To Speak of Antisemitism Without Erasing Others

There is a shadow that moves before the facts, and we are told to name it, not see it. We are told to denounce antisemitism and we must. But we are also told to look away when that word is misused, repurposed like a weapon forged from grief, twisted into a blade to silence dissent, to patrol thought, to colonize the imagination.

Antisemitism is ancient. It is real. It howled through the pogroms of Europe, marched through the gates of Auschwitz, and settled in the marrow of Jewish memory like a splinter of God’s own broken heart. It is a hatred that has endured over centuries, refined through ritual slander, through ghettos, expulsions, inquisitions, gas chambers. And even now, in the antiseptic light of this century, it does not rest. Synagogues are defaced. Men are shot while wrapped in prayer shawls. Women walking home from shul are harassed in Brooklyn and Berlin. The hatred persists, protean and uninvited.

So let me be clear. To be antisemitic is to be inhuman. It is to be allied with the machinery of historical horror. It is to see your neighbor as subhuman. It is to believe that the Jewish people re a monolith to be feared or hated. No, I want no part of that.

But.

When I say “but,” it is not to erase the sentence that came before. It is to open a door in the same house. Because a lie can sit beside a truth and smile like a sibling. Because the same world that weeps for Jewish victims can also fund the drones that drop fire on Gaza. Because power and persecution can change seats at the table, and we must be able to speak when they do.

To criticize the state of Israel is not to hate Jews. To grieve the leveling of homes in Rafah, to mourn a child whose name we will never pronounce correctly, to protest an apartheid wall that slices villages in half; these are not acts of antisemitism. They are acts of conscience. They are acts of memory.

The Nakba happened. It is still happening. Entire families made into ghosts beneath olive trees. And yet we are told that to name this is to endanger Jewish lives. But what is more dangerous: to speak the truth, or to silence it? What sort of safety is built on the suppression of other people’s pain?

I understand trauma. I do. It lingers like smoke after fire. And I understand the need for a homeland, for sanctuary. But when sanctuary becomes supremacy, when the refugee becomes the occupier, when the memory of suffering is used to sanctify the suffering of others, then we must speak.

And yes, I know how fragile the line is; how easily criticism becomes caricature, how quickly protest becomes prejudice. There are those who masquerade their hatred of Jews as political activism, who wrap swastikas in keffiyehs, who deny the Holocaust with a smirk. They are not my comrades. They are not allies of justice. They are desecrators, both of Jewish grief and Palestinian hope.

But there must be room for grief to be complicated, for solidarity to speak more than one language, for history to be told with more than one set of bones. We cannot afford to outsource our moral clarity to those who equate dissent with bigotry, or who think that silence is the only way to honor the dead.

To be truly against antisemitism is to stand against all hatred, even the kind practiced in the name of security. It is to say: never again: for anyone. Not in Warsaw. Not in Gaza. Not in Hebron. Not in Brooklyn.

It is to understand that justice cannot be selective. That liberation is not a zero-sum game. That empathy, like oxygen, becomes toxic only when hoarded.

We must be able to walk and chew history at the same time. We must be able to cry for both a Holocaust survivor and a child in Khan Younis. We must reject the false binary that demands we choose between compassion and critique.

This is not an easy position to hold. But then, truth is rarely easy. It is inconvenient. It is untidy. It comes in fragments, not flags.

And so, I write this with my hands open, not clenched. I write this in the hope that we can grieve together, rage together, build together. Not in spite of each other’s stories, but because of them.

What is antisemitism?

It is a hatred that cannot be cured by another injustice. It is a wound that teaches us not to wound. It is a past that must not dictate whose future is allowed to exist.

Let us be brave enough to name hate where it lives, and tender enough to know that sometimes, love means saying hard things.