What Antisemitism Is, What It Isn’t, and Why It Matters: Part 1

If you took Donald Trump at his word, you would think the MAGA movement is the biggest defender of Jewish people since Moses. Time and again, the Right positions itself as a stalwart crusader against antisemitism—which it identifies almost exclusively with the Left—and claims that its attacks on universities, detention of students, and more are necessary to ensure Jewish safety.

Of course, we don’t take Donald Trump at his word. Whether it’s used by MAGA or by centrists and liberals, the Left has long seen this strategy for what it is—a cynical smokescreen to deflect criticism of Israel’s heinous injustices against Palestinians and to smooth the way for authoritarianism. In fact, Trump’s neo-fascist movement is the greatest purveyor of antisemitism in America—an inconvenient truth that their deflection tactics are designed to obscure. 

But while we on the Left are clear about what antisemitism isn’t, we often lack a textured analysis of what it is. Antisemitism is often thought of as some ancient, unreasoning hatred of Jews, disconnected from other forms of oppression. But in fact it has always been deeply interwoven with other types of social domination. It is both a form of bigotry and scapegoating against Jews, and a conspiracy theory that today is stitched into the fabric of white Christian nationalism and its authoritarian culture. 

In this moment, antisemitism largely doesn’t manifest in the kind of structural disparities in income, housing, incarceration and the like that characterize systemic racism. But these conspiracy theories remain structural in a different way. They are built into the layer of social storytelling, the ideological fabric that holds public understanding in a country shaped by centuries of hegemonic Christian attitudes. In times of crisis like our own, authoritarian leaders draw on antisemitism as a distinct and powerful narrative tool to consolidate their base, name enemies, and advance their agenda.

We must understand and combat antisemitism so that we can protect our Jewish comrades. But ending antisemitism is also crucial to getting everyone free. Antisemitism is a crucial weapon in the Right’s assault on justice movements. It undermines and divides our base, obscures the nature of racial capitalism and helps consolidate authoritarian power. By getting a grasp on antisemitism we can learn to effectively defang the Right’s disinformation campaigns, claw back the narrative and go on the offense against the foes of multiracial democracy.  

‘The socialism of fools’

On November 4, 2016, I stood in my father’s living room as Donald Trump’s final presidential campaign ad came on the television screen. It was the weekend before the election, and this was arguably Trump’s most important pitch to voters. I paused mid-sentence, and a chill went down my spine as I realized Trump’s closing argument was a masterclass in 21st-century antisemitic propaganda. 

The ad, titled “Donald Trump’s Argument for America,” promised a populist crusade against the “failed and corrupt political establishment,” “the levers of power in Washington” and the “global special interests” who “don’t have your good in mind.” Trump’s voiceover slammed “the group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration, and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry,” the “global power structure” that has “robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.” 

Who is this “global power structure,” the “group responsible” for American immiseration? The ad flashed pictures of Jewish figures—liberal philanthropist George Soros, a familiar MAGA bogeyman; Janet Yellen, then-chair of the Federal Reserve; and Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO—alongside the Clintons and other powerful non-Jewish elites. Grainy images of the Federal Reserve, the G20 Summit, piles of money, dark rooms with shadowy men in suits evoked an all-powerful cabal, pulling the strings behind the scenes. 

The ad claimed Trump would defend everyday Americans from this rapacious elite, serving up faces of white, Black, and Latinx men and women in their homes and on the job. But when the frame moved to Trump rallies, the crowd was unsurprisingly lily-white. “I’m doing this for the people and the movement,” Trump thundered to his supporters. “We will take back this country for you and we will make America great again.”

The battle line it drew was clear— “we, the people, real Americans” were getting screwed over by a rootless, parasitic, global elite. Trump’s closing argument offered MAGA as a beacon of hope, collective empowerment, and resistance against the cabal. And the cabal was given an unmistakably Jewish face.

