The Philosophical Core of Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism

We’re told over and over again  that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. It’s just politics, we’re told; it is opposition to one state’s policies, not a judgment about Jews as Jews. In fact, calling it antisemitism is a form of censorship, a way to silence a legitimate political opinion. 

On the surface, this claim seems plausible. People criticize countries all the time. Saying “I oppose China’s treatment of Uighurs” doesn’t mean you hate Chinese people. So why should opposing Israel mean you hate Jews?

The strongest rebuttal so far has been that anti-Zionism denies the Jewish right to self-determination. But the anti-Zionists answer that by saying that most Jews don’t live in Israel and are happy citizens of other countries. They don’t need national self-determination. That’s just a Zionist ideology, not a universal Jewish claim, and opposing Israel's existence as a Jewish state is therefore a moral political opinion and Zionism is an illegitimate form of Jewish supremacy. 

And there the argument usually ends. One side says Jews deserve a state; the other says Jews have no such right and in fact their desire for a state in the Levant is colonialist.  It sounds like a disagreement about values, with two legitimate opinions. And if they are both legitimate opinions, then the anti-Zionist side wins by default, because antisemitism is illegitimate but political opinion isn't. Being anti-Zionist cannot be considered truly antisemitic - perhaps some extremists are, maybe Hamas is, but opposing Israel has nothing to do with Jews as Jews and therefore is fine. 

Until you dig deeper.

I’ve been developing a new method of analysis called Derechology. It begins with a basic principle: everyone has a derech — a consistent moral path. Even when someone’s statements or actions seem contradictory, their derech is usually more coherent than it appears. Contradictions only appear that way because we haven’t yet uncovered the deeper assumption that holds their worldview together.

Which brings us to Professor Ramsi Woodcock.

Woodcock is a law professor at the University of Kentucky. In late 2025, he was suspended after publicly calling for every country in the world to make war on Israel — not metaphorically, but literally — until Israel surrendered unconditionally to Palestinian rule over the entire land from the river to the sea.

He defended this position:

He said his calls for military intervention against Israel, and his views that the future of Palestine should be determined by Palestinians alone – including Jews who lived in Palestine before large-scale Jewish immigration began in the late 19th century – are consistent with recognizing Israel as a colonial project. Woodcock, who is part Algerian, often refers to that country’s experience of ending French colonial rule as a basis for his argument.

He supports Palestinian nationalism while condemning Jewish nationalism as illegitimate. In his view, Jews who lived in the land before Zionism could be considered Palestinians and equal citizens, but everyone else - including Holocaust survivors and Jews from Arab countries and their descendants - are foreign colonizers.

At first glance, this seems like hypocrisy. Why is Palestinian nationalism considered noble, but Jewish nationalism a crime? Why does he support decolonization in one case and not the other? Why does he say that Jews whose families arrived 140 years ago should be subject to a referendum by Arabs but Arabs whose ancestors immigrated to Palestine in the early 20th century are fully Palestinian and have the right to stay?

If we assume his derech is internally consistent, there must be a hidden assumption that resolves the contradiction.

That assumption is this: Jews are not a people.

Jews are merely a religious group. They are not a nation, not an indigenous group. Just a religion. They are merely a group of individuals who have no collective claim to history, land, memory, or destiny.

If you believe that, then Zionism isn’t a form of national liberation. It’s a fraud - a manipulation of categories. There is no “Jewish people” in the national sense, so any attempt to behave like one is inherently illegitimate.

That is Ramsi Woodcock's philosophy. If you ask him if there is a Jewish people, he will have to claim there isn't - because he is a professor who has thought deeply about this and has made anti-Zionism the centerpiece of his identity. The very first word on his personal webpage is "Antizionist." 

But if you think about it, this is the underlying philosophy behind all of today's anti-Zionism.  Arab media denies Jewish peoplehood explicitly, claiming that Jews are really Khazars with no history in the land to begin with; Palestinians routinely claim that all archaeological evidence of a Jewish people in the land is fake and that every Jewish shrine is really Muslim. 

The idea that Jews aren't a people is a fundamental, load bearing premise behind anti-Zionist philosophy. The only way people can believe that Jews have no national rights is if they believe there is no Jewish nation to begin with.  

Once you accept the anti-Zionist premise that Jews are not a people, a whole new moral framework emerges. Any Jewish effort to act collectively as a people -  even outside Israel - becomes suspect. Jewish summer camp becomes indoctrination. Singing “Am Yisrael Chai” becomes a supremacist chant. Prayers that speak of “Your people Israel” become racist. Chanting "Next Year in Jerusalem" at the Passover Seder is colonialist aggression.

This isn’t an accidental side effect of anti-Zionism. It is the logical structure beneath it, and it is the logical result of following its philosophy. You can’t consistently oppose Jewish nationalism while affirming other forms of nationalism -  unless you believe Jews are not a people.

