Antisemitism Is a Symptom. What's the Disease? ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

Antisemitism Is a Symptom. What's the Disease?

In The Abrahamic Metacritique, Nina Saadat has written one of the more honest assessments of American Jewish self-presentation in recent memory. Her essay surveys the major frameworks that Jewish institutions, philanthropists, and advocates have deployed against antisemitism and delegitimization of Israel, and finds them all to be not merely tactically ineffective but structurally misconceived. Here’s a summary:

The first framework treats antisemitism as a species of racism, positioning Jews alongside Black Americans in a shared drama of oppression moving toward liberal-democratic redemption. Robert Kraft’s Super Bowl advertisement — a nebbishy Jewish boy bullied by a white kid in a red baseball cap, rescued by a tall Black classmate who covers the “Dirty Jew” sticky note with a blue one — is her Exhibit A. The framework depends on a philosophy of history that assumes the arc bends toward justice and that the enemies of progress are identifiable as bigots and reactionaries. History does not have an arc.

The second framework — which Saadat labels “We’re Here, We’re Queer” — presents Israel’s multiracial composition and progressive gender and sexuality policies to American liberals. Tel Aviv Pride parades, Arab Israeli Knesset members, women in the IDF, all are used to argue that Israel should be evaluated by the same standards applied to other Western liberal democracies. The problem is that the intended audience isn’t applying those standards in good faith. Leftist anti-Zionism reads Israel’s extension of liberal rights as a settler-colonial fig leaf, and whatever Israel does to demonstrate progressive credentials becomes further evidence of its cynicism. The framework cedes the entire premise to people who built the premise specifically to exclude Jews.

The third framework, which she calls Israelism, is the most substantive: a narrative running from ancient indigeneity through exile and persecution to the Holocaust and the establishment of the state, culminating in Israel’s military and technological achievements. It correctly grasps that Jewish survival requires a state with military power. But it contains a structural contradiction. The first half positions Jews as morally sympathetic through powerlessness and suffering. The second half demands admiration for exactly the opposite: competence, organization, and victory. The listener who absorbed the first half’s logic finds the Palestinians occupying the role the narrative prepared them for, as the new stateless underdogs. The framework argues against itself.

The fourth framework, Western Civilizationism, runs from think tanks and conference circuits through the various institutions that have sprung up to defend the Athens-and-Jerusalem inheritance against its enemies. It is directionally more accurate about geopolitics than its predecessors — the adversaries really are adversaries, the Abraham Accords really do matter. But it flattens the Western canon into a loose aesthetic, cannot tolerate the possibility that American and Israeli interests might diverge, and functions, in Saadat’s sharp observation, as institutionalized self-soothing: a well-funded apparatus that reassures donors their camp still has vitality while persuading nobody outside it of anything.

Her conclusion reaches for the Book of Jonah. The sailors’ questions — what is your occupation, where do you come from, of what people are you — are the questions every hasbara campaign has been trying to answer. Each framework conscripts the Jew to a vision built by others and waits for the fire that doesn’t come. Jonah’s answer refuses every available vision: I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven. There is no transaction, no alliance, no shared victimhood. Saadat reads this as the model: stop performing for an audience that will never be satisfied, turn inward, confront what you’ve been fleeing.

She is right about the diagnosis. But her analysis falls one step too short.

There is a shared assumption underneath all four frameworks that Saadat doesn’t name. Every one of them is a form of historical determinism. The progressive framework has the arc bending toward justice. Western Civilizationism has the Fukuyaman end of history. Israelism has the Holocaust as the catalyst that makes the state’s existence historically inevitable. Even the religious supersessionism that shaped Western moral vocabulary has history moving toward a predetermined redemptive conclusion. They all assume the direction is fixed and the job is to align yourself with it correctly — to be on the right side of history, to survive long enough for the arc to complete its bend.

That assumption is empirically false and morally enervating, and the damage it does is specific. If the arc bends inevitably, what you do matters less than which side you’re on. Activism becomes positioning. Advocacy becomes signaling. The actual work — building and maintaining the moral, institutional, and relational structures that make human flourishing possible — gets replaced by the performance of alignment. There is no arc. There is entropy, which is the default, and there is the ongoing, effortful, never-finished work of building structure against it. Progress is real but contingent; it exists where people built it through obligation and maintained it through accountability, and it degrades when they stop. The Holocaust didn’t make Israel inevitable; people made Israel through extraordinary effort against enormous resistance. Liberal democracy didn’t emerge from history’s logic; it was constructed and has to be continuously reconstructed. Antisemitism doesn’t fade as enlightenment advances; it mutates and finds new frameworks when old ones collapse. Moral structure, like every other structure, requires maintenance. The determinists forgot to budget for it.

The reality is that antisemitism is a symptom, and we have been treating it as the illness.