But if you didn’t know better, the ad may have sounded like a Bernie rally. Its heated polemic against the Federal Reserve could have been delivered at an Occupy encampment. It blended critiques of neoliberal exploitation, unjust foreign policy, and undemocratic governance with xenophobia and nationalism. In a classic right-wing populist sleight of hand, it tapped into widespread grievances against one part of the ruling class only to rally the people behind another part—in this case, Trump himself.

Antisemitism is a crucial narrative hook in this swindle, because it offers an easy definition of the ruling class—a demonic Jewish cabal at the hidden heights of absolute power. Forget a systemic analysis of racial capitalism or a concrete plan to transform society, it says—just trust Trump to wage holy warfare against George Soros and the globalist, Cultural Marxist cabal. In our age, this kind of antisemitism doesn’t have to openly crusade against Jews, though it increasingly does so. It often works best if it is subtle, with an air of plausible deniability or even delivered in ignorance.

Leftist theorists have called antisemitism the “socialism of fools” or a “foreshortened anticapitalism” because it offers a fuzzy, half-baked power analysis, a cartoonish caricature of the root causes of oppression. This can be confusing because we’re used to combating oppressive, demonizing narratives that tell a story of inferiority. Racism, xenophobia, and misogyny often make their targets out to be less capable, intelligent, or moral. 

Antisemitism, by contrast, casts Jews as shadowy overlords. But this “punching up” isn’t totally unique to antisemitism. For example, anti-Muslim bigotry also casts its targets as a cunning, covert, and sinister civilizational threat. Chauvinism after all is a convenient mask for fragility, and those that cling tightest to power tend to conjure up fears that they will lose it; they love to portray themselves as victims as they victimize others. Antisemitism has proved through the ages to be a particularly pernicious projection.

Biblical roots, 20th century fruit

For centuries in Christian Europe, Jews were demonized as threats to the Christian order—as killers of Jesus, sorcerers in league with the devil, predators of Christian children. The roots of these narratives stretch back to theological polemics found in Christian scriptures and the writings of early church leaders, as the Christian religion emerged out of Judaism in the first centuries of the common era. But once Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, ideology became encoded into state policy. 

Especially from the Middle Ages onward, Jews faced rounds of state-enforced subjugation and ghettoization, pogroms (mass outbursts of violence from Christian neighbors, often encouraged by state and church leaders), expulsion, and more across Christian Europe. Christian crusaders also brought forced conversion, subjugation and genocide under the sword and the cross to Muslims in Spain and the Ottoman Empire, indigenous tribes across Turtle Island, and countless other Others. Here as always, antisemitism was deeply interwoven with other forms of domination within a Euro-Christian supremacist power structure.

Some Jews became concentrated in economic roles like moneylending (often because other industries were barred to them, and at the urging of feudal princes) and this left them available as conspicuous outlets for peasant rage against the unjust feudal system. “Peasants who go on pogrom against their Jewish neighbors,” explains Puerto Rican Jewish poet Aurora Levins Morales, “won’t make it to the nobleman’s palace to burn him out and seize the fields.” The trope associating Jews with financial greed and exploitation continues to this day. 

Beginning in the 19th century, as Europe entered into the modern era, nationalists and ultra-conservatives adapted antisemitic narratives for new use, as explanatory models for the frightening new world of capitalism and nation-states. They spread the conspiracy theory that a predatory, parasitic Jewish cabal sat at the heights of financial power, government, and the media, and lurked behind communism, union organizing, racial justice, and other leftist movements.

Millions of workers and peasants, shopkeepers and artisans found themselves dislocated from their old ways of life, crowded into factories and slums, thrown into a strange and jarring new world. “It’s the Jews!” proved to be an appealing meta-explanation for their suffering. But the Left had a better explanation—“it’s capitalism!”—and that too was catching on fast. 

At the turn of the 20th century, powerful left-wing movements mounted a fierce challenge to the despotic rule of the Russian tsar and the landowners, clerics, nobility and nationalists who backed the status quo. These reactionaries circulated a forged document called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the supposed transcript of a secret meeting of the Jewish cabal. They waved it as proof that the Elders were using left-wing movements as a front in their sinister campaign for world domination. But they also claimed that Jews controlled capitalism, newspapers, politicians, popular entertainment—all the dizzying phenomena of the modern world. 

