The new antisemite doesn’t think he’s an antisemite.

The Jewish world has a blind spot. Antizionists know exactly what it is.

Antizionists like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani benefit from being measured against Nazism because they can easily point to all the ways they do not resemble Nazis. (artwork provided by the author)

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This is a guest essay by Josh Warhit⁠, who writes the newsletter “The Anti-antizionist”.

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

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In his address to the United Nations General Assembly last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as “the antisemitic mayor of New York.”

That charged description touches on a broader disagreement over the very meaning and scope of the term antisemitism.

For a long time, it has commonly been used as the encompassing term for animus toward Jews. Under this usage, religious anti-Judaism is antisemitism. Racial Jew-hatred is antisemitism. Conspiracy theories about Jewish power are antisemitism. Violence against Jews because they are Jews is antisemitism. And antizionism, as I laid it out last week, falls squarely beneath this umbrella, too.

There is nothing inherently wrong with using antisemitism this way. What complicates this, though, is that the same word also carries the imprint of something more historically specific.

The term emerged in late 19th-century Europe, in an intellectual environment where older anti-Jewish sentiments were being reconstructed through modern theories of race, nation, and society. The Jew was cast as an alien and destabilizing presence within society, often expressed in racial or biological terms. This modern European form of anti-Jewish villainization reached its most catastrophic expression in Nazism.

Today, antisemitism carries a double meaning. It serves as our general word for all things anti-Jewish while simultaneously summoning the imagery of one particular manifestation.

And so, when Netanyahu calls Mamdani an antisemite, many people do not simply hear the claim that Mamdani participates in something that villainizes Jews. They hear a more specific claim: that he regards Jews as an alien and malevolent presence that society must protect itself against.

Meanwhile, they see him smiling with Jews and Jews signaling shared values with him. And so they naturally conclude that whatever one thinks of Mamdani’s politics, antisemite must be the wrong word. Perhaps his rhetoric on Israel is insensitive. Perhaps his positions make some Jews uncomfortable. But antisemitism? That is something else.

And this is where vocabulary has failed us.

A new form of anti-Jewish villainization emerged in the 20th century — one that speaks the very moral language the post-World War II West developed to stomp out Nazism. By presenting itself as opposition to bad things like racism, colonialism, apartheid, and genocide, and lacking racial pseudoscience and the swastika, this new form could be interpreted solely as politics, not bigotry. Maybe ugly politics or radical politics, but politics nonetheless.

And so “antizionism” spoke the language not of racial hierarchy but of anti-racism; not of national purity but of international solidarity; not of Jewish inferiority but of “Zionist” power, oppression, and imperialism. Measured against the classical prototype of antisemitism, it could appear to be the furthest thing from antisemitism.

But speaking in the moral language of the post-war West does not make the antizionist worldview any less extraordinary. Consider what antizionism asks us to believe.

The Jewish state of Israel is a uniquely malignant entity: inherently colonialist, inherently racist, inherently genocidal, and thus illegitimate in its continued existence. Eliminating the country is the ultimate act of liberation.

“Zionists” represent a global system of “oppression.” Decent people should expose and resist their influence. Zionist institutions are legitimate targets for exclusion, and Jews’ participation in public life becomes acceptable only if and when they repudiate all identification with Zionism and Israel.

It would be disturbing to construct such a worldview around any country. Imagine an ideology that portrayed Slovenia as a uniquely malignant force in human affairs. Imagine Slovenian nationalism being treated as a social contaminant whose adherents must be identified and excluded. Imagine Slovenian institutions around the world becoming presumptively suspect. Imagine Slovenia’s disappearance being framed as a moral necessity and people who defended its continued existence being treated as accomplices to evil.

If unrelated political grievances were being systematically mapped onto Slovenian power, we would not need a preexisting history of anti-Slovenian bigotry to recognize that something strange and ugly was manifesting. That should be all the more apparent in the case of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, because the image of Israel constructed by the antizionist mind bears a striking resemblance to images previously constructed around Jews.

Zohran Mamdani’s own rhetoric illustrates how this kind of mapping works in practice. At a 2023 Democratic Socialists of America meeting, he stressed the importance of conveying to New Yorkers that “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” The brutality represented by the proverbial boot is American; the boot belongs to the New York Police Department. But somehow Israel has laced it.

