Antisemitic (June 2025)
This essay was co-written by the people listed above and by other writers who prefer to remain anonymous. All the authors are members of the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace.
The terms anti-Semite, antisemitic and antisemitism are tied up with relatively modern ideas of the racial and national identity of Jews as well as the fight for their acceptance in European and North American societies. Since the nineteenth century, antisemitic has been an adjective used to describe the way that negative perceptions of Jews, whether as individuals or as a group, are mobilized, primarily in the West, for political purposes. Antisemitic movements have sought to define, regulate, exclude, marginalize, oppress, and kill Jews. As claims of “protecting the Jewish community from antisemitism” have become a politically mobilizing force, newer instrumentalization of these terms use “positive” or philosemitic claims to pursue exclusionary, repressive political aims, particularly to insulate the state of Israel from criticism. The word antisemitic has played a crucial role in every moment of this history, from the nineteenth century to the present.
Such mobilizations identify Jews and descendants of Jews as alien “others” in an otherwise seemingly unified society, frequently essentializing them as a racial, ethnic or national aggregation linked to–but often completely separate from–people following a particular set of religious rituals. In reality, those who identify as Jewish embody a wide variety of racial, ethnic, and political identities and religious practices, so it is important to note that conceptions of Jewishness as a single identity or single set of beliefs are never accurate reflections; they are projected onto Jews. Indeed, the question of who is Jewish–whether that category is defined by biology, by religious practice, by communal membership, by self-identification, or by other means–has since ancient times been highly contested within Jewish communities. Antisemitic movements and discourses sometimes attack projections of essentialized cultural, social, and religious difference rather than comprehending actual Jewish life or identity.
Any history of the keyword antisemitic must be placed in the wider history of capitalism, colonialism, and their dependence on racism and group differentiation, especially on the basis of gender, sexuality and ability. Capital accumulation relied upon the production of differences and inequalities among workers both inside Europe and in its colonies, while colonization relied on race science that separated “superior,” dominating people from “inferior” people destined for servitude, confinement, or death (Gilmore 2007). Throughout the centuries-long construction of racial capitalist modernity, groups of people were increasingly differentiated based on imagined physical qualities, lineages, and personalities (Foucault 1978; Robinson 1983; Wynter 2003; Federici 2004). Jews occupied a particularly charged position in this emerging order, as their high visibility in new economic systems coincided with their political emancipation, making them convenient scapegoats for those who felt victimized by rapid social changes. Religious Christians, monarchists, and rural populations often directed their frustrations at Jews as the most recognizable beneficiaries of modernization, a dynamic that transformed ancient religious prejudices into modern antisemitism embedded within capitalist anxieties.
**********
The word “semite” developed in the eighteenth century as a proto-racial and linguistic term meant to encompass all groups phylogenetically connected to much of Southwest Asia and North Africa, and especially those in the region who spoke languages deemed part of the “semitic” group. This term was coined by German orientalist August Ludwig von Schlözer in 1781 in reference to the Biblical figure Shem, the father of the various people who spoke the family of ancient and pre-modern languages that included Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Amharic, and was often counterposed to what were called the Indo-European or “Aryan” races and languages (Olender 1992, 11).
However, the adjective antisemitic came to refer to hatred and discrimination against just one subset of the “semitic” group: Jewish people (Gilman 1991), who had historically been the one non-Christian religious group permitted to reside within Christian Europe. Though the word antisemitism was likely first used in 1879 by the German journalist and political agitator Wilhelm Marr as a more scientific way to describe what had earlier been called Judenhass or Judenfeindlichkeit (“Jew-hatred” or “Jew-hostility”), the adjectival form is a bit older. Anti-Semitic was coined almost twenty years earlier, in 1860, by Moritz Steinschneider, an Austrian Jew, to denounce the “anti-Semitic prejudices” (antisemitische Vorurteile) of the renowned French Orientalist Ernest Renan. As Sander Gilman writes, in the late nineteenth century “the very choice of the label ‘anti-Semitism’ was to create the illusion of a new scientific discourse for the hatred of the Jews and to root this hatred in the inherent difference of their language.” The discourses of medicine, science, law and criminology all transposed the ascribed difference of the Jew from religion to race (Gilman 1991, 6). Thus, for instance, when the “Ligue antisémitique de France” was founded in 1889, the object of its antagonism was Jews as a distinct national, racial, and political group.
Early producers of antisemitic discourse connected emergent Jewish rights and freedoms with longstanding Christian theological demonization of Jews as Christ-killers, betrayers, and social and economic parasites that had existed long before the term antisemitic emerged (Friedländer 1998, Ch. 3). Over the course of the nineteenth century, such discourse shifted from the theological and linguistic connotations described above toward a confused amalgam of racial and political identities. This shift was part of the rise of pseudo-scientific theories of race and gender. Both conceptually and then as a movement, modern antisemitism emerged from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century out of the backlash against Jewish success–however hesitant and incomplete–in joining the nations among whom they lived, and entering the bourgeoisie of those national groups throughout the period of Jewish emancipation (Bronner 2003).