The Tsar’s allies gambled that this lie would undermine the Left by scaring the masses away from joining its ranks, diverting popular rage onto Jews instead. Ultimately their gamble didn’t pay off. In 1917, the Russian Revolution unseated tsarist rule. The Right claimed that the new Soviet Union embodied the “Judeo-Bolshevik” threat, and the myth of the Protocols spread around the world. In the 1920s auto magnate Henry Ford distributed free copies of his pamphlet, The International Jew, to customers on the floor of Ford dealerships across the United States. Like other capitalists, he was wary that multiracial union organizing threatened his profit margin; by warning white workers to avoid the Judeo-Bolshevik threat to folk, faith, family, and flag, he hoped to shore up his own power. 

Everyone has a stake in fighting antisemitism, and by the same token, we can’t fight antisemitism on its own—like other forms of oppression, it rises and falls alongside the authoritarian upsurge.

These myths were turbocharged by the Great Depression, when millions were newly eager for someone to blame, and the Left’s answer—the system of capitalism—won widespread appeal. Antisemitism fueled fascist movements in Europe, resulting in the genocide of one third of the world’s Jewish population, while in America, fascist movements like the America First Committee and mouthpieces like radio mogul Father Charles Coughlin attacked the New Deal as the “Jew Deal.” Coughlin’s radio show reached as many as forty million weekly listeners at its peak; Ford’s newspaper was one of the largest in the United States; and mass fascist rallies, like the 20,000-person Madison Square Garden rally in February 1939, demonstrated the popular appeal of the movement.  

After the war, McCarthyist anti-Communist crusades decimated the Left and labor unions. Jews were disproportionately targeted in the witch hunt, and as the McCarthyists searched obsessively for the communist conspiracy around every corner, Senator John Rankin “unmasked” the Yiddish names of American Jewish immigrants during Senate hearings. As the civil rights movement rattled the foundations of Jim Crow, white supremacist groups claimed the Jews were behind the Black revolt—Black folks, according to their racist logic, couldn’t possibly have organized themselves—and they firebombed synagogues alongside Black churches across the Jim Crow South. 

This strain of antisemitism never disappeared in American life, even as many American Jews benefited from race and class privilege in the mid-20th century. It was mobilized across the Christian Right and animated the white nationalist movement, whose militant organizing reached its bloodiest peak in the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing. 

In the long tail of the 2008 financial crash, the populist right has surged around the world, capitalizing on widespread resentment amidst economic dislocation, wars and refugee crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, and more. In the US, an organized coalition of Christian nationalists, nativists, and radical libertarians rode the MAGA wave to reshape the American political and social landscape, and they brought antisemitism, along with a raft of other forms of bigotry and domination in tow.  

In hindsight, with almost a decade between our time and the 2016 election, Trump’s closing campaign ad seems almost innocent. American Jews have faced the deadliest attack in our history, when a white nationalist murdered 11 congregants at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2018. Conspiracy theories against George Soros, globalists, or blood-drinking liberal pedophiles have become so normalized that nobody bats an eye. MAGA’s leading lights opened the second Trump administration by flashing Nazi salutes at rallies. Leading Trump staffers have praised white nationalist Nick Fuentes and recycled antisemitic slander dredged from the depths of 4chan. Studies show that antisemitic attitudes are commonplace across the Gen Z Right—the future of MAGA—bolstered by Elon Musk’s Twitter and a conspiracy-drenched ecosystem. 

When Elon Musk scapegoats George Soros as the evil mastermind behind government and the media, it is of course a massive and ironic projection—Musk himself hacked the federal source code with DOGE, and manipulates the algorithms of our public square on X. The specter of George Soros or the ‘globalist elite’ embodies a paradoxical unity of opposites. Like the Elders of Zion in past generations, they are the arch-puppeteers of both rapacious neoliberal capitalism and unbridled progressivism. 

