When Antisemitism Became Anti-Progress
Jew-hatred, both old and rebranded, should have no place within a movement that preaches justice and equality. Yet it has been allowed to thrive under new disguises.
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.
Israeli football fans in Amsterdam were deliberately targeted and beaten up on Thursday by mobs of antisemitic rioters, in what was described as a 21st-century pogrom.
Israeli officials said 10 Israelis were injured in the hours of overnight violence, which the victims said was perpetrated largely by local Muslims and Arabs, with hundreds more people reportedly besieged in their hotels and fearing they could be attacked again when trying to reach their flights home. The Israelis were mainly fans of the football team Maccabi Tel Aviv, who came to watch their team play against Ajax in Amsterdam.
Two Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, Aviv and Harel, told Israel’s Kan public broadcaster: “There was a police force standing on the side, not doing too much when there was some kind of protest. Everything was planned down to the last detail. Each of us had been to the Netherlands four times; we had never felt like this before.”
Dan Kopleh, an eyewitness, told Kan: “It was a pogrom. We were abandoned by the Amsterdam police. Until other Israelis arrived at Dam Square and drove away the rioters, an hour and a half from the start of the event, the Amsterdam police didn’t lift a finger.”
Speaking to the same TV station on his return to Israel on Friday afternoon, Maccabi fan Tomer Talias said he and other fans feared for their lives the entire time they were in Amsterdam. “There was trouble from the start,” he said. “That people were not killed was because of the fans [managing to save themselves] and not the police.”
Talias added that the assailants were organized “like a terror group” and that “they waited for the fans of Maccabi everywhere … with clubs and knives. They had their faces covered, carried Palestinian flags.”
“They didn’t distinguish between women, child, men, or the elderly,” said Talias. “They attacked everyone they saw as Israeli.”
Two Israelis who left Amsterdam on Friday morning and flew to London told a reporter from Israel’s Channel 12 on arrival in the U.K. that they were attacked Wednesday evening — a full day before the football game in Amsterdam — by Arab gangs in the city.
The two said they were targeted as Israelis and beaten. They also said that they reported the attack to local police, who took no action.
A third Israeli told Channel 12, on arrival in London, that he had been forced to the floor by assailants who had demanded to know if he was Israeli. He said he was beaten up by a gang of eight to 10 people — “punched in the head, two teeth broken” and that he “woke up in an ambulance covered in blood” and was told afterward that he was found in a pool of blood.
Antisemitism, humanity’s oldest hatred, has mutated over centuries, consistently adapting to the anxieties and prejudices of each era. But one of its most ironic transformations is how antisemitism, a prejudice initially rooted in religious difference and later in racial hatred, now often stands in direct opposition to the very progress it once accused Jewish people of corrupting.
For societies that champion progress — such as self-determination, human rights, equal opportunity, and innovation — antisemitism has become not just a moral failing but an intellectual anachronism. The stubborn persistence of this prejudice in the face of modernity is not only socially harmful but fundamentally anti-progress.
Today’s antisemitism, however, cloaks itself in a newer guise: “anti-Zionism.” While some Diaspora Jews are still hanging on to the post-Holocaust halo effect that shields them from direct antisemitism, Jew-haters have taken up the delegitimization of Israel’s very existence, applying so-called “moral standards” to the Jewish state that are not reasonably applied to any other nation.
Here, antisemitism has taken on a guise that positions itself as “progressive” while operating on fundamentally illiberal and regressive principles. The intellectual dissonance is glaring: How can one claim to support the right to self-determination for all peoples but deny it uniquely to Jews?
In many progressive circles, Israel has become a lightning rod — a stand-in for Western colonialism or capitalist overreach. Conveniently forgotten in this analysis is Israel’s multiethnic democracy; its achievements in technology, medicine, and the humanities; and its demonstration of democracy in a region fraught with authoritarianism.
The academic and cultural boycotts of Israel and Jews, and attacks on them, represent an attempt to exclude an entire people based on pure and utter Jew-hatred. For instance, boycotting Israeli innovations or researchers, who often bring medical and technological breakthroughs to the world, is an act that undermines progress. This is not merely prejudice; it is intellectual regression.
In the United States, many young “progressives” threatened to refrain from voting for the liberal Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, because of her extremely mild support for Israel. These same “progressives” wailed for years about how American democracy is under attack by Harris’ opponent, Donald Trump, but democracy cannot survive if everyone is a stubborn single-issue voter — no less on issues that do not significantly affect domestic America.
Yet, such is antisemitism, a virus so potent that it causes people to lose all their logical bearings (if they even had them to begin with).
Across the “literary community” (which is supposed to feature some of the most liberal people on this planet), “anti-Zionists” have been profusely harassing and ostracizing their Jewish colleagues for not sharing a one-sided narrative in response to October 7th, the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. As a courageous letter — signed by 1,000-plus authors, writers, journalists, publishers, and entertainment leaders — so aptly put it:
“The exclusion of anyone who doesn’t unilaterally condemn Israel is an inversion of morality and an obfuscation of reality.”
