Eighty years. Can you believe it? Eighty whole years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1945 put a conclusive end to Antisemitism, the world collectively exhaled, and Jewish people everywhere were finally free to just be people. No more looking over our shoulders. No more community security guards at synagogues. No more explaining to airline seatmates why, actually, we don’t control anything. Things are going so well, in fact, that on his first day in office New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani revoked the city’s official definition of Antisemitism entirely, because when Antisemitic incidents account for 57% of all hate crimes in the largest Jewish city outside of Israel, clearly the most urgent priority is making sure we don’t define the problem too broadly. What a time to be alive and Jewish and completely unbothered.
So on this occasion, I want to take a moment to thank all the people who have been kind enough to help us understand our own history, our own identity, and our own oppression. We couldn’t have done it without you.
A special thank you to the Anti-Zionists who have patiently explained that their movement has nothing to do with Jews. We understand now. You simply want to dismantle the one Jewish-majority state on earth, the one that exists specifically because every other option was tried and failed, and your interest in doing so is entirely about human rights and has no relationship whatsoever to the fact that you describe its supporters as controlling media, governments, and finance. We hear you. Criticism of Israel is not Antisemitism, and we agree. It’s also true that screaming “globalize the intifada” at Jewish college students during Shabbat dinner, or tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children, or physically blocking Jewish students from entering university buildings is not criticism of Israel. But details are for people without a movement to run.
A warm thank you to the historians who have generously informed us that most Ashkenazi Jews are not actually descended from the ancient Israelites but are in fact the descendants of Khazar converts. This is enormously helpful because it means we don’t need to take seriously any Jewish claim to historical connection to the Land of Israel, religious tradition, or cultural continuity. It also helpfully implies that the real Jews are somewhere else, and that the current ones are frauds. Arthur Koestler popularized this idea in The Thirteenth Tribe in 1976, a book the New York Times later described as “widely discredited,” but never mind that. Never mind, either, that multiple genetic studies have found that Ashkenazi Jews cluster far more closely with other Jewish populations and with populations from the ancient Near East than with any Turkic group, that a 2010 study found Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews sharing genetic signatures consistent with common origins in the Middle East roughly 2,500 years ago, or that a 2024 Harvard Medical School study of ancient DNA from medieval Ashkenazi Jews confirmed Middle Eastern ancestry alongside their European presence. You found a compelling thesis and the fact that virtually every geneticist who has examined it in the last twenty years has rejected it should not slow you down. We’re touched by the effort.
Profound gratitude also to those who have pointed out that we probably brought the last two thousand years on ourselves. You may have seen this argument in its popular online form: Jews have been expelled from 109 countries, and if the same thing keeps happening everywhere, perhaps we should consider whether the common denominator is the Jews. Never mind that this figure originated on a Holocaust-denial website in Australia, inflates the real number by counting individual cities and regions as separate countries, and has been comprehensively rejected by actual historians. The logic is what matters. If 109 landlords evict the same tenant, and some of those evictions involved mass graves and inquisitions and the burning of children, clearly the tenant is the problem. We should reflect on that. We have been reflecting on it, in fact, across many centuries, and we remain open to suggestions about what exactly we could have done differently in medieval England or Tsarist Russia or Nazi Germany to make the locals more comfortable. We are taking notes.
And thank you, most tenderly of all, to the theologians who have clarified that we are not merely impostors but specifically Satanic ones. This insight, drawn from a particular reading of Revelation 2:9, holds that those who “say they are Jews and are not” constitute a Synagogue of Satan, a phrase that has found enthusiastic audiences across Christian Identity movements, certain Black Hebrew Israelite sects, corners of the Nation of Islam, QAnon, and various strains of political Islam, who have all independently arrived at the conclusion that the Jews in Israel are not the real Jews but rather a demonic conspiracy masquerading as God’s chosen people. What is remarkable is that this crowd and the Khazar theorists have never read the same books, belong to entirely different ideological traditions, and would despise each other in any other context, yet have converged on the same two-part argument: you are not real Jews, and you are evil. The Hamas founding charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by name, which means the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust was carried out by people working from the same conspiratorial framework the Khazar theorists, the Christian Identity movement, and QAnon all share. But the conclusion they draw, regarding what should happen to the fake Satanic Jews currently living between the river and the sea, is left as an exercise for the reader.
A particular shoutout to the organizations and individuals who serve as the indispensable proof that Jewish opposition to Jewish interests exists and therefore those interests are illegitimate. Jewish Voice for Peace, whose membership includes a great many non-Jewish people of peace, including, as documented, a Palestinian-American co-founder of one chapter and a Lutheran minister from three generations of Lutheran ministers who counts himself a proud member, has been enormously useful in lending “as-a-Jew” cover to campaigns that most Jews find straightforwardly hostile. JVP also actively campaigned for and endorsed Mamdani, which does bring this introduction full circle in a way we can only admire. Neturei Karta, the tiny ultra-Orthodox sect whose members traveled to Tehran to attend a Holocaust denial conference alongside David Duke, sat in the front row, and were photographed kissing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the cheek, has been equally valuable in demonstrating that some Jews agree that Zionism is the problem. When your argument requires you to find the twelve people in a community of sixteen million who agree with you and present them as representative of the whole, you have found a very solid argument.