Which means that all consistent anti-Zionism is built on the denial of Jewish peoplehood. Woodcock is not an outlier. He is just saying explicitly what anti-Zionists must believe if they are consistent. 

And that’s antisemitism.

It isn't mere criticism of a government. Anti-Zionism erases the Jewish right to exist as a collective -  as a “we” - not just in Israel but anywhere. 

And when that erasure is dressed up as progressive, anti-colonial, or humanitarian, it becomes even harder to detect - and even more important to expose.

Denying Jewish peoplehood is at the very core of anti-Zionism. If Jews are a people, the entire argument against Israel falls apart. And until anti-Zionism emerged, no one in the world denied that Jews are a people. That denial is a recent invention - a retrofitted premise created to justify a political conclusion.

It is easily possible to criticize Israel and not be antisemitic. But it is structurally impossible to be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic. 

Once you realize this, the landscape changes. Anti-Zionism isn’t merely entangled with antisemitism. It doesn’t simply echo older tropes. 

Anti-Zionism is antisemitic by definition.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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The @Heritage Foundation NEVER cared about right-wing antisemitism

Jewish Insider reports:

An antisemitism task force affiliated with the Heritage Foundation announced on Thursday that it would cut ties with the conservative institution, as the prominent think tank has come under fire for its defense of Tucker Carlson after the firebrand podcaster hosted neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes for a friendly interview. 

The task force was formed following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and was instrumental in the drafting of Project Esther, Heritage’s signature counter-antisemitism framework released last year in response to the Biden administration’s national strategy to combat antisemitism. 

The Project Esther report made no mention of antisemitism on the political right. In their Thursday email, the co-chairs of the task force said they can no longer ignore it.

“The NTFCA will also now expand our work to fight the rising scourge of antisemitism on the Right, beyond our previous work combating the pro-Hamas movement on the Left,” wrote the co-chairs, announcing that they will co-host a conference on “Exposing & Countering Extremism and Antisemitism on the Right” on Nov. 18 in Washington, in partnership with the Conference of Christian Presidents for Israel. 

I had never looked at Project Esther before, and sure enough, it doesn't say a word about right-wing antisemitism. 

That is insane.

Highlighting left-wing antisemitism is important. But ignoring antisemitism from the Right means that the Heritage Foundation never really cared about antisemitism at all, and only used it as an excuse to attack the Left.

I have been highly critical of the left-wing politicization of antisemitism, pretending to be against it while enabling it and using antisemitism as an excuse to attack their political enemies. 

Yet that is exactly what the Heritage Foundation and their  National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism were doing.

Which means that on this topic at least, the Heritage Foundation has been just as immoral in weaponizing antisemitism as Jewish Voice for Peace has been. 

This is outrageous no matter which side does it. 

In both cases, their faux "fight against antisemitism" also ignores antisemitism from Arabs, Muslims, Black entertainers, Nation of Islam and others who spread the virus. And, equally bad, neither side even defines antisemitism in a coherent way. 

 At this point, I sometimes think that I am the leading US expert on antisemitism. I came up with a definition that is clearer and better than any other.  This article I wrote in April holistically explains eliminationist antisemitism of all kinds better than any analysis I've ever seen, by far. 

It is bad enough that major organizations and government-backed committees cannot even figure out what different antisemites have in common to begin with. If you don't understand the problem, you cannot fix it. 

I have a fix. It might take a generation to work but no one else has anything that isn't a Band-Aid. If the newly independent National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism wants to understand the problem, I'm here. 

But any group that is partisan, even with the best of intentions, will continue to be blind, and use antisemitism for their own purposes. 

 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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The philosophy of Islamist antisemitism

Earlier this year I published a series of articles discussing different kinds of eliminationist antisemitism and exploring what they all have in common. My theory is that all eliminationist strands of antisemitism is based on malign philosophies, and the very existence of Jews, or Judaism, or Israel, is considered an existential threat to their philosophies. That is how I came into my project to promote Jewish philosophy as an antidote - to prove that these philosophies are not only wrong but immoral, and also to provide a secular alternative moral philosophy that is superior to the others by any measure.

 I covered Islamic Arab  supersessionism (pretending that all Jewish  prophets and holy places are really Muslim,) Palestinianism (the explicit desire to replace Israel with an Arab state) and Iranian annihilationism (the desire to utterly destroy Israel.) 

Surprisingly, I never tackled Sunni Islamist antisemitism, which is at least as important, and which has become its own philosophy only relatively recently. 

Before the mid-20th century, antisemitism among Arabs was imported. The 1840 Damascus Affair blood libel was eagerly pushed by French Catholic antisemites and was a precursor to other blood libels in the Arab world in later decades. It was profoundly influential in introducing European-style antisemitism to the Middle East.