**********
As with discourses of racialization generally, Jewish people in Europe were constructed as an inferior race through the idea that they deviated from gender and sexual norms. This construction played a crucial part in the emergence of the term antisemitic. As a European-dominated global colonial order formed, popular gender ideals of “active” men and “docile, chaste” women became symbols for the health and vigor of the European nation. These gender norms and hierarchies of ability mapped closely onto racialization. Bodies and people who were marked as deviant or degenerate were viewed as racially inferior, to be expelled and dominated. The application of this European gender-race discourse upon Ashkenazi Jews prompted the “Jewish question” or “problem” that some major Jewish thinkers, including Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl, set out to resolve (Boyarin 1997). Rather than rejecting the premise of this discourse, Freud sought to use the assimilatory process of the normativized subject of psychoanalysis, while Herzl sought the political assimilation of Jews into the colonial world-order that Zionism would enact. Both figures, whose work led to major transformations in Jewish and European life, were motivated by the desire to overcome antisemitism as gendered racialization, manifested in “the persistent European representation of the Jewish man as a sort of woman” (Boyarin 1997, 3).
While the Jewish male was subjected to some of the negative stigma applied to femininity and other categorizations of difference, in the course of the nineteenth century “modern discourses of antisemitism and homophobia” were likewise bound together “with stereotypes of the Jew frequently underwriting pop cultural and scientific notions of the homosexual, and vice-versa” (Boyarin, Itzkovitz, and Pellegrini, 1). Jewish women feature less prominently in this discourse, but the stereotypical figure of the “Jewess” is likewise represented as gender dissident, sharing a “transgression of womanliness” with the simultaneously produced type, the “female sexual invert,” or lesbian (ibid, 5). The “racialized sexuality applied to the figure of the Jewess,” in Jewish feminist analysis, “serves as the stereotyped sex-object par excellence,” as her triple idealization--as the caretaking mother, the untouchable virgin, and the dangerous seductress of Christian men--provides a foundation for antisemitic white Christian heteropatriarchy (Bitton 1973, 63-65). This image of the Jewish woman was codified as an “other” to the submissive ideal of woman proper to the “Cult of Domesticity” or “True Womanhood” that emerged in many western cultures in the nineteenth century and continues to be foundational to contemporary sexism.
Additionally, this particular intersection of race and gender produced an oppositional response among Jewish nationalists, who defined their project for Jewish regeneration by producing a new ideal type that was intended to replace the European antisemitic understanding of the inferior Jewish male (Mayer 2000, Presner 2007, Weiss 2002). Zionist leader Max Nordau offered a program of bodily regeneration to supplement Herzl's nationalist vision: “the muscular Jew” who was a “heroic warrior” (Presner 2007, 3). While the “resolutely masculine” and “muscular Jew” was the ideal subject of this early Zionism, the new heterosexualized Zionist gender order that Nordau and his followers posited also featured Jewish women as nation-builders. This transformation of traditional Jewish gender norms was to serve as a colonial tool: “the muscle Jew represents a radically hygienic and racially charged counter-image to any form of Jewish degeneracy; and in Jewish colonial and military discourses, the strength of the muscle Jew is the prerequisite of a successful colonization effort in Palestine” (Presner 2007, 4). The “queerness” and gender dissidence applied to the Jews of Europe ultimately figured prominently in the ethnic cleansing and genocide to which they were subjected.
Even as racialized and gendered nationalism helped underwrite antisemitism, Jews and Jewish communities in both Europe and North America related to nationalism in a variety of ways, and were deeply divided over it (Feld 2024; Balthaser 2025). Depending on factors both outside of and intertwined with their Jewish identity–such as class, secularism, political positions, and worldliness–many European Jews embraced European national identity, including its racist, gendered, and colonial framings, while others built Jewish antiracist and anticapitalist political movements. Jews also disagreed on the meaning of Jewishness as a racial, religious, and national identity. Jewish cultural nationalists such as the Bund held that Jews had a right to political autonomy in Europe (Frankel 1981). Among themselves, Bundists held different views on whether Jewishness was a religious, cultural, political, or national identity. Uniquely among European Jews, most Jewish Zionists agreed with the racial logic of antisemites who believed Jews had no authentic place in Europe (Herzl 1896; Mendelsohn 1993; Gitelman 2014).