We would also like to thank our roster of credentialed Jewish intellectuals who have made themselves available for this purpose. Norman Finkelstein, the son of two Auschwitz and Majdanek survivors, built a career arguing that Jewish organizations exploit Holocaust memory for political ends, which is a serious claim worth engaging with, and then celebrated the October 7th massacre by analogy to a slave rebellion, which it is not. Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian at the University of Exeter whose fellow New Historian Benny Morris described as “at best, one of the world’s sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest,” is nonetheless cited as proof that any scholar who agrees with you must be right. Avi Shlaim, the Iraqi-born Oxford professor whose family was expelled from Baghdad, lost everything, and was resettled in Israel, a personal history that would seem to complicate rather than support simple anti-Zionist narratives, has nonetheless become a reliable citation for those who need an Israeli-born name attached to the word “genocide.” Gabor Maté, the Hungarian-Canadian physician and Holocaust survivor who has done genuinely important work on trauma and addiction, has in his later years found a second career on The Grayzone explaining that Zionism is the real problem, a website also home to his son Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal, who went to Hebrew school, did Birthright, and arrived at the conclusion that Israel is a Nazi-like death cult, which is the kind of nuance you develop when you stop talking to anyone who disagrees with you. We are grateful these fig leaves exist, because without them you would have to make the case on its own merits.
Deepest appreciation to the people who have taken time out of genuinely busy lives to lecture Jews about what Antisemitism really is. You’ve explained that what we experience as hostility is actually justified anger. You’ve explained that the Holocaust, while bad, was a long time ago, may have been justified, and perhaps we should move on. You’ve explained that if Jews simply behaved differently, stopped supporting Israel, stopped being so visible about our Jewishness, stopped dominating Hollywood, the banks, the media, the Federal Reserve, both major political parties, the UN, the weather, the good parking spaces, the dating apps, and every other thing that has ever gone wrong in anyone’s life up to and including the Lego piece they stepped on this morning (all of which we apparently still do), and generally made ourselves less of a presence, the whole problem would go away.
And to the Christians, the atheists, and the Muslims who have taken time to explain what Judaism is really about, what it means, what it requires of us politically, and why the part where we get to survive is actually the part that needs to be reconsidered: thank you too. It is very funny to receive this guidance. Or possibly very offensive. We have not decided. What we know is that we have been around for three thousand years across every conceivable political and theological climate, and the instruction that we should trust outside observers to define our identity, our history, and our obligations more accurately than we can ourselves is one we continue to receive with great patience and considerable exhaustion.
I grew up knowing Jewish history the way most Jewish kids do, which is to say I learned it at a kitchen table where the adults occasionally went quiet in the middle of a sentence. I have relatives who came to Israel because there was nowhere else to go. I have been called things in eight languages on three continents. I sat through the kind of Passover seders where “in every generation they rise up against us” did not sound like liturgy. It sounded like the news.
So I hope you’ll forgive me for not finding it particularly illuminating when someone who has never once felt the need to hide what they are explains to me that my perception of Antisemitism is clouded by trauma, tribalism, or insufficient political sophistication. What I find remarkable is how the arguments keep changing while the conclusion stays the same. Sometimes we are too powerful. Sometimes we are not real. Sometimes we are Satan’s congregation. Sometimes we are simply bad tenants who have been asked to leave everywhere and should take the hint. The details differ across centuries and continents and ideological traditions, but the destination is always identical, and it is always us standing at it.
These are not abstractions. Eleven people were killed at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018, the deadliest Antisemitic attack in American history. Sarah Halimi was thrown from her Paris apartment window in April 2017 by a neighbor shouting religious invective while she screamed for help; a French court ruled in 2021 that her killer could not be tried because he was high on cannabis, a decision that prompted protests across France and around the world. Two worshippers were murdered at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester on Yom Kippur 2025 by an attacker who drove into the gates and stabbed congregants as they emerged from services, wearing a fake suicide vest. And on the first night of Hanukkah 2025, fifteen people were shot dead at a public celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney, including a ten-year-old girl, in an IS-inspired attack the Australian Prime Minister immediately called an act of Antisemitic terrorism. These are four incidents from a list that runs to thousands. The ADL recorded 9,354 Antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2024 alone, more than twenty-five a day, every single day. The UK recorded 3,700 in 2025. But we are sure it is all about to wind down any moment now.
Eighty years since it ended. Not a single real, legitimate, actually-Jew-hating incident since. And yet somehow we’re still having this conversation.
Go figure.