Arab nationalism that grew in the late 19th century was in no small part a reaction to Zionism. It was followed by Arab socialism, as Marx' theories started to spread, mostly starting with Arab Christians. 

But the first truly home-grown Muslim antisemitism was popularized by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and mostly through one man: Sayyid Qutb.

Qutb created an entirely new history of Islam that is centered around antisemitism and an anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. He dates the beginnings of Islam itself to 622 CE, not the more normally accepted 610 CE, because 622 is when Mohammed started looking at Jews as rivals and no longer potential partners. In Qutb's telling, 622 is when Jews started to wage an existential war against Islam that has never ended and will never end until the Jews themselves are eliminated. In his words, "this is an enduring war that will never end, because the Jews want no more no less than to exterminate the religion of Islam ... Since Islam subdued them (in Medina) they are unforgiving and fight furiously through

conspiracies, intrigues, and also through proxies who act in the darkness against all what Islam incorporates."

This cosmic war according to Qutb, has gone on century after century:

Who tried to undermine the nascent Islamic state in Medina and who incited Quraish in Mecca, as well as other tribes against the foundation of this state? It was a Jew! Who stood behind the fitna-war and the slaying of the third caliph Osman and all the tragedies that followed hereafter? It was a Jew! And who inflamed national divides against the last caliph and who stood behind the turmoil that ended the Islamic order with the abolition of shari'a? It was Ataturk, a Jew! The Jews always stood and continue to stand behind the war waged against Islam. Today, this war persists against the Islamic revival in all places on earth.  

I often see mainstream Arabic media describing the "character" of the Jews, as murderers, cheaters, liars and aggressive. This all comes from Qutb (although some of his antisemitic theories seem to come from the Mufti of Jerusalem.)

The only Western antisemitic ideas that Qutb didn't try to Islamicize were the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he adopted in his theories. But everything else was his own home-grown antisemitic philosophy, which also regards America as a proxy for Jews.

This is the worldview of Al Qaeda, of ISIS, of Hamas. Qutb is considered a seminal thinker for them, who was followed by Sheikh Yussuf Qaradawi. 

Qutb’s innovation was not to borrow European antisemitism whole cloth as the previous versions did, but to rewrite Islam itself as a cosmic struggle with Jews. In doing so, he gave Islamists a philosophy that structurally requires Jewish disappearance. This is precisely what my larger thesis predicts: whenever a malign worldview senses Judaism as an existential threat, antisemitism is not an accident but an organizing principle. Qutb shows how that principle was Islamicized, and why Islamism cannot make peace with Jewish existence.

(Thanks to this great 2010 paper by Bassam Tibi)

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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When Theory Meets Jews: A Stress Test for Modern Ideologies

When Reality Refuses to Cooperate with Theory

Modern ideologies that claim to explain the world often do so through seemingly elegant, simplified and totalizing frameworks. The most visible ideologies reduce the moral and social complexity of the real world into a binary lens of guilt and innocence, dominance and submission, right and wrong, with little room for ambiguity or inconvenient facts.

Marxism categorizes all people into two economic classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. If you are not being exploited, you must be the exploiter. Any middle ground—such as the aspirational or entrepreneurial working class—must be dismissed or renamed to protect the model.

Post-colonialism sees global history through the lens of European (and only European) conquest, dividing peoples into colonizers and the colonized. If a group doesn't clearly fit into either role, the theory invents new terms (like "internal colonialism" or  the modern use of "settler colonialism") to make them fit. Complexity is flattened into narrative clarity.

Critical Race Theory maps society onto racial hierarchies of power, privilege, and oppression. Those with power must be perpetuating structural racism, and those without must be victims of it. If groups of people contradict that model, the theory accuses them of internalized racism or reclassifies them as "white-adjacent."

Identity Politics breaks moral authority into group membership, granting credibility only to those deemed oppressed. Morality flows not from argument or behavior, but from status. Anyone challenging the ideological structure, even from within a marginalized group, is labeled a traitor to their identity.

Liberalism,  in its classical form, frames the world as a tension between individual liberty and government overreach. Everyone is either for freedom or for tyranny. Liberalism supports freedom as a sufficient moral value,  while remaining silent about immoral ideas that can flourish and subvert liberty itself within the system. 

Environmentalism-as-apocalypticism divides the world into saviors of the planet and enemies of nature. Any technological optimism or nuanced cost-benefit thinking is framed as denial or betrayal. Solutions that don’t fit the doomsday narrative are dismissed as tools of the oil lobby or capitalist manipulation.

These frameworks don’t just describe the world—they offer moral clarity, identity, and belonging. They claim to turn chaos into order.