**********
While at one point antisemitic was more of a self-description than an accusation, a spreading belief in ideas of universal rights and equality had begun to make the words antisemitism and antisemitic terms of opprobrium as early as the late nineteenth century. Supporters of social and cultural equality for Jews increasingly used the term anti-semitism critically in the 1880s, shortly after the formation of anti-Jewish organizations in Germany (“The Jews in Germany”). In English-language publications in the 1880s, writers mostly used the term anti-semitic in reference to the Anti-Semitic League and the challenges facing German Jews. As early as 1880, the British journalist and anti-Zionist Lucien Wolf, who later went on to expose the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery (Wolf 1920), explained antisemitism as the idea that “Jews are not only distinct by social and theological characteristics from the people amongst whom they dwell, but they keep themselves altogether distinct in their own selfish and tribal interests in whatever they do.” By the 1920s Rabbi Lee Levinger could state bluntly that “Anti-Semitism is the modern form of the ancient prejudice against the Jew” that “bases its opposition to the Jews on the race theory.”
In the early part of the twentieth century, wealthy German Jews in the US formed several “Jewish defense organizations,” including the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B’rith (ADL), widely publicizing the term antisemitic. This period saw mass immigration of poor and racialized Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States who were often highly religious or politically leftist. In part, the organizations ostensibly opposed the sharply rising antisemitism of this period by seeking to resist the paradigmatic anti-Judaism of Christian-dominated culture. However, they also blamed the new immigrants themselves for reinforcing antisemitic stereotypes by seemingly embodying the very racial otherness and foreignness that antisemites used to portray Jews as an invasive presence in the United States. The AJC and the ADL thus tried to induce immigrants to drop the practices that marked them as “backward,” “non-white,” or otherwise outside of Euro-American capitalist norms; they also used public relations and political advocacy to define U.S. Jewry in terms of bourgeois values and whiteness. Politician and businessman Isidor Straus, a co-founder of the American Jewish Committee, put it bluntly in a comment on Russian Jewish immigrants: “Let me assure you that in case nothing is done to eradicate the innate principles of these people, they will, by their superior numbers, in time bring so much injury to our children that I shudder to think about it.”
The ADL and the AJC also closely identified Jewishness with the U.S. state and its liberal, capitalist, and colonial foundations. They denounced the burgeoning Jewish leftist (communist, socialist, and anarchist) movements of the period, and often refused to defend Jewish leftists against what was clearly antisemitism. Instead, they asserted that the idea of a Jewish left was itself an antisemitic slur intended to racialize Jews and cast them as foreign intruders. (Svonkin 1997, Ch. 6) This further tangled the meanings of the antisemitic, as well as opposition to it, with political, racial, religious and national projects outside of Jewish communities.
**********
With the post-World War I rise of Nazism and the slaughter of European Jews in World War II, the term antisemitic became the subject of much wider analysis and debate. The effort by Nazi Germany and their European collaborators to systematically exterminate Jewish people across Europe–along with other minoritized groups such as Roma, people perceived to have been disabled, and Afro-Europeans–prompted a reconsideration of the meaning and place of antisemitism within Western thought and practice. The extent and methods of killing seemed to most observers unprecedented, and led to a series of intellectual and moral crises that involved not only intellectuals and political leaders, but also many major institutions, including academia, the church, and the media.
The Holocaust, as it came to be known by the late 1960s and 1970s, was widely understood as the culmination of centuries or even millennia of anti-Jewish hatred in the West. This understanding prompted calls by political, religious, and intellectual leaders for a reassessment of the prejudices and bigotry that had permeated Western institutions and culture. A notable example of this institutional reckoning came when the Catholic Church, during the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), formally repudiated the ancient charge of collective Jewish responsibility for Christ's death in the declaration "Nostra Aetate," stating that "what happened in [Christ's] passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today." This theological transformation represented a profound break with centuries of Christian teaching and demonstrated how the moral shock of the Holocaust forced even the most traditional institutions to reexamine their foundational texts and doctrines. Beyond religious spheres, this period of critical self-examination extended into education, where curriculum reforms sought to address historical antisemitism, and into international law, where new frameworks for human rights and opposition to genocide emerged directly from the murder of European Jewry.
After World War II, European and American scholars tried to grasp the meaning of a phenomenon that had led to the systematic killing of two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe. Those studying Nazism shared an assumption that antisemitic thinking did not arise because of any quality of or behavior by Jews but because of the circumstances and mind of the antisemite, even as they differed on whether antisemitic thought was a function of class status, psychology, or political friction. Writing in 1941, Donald Strong tied the antisemitic to the idea of “blood and soil nationalism” and other counter-revolutionary ideologies (4). German Jewish refugee and social theorist Theodor Adorno and a group of refugee and American psychologists saw the antisemitic impulse as partly a psychological phenomenon, one that could be measured and its etiology scientifically established. With AJC sponsorship, they published The Authoritarian Personality (1950), finding that the “the anti-Semitic syndrome” is part of a larger category of anti-minority beliefs among people who “share a desperate clinging to what appears to be strong and a disdainful rejection of whatever is relegated to the bottom” (971), though they also saw the antisemitic as importantly driven by capitalist and liberal institutions (Svonkin 1997, 36).
