When people forget God, they blame the Jews.
This is what happens when societies lose their moral vocabulary. The collapse of religion on the Left and the collapse of integrity on the Right is creating a spiritual vacuum that antisemitism fills.
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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
After Auschwitz, much of the West swore that Jew-hatred would never again find respectable expression.
Yet, today, it is cheered from the quad and whispered from the pew, dressed up as “anti-Zionism” on one side and “national pride” on the other. The old prejudices never died; they changed their hashtags.
For decades, the progressive intelligentsia prided itself on its moral sensitivity: the ability to detect injustice even where others could not. Yet that moral radar has malfunctioned. It sees colonialism everywhere except in the Middle East. It sees racism in every Western institution except the racism aimed at the world’s only Jewish state. The modern Left has turned victimhood into a religion, and because the Jews are not easily cast as victims — because they built a successful democracy, defend it with strength, and refuse to disappear — they are written into the script as “oppressors.”
This is the moral inversion of our age: Success is sin, resilience is guilt, and survival, if achieved through strength, is condemned as violence.
Since October 7th, this pathology has become unmistakable. Progressive activists who claim to speak for “the oppressed” celebrate the massacre of Jews as “resistance.” Ivy League students chant for “intifada” while university presidents parse the difference between genocide and “context.” Human rights organizations have contorted themselves into moral absurdity, condemning Israel for defending itself while ignoring Hamas’ use of hospitals as military bases and civilians as shields.
In the post-moral Left, empathy no longer extends to human beings, but to ideological categories. A Palestinian baby killed by Hamas’ misfired rocket elicits tears; a Jewish baby murdered in a kibbutz does not exist. This is what ethical collapse looks like.
The Left’s antisemitism has morphed beyond prejudice and into a creed. It grows from a worldview that rejects universal moral standards. Once “context” becomes the final arbiter of morality, anything can be excused. Even beheading children can be “understood.”
Yet, to stop here would be to indulge in self-flattery. The disease is not just confined to the campus; it festers in church pews, podcast microphones, and the so-called “patriot” movement. Last week in Texas, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz issued a warning that should have rung like a church bell across the republic: “I’m here to tell you, in the last six months, I have seen antisemitism rising on the Right in a way I have never seen in my entire life. The church is asleep right now.”
He is right. The church is asleep. It dreams of moral grandeur, but the termites are eating through the beams. Conservative America once anchored its moral compass in the biblical covenant that gave birth to its civilization: the covenant between God and the Jews.
Today, in some quarters, that memory has rotted into a conspiracy theory. Online influencers once dismissed as fringe now mainstream their venom under the guise of “America First.” On libertarian channels and alt-right podcasts, a vocabulary of hate has taken root, one that dresses antisemitism as “anti-globalism,” “anti-banking elites,” or “anti-woke.” New hashtags, same scapegoat.
This Right’s moral rot is a political embarrassment and a theological betrayal. Christian civilization owes its entire moral grammar — justice, mercy, covenant, conscience — to Judaism. Yet many churches that once saw Israel’s restoration as providential now avert their gaze, content to preach cheap grace while ignoring moral responsibility.
Ted Cruz’s rebuke that the church is asleep is a diagnosis and an indictment. It is what happens when faith becomes an opiate of self-regard rather than a discipline of truth. Too many conservative Christians have confused cultural nostalgia for spiritual conviction. They defend “Judeo-Christian values” as a slogan, but recoil from the living Jews who embody them.
The irony is that the Far-Left and the Far-Right, though they detest one another, now drink from the same well. Their ideologies differ; their hatred converges. Both despise the liberal democratic order that the Jews symbolize. Both resent a people who thrive through learning, adaptability, and moral self-scrutiny — traits that expose their own dogmas’ failures. To the radical Left, the Jew is a “capitalist oppressor”; to the radical Right, the Jew is the “cosmopolitan corrupter.” The Jew represents the conscience they have lost.
