditional. Our advocacy is viewed as foreign even when we were born in America, live in America, work in America, pay taxes in America, and raise our families in America.
The accusation of Jewish control is therefore inseparable from the accusation of Jewish disloyalty.
It suggests that Jews are not participants in American democracy. They are intruders operating inside it.
The theory that Jews control America is not merely antisemitic. It is anti-American.
Consider what the accusation says about the American people.
If Jews control Congress, then elected officials have no agency. If Jews control the media, then editors, journalists, audiences, owners, advertisers, and consumers have no agency. If Jews control universities, then administrators, professors, students, donors, and governing boards have no agency. If Jews control American foreign policy, then presidents, generals, diplomats, voters, Christian supporters of Israel, strategic planners, defense officials, and lawmakers have no agency.
Everyone becomes a puppet.
The theory pretends to expose Jewish power, but it does so by portraying millions of non-Jewish Americans as mindless, cowardly, corrupt, or easily manipulated. When someone says Jews control America, he is also saying Americans do not. This is one reason the conspiracy is so useful. It allows Americans to escape responsibility for America.
Dislike the country’s foreign policy? Blame Jewish influence. Dislike the financial system? Blame Jewish bankers. Dislike Hollywood? Blame Jewish executives. Dislike elite universities? Blame Jewish donors and academics. Dislike social liberalism, immigration, capitalism, communism, globalization, nationalism, or war? Somewhere, a Jew can be placed behind it.
The contradiction does not matter. Jews have been blamed for capitalism and communism, nationalism and globalism, racial integration and racial division, militarism and pacifism, cultural degeneracy and religious fanaticism. The theory does not need consistency because Jews are not being blamed for a specific ideology. They are being blamed for change, disorder, resentment, and power itself.
Whenever Americans become dissatisfied with the society Americans built, Jews can be introduced as its secret authors. The myth becomes a form of national absolution. We did not make these choices. We did not build these institutions. We did not elect these leaders. We did not consume this culture. We did not create this economy.
The Jews did it to us.
The control myth has another consequence: It makes Jewish vulnerability difficult for others to recognize.
People struggle to see a group as both successful and endangered. If Jews are imagined as rich, connected, white, powerful, and institutionally protected, then Jewish fear appears exaggerated. Security concerns appear manipulative. Antisemitism appears minor compared with other forms of hatred. The supposedly powerful are not permitted to describe themselves as vulnerable.
This is why attacks on Jews are often surrounded by arguments about Jewish power. Before the victim can be mourned, the victim’s politics are interrogated. Before the threat can be acknowledged, Jewish privilege is discussed. Before antisemitism can be condemned, someone insists on changing the subject to Israel, donors, influence, or American policy.
The Jew must first be stripped of innocence. That is what the control myth accomplishes: It ensures that no Jew is ever merely a victim. Every Jew can be connected to a government, a lobby, an institution, a war, or another Jew’s wealth. Collective power is assigned to Jews when convenient. Collective vulnerability is denied to them when necessary.
The result is a perfect trap: Jews are powerful enough to be blamed for society, but never powerful enough to be safe within it.
The theory that Jews control America is not sustained by evidence. It is sustained by usefulness.
It gives ideological movements a universal villain. It turns political frustration into ethnic suspicion. It replaces complicated institutions with secret meetings. It converts individual Jews into representatives of collective power. It transforms Jewish participation into infiltration, Jewish influence into domination, and Jewish success into guilt.
Most importantly, it offers moral permission.
Once Jews are imagined as the hidden rulers of society, targeting them can be framed as liberation. Excluding them becomes accountability. Intimidating them becomes protest. Silencing them becomes resistance. That is why the theory is so dangerous: Its purpose is not simply to make people believe that Jews are powerful, it is to make people believe that harming Jews is a challenge to power.
The security guard standing outside the synagogue tells a different story.
So do the locked doors, the nervous parents, the police cars outside community events, and the Jews who look over their shoulders after hearing their identity discussed as if it were evidence of a crime.
Jews do not control America. We live in it. We contribute to it, argue about it, succeed in it, fail in it, organize within it, and worry about our future in it. We possess influence in some places and little influence in others, just like countless other communities in a vast democratic society.
The conspiracy theory erases all of that complexity because complexity is not what it wants. It wants a culprit. It wants an explanation that demands no thought. It wants a minority powerful enough to blame and vulnerable enough to punish. The most revealing fact about the myth of Jewish control is not what it says about Jews. It is what it allows everyone else to avoid seeing about themselves.
Jews do not secretly control America, but the fantasy that we do has exercised extraordinary control over the way America understands its Jews.
Great piece! As for the idiot conspiracy-theorist anti-semites who say the Jews control (insert institution here), I say… who better?
There is such a lack of critical thinking in our society! Present the facts and it's not believed! Great article.