In a paradigmatic work of scholarship published shortly after the war, Hannah Arendt differentiated between medieval “religious Jew hatred” that arose in response to the role Jews played in the shaping of Central Europe and more recent eighteenth and nineteenth century ideologies of national character that invented Jews as an unassimilable “race” of conspirators in Europe. She argued in opposition to claims about “eternal antisemitism;” to Arendt, antisemitism must be defined as “not merely the hatred of Jews,” but “an outgrowth of specific and traceable historical developments.” Antisemitism, she argued, is a modern phenomenon sociologically tied to the later nineteenth- and twentieth-century crisis of the nation-state as “the bourgeoisie no longer needed the alliance with the Jews” (Arendt 1951, Ch. One).
Closely related to the debate over the meaning of antisemitic was a related debate about the meaning of the mass murder of Jews and others in Europe: was the slogan “Never Again” specific to Jewish people, or did it mean “Never again for anyone”? Among social movements that sought to use the mechanism of international law to shift the conditions of their oppression, as among scholars of genocide, this resulted in debate surrounding the claim that comparative studies or diverse applications of the term “genocide” could be considered “antisemitic,” as the standard of genocide was set in legal discourse by the response to the targeting of Jewish people by the Nazis and others.
Even as these questions were debated, antisemitism–however defined–was now understood as a social ill. In the United States, popular revulsion against Naziism and fascism, and the putative triumph of ideas of multiculturalism and racial equality that arose from anticolonial and civil rights movements around the world led to a widespread rejection of explicitly antisemitic ideologies alongside other forms of racism. This rejection was exemplified in 1948 in Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
Prominent mid-twentieth century US social critics disagreed over whether antisemitic thought and actions arose from people at the successful core or from the distressed margins of society. Oscar Handlin, the first Jewish professor at Harvard and author of multiple popular histories (including several for the ADL), argued that antisemitism arose because of widespread upheaval due to immigration and industrialization (1951, 343-4). In contrast, Carey McWilliams, the civil rights attorney and later editor of the liberal magazine The Nation, argued that antisemitism was “a mask for privilege” in that it was used to exclude Jews from the higher reaches of social institutions, clubs, universities, and neighborhoods in the US (1948). Importantly, even in disagreement, these perspectives rested on their embrace of liberalism and capitalism as conditions in which antisemitism (and racism) could be ended, rather than as conditions that engendered it. This put Jewish organizations' experts on antisemitism at odds with scholarly perspectives on racism in other spheres, including Black sociology and global movements for decolonization. Such conflicts have continued to make a fraught project of efforts to define antisemitism as a form of racism (Svonkin 1997, 149; Von Eschen 1997, Ch. 1).
**********
The history of Zionism and the colonization of Palestine in the service of creating a Jewish national home introduced important additional concerns about whether antisemitic thought and behavior was an innate characteristic of some peoples, societies or religions, a learned ideology, or an idea grounded in material conflicts over resources, particularly land. The confrontation between Zionist settlers and the Palestinians they displaced led to a revision of thinking about the sources and dangers of antisemitic ideas. Some early Zionists had argued that ethno-religious conflict with Palestinians was a result of Christian antagonism. Yosef Gorny quotes settler Eliyahu Saffir explaining in 1900 that the Muslim Arabs “are one of those nations—or the sole nation—close to us and to our hearts; in their time we prospered, and their love and affinity are still a possibility for the future’” (1987, 41). But increasing confrontations led to a view among Zionists that what they viewed as Arab antisemitism was a result not only of manipulation by Christians and wealthy notables, but an innate characteristic of Arabs. A few years after Saffir asserted a connection between Arabs and Jews, Moshe Smilansky asserted that “the Arab masses have developed a simmering hatred for the Jews. These Semites are anti-Semites” (Gorny 1987, 64). In short, when the term was coined in the nineteenth century, antisemitic was a charge directed at those who racialized Jews; later in the twentieth century, being antisemitic was itself being characterized as a racial trait.
Historians and critical scholars of Middle Eastern societies, especially Arab Jewish scholars, have argued that Arab resistance to Zionist colonialism has been mislabeled as antisemitic, and that where actual antisemitism has emerged in Arab spaces it is a construction of Western colonial forces, particularly Zionism. But a number of scholars and writers have offered “explanations” for ostensible Arab antisemitism. Tunisian Jewish intellectual Albert Memmi asserted that Jews lived “amid an Arab world that had always been hostile,” implying that such hostility was an innate characteristic or at least an inevitable result of two distinct “groups” living in the same society (1975, 12). Memmi’s analysis was later taken up by advocates such as Samuel Huntington who proposed that transhistorical and innate characteristics of “civilizations,” particularly of Islam, inevitably led to “bloody clashes” (1996, 28). Similarly, historian Benny Morris argues that Islam has always been antagonistic to Judaism and that it was a myth that Islamic societies were once tolerant. The “clashes” of the twentieth century, he argues, were a blend of “traditional Islamic anti-Semitism” with the ideas of “modern European hate-merchants.”