But what happens when reality pushes back? When facts don’t fit the model? The answer, in almost every case, is that the ideology adjusts the facts to preserve the theory. Contradictions are explained away. Data is reclassified. Motives are projected onto dissenters. The result is that these ideologies behave, under pressure, not like philosophy or science – but like conspiracy theories.

Ideology Becomes Conspiracy

A conspiracy theory is not defined merely by its content, but by its structure. What makes a theory conspiratorial is its refusal to admit disproof. Every counterexample becomes a secret confirmation. Every dissent is proof that the dissenter is compromised. Every failed prediction is reframed as deliberate misinformation planted by the enemy.

This is precisely how modern ideological frameworks operate:

Trait	Conspiracy Theory	Modern Ideology (Marxism, Post-colonialism, CRT)
Immunity to Falsification	"That’s what they want you to believe."	"That’s internalized oppression / false consciousness."
Binary Thinking	The righteous vs the secret cabal.	Oppressor vs oppressed.
Dissent as Guilt	Disagreement proves you're in on it.	Disagreement proves you're privileged or complicit.
No Complexity	Every fact must fit the story.	Nuance is a distraction from justice.
Moral Absolutism	The theory is always righteous.	The theory cannot be questioned without moral failure.

These modern ideologies offer not just an analysis of the world, but a moral identity to their followers. They are too brittle to accommodate counterexamples, but they are too ideologically constrained to admit that the real world contradicts their core tenets. Counterexamples collapse their theories, so they must be explained away and belittled.  Correction is not an option. Reality must be reframed or denied to conform to the theory.

Case Studies in Ideological Failure

• Marxism predicted proletarian revolution in advanced capitalist states. Instead, those states democratized and raised living standards. The response? Declare the workers "false conscious" or blame imperial interference. The theory also could not explain the emergence of a growing, politically moderate middle class—so it created the category of the "petit bourgeoisie," a rhetorical wastebin for those who failed to fit neatly into the oppressed-oppressor binary. This allowed Marxists to dismiss the aspirations, agency, or needs of the middle class as either reactionary or irrelevant.

• Post-colonial theory should see Israel as a triumph of indigenous return. But after Israel's triumph in 1967, the theorists were uncomfortable with victory over Arabs who were viewed as "more" indigenous. So the theory rebranded Jews as white settlers and Israel as "settler colonialist" - a category that no one applied to Israel before 1967. Similarly, the countries of South America, which gained independence in the early 19th century, present a challenge to post-colonial categories. Rather than acknowledge the limitations of the framework, the theory pivots to ideas like "internal colonialism," where creole elites are cast as colonizers despite being native-born. Entire histories of local complexity are flattened to fit the model.

• Critical Race Theory cannot explain the success of Jewish or Asian communities, or the antisemitism that emerges from other minorities. So it reclassifies these groups as "white-adjacent" to keep the model intact, even if it requires erasing their distinct histories of persecution.

• Identity Politics proclaims that only the oppressed may speak on justice. But when internal dissent arises from within minority communities, it is dismissed as betrayal, not evidence.

In every case, empirical contradictions are ignored, minimized or reprocessed into ideological fuel. New jargon is invented to plug leaks in the framework, not to update or repair it. 

The Jewish Exception: When Theories Break

Across these modern ideologies, there is one case that poses a unique and persistent problem: the Jews - and especially the Jewish state. Again and again, the existence of Jews defies ideological categorization in these rigid systems. Jews are both historically oppressed and disproportionately successful. They are both indigenous to the Land of Israel and accused of being foreign colonizers of the same land. They have been scapegoated by both the far right and the far left. No binary framework can contain them.

For Marxists, Jews were inconveniently middle-class or mercantile - neither industrial proletariat nor feudal aristocracy. Worse, they were often upwardly mobile, becoming successful through hard work, which Marxism cannot accept as a possibility. Thus the term "petit bourgeoisie" became a pejorative used to sideline and discredit Jewish shopkeepers. 

For post-colonialists, Zionism should have been a triumph: a displaced people returning to their ancestral land to reclaim sovereignty. But the theory could not tolerate a non-European people exercising power, so Jews were recast as white Europeans and Israel as a settler-colonial outpost - regardless of the facts.

For CRT and identity-based ideologies, Jews violate the theories in multiple ways: by succeeding despite persecution, by being targets of hatred from other minorities, and by resisting the white/non-white dichotomy. To preserve the hierarchy, Jews are demoted from oppressed to privileged. Their suffering is downplayed. Their achievements are proof of their being oppressors. Their very visibility becomes a threat - something the ideology must explain away, denounce, or erase

And because the theories cannot adapt, they must scapegoat. Instead of admitting that Jews expose the theory’s weaknesses, the ideologies double down. The result is not just distortion. It is antisemitism. When Jews are reclassified as villains for failing to conform to the narrative, the ancient pattern of blame resurfaces in a modern vocabulary.