There is an antizionist tendency to see Israel and only Israel — and to see it in everything. Once Israel and Zionism are understood as core components of a global system of “oppression,” ostensibly unrelated injustices can be interpreted through their influence.

This does not mean that Mayor Mamdani secretly resembles a 19th-century racial antisemite. In fact, the point is almost exactly the opposite.

The sentiment Mamdani expressed here belongs to a different ideological tradition, one that has its own moral language but nevertheless performs an eerily familiar function: casting Israel, Zionism, and Zionists as explanatory agents for evils extending far beyond the actual conduct of any real country, and ultimately as a linchpin of global “injustice” — something that must be dismantled for humanity to be redeemed.

This is hardly an exonerating distinction, but it helps explain why arguments over whether figures like Mamdani are antisemitic usually go nowhere. One side points to the anti-Jewish patterns embedded in their politics. The other looks at the person, finds none of the familiar markers of classical antisemitism, and concludes that the accusation is defamatory.

The two sides, at least in their most good-faith forms, are applying different meanings of the same word. One is using antisemitism as the encompassing category for anti-Jewish villainization. The other is testing the accused against the dominant prototype of the antisemite. The disagreement therefore cannot be solved simply by repeating the accusation more forcefully.

This vocabulary problem is particularly consequential for Jewish institutions dedicated to identifying antisemitism, educating the public about it, documenting its manifestations, and persuading political and civic bodies to take it seriously.

Many of these institutions understand antizionism to be part of what they’re dedicated to fighting. They have devoted considerable resources to explaining that attacks on “Zionists” can function as attacks on Jews and that hostility to Jewish collective existence is in and of itself anti-Jewish. Yet they are attempting to communicate something relatively new through a word burdened by an older prototype.

They say antisemitism, the public hears antisemitism, and then the public goes looking for antisemites. When it finds campus activists speaking about decolonization rather than racial purity, or politicians condemning Zionists rather than Jews, or movements that eagerly showcase Jewish members who endorse their worldview, the accusation comes off as inflated, if not fabricated entirely.

The satirical website The Babylon Bee, for example, has joked about Mamdani creating a “Little Auschwitz” in Brooklyn and lacking the legal authority to invade Poland. Both jokes draw on an anti-Jewish bridge between Mamdani’s worldview and Nazism. But insofar as that comparison is understood to mean that Mamdani is himself a Nazi, it comes off as ridiculous slander.

Antizionists benefit from being measured against Nazism because they can easily point to all the ways they do not resemble Nazis. What gets lost in that comparison is crucial: the possibility that an ideology speaking a moral language radically different from Nazism can construct its own system of anti-Jewish villainization.

For legacy Jewish institutions, there is actually something encouraging about this diagnosis. It means they are not structurally incapable of addressing the phenomenon before them. They are simply constrained by a vocabulary poorly suited to describing much of what Jews are experiencing now. Many recognize antizionism’s anti-Jewish character and devote considerable effort to exposing it, but are left trying to explain it through a word — antisemitism — whose associations continually drag audiences back toward the Nazi prototype.

Naming antizionism in its own right is not an indictment of these institutions. If anything, it suggests that part of the difficulty is conceptual; they have been trying to describe a distinct phenomenon using words that predispose audiences to look for the wrong things. The implication is that more precise language could allow their efforts to bear more fruit.

If the institutional consensus is that antisemitism should continue to serve as the broad category encompassing anti-Jewish hostility, then those institutions must be scrupulous about explicitly naming and distinguishing the specific forms it takes.

If antisemitism is being used as an all-encompassing term for anti-Jewish villainization — a superstructure, so to speak — then antizionism belongs firmly within it. As a result, Zohran Mamdani, who consistently participates in the collective villainization of “Zionists,” is certainly an antisemite.

Antizionism deserves a name not because it has nothing to do with antisemitism, but because calling it antisemitism alone can prevent us from seeing what is distinctive about it. Vocabulary determines what distinctions we are capable of making. And the distinctions we make determine what we are capable of seeing and addressing.

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