These sleights of hand erase Jewish histories of membership and belonging in Arab and Muslim-majority societies, and attributes European race science, reliant on the figure of the abject Jew, to the colonized--the target of racial science and its cultural hierarchies (Shohat 1999, Khalidi 2020, Shlaim 2023, Azoulay 2024). Indeed, proponents of arguments claiming an “Arab antisemitism” have often been the same authors posing Orientalist rationales for colonialism and anti-Muslim or anti-Palestinian racism, and their arguments have often been part of an anti-Arab or anti-Muslim project based on ahistorical claims.
In response to the rise of Arab and then Third World resistance to the mass expulsion and killing of Palestinians after the founding of Israel in 1948, and to the subsequent displacement to Israel of Mizrahi Jews from their ancient homelands in largely Muslim countries, Zionist organizations increasingly focused their antisemitism discourse on Arabs, particularly Arab Muslims, and soon more generally: on anticolonial African, Asian, Latin American, and Indigenous political movements, and U.S. Black and Third Worldist movements (Feldman 2015). Organizations like the ADL and the AJC identified Arabs and Muslims in racial and religious terms, rather than as people confronting political and military forces; and they identified opposition to Jewish and/or European settlement as motivated by race and religion, rather than by politics or conquest. Similarly, they criticized Black liberationist support for Palestinian rights and opposition to colonialism as a new form of “Black antisemitism.” Major Jewish organizations’ categorizations of the antisemitic centered on “third world antisemitism.” (Congressional Record 1969, 5418)
**********
In the United States, the claim that anticolonial and anti-racist movements were somehow inherently antisemitic emerged as the thinly-veiled racism of the “new antisemitism,” an important and ostensibly “new” deployment of the keyword. The “new antisemitism” is best seen as a form of exceptionalism proposed and vigorously campaigned for by Zionist organizations in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Epstein & Foster 1974). In the wake of the 1967 war, racial justice movements grew in their breadth and power in the U.S., even as the Israeli state became a more overtly imperial force. While the Israeli state’s actions clearly contradicted the zeitgeist of a generation of anti-war protesters, a Zionist effort to demobilize anticolonial solidarity inclusive of Palestinian resistance, couched in the progressive terms of opposition to antisemitism, formed a challenge to the grassroots left.
Antiracist movements in the U.S., like anticolonial movements globally, rejected this new accusation of antisemitism, advancing an analysis of Zionism as a form of racism, and drawing parallels between Jewish resistance to antisemitism and anticolonial resistance, including the Palestinian movement. Jewish activists in New Left movements, including participants in the Weather Underground (Berger 2006) and the Jewish Alliance Against Zionism, identified the Israeli state as an imperial and colonial endeavor, elaborating an understanding and a practice of anti-Zionism as anti-colonial antiracism, and as a contemporary echo of historic Jewish resistance against genocidal state practice. The “new antisemitism” thesis was thus an effort to break the solidarity of the left; The New Anti-Semitism, a 1974 book published by the ADL, argued (as the ADL had before) that “Jewish interests” and the interests of “the Establishment” were closely connected, and as such that movements from below were attacking “Jewish interests.” Such weaponization of the notion of antisemitism to suggest that racial justice movements are “antisemitic” has now become a familiar Zionist and U.S. imperial strategy to attack and dismantle social movements across the internationalist left. In this way, antisemitism has shifted from a term used to protect a vulnerable people against hostile forces to a term used to defend a powerful state against critics of its anti-democratic, colonial, and segregationist policies.
**********
A form of gendered antisemitism emerged from the cauldron of Jewish European assimilation in the U.S., quickly becoming hegemonic. In the 1960s, the positive cultural ideals of Jewish women--the “Yiddishe mama,” once considered abundant and loving, and the “belle Juive,” or the beautiful and independent young Jewish woman in a Christian-dominated world--gave way to negative images of the “nagging mother” and the “Jewish American Princess,” or JAP. Upwardly mobile Jewish men contributed significantly to such degrading stereotypes of Jewish women; this cultural trend contributed to the male-dominated process of Jewish European assimilation in the US, normalizing revulsion with Jewish women while popularizing Jewish male protagonists through the novels of Philip Roth and Hollywood film (Abrams 2012, 48-50). In distancing themselves from such reviled feminine figures, Jewish men shifted the dominant representation of their matrix of desire, thereby figuring a Jewish masculinity that would be more proximal to white, Protestant normativities, as in Woody Allen’s paradigmatic self-representation in films like Annie Hall. Meanwhile, revived white supremacist and antisemitic beauty ideals ensured that into the 1980s, Jewish women would increasingly invest in plastic surgery, particularly rhinoplasty, as a matter of course (Gilman 1999); prominent Jewish women, especially in the entertainment industry, managed gendered Jewish “difference” through oscillating portrayals of feminine normativity and Jewish feminine excess (Levine 1997, Wolf 2003).