This is not a new failure. It is the latest chapter in a very old refusal to let Jews exist outside someone else's system.

What makes this all the more ironic is that these ideologies often present themselves as the cutting edge of modern moral evolution—enlightened, scientific, and intellectually progressive. Yet when challenged, they are more brittle than many of the religious traditions they deride as outdated. These secular ideologies lack any internal mechanism for doubt, contradiction, or change. They are more dogmatic than anything claimed to have been given by God.

Jewish Ethics: A System That Can Learn

In contrast, Jewish ethics is not built to control reality. It is built to wrestle with it.

It supports and encourages arguments and disagreement within its framework. It adapts to new realities, whether they are political, social or technological. It doesn't  pigeonhole people into predefined categories but has the built in concept of repentance and self-improvement. It is not fixated on a single value but has a framework that can balance and prioritize multiple values in conflict. 

This is what moral maturity looks like.

Where ideology rejects contradiction, Judaism turns contradiction into dialogue. Where ideology shames uncertainty, Judaism elevates it into wisdom.

Conclusion: Against the Theology of Theories

Ideologies that cannot learn are not ethics. They are theologies pretending to be science. They demand loyalty, not inquiry. Their rigidity is not strength, but fragility. Like all closed systems, they fear the free movement of truth.

Jewish ethics stands apart not because it is ancient, but because it remains open. It preserves a memory older than modern ideologies and offers a humility deeper than any theoretical model: that humans are flawed, truth is complex, and justice requires listening.

In an age of moral panic and ideological echo chambers, that humility may be the most revolutionary ethic of all.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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The Conspiratorial Mind of Antisemitism

Bret Stephens says, "Antisemitism is not merely a form of hatred. It is a conspiracy theory about how the world works." 

He is not the only one to frame antisemitism this way. Deborah Lipstadt has echoed similar ideas, describing antisemitism as a “conspiracy theory that blames Jews for every problem under the sun.” In her book Antisemitism: Here and Now, she emphasizes that this form of hate is unique in its persistence and in its insistence that Jews are not merely wrong, but secretly powerful and malicious. This framing, she argues, makes antisemitism self-reinforcing and impervious to logic. Historian David Nirenberg has likewise suggested that antisemitism functions as a kind of moral or explanatory engine: when things go wrong, the Jew is cast as the hidden cause.

At first glance, this is an appealing explanation. It seems to unite many divergent forms of antisemitism under a single intellectual umbrella: the belief that Jews operate in secret, behind the scenes, manipulating events for their benefit and others’ ruin. And across the ideological spectrum, this indeed shows up again and again.

The Nazi obsession with blaming Jewish financiers controlling the First World War. Islamist narratives about Jews as breakers of covenants and corrupting the Torah. Progressive suspicions that Jews serve as hidden faces of capitalism, whiteness, or settler colonialism. Far-right theories about Jews bringing in immigrants, controlling Hollywood and the government. 

These conspiracies differ in content, but share one thing: they give the hater a moral story that makes their hatred feel justified. Even Nazi ideology, which felt that subhuman Jews would eventually become extinct under social Darwinism, embraced Elders of Zion conspiracies to explain why Jews survived. 

But are antisemitic philosophies conspiracy theories themselves, or are conspiracy theories an aspect of antisemitic philosophies?

I started this series with an article called A Unified Field Theory of Antisemitism. As I explored and analyzed all the major types of antisemitism, I saw that my initial theory was not quite right. 

I identified several aspects that antisemitic groups have in common. They are all eliminationist, wanting to see Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state disappear. They all have a hate for Jews that is far deeper than the feelings normal people have towards their perceived enemies. They all have extremist and absolutist beliefs.

What dimension does the fact that they all resort to conspiracy theories add to the conversation? 

It helps prove that all of these philosophies hate Jews because they regard Jews as an existential threat - to themselves.

Across cultures and ideologies, Jews have often represented something both enduring and distinct. That distinctiveness, especially when Jews are successful, moral, or intellectually visible, creates a psychological problem for absolutist belief systems.

Christianity promised to replace the Jews. But Jews kept existing.

Islam declared itself the final truth. But Jews wouldn’t submit.

Marxists envisioned class liberation. But Jews didn’t fit in their classes.

Progressives advocate for the oppressed. But the most oppressed people on Earth built a nation out of the ashes.

People avoid normal threats. But they only want to eradicate threats that they believe makes their entire lives meaningless.

For these and other antisemites,  conspiracy theory is not the reason for the hate, but a consequence of it.  It is a coping mechanism -  a psychological defense to explain why the Jew has not disappeared, and why their very presence feels like a threat to their own self-definition. It is a result of cognitive dissonance.

