Antisemitism Operates as a Political Strategy | Ruth Wisse

Why Antisemitism Works: Politics of the Pointing Finger

To understand why Antisemitism works, we have to stop treating it as merely a prejudice, however ugly or dangerous a prejudice may be. Modern Antisemitism is something more organized than that. It is a political strategy.

• It gathers grievances.
• It supplies blame.
• It builds coalitions among groups that otherwise have little in common.
• Most importantly, it diverts public attention from the ambitions and failures of the people who use it.

Antisemitism is the organization of politics against the Jews.

That is why Antisemitism works so effectively across political systems, countries, and ideologies. It can appear on the far left, in the populist right, in Islamist movements, and in supposedly respectable institutions. The accusations change. The political use stays remarkably consistent.

The First Question: Why the Jews?

For many Jews, the Passover Haggadah makes the question unavoidable. It tells us that in every generation, enemies rise up to destroy us. For those who escaped Hitler, Stalin, and the postwar assault on the newly founded State of Israel, those words were not abstract.

Yet it is important not to make the mistake of believing that every person, every society, or the whole world hates the Jews. That simply has not been true. Jews in the United States and Canada, especially after World War II, lived in countries whose laws protected them and whose democratic institutions gave them real opportunities.

There was prejudice. There was discrimination. But prejudice alone cannot explain why Antisemitism becomes a central political force in some places and not in others.

The real question is not whether prejudice exists. It is why some people organize their politics around hostility to Jews.

That is the question that explains why Antisemitism works. Democracies can have minority tensions and social failures without turning Jews into the central explanation for everything wrong. Other political movements do exactly that because they find it useful.

Modern Antisemitism Was Built for Mass Politics

Modern political Antisemitism emerged in Germany in 1879 with Wilhelm Marr and his Antisemitenliga, or Antisemitic League. Marr explicitly distinguished his program from older Christian anti-Judaism. He did not frame the Jews as a religious problem. He framed them as a political threat.

Germany was becoming more liberal and more democratic. Political leaders increasingly had to persuade large publics. They needed a message that could turn frustration into a movement.

Marr supplied one. If a worker was unemployed, the Jews had supposedly taken the job. If the city seemed unfamiliar, Jews were supposedly taking it over. If German culture appeared threatened, Jews were blamed for corrupting German music, commerce, politics, and public life.

The claims were false. But their usefulness was real.

Every society has problems. The politics of the pointing finger says, “Here is the people responsible.”

That is why Antisemitism works. It turns complicated economic, cultural, and political problems into a simple story. It offers a visible target. Jews are few enough not to be a military threat but prominent enough in the public imagination to be magnified far beyond their actual numbers.

It is a ready-made answer for anyone who wants to organize resentment.

Grievance, Blame & Deflection

The political machinery of Antisemitism has several moving parts. Each one makes the strategy more powerful.

• Grievance: People are told they have been wronged.
• Blame: Jews are named as the cause of the wrong.
• Deflection: Leaders avoid responsibility for the real problem.
• Mobilization: Angry groups are brought together through a common enemy.

Think of a magician pointing dramatically in one direction. The audience follows the finger. Meanwhile, it misses what the other hand is doing.

When the finger points at Jews, it often conceals the speaker’s own will to power.

A government that cannot solve unemployment can blame Jews. A movement that cannot offer a workable economic program can blame Jews. A politician who wants influence can manufacture a crisis around Jews and present himself as the necessary defender of the public.

This is also why negative campaigns are so common in ordinary elections. Candidates love to promise to run uplifting campaigns, but political advertising is usually negative because fear and anger mobilize people.

Antisemitism is perhaps the most durable negative campaign ever devised.

• Socialism promises a better society.
• Communism promises a classless society.
• Democracy promises equal rights and political representation.
• Antisemitism promises no positive future at all. It simply says, “Identify the enemy, unite against the enemy, and everything will improve.”

That promise is false. But it can be politically electrifying.

Antisemitism as a Coalition Builder

One of the clearest answers to why Antisemitism works is that it creates coalitions. Groups with conflicting interests can still agree on one thing: blame the Jews.

The Arab League offers a powerful example. In 1945, the Arab states had immense resources and opportunities. The European empires were exhausted after World War II. The region had land, oil, people, and a historic chance to develop on its own terms.

• But pan-Arabism lacked a durable source of unity. The Arab world included rival states, religious divisions, ideological conflicts, and rising threats from Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
• Hostility to the Jewish state became the great unifier. The Arab League organized an economic boycott of Israel from the beginning. The destruction and isolation of Israel became a common cause that could unite people divided by nearly everything else.

Anti-Israel politics became the accordion that could pull the region apart, then bring it together again.

This does not mean every Arab, Muslim, or citizen of an Arab state is Antisemitic. It means that political leaders discovered the strategic value of anti-Jewish organization. They could redirect dissatisfaction with their own governments toward Israel.