In response to such antisemitic gendered racialization, and in the context of mass social movements against war and racism, as well as a grassroots feminist movement in which Ashkenazi Jewish women participated far beyond their proportionality (Antler 2018), and the rise of identity politics as a feminist method, a specifically Jewish feminist movement arose to claim pride in Jewish women’s identities (Beck 1982, Rich 1987). Throughout this period, feminisms were riven by contestations over the question of Palestine, while Zionist feminists’ weaponization of antisemitism resulted in anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism within the movement--including within radical feminist of color spaces, where Palestinian feminists were frequently called antisemitic when they opposed Zionism (Naber et. al. 2006).
This trend was at least thirty years in the making: some claimed that the debate over Zionism and the rise of accusations of antisemitism within the feminist movement began in the forums of the UN Decade on Women. The 1975 Mexico City meeting resulted in a statement against “colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism, foreign domination and occupation, zionism, apartheid, racial discrimination…” which Betty Friedan, a major feminist figure and conference delegate, decried as antisemitic; five years later, the presence of Leila Khaled at the UN women’s meeting in Copenhagen elicited broad Third World feminist support and another round of accusations of antisemitism, published in the feminist press (Bourne 1987). At the grassroots, anti-Zionist Jewish feminists responded to such accusations of antisemitism against the Palestine solidarity movement, with groups like Jewish Women for a Secular Middle East and prominent Jewish feminist writers like Aurora Levins Morales promoting anti-Zionism, especially in wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacres at Sabra and Shatila (Feldman 2015, Fishbach 2018, Lober 2019).
In the 1980s and into the 1990s, Jewish feminists’ analogizing of antisemitism with anti-Blackness and other forms of racism took center stage; this is just one example of the many ways that, throughout the Cold War, “Israel and Palestine entered and became sedimented in debates about purportedly ‘domestic’ U.S. concerns” (Feldman 2015, 2). In a paradigmatic merging of opposition to antisemitism as a racial justice project with Jewish national belonging in Israel, in the pages of Ms. Magazine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin famously argued for Zionism as “affirmative action on a national scale” (1982), while the Jewish feminist group Di Vilde Chayes called anti-Zionism antisemitism, lauding Israel “as a place of refuge and safety for Jewish people all over the world,” especially “Sephardic, Arabic, and African Jews” (1982). This legitimization of Zionism as the progressive response to antisemitism defined a Jewish feminist “roots” movement that equated Israel with ethnic belonging and a “homeland,” exemplified in groups like “Feminists Against Antisemitism,” anchored by Zionist writers including Phyllis Chesler (Cantarow 1988). Responding to what they considered a demobilizing and rightward turn among feminists, in 1982 Women Against Imperialism decried the “growing tendency to use the issue of anti-semitism to justify Zionism and the colonization of the Palestinian people,” while UK Marxist feminist Jenny Bourne (1987) argued against drawing equivalencies between antisemitism and other forms of racism and decried what she called “homelands of the mind” as a betrayal of feminist antiracist solidarity. In this fractious period, some Jewish feminists claimed that antisemitism was equivalent to anti-Black racism (e.g. Dale 1985, Beck 1989), but most maintained that Ashkenazi Jewish people in the US were white (Bulkin, Pratt and Smith 1984). Such debates about Jewish identity, antisemitism, and comparative racialization raged throughout the 1980s and 90s, with the charge of antisemitism often applied to feminists of color who expressed solidarity with Palestine--famously, June Jordan (Magloire, 2024).
**********
While antisemitic beauty ideals played out on the gendered Jewish body, and while grassroots movements debated the meaning of antisemitism in US racial formation, the idea of Jews as “other” was understood as a kind of racism. But by the end of the twentieth century, a contradictory synthesis was (re)emerging. It was considered antisemitic to believe that Jews were a distinct, ancient, unassimilable group of people connected in a global conspiracy to dominate the world, particularly through financial power. Acceptance of that belief had been one of the factors leading to the murder of millions of Jews in Europe in the 1930s and ‘40s. But it was also considered antisemitic to believe that Jews did not have the right to create and control an ethnically/religiously homogenous state because they constituted such a distinct, ancient, unassimilable group of people--in other words, a national group. Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, thus grounded itself in ideas that it defined as antisemitic even as it posited itself as the only reasonable response to antisemitism.