The spread of antisemitic thinking endangers not only Jews, but a range of minoritized groups as well as the Left. When figures like Tucker Carlson claim Soros is engineering racial justice movements, it helps mobilize the MAGA base to attack Black Lives Matter protests on the streets, demonize DEI at school board meetings, or commit mass shootings targeting Black communities. When Fox News claims the “globalist elite” are opening American borders to destroy Western civilization, it drives popular support for mass deportation. Everyone has a stake in fighting antisemitism, and by the same token, we can’t fight antisemitism on its own—like other forms of oppression, it rises and falls alongside the authoritarian upsurge.

A quote is often attributed to Walter Benjamin—“every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution.” The spread of conspiracy thinking means that people are hungry to understand why our social order seems so broken. It also means that the Left hasn’t yet succeeded in turning our better explanations into common sense. We need to remind people that there is a small minority of elites who control the world’s political and economic systems at the expense of the world’s population, but it’s not the Jews—it’s the bourgeoisie.

It’s a class, not a cabal

Sometimes, we also need to remind ourselves within our own ranks. As we do with any form of oppression, we are liable to reproduce antisemitism if we do not actively unlearn it. Fighting antisemitism also means clarifying our own analysis, and making sure to avoid conspiracy thinking in Left movements. There’s a particular risk here, because social movements, after all, are all about emancipation from oppression, and antisemitism promises false emancipation from imaginary oppressors.

There is a long history of antisemitic ideas showing up on the Left. In the 19th century, a few revolutionary leaders framed anti-capitalist revolt as a struggle against the Jews, while many others argued against this mistake. In the long civil war following the Russian Revolution, Jewish communities faced attacks and pogroms—mostly from marauding nationalist armies, but occasionally from Red Army supporters. Jews in the Soviet Union faced persecution under Stalin’s leadership, as nationalist sentiment re-emerged.

Closer to our own time, we saw occasional antisemitic signs at Occupy encampments, and more commonly, conspiratorial grumblings against all-powerful puppeteers like the Rothschilds or the Illuminati lurking behind the Federal Reserve. Movement leaders don’t always recognize these allusions as antisemitism, and suffer media attacks and corrode Jewish trust as a result. But these tropes fail the tests of facts and morals. While Jews can be found in the ruling class, the world’s wealthy and elite are mostly Christian. On a local level, your slumlord isn’t raising the rent because he’s Jewish, but because he’s a slumlord. We can grant no quarter to crude stereotypes in our movements to build a better world.

Any conspiracy theory, whether it involves Jews, the Illuminati or anyone else, is a shoddy guide for liberatory praxis. The conspiracist mindset makes the opposition out to be all-powerful, infinitely subtle, diabolically clever, enshrined with an almost religious aura. But the ruling class is not all-powerful. They can be defeated. They don’t always have an ironclad, air-tight master plan; sometimes they don’t have their shit together. They disagree amongst themselves all the time, and we can exploit those wedges in their coalitions.

Like us, the ruling class tries to get organized, to coordinate their efforts. Sometimes they practice good security culture, and we aren’t in all their group chats. But often, they announce their intentions in the open, and work out their strategy in the pages of the Financial Times. Their agenda, strategy, and tactics are knowable, and this is key to defeating them. 

And they are a class, not a cabal. The faces at the top don’t matter. They do what they need to do. They may also be terrible people, but no one could run Amazon under late neoliberalism without cutting wages, fighting unions, and being a rapacious capitalist. The system is bigger than any personality at the top.

In addition to the socialism of fools, the Right has another trick up its sleeve. They portray themselves as the greatest defenders of Jews, as they defend Israel’s ongoing campaigns of genocide, apartheid, and supremacist domination against Palestinians. We can’t understand or fight antisemitism in our era without confronting this head on, which we will do in part 2 of this article.

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Featured illustration by Kimmie Dearest