Look at the symmetry. The Left screams that Israel commits “genocide” in Gaza; the Right whispers that Jews control Hollywood, finance, and Washington. One marches with Hamas flags, the other flirts with Hitler memes. Uniting them is a contempt for reality, an adolescent thrill of transgression, and the self-glory of belonging to a cause that feels righteous without requiring moral discipline.
What they share, above all, is resentment. The Left resents that Jews remind it of merit; the Right resents that Jews expose the fraudulence of blood purity. In the end, both sides hate Jews, and Judaism, for making moral excuses impossible. This is what happens when societies lose their moral vocabulary. The collapse of religion on the Left and the collapse of integrity on the Right have created a spiritual vacuum that hatred rushes to fill.
Progressives have replaced morality with identity; conservatives have done so with tribalism. The former worship the self; the latter worship the nation. Both have forgotten that the moral law is neither individual nor collective, but transcendent. Without that higher anchor, the mob’s passions become truth’s measure.
The Enlightenment sought to reconcile reason with faith. It was a huge step forward because it embraced that awkward thing called reality. The post-modern world has abandoned both. Emotions, algorithms, and an economy of outrage that rewards moral exhibitionism over moral excellence, now guides our discourse. Antisemitism is inevitable in such a culture. It is the default setting of societies that refuse to hold themselves morally accountable.
To fight antisemitism, one must first understand what it indicts. It is not merely hatred of Jews. It is hatred of moral law itself, hatred of the idea that there exists a truth above the tribe, a covenant that binds all humans equally, a standard that judges even our feelings. That is why antisemitism resurfaces whenever a civilization loses its own moral order. It is the oldest hatred because it is the most revealing. It tells us, with unerring accuracy, when a culture has stopped believing in the sanctity of conscience. This is why spikes in antisemitism always precede civilizational decline.
The Left must reckon with the fact that its moral relativism has created a haven for barbarism. The Right must confront that its indulgence of conspiracy and nostalgia has become a breeding ground for bigotry. Both must rediscover that morality is not a mood but a discipline — and that courage, not comfort, is the first duty of civilization.
Nowhere is this moral test clearer than in the world’s reaction to Israel. When Hamas committed the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, much of the world responded not with solidarity but with suspicion, asking what Israel might have done to “provoke” it. It is the same reflex that once asked what Jews had done to “provoke” pogroms. It reveals that the moral progress the West congratulated itself on was never more than a costume change.
Israel, for all its flaws, remains the most honest mirror the West has. It shows us what it looks like when moral conviction still exists — when a people, however imperfect, still believe in duty, covenant, and survival. That is why so many hate it. It makes their moral evasions unbearable.
The Jewish state is not the cause of antisemitism; it is the proof of it. Every generation invents a new reason to despise the Jews — too rich, too poor, too clannish, too universal, too weak, too strong — because the real grievance is not what Jews do but what they represent: the endurance of moral law in a world that wants freedom from it. This moral failure is outright cowardice. The Left fears being called racist; the Right fears being called divisive. Both would rather be applauded than be right, mistaking popularity for virtue.
Cowardice always disguises itself as sophistication. The Left cloaks it in nuance; the Right in irony. Yet there is nothing nuanced about moral collapse, and nothing ironic about normalizing evil. The civilized person’s laughter at fanaticism is how barbarism wins.
The West needs to recover its moral backbone post-haste. That means telling the truth, even when it offends fashionable sensibilities. It must name antisemitism not just as a social pathology, but as a civilizational betrayal. It must call out the Left’s moral relativism and the Right’s spiritual decay with ferocity. It must relearn that decency without courage is hypocrisy.
Ted Cruz is right: The church is asleep. So are the universities, the media, the NGOs, and the political parties. The alarm clock is ringing, and the name on its face is Israel.
 | A guest post by
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GOD BLESS ISRAEL AND ITS PEOPLE
Nice closer! Powerful imagery.