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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.
We were supposed to have learned this lesson in 1945.
When Nazi Germany collapsed, the world did not merely discover the horrors of the Holocaust. It supposedly learned something about the political machinery that had made the Holocaust possible in the first place.
Antisemitism was not simply an irrational hatred that happened to infect German society. It was useful. It was a political technology.
The Nazis understood that if you could convince enough people that Jews were responsible for their humiliation, their poverty, their wars, their cultural decline, their political instability, capitalism, communism, internationalism, and virtually every other source of anxiety, you could accomplish something extraordinarily valuable: You could take millions of people with different problems and give them the same enemy.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes Nazi propaganda as essential to constructing a German “national community” by identifying who did not belong. Jews were designated the principal enemy. Nazi propaganda subsequently portrayed Jews not merely as people Germans should dislike, but as a hidden force manipulating governments, provoking wars and conspiring behind the scenes.
That distinction matters.
The political usefulness of antisemitism has never depended primarily on getting everyone to hate individual Jews. It depends on teaching people to understand the world through Jews. Something is wrong with your country? The Jews. Your economy is struggling? The Jews. Your nation is at war? The Jews. Capitalism is exploiting you? The Jews. Communism threatens you? The Jews. Foreign governments are conspiring against you? The Jews.
The accusation changed according to the audience. The function remained remarkably consistent: Take complicated problems and give them a Jewish explanation. That is the genius — and horror — of antisemitism as a political instrument. And we made an enormous mistake if we believed that instrument was buried beneath the ruins of Berlin. It wasn’t. It evolved.
After the Holocaust, openly announcing that “the Jews” were responsible for the world’s problems became considerably less fashionable in respectable political circles. But the fundamental political temptation remained: There was still enormous power in telling people that a Jewish collective stood somewhere behind their suffering.
Increasingly, the word simply changed. The Jew became “the Zionist.” The international Jewish conspiracy became “the Zionist lobby.” The uniquely evil Jewish people became the uniquely “evil Jewish state.”
Israel ceases to be one country among many and becomes a kind of universal explanation; a symbol onto which unrelated grievances are projected, a villain that appears in political struggles thousands of miles from Jerusalem, regardless of whether Israel has anything meaningful to do with the problem being discussed. That is when history should make Jews nervous.
Consider what happened in Jordan this summer. In July, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it had launched ballistic missiles at Jordan. Then came an extraordinary message to the Jordanian people: “You know very well that not only do we not have any enmity with your country, but we also love you,” the IRGC said, describing Jordanians as people who understood Palestinian suffering especially well.
Think about the chutzpah (the audacity) of this: Iran had just fired ballistic missiles onto Jordanian territory, and its message to Jordanians was effectively: We are not your enemy.
The appeal to “Palestine” was not incidental. It was the mechanism. Iran understands the enormous emotional power of the Palestinian cause across the Arab world. It also understands that Jordan maintains relations with Israel and works closely with the United States.
So the Iranian regime is attempting to redraw the political map inside the Jordanian imagination. Do not blame the country firing missiles into Jordan. Blame Israelis and their American supporters. Understand your suffering through “Palestine.” See your government’s relationship with Israel as betrayal.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is doing what antisemitic political movements have done for generations: redirecting domestic anger toward an external Jewish enemy and using that enemy to fracture political alliances. The circumstances are completely different from Nazi Germany. The political technology is disturbingly familiar. And Iran is hardly alone.
Look at New York City. Zohran Mamdani won the mayoralty, in part, by aggressively campaigning against Israel. He carried an unusually intense anti-Zionist politics into a race for an office with almost no authority over Israeli policy, and with Israel playing virtually no part in day-to-day life in New York City.
He had supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for years. He repeatedly refused to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada.” He also made the prospective arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York a political issue.
Whatever one thinks of those positions, there is an obvious question: Why does the mayor of New York City need a foreign policy toward the Jewish state? Israel does not control New York rents. Israel does not determine subway service. Israel does not run New York schools. Israel does not collect New York garbage. A mayor cannot negotiate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet somehow the Jewish state became a recurring ideological test in a municipal election.
That phenomenon should interest us far beyond Mamdani himself — because politicians rarely spend enormous amounts of political capital on subjects they believe have no political value. Israel has become valuable not necessarily as policy, but as symbolism. It tells voters which tribe you belong to. It communicates who you believe is “oppressed” and who you believe is an “oppressor.” It signals whether you belong to the “establishment” or the “resistance,” the “colonizer” or the “colonized,” the “powerful” or the “powerless.”
And once Israel is transformed from an actual country into a symbol of everything a political movement despises, demonizing it becomes politically useful even when Israel has absolutely nothing to do with the office being sought.