“History is full of examples of self-righteous sects, movements and cults who have used short-lived moments of power to enforce their vision of purity, to persecute, exclude, boycott and intimidate those with whom they disagreed, who made lists of people with ‘bad’ views, who burned ‘sinful’ books (and sometimes ‘sinful’ people).”1
Booker Prize-winning author, Howard Jacobson, said: “Art is the antithesis to a political party. It is a meeting place, not an echo chamber. Art explores, discovers, differs, questions, and surprises. Precisely where a door should be forever open, the boycotters slam it closed.”
Author and historian Simon Sebag Montefiore added: “The resort to witch hunt is always dangerous and ugly, especially when the inquisitors are writers. History is full of examples of self-righteous cadres of self-appointed judges who tried to enforce their version of purity by excluding people. Whatever one thinks of this tragic Middle Eastern war, who judges who is good, who bad? Once started, where would it stop? Who is pure enough?”
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of antisemitism in the 21st century is its presence in spaces that would otherwise champion diversity, justice, and human rights. It is here where antisemitism becomes ironically anti-progress: the assumption that Jews hold unearned power, the reduction of Jewish identity to a monolith, or the notion that they are inherently oppressive all resonate disturbingly with the narratives that once justified exclusion, persecution, and genocide.
Today’s “progressive” thought encourages examining systems of power critically, addressing privilege, and supporting communities that have faced historical injustice. I put “progressive” in quotation marks because one cannot truly be a progressive while tolerating, overlooking, or engaging in antisemitism, whether overt or covert (i.e. “anti-Zionism”).
This is not just hypocrisy; it is a fundamental betrayal of the “progressive” movement’s own ideals. Real progressivism does ot play favorites with oppression, nor does it selectively determine which minority narratives are worth hearing.
Antisemitism, both old and rebranded, should have no place within an ideology that preaches justice and equality. Yet, it has been allowed to thrive under new disguises, largely because it is tolerated, dismissed, or even welcomed by segments of the so-called “progressive” Left, which in turn has been mainstreamed by the Left in many Western societies.
As Abe Greenwald, Executive Editor of “Commentary” magazine, so accurately said:
“Gaza is precisely what the Western Left says it hates: a racist, sexist, homophobic, militaristic, anti-democratic, kleptocratic, dogmatically religious police state of science fictional inequity and oppression. And they love it more than anything in the world.”
So, let’s cut the crap: Genuine progressivism requires self-awareness and consistency. A true progressive position would recognize antisemitism as a centuries-old scourge, not fashionable critique against the State of Israel or a shorthand for “standing against imperialism.”
When “anti-Zionism” begins to treat Jewish self-determination as uniquely offensive or casts Jewish voices as inherently suspect, it reveals itself as something darker and deeply at odds with the apparent values of progressivism. Not recognizing this contradiction makes the term “progressive” worthy of the infamous air-quotes. When any form of bigotry is overlooked, tolerated, or rebranded to fit an agenda, the term becomes an empty slogan — a placeholder for hypocrisy, rather than an ideal.
Moreover, this selective blindness undermines the integrity of every other cause that “progressive” movements support. When activists who champion minority rights treat Jews and Jewish concerns as tangential or unworthy of full inclusion, they are not just excluding a people but betraying the foundational ethics of their movement. To embrace every marginalized group’s experience except the Jewish one is to break the very promise of progressivism — to listen, to uplift, and to seek justice impartially.
The irony runs deeper. In its pursuit of the “empire” lurking in every power structure, today’s pseudo-progressive stance often unthinkingly reinforces the oldest empire of all: the one built on prejudice. When the demonization of Israel morphs into the demonization of Jews as a whole, when “anti-Zionist” rhetoric slips into denying Jewish self-determination or distorting Jewish history, then progressivism is not merely faltering; it is feeding directly into the very reactionary forces that cult-like followers claim to oppose.
This selective tolerance for antisemitism — overlooked, downplayed, or cloaked as mere “political critique” — ultimately corrupts progressive goals. A true progressive would recognize that antisemitism, like any form of bigotry, undermines the very fabric of an equitable society. By calling out antisemitism consistently and holding their peers to the same standard, progressives can reclaim the “progress” in their name and uphold the ideals they ostensibly hold dear.
Until “progressives” do a better job of living up to their claims, this movement will remain just that — a shallow, self-righteous label rather than a genuine, inclusive cause for societal advancement. And that is a shame because true progress demands rigor and honesty. And, frankly, the courage to challenge oneself before challenging others.
In the end, progress is either for everyone, or it’s for no one at all.
“1000+ Authors, Writers, Journalists, Publishers, and Entertainment Leaders Stand United Against Cultural Boycotts.” Creative Community for Peace.
Well progressives never cared about progress anyway. The logic of progressive ideology is all about arresting progress, putting a ceiling on how much wealth you can have, putting handcuffs on your right as an individual. Because it’s statist, it’s essentially deeply conservative. It’s salutary to remember how the communists hated Jews too.
Anti-semitism is ALWAYS anti-progress and anti-humanity!