This past weekend in Texas, a gunman held a synagogue hostage for more than 11 hours. Ultimately, the congregants managed to escape, thanks to a diversion created by their quick-thinking rabbi. The terrorist had flown to the United States and deliberately targeted Jews under the delusion that they could get a particular convict released from federal prison.
Today in The Atlantic, I have a piece explaining the warped worldview that inspired this act, which is far more common across the ideological spectrum than most realize:
Jews are a famously fractious lot who can rarely agree on anything, let alone their religious leadership. We do not spend our days huddled in smoke-filled rooms plotting world domination while Jared Kushner plays dreidel in the back with Noam Chomsky and George Soros sneaks the last latke.
The notion that such a minuscule and unmanageable minority secretly controls the world is comical, which may be why so many responsible people still do not take the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory seriously, or even understand how it works. In the moments after the Texas crisis, the FBI made an official statement declaring that the assailant was “particularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community.” Of course, the gunman did not travel thousands of miles to terrorize some Mormons. He sought out a synagogue and took it hostage over his grievances, believing that Jews alone could resolve them. That’s targeting Jews, and there’s a word for that.
The FBI later corrected its misstep, but the episode reflects the general ignorance about anti-Semitism even among people of goodwill. Unlike many other bigotries, anti-Semitism is not merely a social prejudice; it is a conspiracy theory about how the world operates. This addled outlook is what united the Texas gunman, a Muslim, with the 2018 shooter at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, a white supremacist who sought to stanch the flow of Muslims into America. It is a worldview shared by Louis Farrakhan, the Black hate preacher, and David Duke, the former KKK grand wizard. And it is a political orientation that has been expressed by the self-styled Christian conservative leader of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, and Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran’s Islamic theocracy …
At the same time, because this expression of anti-Jewish prejudice is so different from other forms of bigotry, many people don’t recognize it. As in Texas, law-enforcement officials overlook it. Social-media companies ignore it. Anti-racism activists—who understand racism as prejudice wielded by the powerful—cannot grasp it, because anti-Semitism constructs its Jewish targets as the privileged and powerful. And political partisans, more concerned with pinning the problem on their opponents, spend their time parsing the identity of anti-Semitic individuals, rather than countering the ideas that animate them.
In short, although many people say they are against anti-Semitism today, they don’t understand the nature of what they oppose. And that’s part of why anti-Semitism abides.
Read the whole piece here to learn how this conspiratorial ideology threatens not just Jews, but the non-Jewish people and societies that embrace its tenets.
Whenever something like this happens, I am flooded with messages from well-meaning people who want to educate themselves about anti-Semitism and better equip themselves to fight it. But I can only answer so many emails and lecture in so many places at once. That’s why over the summer, I created and scripted a six-part explainer video series about anti-Jewish prejudice, produced in partnership with the Jewish educational nonprofit OpenDor Media. In straightforward but not simplistic language, the series answers basic questions that most people have about anti-Semitism but are afraid to ask—from “Whose Fault Is Antisemitism?” to “Do Jews Cause Antisemitism?” You can watch the entire thing here and share it with anyone you think might benefit from it.
Obviously, YouTube videos can only scratch the surface of the subject, and my voice is not the final one on these controversial questions. But I hope the series can help put people on the path to more productive conversations about this prejudice.