The protracted campaign against the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 (1975), an opposition spearheaded by the United States and Israel, exemplifies this contradictory thesis (Erakat 2019). Resolution 3379 resolved that Zionism was a form of racism and racial discrimination. Seventy-two member states voted in favor of the resolution, thirty-five voted against, and thirty-two abstained. The Resolution drew on the critical analysis of Zionism pursued by the likes of Fayez Sayegh and the Palestine Research Center, which, as early as 1965, had framed the historical practice of Zionism as infused with colonial logics (Sayegh 1965). Sayegh argued for the resolution at the United Nations in 1975, underscoring the racial logic driving a process of Jewish settlement and Palestinian dispossession, and building on the statement in Mexico City earlier that year. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then the US Ambassador to the UN, argued the case against the resolution--reframing opposition to Zionism's racial logics as instead a denial of the Jewish people's right to self-determination, as a national group, and hence antisemitic (Feldman 2015). US and Israeli opposition to the resolution persisted throughout the 1980s, culminating in the resolution's revocation in 1991--one of Israel's preconditions for participating in the Madrid Peace Conference, and the first time a UNGA resolution had ever been revoked. Throughout the first two decades of the 2000s, the US delegation to the UN refused to participate in conferences that advanced anti-colonial analyses of Zionism on the grounds that they manifested antisemitic tropes.
**********
The adjective antisemitic is thus often used to defend and obscure the actions of the State of Israel and other states supporting it, rather than serving as an intellectual tool to confront a set of oppressive, racist beliefs. Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than the uses to which The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism have been put. The IHRA, formed in 1998 to counter Holocaust denial and to advise European governments, promulgated a “working definition of antisemitism” in 2016 that dominates contemporary discourse and is being leveraged to intimidate critics of Israel. Its genesis has been documented in scholarship as a project undertaken in concert with the Israeli government (Stern-Wiener). The IHRA definition has been weaponized by states even against the will of its lead drafter Kenneth Stern, who worried in 2019 (and again in 2025) that right-wing organizations, Jewish and non-Jewish, were instrumentalizing the IHRA definition to attack their political opponents.
The IHRA document states that “antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” This vague and circular definition is followed by eleven specific examples of antisemitism, seven of which use that term to describe criticism of the State of Israel or Zionism, or the making of historical comparisons between the actions of Israel and the actions of Nazis. One example asserts that describing Israel as a racist endeavor amounts to “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination,” thus conflating a specific manifestation (the current State of Israel) with the principle of self-determination. Such a conflation forecloses what alternative sites or models of Jewish self-determination might flourish, beyond the form of the nation-state or its vexed geography. It also proscribes discussions of racism, historical facts about Israeli state actions, the experiences of Palestinians, and the clearly-stated beliefs of anti-Zionist Jews, summarily declaring them all antisemitic. As many scholars and community groups have noted in opposing the IHRA definition, the idea that freedom of speech, academic freedom, historical fact, movements against state violence, and Jewish communal work must be severely compromised in order to “oppose antisemitism” itself constitutes an attack on Jewishness (Gordon 2024).
A significant critique of this conflation appeared in 2021 as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), drafted and signed by a large group of scholars from the fields of Jewish Studies, Antisemitism Studies, Holocaust Studies, and Middle East Studies. The JDA defines antisemitism more succinctly than the IHRA and in explicit response to that earlier text: "Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).” The Declaration then offers counterexamples where challenging Israeli state action ought not qualify as antisemitic. For instance, supporting the Palestinian demand for justice and the full granting of their political, national, civil and human rights as encapsulated in international law, or criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism, or arguing for a variety of constitutional arrangements for Jews and Palestinians in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean: none of these beliefs, or their expression, is antisemitic.
The Jerusalem Declaration also states that it is not antisemitic to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants “between the river and the sea,” whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state, federal state, or in whatever form. Nor is it antisemitic to deploy evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state, including its institutions and founding principles. Criticism can also include Israel’s policies and practices, domestic and abroad, such as the conduct of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, the role Israel plays in the region, or any other way in which, as a state, it influences events in the world. Finally, it is not antisemitic to point out systematic racial discrimination.
The JDA aims to be universalist in its assertion that the same norms of debate that apply to other states and to other conflicts over national self-determination apply in the case of Israel and Palestine. Thus it affirms that it is not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonial states or apartheid regimes, even where such comparisons may be contentious. Similarly, boycott, divestment and sanctions are commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest against states and not, in and of themselves, antisemitic if turned against Israel. Nor, finally, does political speech have to be measured, proportional, tempered, or reasonable to be protected under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and other human rights instruments. Criticism that some may see as excessive or contentious, or as reflecting a “double standard,” is not, in and of itself, antisemitic. In general, the line between antisemitic and non-antisemitic speech is different from the line between unreasonable and reasonable speech.
However, the Jerusalem Declaration repeats some of the IHRA definition’s problems, including implicit limits on political speech and limited attention to power relations between Jewish communities and marginalized populations. For instance, its guidelines suggest that it could be construed as antisemitic to discuss the fact that most major Jewish organizations have endorsed Zionist violence, since that might be understood as a “sweeping negative generalization.” Similarly, it does not distinguish between a discussion that plays on racist tropes (for instance, the “Jewish landlord”) and a factual discussion of the same subject (for instance, Jewish landlords in the context of an area like Brooklyn, NY, in which a distinct Jewish community has made a communal business in local real estate, with all of the attendant race and class dynamics of gentrifying New York neighborhoods) (Deutsch and Casper 2021). In this way, the JDA mislabels discussions of historical and political realities as “antisemitic.” Additionally, the JDA focuses primarily on debunking charges levied against the global movement for Palestinian liberation, with the effect that it omits any mention of white supremacist or right-wing antisemitism, and instead reinscribes Palestine and Palestinians as being at the center of antisemitism discourse.