I came to this conclusion by a route that might seem backwards. Last year I asked myself what all the diverse types of antisemitism share. Religious antisemitism, racial antisemitism, leftist anti-Zionism, Islamist eliminationism — the specific hatreds differ enormously in vocabulary and justification. Yet the structure is surprisingly similar. In every case, Jewish existence doesn’t merely offend the system. It falsifies it.

Medieval Christianity needed Jews to convert or disappear because a remnant community still practicing the original covenant undermined supersessionism — the claim that the church had replaced Israel as God’s people. A living Jewish community was a permanent theological refutation. Racial antisemitism needed Jews eliminated because an inferior people who should have disappeared via social Darwinism should have disappeared long ago. Leftist anti-Zionism needs Jewish nationalism dissolved because a people with a three-thousand-year particular identity who returned to and thrive in their own land breaks all progressive theories, like decolonial theory and the oppressor/oppressed binary. In each case Jewish existence is constitutively threatening, because it embodies exactly the particularism that every totalizing framework must eliminate to remain coherent.

Once that pattern is visible, the conventional responses to antisemitism look less like solutions and more like the wrong operation on the wrong organ. Every initiative Saadat describes accepts the premise that the surrounding culture’s moral vocabulary is basically functional and that the defect is in Jewish self-presentation or in the specific pathology of Jew-hatred. That premise is what needs examining.

The Western moral tradition has been operating without a coherent ontological foundation for centuries, and the frameworks Saadat catalogs are all downstream of that failure. Progressive identity politics reduces every moral question to a single axis of oppression and liberation. Western Civilizationism gestures toward a canon it can’t actually read without finding contradictions it prefers to ignore - Athens and Jerusalem are more at odds than similar. Post-colonial Israelism borrows the oppressor-oppressed binary from the tradition it’s trying to resist. Each produces pathologies — the campus chaos, the inability to adjudicate competing claims without collapsing into raw power, the exhaustion of institutions built on premises nobody quite believes anymore — and antisemitism is one of those pathologies. A framework that requires simple, universal rules will always find the Jew to be a problem, because Jewish existence has spent three millennia refusing clean categories.

Fighting antisemitism within any of these frameworks is approximately as productive as treating fever with ice packs. The temperature drops temporarily. The infection continues.

The question that follows is what a functional moral epistemology would actually look like — and whether the tradition being attacked might have preserved the tools to build one.

Judaism preserved tools that other traditions let atrophy. I’m not talking about theology, but the ontological and epistemological scaffolding underneath the theology. It treats truth as real but only asymptotically approachable, something to be pursued through argument and lived obligation rather than possessed by whoever argues most confidently. It centers relationships rather than individuals as the primary unit of moral analysis, so that ethics emerges from actual accountability built into relationships rather than from overly simplistic rules that only see individuals. It talks about obligations, not rights. Judaism provides a way of building on a narrow universal floor — the basic conditions without which no moral community can function — above which genuine pluralism is a feature, not a problem to be managed. The Talmudic tradition didn’t produce relativism; it produced a methodology for holding irreducible disagreement without dissolving it or weaponizing it, a methodology refined across centuries of arguing about the exact questions contemporary moral discourse keeps breaking itself against. It works because it contains self-correction mechanisms — the tradition has produced rigidity and failure as well as wisdom, and the honest account of why it generates insight includes the internal dissent that kept it honest. We give lip service to pluralism, but most Western philosophies cannot handle it. Judaism does, because it never claimed to be universal. The methodology is the achievement, not the people who carried it.

In a framework built on those foundations, moral progress looks like maintenance rather than inevitability — the ongoing work of obligation, relational accountability, and truth-pursuit against the default of entropy. And Jewish particularity requires no defense within it. It is an instance of something the system is designed to protect: a community maintaining specific obligations and a specific identity across time, demonstrating that particularity and ethical seriousness are compatible, that covenantal commitment doesn’t require the elimination or subordination of any other group The eliminationist logic that drives every flavor of antisemitism — this group’s irreducible difference threatens the coherence of my system — disappears, because the system no longer requires that kind of coherence. It was built for a world where the person standing across from you is irreducibly other, and that is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be honored.

I’ve been developing this framework, which I call Derechology, initially as an attempt to understand antisemitism and increasingly as a broader project. The Haggadah commentary I wrote this past Passover touches on parts of it, as does my recently completed book on the American covenant. The full argument is still being written. But its origin is worth naming: it did not begin as a theory. It began as a question about why every system that tries to eliminate Jews needs to eliminate them, and what that pattern reveals about the systems rather than about the Jews.

Jonah’s answer to the sailors — I am a Hebrew, I fear the Lord, our situations are simply different — is the right response. It is not the full extent of what the encounter offers. Jonah eventually delivered his message. The sailors, the text records, feared God greatly and offered sacrifices and vows from their encounter with him. Their frameworks didn’t survive the storm unchanged. That part of the story gets less attention than the whale, and perhaps it shouldn’t.

The alternative is to keep treating the fever, and the infection has been running long enough.

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