Iran uses the same logic. A population frustrated by repression, corruption, or economic failure can be told that its real enemy is Israel and the Jews. The tactic is useful in the short term because it protects those in power.

But it is ruinous in the long term. A country that misidentifies its problems cannot solve them.

Never Follow the Pointing Finger

Here is the trap. Someone points at Israel and asks about a particular Israeli policy, leader, military operation, or border. Jews and Israelis often feel compelled to answer immediately.

Of course, Israel, like every democracy, has arguments, political disagreements, and imperfect leaders. But the argument must begin by recognizing the political function of the accusation.

Do not assume the charge is the real issue simply because someone has made it loudly.

• When international institutions obsessively condemn Israel while ignoring far worse atrocities elsewhere, the issue is not a balanced concern for human rights.
• When political movements make hostility toward Israel the test of progressive membership, the issue is not a matter of detailed policy disagreement.

The charge is often the pointing finger. The real question is, why are you pointing there?

This matters because accommodation can become a fantasy of control. If Jews believe hostility will end if Israel just withdraws from one area, changes one government, accepts one demand, or apologizes more persuasively, they may feel they can solve the problem.

But Antisemitism is not solved by helping the Antisemite redefine the Jews as guilty.

The Oslo process showed the terrible danger of that hope. Israel tried to make peace by empowering Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, hoping they would restrain terror and provide security. Instead, the Second Intifada brought a mass campaign of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.

No country can arm an enemy and expect that enemy to create its security.

• The desire for peace is understandable.
• The belief that anti-Jewish politics will be satisfied by concessions is not.

Why Jewish Coexistence Can Become a Vulnerability

Judaism is built for coexistence. The Jewish people accepted a demanding covenant at Sinai, then lived by it among other nations. Jews were not meant to remain alone on a mountain. They were meant to maintain a distinct moral and national life while living in the world.

That is an extraordinary achievement. It also creates a political vulnerability.

Jews need coexistence. A small people dispersed among larger nations has every incentive to be useful, peaceful, self-critical, and constructive. Jews have poured energy into medicine, commerce, scholarship, art, law, and public service not because they are perfect, but because usefulness has been a condition of survival.

Jews have every incentive to seek acceptance, including from those least willing to offer it.

That desire can become dangerous when it discourages necessary self-defense.

• Jews do not generally seek counteraggression.
• They often hold themselves accountable before anyone else asks them to.
• Those are admirable moral instincts. Yet enemies can exploit them.

That is another reason why Antisemitism works. It takes advantage of a people predisposed to ask whether the accusation might somehow be true, even when the accusation is wildly detached from reality.

Israel’s Resurrection Is the Story We Must Tell

The creation of Israel in 1948 was one of the most hopeful events in modern civilization.

• Europe had destroyed itself in war.
• Germany, long seen as a center of philosophy, music, literature, and learning, had plunged into barbarism.
• Stalinism had corrupted the promise of communism with terror and mass murder.

Then, three years after the destruction of European Jewry, the Jewish people restored sovereignty in their ancestral homeland after roughly two thousand years of foreign rule.

This can be explained through the history of Zionism, Jewish organizing, sacrifice, and political action. Yet nothing comparable exists in the history of nations.

From the ashes of civilization’s collapse came the resurrection of Israel.

Survivors of ghettos, slave labor camps, and displaced persons camps came to build homes, farms, institutions, schools, and an army. They came because many countries would not take them. And they built a state.

This is not a story of guilt. It is a story of courage, recovery, and national life. It is a story with something to teach the world about what a people can do after a catastrophe.

Yet anti-Zionist politics pressures Jews to treat that achievement as a source of embarrassment. It teaches them to internalize the accusation that Jewish sovereignty itself is a moral offense.

That is a profound distortion. Israel is not the problem that explains the failures of the Middle East, the West, or anyone else. It is a living answer to despair.

Why Antisemitism Works on the Progressive Left

On parts of the progressive left, hostility to Israel can feel almost cost-free.

• It wins headlines.
• It creates alliances.
• It allows politicians to perform moral outrage without fixing a single local problem.

A city may face failing schools, unaffordable housing, budget deficits, crime, or overwhelmed public services. Solving those problems requires difficult choices, money, competence, and responsibility. Attacking Israel requires none of those things.

It can also bind together a coalition of grievance movements. On campuses, decades of activism around anti-war politics, anti-capitalism, radical feminism, anti-colonialism, and other causes created a culture organized around grievance.

Then the Palestinian cause presented itself as the leading grievance. After October 7, dozens of campus groups could immediately unite around blaming Israel for the war launched against it.

When every grievance movement needs a common banner, anti-Zionism can provide one.

This does not make every concern about Palestinians illegitimate. Human beings deserve concern wherever they suffer. But it does mean we should notice when Israel becomes the one issue that defines moral belonging, while mass slaughter, repression, and tyranny elsewhere barely register.