**********
One of the many complications underlying the term antisemitic in U.S. parlance is a result of the multiple and often contradictory identities Jews are seen to inhabit. According to whiteness scholars such as Karen Brodkin (1996) and Mathew Frye Jacobson (1999), the once racially liminal and “off-white” identity ascribed to European-descended American Jews was largely “reassigned” in the early years of the Cold War. Jews moved en masse into newly forming all-white suburbs with the assistance of Federal housing loans denied to Black Americans, were allowed entrance into prestigious universities (although "numeri clausi" remained in effect, and entered into professional occupations in media, education, the arts, and medicine that had previously been restricted, albeit unevenly. While the “red scare” of the 1950s mobilized explicitly antisemitic imagery and disproportionately affected Jewish radicals, by the 1960s both the explosion of Jewish cultural achievement and the ascension of broadly liberal ideas of anti-racism led antisemitism to be seen as a diminished political force in the U.S. The “New Antisemitism” thesis proffered by the Anti Defamation League in 1974 took note of the fact that Christian and far-right antisemitism was at that time on the decline in the West. However, the ADL argued that left-wing anti-Zionism associated with socialist and Black power organizations is the “new antisemitism,” while other scholars held and continue to hold that antisemitism and anti-Zionism have no necessary correlation.
At least since the first election of Donald Trump, the discussion of Jewish whiteness and antisemitism have become even more complicated due to the rise of the “alt-right” or “new-right.” Many alt-right figures hold classically antisemitic ideas tied to their white supremacism, and to the adoption of “anti-antisemitism” in the name of defending Zionism. The charge that a person or an action is antisemitic often seems unmoored from its historical and material foundations, and is far too often deployed as a form of bigotry against Jews and anti-Zionists. Trump himself, who has tweeted antisemitic conspiracy theories and insisted that anti-Zionist Jews are not “real Jews,” also promises to defend Jews against antisemitism at prestigious universities. Such “defense” targets Palestine solidarity activists while simultaneously allowing for and encouraging antisemitism as it arises in white and Christian nationalist discourse. The inclusion of a “religious freedom” exemption for Christian antisemitic claims of Jewish deicide in the 2025 US Antisemitism Act, which uses the IHRA definition as its basis, underscores this exception. The current contradictory social formation can either be seen as the product of Zionist ideology itself, which agreed with antisemites in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that Jews only belong in Israel, or even as a reversion to more classic forms of antisemitism, in which Jews are deployed as a convenient cover for reactionary state policy.
*****
These contradictory histories have converged to make antisemitic what the scholar Raymond Williams would have called a “difficult word” (1983). The word can reference actual racism toward actual Jews; it can also be a specious, weaponized claim that undermines movements against racism and state violence. Too often, it sets the stage for simply false claims that state violence, white supremacy, and attacks on anticolonial and anti-genocide movements are actually “opposing antisemitism.” These deeply contradictory meanings of the same word are not simple disagreements.
As scholars John Harfouch and C. Heike Schotten theorize, such misconstructions are the basis for an “antisemitism industrial complex” in which affective and abstract claims about antisemitism (for instance, claims about feeling unsafe when Palestinians’ right to self-determination is invoked) are able to displace factual and material discussions of state violence against a wide range of people and institutions, including Palestinians, Muslims, and Jews who criticize Israel, students, protesters, universities, and more (Harfouch and Schotten, 2024). These conditions, in turn, have cleared the way for extraordinary material impacts, including the expedited transfer of billions of dollars in weaponry and aid from the United States to Israel for the implementation of anti-Palestinian genocide. They have facilitated authoritarian policy in the United States as Christian nationalist organizations make “antisemitism” the rationale for policy blueprints like Project Esther; and underwritten repression in similar ways around the world.
Antisemitic is no doubt a “keyword” because groups representing radically different interests—ranging within the US from Christian nationalists and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) to the authors of the Jerusalem Declaration to groups supporting Palestinian rights, including Jewish Voice for Peace—have come up with differing and often conflicting definitions of the term. Its meaning is thus both the site and the stakes of heated contestation. This essay—like all keyword essays—is meant to provide analysis of this conflict over definitions. Though it is no doubt written from a particular perspective—its authors are all affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace—even those who hold views radically different from the thinkers and scholars who have contributed to this essay should be able to recognize the historical and present-day facts presented here, even if not everyone shares the same interpretation of those facts. Specifically, those who use the word “antisemitic” to attack critics of the state of Israel and its actions must grapple with the clear fact that they are twisting and distorting both the history and the meaning of this keyword when they do so.