This exposes something deeper: antisemitic ideologies are not defined by conspiracy theory, but by an inability to tolerate the Jew. The conspiracy theory is merely the justification they create to preserve their worldview. the philosophies that end up antisemitic are the ones that cannot tolerate the continued existence of the Jew. And more importantly, they are the ones that require conspiracy thinking to resolve their own internal contradictions and reduce their cognitive dissonance. If Jews should not exist in their philosophies, yet they not only exist but thrive, the Jews must have cheated somehow - which is the justification for their destruction.

Other moral and philosophical systems do not need to explain away Jewish persistence. They do not feel threatened by Jewish moral or national distinctiveness. They can tolerate, or even embrace, Jewish survival, visibility, and sovereignty. For example:

• Utilitarianism seeks outcomes, not targets. It has no built-in reason to resent Jews.

• Kantian ethics values moral autonomy and duty. Jews fit that model.

• Classical liberalism cherishes pluralism. Jews thrive within it.

• Moral relativism, despite its flaws, does not centrally oppose any one tradition.

• Buddhism, Stoicism, and Confucianism show no historical pattern of anti-Jewish sentiment.

None of these frameworks are perfect. Elsewhere we have criticized some of them. But none feel compelled to invent a moral explanation for why the Jew exists. That burden belongs to broken systems.

So while Stephens and Lipstadt are right to identify conspiracy theory as a hallmark of antisemitism, their analysis stops short of the root cause. The conspiracy theory is not the root. It is a tool used by philosophies who consider the Jew’s existence a refutation of their beliefs. 

The Jew is not just a scapegoat in these systems, but intolerance of the Jew is a metric that shows the philosophy is not only dangerous, but failing.

If we are going to fight antisemitism, it is critical that we know exactly what it is and why the practitioners hate Jews so much. Exposing the conspiracy theory alone is not enough, since those theories of evil Jewish power is just a symptom of the problem. 

This also explains the so-called horseshoe theory, why radically opposed ideologies - like Marxism and Islamism, or progressive anti-racism and white nationalism  -  all converge on antisemitic narratives. They share a psychological need to explain why the Jew, who should not exist in their systems, continues to succeed. The conspiracy a necessity to allay their internal contradiction. We must understand the moral discomfort that precedes the hate - the loathing oft Jews is a kind of moral check, a mirror that reflects back the flaws of the system.

That’s why Jewish ethics isn’t just a counter-narrative. It’s a diagnostic tool. It reveals exactly how and where a system can’t handle contradiction, humility, or difference - and how quickly that failure metastasizes into hatred.

This isn’t just a rhetorical point. It’s the key to understanding why antisemitism outlives every ideology it infects. 

The conspiracy theories will never stop as long as people teach and learn philosophies that cannot explain why the Jews are still alive.

 

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Jewish Ethics vs. the New Secular Messianisms

I have argued that Jewish ethics can become the basis for a secular morality. But not being incompatible with secularism is not the same as being attractive to secularists. What could secularists get out of a Jewish ethical system? 

Let's turn the question around. What do they get out of joining extreme Leftist movements?

The extreme Leftist, usually secularist, movements like Animal Liberation Front, Extinction Rebellion and BDS have something in common rarely seen in their Rightist counterparts - a seemingly religious fervor and a quasi spiritual dimensions. They regard themselves as modern doomsdayers, warning the world of catastrophe if we do not repent from our evil ways like climate change. They demand that we "decolonize" our minds and embrace the new edicts as written in their sacred texts - Ibram X. Kendi's How to be an Anti-Racist and the Call to BDS. They chant new rhyming psalms at their demonstrations to the point of self-hypnosis. They anoint new prophets like Great Thunberg. Those who are part of the "oppressor" groups like white men must publicly repent and acknowledge their status, and salvation can only come from allyship with the oppressed.  People who do not follow their dictates - especially believers who turn away - are "canceled," i.e., excommunicated. They actively recruit new followers, especially targeting young people. Finally, they promise a utopian vision of a world that they will perfect with their actions and redeem with their struggles - a pseudo-messianic vision. 

While they claim that religions are one source of oppression, they have created a new set of beliefs that have all the trappings of religion, without God.

Blaise Pascal wrote, "What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? … [T]his infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words, by God himself’ (Pensées, 425).”  Based on the extremist secularist movements actions, it appears that at least for some non-believers, they indeed are looking for a spiritual experience. People who reject religion still crave meaning, justice, community, and moral clarity, and these movements provide a shallow replacement for religion.

As we have seen, antisemitism thrives in groups that view Jews or Jewish beliefs or Israel as a threat to their entire existence. The Jewish ethical system does not accept one-dimensional, simplistic answers to life's questions. It rejects the binaries of oppressor/oppressed, colonizer/colonized, white/people of color, animal lives as sacred or worthless. 