That double standard is not humanitarianism. It is a political organization against the Jews.

Anti-Zionism Is a More Dangerous Form of Anti-Jewish Politics

Anti-Zionism inherits older anti-Jewish ideas and adds new power to them.

• It draws from Christian anti-Judaism, Muslim anti-Judaism, racial Antisemitism, revolutionary politics, and anti-Western ideology.
• The image of the Jew grows larger with every layer.

And it now targets not only individual Jews but the Jewish collective, Jewish sovereignty, and the state that protects Jewish life.

October 7 exposed something especially grim. The Nazis tried to hide the industrialized murder of Jews because they understood that Western civilization would be horrified if it saw the full truth.

Hamas did the opposite. The terrorists documented and publicized their atrocities.

• The barbarity was part of the message.
• It was intended as propaganda, intimidation, humiliation, and recruitment.

The point was not merely to murder Jews. It was to celebrate the destruction of civilized restraints.

That is why anti-Zionism can become a war not only against Israel but also against the moral foundations of Western civilization. It attacks the idea that a people has the right to national self-determination, that civilians should not be targeted, and that barbarity should be condemned rather than excused.

When public figures promise to humiliate Israeli leaders or obsessively threaten actions they have no legal authority to carry out, they are often signaling something deeper than a policy preference. They are making Jews into a permissible public target.

American Freedom & Jewish Freedom Are Inseparable

American Jews cannot be understood apart from America itself. Jewish confidence depends partly on national confidence, because Jews flourish when a country believes in its own principles.

The United States is one of the most extraordinary political achievements in history. Its Constitution, Bill of Rights, democratic institutions, and broad promise of equal citizenship made large-scale democracy possible in ways the world had not seen before.

But a country has to teach its story. Its citizens are not born knowing why their institutions matter.

For generations, American schools, universities, and cultural institutions have increasingly stopped teaching national confidence.

• They began to apologize for America rather than explain its achievements and obligations.
• They taught suspicion of national identity, suspicion of civic loyalty, and suspicion of the very idea that a free society is worth defending.

What a society teaches its children becomes the future of that society.

Israelis understand this instinctively because physical danger makes national identity impossible to ignore. Military service, shared responsibility, and the reality of enemies who openly seek destruction force people to ask what they are protecting.

Americans have not faced that same pressure for generations. They can drift into believing that peace requires no defense, freedom requires no loyalty, and national survival requires no education.

But Jewish freedom is a test of American freedom. If Jews cannot attend synagogue safely, wear a kippah or Magen David openly, or live as Jews without intimidation, America is no longer keeping its promise.

This is why Antisemitism works as an attack on America itself. It is not a narrow Jewish issue. It is an assault on equal citizenship, religious liberty, pluralism, and the confidence of a free people.

Education, Culture & Confidence

The answer begins with teaching. Jewish identity cannot be built from slogans. Young Jews need to know their history, literature, traditions, political circumstances, and the story of Israel.

They need to understand Zionism not as an inherited talking point, but as the movement through which a dispersed people returned to national life. They need enough confidence in their own story that no ideological whirlwind can talk them out of who they are.

And education cannot stop with historical facts. A healthy people needs culture. It needs novels, films, music, journalism, art, humor, argument, and stories that express its own moral imagination.

• American Jewish culture needs to become thicker, bolder, and more self-aware.
• Israeli artists, writers, and journalists also have a special responsibility.
• The world is hungry for the real story of Israel, not a story filtered through the anxieties or guilt of outsiders.

Israel has one of the greatest stories ever told. It should tell that story with confidence.

This does not mean inventing perfection. It means telling the truth about a creative, democratic, embattled society that has built a vibrant country under extraordinary pressure.

It means focusing not only on suffering but also on energy, achievement, moral seriousness, and the daily work of sustaining a free society.

The Work of Refusing the Lie

The future is not guaranteed. The war of ideas is real, and it must be fought as seriously as any political or military struggle.

But there are reasons for confidence. The arguments for Jewish freedom, Israeli sovereignty, American constitutional democracy, and Western civilization are stronger than the arguments against them.

Understanding why Antisemitism works helps strip away its illusion. It reveals that the obsessive accusation is not evidence of Jewish guilt. It is evidence of someone else’s political need.

So when the finger points at the Jews, do not be hypnotized by the gesture. Ask what problem is being concealed. Ask who benefits from the blame. Ask what coalition is being built. Ask what ambition is hiding behind the accusation.

The Jews are not the explanation for another society’s failures. They are not the problem to be solved.

• Jewish self-confidence is not arrogance. It is clarity.
• American self-confidence is not chauvinism.
• It is gratitude for a precious inheritance.
• And Israel’s confidence is not a denial of difficulty.
• It is the determination to live, build, defend itself, and contribute to the world.

That is the answer to why Antisemitism works: recognize its political purpose, refuse its false frame, teach the next generation, and tell the story of a people that has never surrendered its right to exist.