The most successful antisemitic ideas are the ones some Jews believe.

Enduring forms of antisemitism are not always imposed from the outside. Sometimes they are absorbed, repeated, and defended by Jews themselves.

photo: Nikolas Gannon/Unsplash

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.

---

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

---

Antisemitism is often imagined as something that comes from the outside.

It is the neo-Nazi marching with a swastika, the activist chanting for the destruction of Israel, the conspiracy theorist who blames Jews for every social ill, the extremist who vandalizes a synagogue.

But antisemitism can also become internalized.

This does not mean Jews who criticize Israel are antisemites. It does not mean disagreement on Jewish or Israeli topics is antisemitic. Of course, Judaism itself is built upon argument, debate, and dissent.

Internalized antisemitism is something more subtle.

It occurs when Jews unconsciously adopt assumptions, standards, and expectations that are applied uniquely to Jews and to no one else. It happens when Jewish people begin viewing Jewish individuals, Jewish institutions, and the Jewish state through a lens that they would never use when evaluating anyone else.

The defining feature is not criticism. The defining feature is the double standard — and double standards have always been at the heart of antisemitism.

For centuries, Jews were accused simultaneously of being too weak and too powerful, too separate and too integrated, too religious and too secular, too wealthy and too poor. The content of the accusation changed from generation to generation. The principle remained the same: Jews were judged differently.

That habit did not disappear in the modern era. In many cases, Jews themselves have unknowingly absorbed it.

One example is the extraordinary obsession some diaspora Jews have with longtime Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who we have to keep reminding some readers has been democratically elected in a country that has higher voter turnout than the United States, Canada, France, and the UK.

There is nothing wrong with supporting Netanyahu. There is nothing wrong with disliking Netanyahu. The question is why so many Jews thousands of miles away have stronger opinions about the Israeli prime minister than they do about the elected officials who govern their own daily lives.

Many Jews can explain Netanyahu’s coalition politics in remarkable detail, yet they cannot name their city council members. They cannot identify their local legislators. They know little about the district attorney, school board, mayor, governor, or members of Congress whose decisions directly affect their neighborhoods, schools, taxes, public safety, businesses, and communities.

Israel becomes a political fixation while local civic engagement becomes an afterthought. Why?

Part of the answer may be emotional attachment to Israel, but part of the answer is something less comfortable: Jews have been conditioned to view the Jewish state as uniquely responsible for explaining itself, defending itself, and justifying itself at every moment.

No other country is expected to occupy so much mental space among people who do not live there. No other foreign leader becomes such a central figure in the identity of people living thousands of miles away.

The result is that discussions about Israel and Zionism often become discussions about Netanyahu — as if the fate of Judaism, Jewish identity, and the Jewish future can somehow be reduced to the latest Israeli coalition dispute. That is not merely political engagement. It can become a form of internalized acceptance that Jewish affairs deserve a level of scrutiny that nobody applies elsewhere.

---

A second example is the disproportionate focus on settlements and so-called “settler violence.” Again, criticism is legitimate. Every democracy debates the behavior of its citizens. Israel is no exception.

The question is proportionality. Many Jews can speak endlessly about isolated incidents in Judea and Samaria, yet they show remarkably little interest in comparable issues unfolding in their own countries.

Every nation struggles with questions of borders, migration, law enforcement, competing land claims, public order, and political violence. These issues dominate domestic politics throughout Europe, North America, and much of the world.

Yet many Jews who rarely discuss such matters at home become intensely focused when Jews are involved. The standard suddenly changes. Complex realities become simplified. Nuance disappears.

The assumption becomes that Jewish actors require special scrutiny while everyone else receives ordinary political analysis (or none at all) — raising the question of why Jewish actions often receive a level of attention that far exceeds comparable situations elsewhere.

When Jews become more outraged by flaws in Jewish society than by similar flaws in their own societies, something deeper may be occurring. The issue is the instinctive belief that Jews must meet standards that nobody else is expected to meet. That instinct has a long history, and it did not originate with Jews.

---

Perhaps the clearest example is the Jewish obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself. Sometimes it feels as though certain diaspora Jews care more about the conflict than Israelis do, which sounds absurd. After all, Israelis are the ones living with terrorism, military service, rocket attacks, security concerns, and the daily consequences of war and peace.

Yet many Israelis still manage to build businesses, raise families, enjoy friendships, pursue careers, and live ordinary lives. The conflict is part of their reality, but it is not the entirety of their identity, and it doesn’t dominate daily or even weekly discourse.

For some diaspora Jews, however, the conflict becomes all-consuming. Every Jewish conversation eventually returns to it. Every Jewish institution is evaluated through it. Every discussion about Israel is filtered through it. The conflict becomes the organizing principle of Jewish identity itself.

But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not fundamentally a Jewish problem. It is fundamentally an antisemitism problem. The central obstacle has been the refusal of many Palestinian, Arab, and Iranian leaders to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state in any borders whatsoever — meaning whether a Jewish state should exist in the Jews’ indigenous homeland at all.

This pattern did not begin in 1967. It did not begin with settlements. It did not begin with Netanyahu. It predates all of them. Opposition to Jewish sovereignty existed well before Israel’s independence in 1948. It existed before the armistice lines. It existed before modern settlement movements. It existed throughout the formative decades of Zionism.

That reality does not eliminate Palestinian grievances, nor does it remove the need for practical solutions, but it does challenge the tendency to treat the conflict as a problem primarily created by Jewish decisions.

When the world’s only Jewish state becomes the subject of endless analysis while the Palestinians are absolved of responsibility — and while countless other ethnic, territorial, and religious conflicts receive comparatively little attention — Jews everywhere should ask themselves why they have accepted that imbalance.

---

The greatest challenge facing Jews after October 7th is not simply antisemitism from the outside. It is also the assumptions we have absorbed from the outside.

For decades, many Jews accepted a framework in which Jewish life revolved around explaining, defending, apologizing for, or criticizing Israel. That framework has produced endless arguments, and it has produced very little Jewish renewal.

The growing challenges of the post–October 7th world cannot be addressed by recycling the arguments of a pre–October 7th paradigm. The conversations Jews need today are not primarily about Israeli politicians, governments, settlements, or even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The more urgent questions are different. How do we make Judaism more meaningful? How do we strengthen individual and collective Jewish identity? How do we enhance Jewish communities? How do we create deeper connections between Israel and the diaspora? How do we raise proud Jewish children? How do we build a Jewish future worth inheriting?

Those are the conversations that ultimately matter far more than the arguments that have consumed many of us for far too long.

---