So if these movements succeed because they fill a need, what would it take for Jewish ethics to meet that same need more honestly—and more durably? Can a secular version of Jewish ethics, with few pat answers, offer what people are missing from their lives?

Yes. 

While these movements present themselves as moral revolutions or secular equivalents to spiritualities, they bear far more resemblance to cults than to religions. They imitate religion’s outer forms—ritual, purity codes, sacred texts, prophets, and excommunication—but they lack its inner core: the pursuit of enduring truth through humility, tradition, and moral complexity.

Cults offer brainwashing in place of moral introspection. They satisfy the desire to belong, but only through enforced conformity. They promise redemption, but only through submission. They silence doubt, they punish dissent, and they demand emotional loyalty above all else. This is not spirituality. It is programming.

And once someone is drawn in, it is incredibly difficult to break the spell. Former cult members often describe their experience as a kind of moral gaslighting: they were told they were good only if they chanted the party line. Their doubts were demeaned. Their previous relationships were severed. The world was reduced to a binary of us vs. them, good vs. evil. The moral complexity of real life was replaced by a simple script. And the answers they were promised were all lies, often meant to give more power to their leaders.

Meanwhile, Jewish ethics form the true DNA of causes like human rights. "The Jewish tradition is a tradition of law and justice. The Ten Commandments and the teachings of the prophets are a source of inspiration for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," according to René Cassin, who drafted the Declaration itself.

So the question becomes: how can we prevent people from falling into these kinds of ideological cults? And how can we help those already captured to reorient themselves toward genuine ethical inquiry?

The answer, I would argue, is not just to critique the cults—but to offer something better, earlier, deeper. The antidote to cult thinking is moral maturity and literacy.

We must teach people—early and often—how to navigate ethical tension, how to hold multiple values in tension, how to argue without dehumanizing, how to seek justice without demanding perfection. And we must do this in community, through discussion, with humility rather than performative rituals of moral superiority. That might take the form of paired study groups, discussion circles, online forums, or even digital tools that foster thoughtful disagreement. 

Imagine a secular activist who feels burned out by the moral absolutism of their climate or anti-colonialist group, constantly shamed for not being "pure" enough. They stumble upon a Jewish ethics discussion group, where chesed encourages them to practice kindness without judgment, where machloket lets them debate ideas without fear of cancellation. For the first time, they feel both morally grounded and free. 

The medium can vary. The principle is what matters: we must teach people to think morally, not just claim the mantle of morality.

Jewish ethics offers a model for this. Not because it is the only source of moral truth, but because it is one of the few surviving systems that trains people from youth to think ethically without collapsing into ideology. The chavruta system of studying in pairs, the halachic process, the culture of respectful dissent and precedent - all of these immunize against unthinking cult-like movements. 

This is not just a philosophy—it is a method. And if we can share it widely, honestly, and humbly, we may offer people not only protection from cultic-style ideologies, but a path to reclaim their moral autonomy after having been misled by them.

The secular extremists claim that they are brave, that they are courageous, that they are speaking forbidden truths. Yet when people try to talk to them, as we saw during the anti-Israel university encampments in 2024, most of them duck the questions and refuse to have a discussion. That isn't courage - it is cowardice. 

Moral courage is being able to defend your beliefs in the face of the mob. That takes time and effort, it takes honest debate and discussion. The Jewish ethics system excels at teaching people how to find a moral position, refine it, and defend it against all arguments. 

Becoming a mature, thinking person might not be as fun as shouting slogans and vandalizing buildings. But it is a lot more rewarding.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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The (usually unstated) foundational axioms of Jewish ethics

We have described a three-tier framework for Jewish ethics:

1. The Values Tier (life, dignity, truth, justice, etc.)

2. The Adjudication Tier (weighing and balancing those values in real-world cases)

3. The Meta/Interpreter Tier (ensuring the process is transparent, humble, and open to critique)

There is also a foundational tier for this framework, which  we can call Tier Zero. This tier consists of axioms that the other tiers implicitly depend on.

Before any values can be selected, adjudicated, or interpreted, there must be basic philosophical assumptions in place. These are the bedrock axioms upon which the entire Jewish ethical system rests. No one talks about these axioms too often because they were considered obvious truths. But in today’s intellectual environment, many of these premises are under direct attack. They must be named, clarified  and defended.

These axioms are assumptions about human nature, moral reasoning and reality itself. These are not "values" in the traditional sense. They are metaphysical or epistemological commitments without which values are meaningless.

Truth Exists and Can Be Known: There is an objective reality, and moral and factual truths can be discovered and reasoned about.

