POLITICS AND POETICS

WHY ANTISEMITISM? WHY US? NOTES TOWARD AN INCOMPLETE ANSWER

LAUREN DANIEL

December 18, 2025

This essay does not announce a crisis; it examines a recurrence. Across belief systems, political camps, and historical ruptures, one figure continues to reappear as explanation rather than participant. What follows is an attempt to trace that persistence with neither hysteria nor reassurance, resisting both panic and indifference. It does not seek verdicts or prescriptions, only clarity at a moment when clarity feels increasingly difficult. The aim is not accusation, but understanding—why certain questions, once raised, refuse to disappear.

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I want to be careful at the outset not to sound alarmist, not to adopt the tone of a doom prophet or a fearmonger. History has taught us how easily urgency curdles into rhetoric, how quickly concern can harden into spectacle. This is not that. What follows is not a warning siren, nor a claim that history is repeating itself in some crude or inevitable way. It is, rather, an attempt to think clearly at a moment when clarity feels increasingly difficult.

I have asked the question carefully, because it resists care. Why antisemitism? And, more narrowly, more uncomfortably: Why us?

I am writing this not as a scholar, not as an academic, not from the shelter of a discipline or the authority of a field. I am writing simply because I want to know. Because I want to understand it deeply. Because I have been confronted with it—directly and indirectly—over and over again, in ways both crude and subtle, historical and immediate. And because its renewed visibility in recent years is unsettling, not only in its volume but in its confidence, its ease, its willingness to speak again in public without embarrassment.

Not why antisemitism in the abstract—that would suggest a phenomenon already mapped, a pathology with known causes. I mean the more naive, more dangerous question beneath it: Why Jews? Why, across centuries and continents, across religions and political systems, does the figure of the Jew return, again and again, as problem, threat, explanation?

Antisemitic propaganda portraying Jews as secret manipulators controlling political systems—democracy, communism, Freemasonry, and capitalism—through conspiracy imagery and dehumanizing symbols.

The question is awkward to pose because it risks sounding plaintive, or worse, self-exonerating. It is not meant that way. It is closer to an anthropological curiosity turned inward. I am not asking for innocence; I am asking about function.

Antisemitism is too old, too persistent, too adaptable to be explained by hatred alone. Hatred burns out. Antisemitism renews itself. It survives conversions, secularization, emancipation, genocide, and even—perhaps especially—memory. It thrives in societies that pride themselves on reason as well as those anchored in faith. It appears among the uneducated and the hyper-educated alike. It attaches itself to revolutions and restorations, to nationalism and cosmopolitanism, to capitalism and its critics.

If antisemitism were merely ignorance, it would have died long ago. If it were only prejudice, it would have exhausted itself. Instead, it behaves like a structure—something closer to grammar than belief. It does not argue; it arranges. It does not persuade; it positions.

So: Why us?

The first temptation is to begin with Christianity, but that would already be a distortion. Antisemitism did not originate with the Church. Christianity intensified it, mythologized it, weaponized it—but it did not invent it.

Long before Christ, Jews were already perceived as strange. Not foreign in the obvious sense—ancient cities were full of foreigners—but strange in a more unsettling way. Jews lived among others while refusing to dissolve into them. They spoke the languages of empire, traded, paid taxes, and wrote contracts, but insisted on laws that came from elsewhere. They worshipped a god who could not be pictured, rested on a day when others worked, obeyed rules that made little sense to outsiders.

Caricature depicting Jews as puppet masters governing society from behind the scenes, a recurring antisemitic trope used to naturalize suspicion and resentment toward imagined Jewish power.

In the ancient Mediterranean world, religion was civic. Gods were woven into the life of the city. To refuse them was not merely eccentric; it was antisocial. Jews were tolerated, sometimes admired, often resented—not because they were invisible, but because they were visible in their refusal.

This is where something important begins. Jews are marked not by what they do, but by what they do not do. They do not eat what others eat. They do not pray where others pray. They do not disappear.

Difference, when paired with proximity, creates irritation. Difference that persists creates suspicion. Jews were neither conquerors nor vanquished; neither fully inside nor clearly outside. They occupied an uncomfortable middle—embedded yet apart. This position would become their most dangerous inheritance.

Christianity does something decisive: It turns Jewish difference into cosmic error.

Once Christianity defines itself as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy, Jews acquire a new symbolic function. They are no longer simply a peculiar people; they are the people who refused revelation. Their continued existence becomes a theological problem. If Christ is truth, why do those who know the law not accept him?

Antisemitic illustration framing Jews as alien outsiders and social parasites, visually separating them from the “national body” through grotesque exaggeration and exclusionary symbolism.

The answer Christianity produces is as elegant as it is devastating: Jews are blind. Stubborn. Hardened. Necessary, but fallen.

From this moment on, Jews are asked to carry an impossible burden. They must survive to prove Christianity true, but survive in a state of degradation. Augustine’s formulation—that Jews must be preserved as witnesses to their own error—ensures their endurance while sanctifying their humiliation.

Here, antisemitism becomes structural. It is no longer a matter of occasional resentment; it is built into Christian cosmology. Jews explain the world’s suffering. When plague strikes, they are suspected. When faith wavers, they are blamed. When order collapses, they are accused of conspiracy with the devil.

Conversion is offered as a solution, but history shows that this offer is hollow.

Conversion solves the problem only briefly. Converted Jews are watched, tested, suspected. In Spain, the conversos are scrutinized obsessively. Their kitchens, their marriages, their habits become evidence. Christianity begins to sense what it cannot yet articulate: The problem is not belief alone.

Nazi-era poster identifying Jews as enemies of the state, combining racial caricature with state authority to legitimize persecution and collective punishment.