The State of Michigan offers another example. Abdul El-Sayed has just won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate there, defeating the incumbent Haley Stevens in one of the United States’ most closely watched primaries. Israel became one of the race’s major dividing lines.
El-Sayed has not simply criticized Benjamin Netanyahu. He has described the Israeli government as “evil” like Hamas, called Israel a “rogue state,” accused it of apartheid and genocide, called for ending American military assistance and repeatedly resisted questions asking whether Israel has a right to exist. After winning the primary, he went even further, describing Israel as “bloodthirsty” and an “illegal apartheid regime.”
The warning sign is something larger: the transformation of the Jewish state into an almost metaphysical villain. Bloodthirsty. Evil. Apartheid. Genocidal. Rogue. A state whose very legitimacy becomes questionable.
And somehow this single country of roughly 10 million people occupies an extraordinary amount of space in political campaigns conducted thousands of miles away. That is not unprecedented. It is one of the oldest patterns in Jewish history.
The antisemite rarely begins by saying, “I simply hate Jews.” He gives you a political theory: The Jews control finance, the Jews control governments, the Jews are undermining the nation, the Jews are responsible for war, the Jews are disloyal, the Jews exploit workers, the Jews oppress people.
The content changes because antisemitism is extraordinarily adaptable. The Jew can be blamed simultaneously for capitalism and communism, nationalism and globalism, whiteness and foreignness, imperialism and revolutionary subversion.
Contradiction has never been a weakness of antisemitism. It is one of its greatest strengths. A conspiracy theory capable of explaining everything can survive almost anything.
Today the same strange flexibility increasingly attaches itself to Zionism. Israel can somehow be portrayed simultaneously as an American puppet and America’s master. It can be accused of controlling Western foreign policy while simultaneously surviving only because Western governments sustain it. It can be described as a colonial outpost of Europe even though roughly half of Israeli Jews descend from communities across the Middle East and North Africa.
And political movements thousands of miles away can incorporate opposition to Zionism into their identities regardless of whether the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has the slightest relationship to the problems their voters actually face. This is what should worry us: this obsession.
There is another danger here, and Jews should be intellectually honest enough to acknowledge it: The accusation of antisemitism can itself be abused. We are being told that if the speaker says “Zionist” instead of “Jew,” history no longer applies. That is absurd. Antisemitism has never required a particular vocabulary. It requires a function.
Who is being turned into the explanation for society’s problems?
Who is being portrayed as uniquely malevolent?
Who is imagined to possess extraordinary hidden power?
Who becomes the enemy around whom otherwise unrelated groups can unite?
Who is denied political rights that everyone else is assumed to possess?
And most importantly: Who benefits politically from making people believe it?
That last question may be the most important, because the most dangerous antisemitism has never merely been personal prejudice. It has been organized prejudice, useful prejudice, mobilized prejudice.
A politician discovers that attacking Jews (or Zionists, or Israel) wins applause. A regime discovers that blaming the Jewish state redirects anger away from itself. An activist discovers that “Zionism” can bind together groups with almost nothing else in common. And suddenly antisemitism has a constituency. That is how it becomes dangerous.
There is a tendency to study Nazi Germany as though it belonged to another universe: black-and-white photographs, strange uniforms, burning books, and speeches delivered in a language most of us do not understand. That makes history comfortable. It allows us to believe we would recognize the next version because it would look like the last one.
But history almost never returns wearing the same uniform. The slogans change, the political parties change, the ideologies change, the technologies change — and the scapegoat mechanism does not. Find the Jew. Turn him into an abstraction. Make him responsible for problems he did not create. Convince people that fighting him is synonymous with fighting injustice. Build a political identity around that fight. Then collect the votes, loyalty, power, and social cohesion that follow.
We thought the Holocaust had made this strategy politically radioactive forever. We were horribly mistaken. Antisemitism did not disappear after 1945. It learned how to speak the language of the age. And politicians, regimes, and movements are discovering all over again what their predecessors understood centuries ago: There are few political shortcuts more powerful than giving people a Jewish enemy.
Antisemitism is just like any virus; you can never eradicate it, the best one can hope for that it goes dormant for as long as your lifetime. We all know that hope is never final.
Ms Berg, you wrote a most poignant piece! It lays out antisemitism to perfection! As the daughter of Holocaust survivors I applaud you with a standing ovation. No one has ever stated this horrific hate mongering more clearly!!! I for one see this hatred as a mental illness, a deep seated jealousy towards us, a terrible sickness akin to cancer. The only cure is education; otherwise the cancer spreads exponentially!!!