This has been challenged by various philosophies over the past two centuries. Postmodernism says truth is relative, dependent on social, linguistic, or cultural context. Relativism, critical theory and other schools also disparage the existence of objective, knowable truth.

Judaism utterly rejects these ideas. Truth isn't relative, facts aren't subjective, different narratives do not have equal value. When one discards truth then one discards the very basis for a universal moral system.

Humans Have Moral Agency: People contain the capacity to choose, to reason, and to be held accountable for their choices. 

Many philosophical schools disagree. Hard determinism, behaviorism and neuroscientific reductionism insist that biology, environmental factors or the unconscious determine how we act. The conclusion is that people cannot be held responsible for their actions.

This is anathema to Jewish thought. While Judaism recognizes that everyone has predispositions and their environments influence them, ultimately humans are able and are expected to transcend their inclinations and try to improve and perfect themselves. Those who paint themselves as eternal victims of circumstance are tragic; the person who rises above is heroic.

Right and Wrong Are Real Categories: There is such a thing as objective morality.

Moral relativism and postmodernism say that right and wrong are dependent on external factors like language and culture; moral naturalism says the concept of morality is an evolutionary artifact; Nietzsche says morality is simply an attempt by the weak to control the strong. 

This is completely foreign to Jewish thinking. The concepts of  justice, truth, and dignity are universal and foundational. A society that rejects morality is itself an evil society. 

Humans Are Capable of Growth: Beyond moral agency, people have the inherent capacity to improve themselves. 

Behaviorism claims all behavior is the result of environmental conditioning and people only change from external factors. The schools that deny moral agency inherently deny moral growth as well.

Judaism says that moral growth is not just possible but expected. The entire concept of teshuva, repentance, is based on the idea that everyone can change. Moral development is a lifelong pursuit. The idea of the "pintele Yid" that is within each Jew, even those who have done immoral acts, is the spark of the Divine that wants to do the right thing. Within the Jewish religion, everyone has a sacred soul; but even without the religious aspect, Judaism says that everyone can change. 

Moral Disagreement Has Value: Arguments and differences of opinion are essential and eternal tools to reach objective truth.

This is a unique aspect of Jewish philosophy. While Greek philosophers valued debate to arrive at moral truths, once they decided they found it they rejected further discussion. Christian theology strived to arrive at consensus and other opinions were often framed as heresy. Other more modern philosophies reject the entire concept of truth.

Judaism sees argument as the path to truth - but acknowledges that truth is often complex, layered, and elusive. Sometimes the Talmud concludes with teiku - leaving the question unresolved until Messianic times. This is why all sides of the arguments are preserved - the assumption is that while there is objective truth, it is not always easy to determine, and it may have multiple aspects. Moreover, the arguments themselves help people grow. The moral decisions they make are the result not only of dictates from above but their own contributions to the discussion and  humility to engage with others in pursuit of truth.

Human Dignity Is Inherent and Universal: Every human being has inherent worth that does not depend on merit, productivity, or identity. This is foundational to Jewish ethics and grounded in the idea that all people are created b’tzelem Elokim—in the image of God.

Some ethical and political systems reject this. Utilitarianism ranks people by usefulness; Nietzschean ethics mocks universal dignity as weakness; totalitarian regimes define worth by political utility or race; and modern reductionist science sometimes reduces people to neurological machinery. Even well-intentioned identity politics can fall into this trap by awarding dignity based on category rather than common humanity.

Judaism resists all of these. Human dignity, like life itself, is not earned. It is simply and profoundly there. Any moral system that fails to recognize this invites cruelty.

This is beyond "tzelem Elokim" in the values tier, which calls on everyone to treat everyone else with dignity. This is a underlying concept that the value builds upon. 

For most of human history, these axioms were implicit. But in today’s intellectual landscape, postmodernism challenges the existence of truth. Deterministic science challenges free will. Moral relativism challenges the existence of good and evil. Behavioral economics and neuroscience reduce humans to predictable inputs and outputs.

These are not mere academic fads; they have filtered into popular culture, university curricula, public policy, and even technology design. Any ethical system must now defend its very right to exist.

The Jewish ethical system, by contrast, affirms these axioms explicitly through its structure, laws, literature, and traditions. And by naming these Tier Zero commitments, we show that:

• The system is honest about its philosophical assumptions.

• These assumptions are themselves open to critique, reflection, and reasoned defense.

• The structure is robust precisely because it acknowledges the need for a moral metaphysics.

Without Tier Zero, the other layers collapse. With it, they form the most resilient, dynamic, and coherent moral system ever developed.

Tier Zero is what makes the other tiers possible. It is not itself an ethical method but the precondition for all ethical methods. Jewish ethics begins by assuming what many modern systems forget: that moral reasoning is real, humans are responsible, and truth matters.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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