This is the moment when antisemitism starts to slide from theology into genealogy. Blood replaces doctrine. One can be a Christian and still be a Jew.

The language of purity emerges. Limpieza de sangre. Cleanliness. Contamination. What was once a religious disagreement becomes a hereditary stain.

Islamic societies, often invoked as a counterexample, offer a different—but not opposite—historical configuration. Jews were recognized, protected, and granted communal autonomy, but never equality. Their status was hierarchical rather than racial, conditional rather than annihilatory. Safety depended on political stability and the disposition of rulers, not on abstract rights.

What is crucial, however, is that this premodern arrangement should not be mistaken for continuity. Contemporary antisemitism in parts of the Middle East is not a simple inheritance of Islamic tradition. It is a hybrid formation—shaped by European racial myths, imported conspiracy literature, colonial trauma, and modern nationalist conflict. Theology supplies vocabulary; modern politics supplies urgency.

Where it appears today, this antisemitism is often explicit and eliminationist, less concerned with coexistence than with cosmic struggle. It does not rely on insinuation or irony. It speaks plainly, rehearsed through propaganda, education, and violence.

The modern period promises emancipation. Jews are invited into the social contract. Ghettos open. Professions unlock. Citizenship is offered as an answer.

But emancipation introduces a new unease. Once Jews are no longer confined, they become difficult to classify. They are no longer a fixed other but a moving one. Their presence becomes legible not as mass but as influence.

Antisemitism adapts seamlessly. Jews are accused not of refusing modernity but of embodying it too well. They become the face of finance and the whisper behind revolution. The avant-garde artist and the corrosive intellectual. The universalist without roots.

Propaganda image suggesting that global political powers—Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—are secretly controlled by Jews, reinforcing the myth of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

What is remarkable is not the accusation itself, but its elasticity. Jews can be blamed for everything precisely because they are imagined as nowhere and everywhere at once.

Racial antisemitism completes this logic. Once Jewishness is imagined as biological, there is no exit. No conversion, no loyalty, no achievement can undo it. Jews are no longer wrong; they are incurable.

The Holocaust does not erupt from nowhere. It is antisemitism stripped of metaphor and subjected to administration. The old myths are no longer enough; the state takes over. Presence itself becomes intolerable.

After 1945, the language changes. Antisemitism becomes unspeakable, but it does not vanish. It relocates.

Today, that relocation is visible in three distinct but occasionally overlapping registers, each with its own language, genealogy, and alibi. On the radical right, antisemitism is the most explicit and the least disguised. It appears as conspiracy, as demographic panic, as fantasies of control—financial, cultural, demographic. Jews are named directly, often crudely, as puppet masters of liberalism, globalization, feminism, migration. This antisemitism is familiar, almost archival. Its danger lies not in its originality but in its shamelessness, in the way it has learned once again to speak without embarrassment, to circulate openly, digitally, algorithmically, as if the past as a warning had been successfully neutralized.

Carved figurines depicting Jews with animalistic features, part of a long tradition of folk and decorative antisemitism that normalized contempt in everyday objects.

On parts of the radical left, antisemitism rarely announces itself as such. It enters through moral certainty rather than racial myth, through the language of justice, emancipation, and structural critique. Here, Jews are framed not as biologically corrupt but as politically suspect. Jewish history is compressed, specificity is treated as inconvenience, and vulnerability is reframed as strategy. Israel becomes less a concrete political entity than a symbolic condensation—an abstract problem onto which broader grievances are projected. Critique turns obsessive. Nuance is dismissed as complicity. Jews, once again, are asked not to speak as themselves, but to answer for structures far larger than them.

Among radical Middle Eastern groups, antisemitism is often explicit, theological, and eliminationist, drawing on a hybrid vocabulary shaped by imported European conspiracy literature, postwar geopolitics, and unresolved regional trauma. Here, Jews are not merely adversaries but cosmic antagonists, folded into narratives of destiny and struggle. This antisemitism does not rely on implication or irony. It is stated plainly, rehearsed continuously, and sustained through education, propaganda, and violence.

What links these three is not ideology but function. In each case, Jews serve as a symbolic solvent—capable of absorbing contradictions that cannot otherwise be held. Capitalism and anti-capitalism, power and marginality, modernity and tradition, universality and particularism are all projected onto the same figure. The Jew remains the answer offered when systems fail to explain themselves.

None of this requires coordination. Antisemitism does not need unity to persist. It survives precisely because it can inhabit opposing worldviews without strain. The vocabulary changes; the role remains.

Walking sticks topped with grotesque Jewish caricatures, demonstrating how antisemitic imagery circulated not only in mass propaganda but also in personal possessions and leisure culture.

Biology gives way to insinuation. Hatred learns to speak the language of critique, of irony, of moral concern. Jews are accused of exploiting memory, monopolizing suffering, instrumentalizing the past. The crime is no longer existence, but remembrance.

The establishment of Israel complicates this further. A people long accused of being stateless now possess a state—and are condemned for it. Criticism of Israel is necessary and legitimate; antisemitism enters when Israel is treated not as a political entity but as a metaphysical offense, when Jews everywhere are held responsible for its actions, when old accusations resurface in new vocabularies.

What is striking is not disagreement but fixation. Few states attract such disproportionate symbolic weight. Israel becomes a screen onto which unresolved European guilt, colonial trauma, and revolutionary fantasy are projected.

Once again, Jews are asked to explain the world’s disorder.

The most uncomfortable answer to why us? is also the most convincing. Antisemitism persists because Jews are useful. They are useful as symbols of abstraction in a world anxious about abstraction. Useful as carriers of memory in cultures eager to forget. Useful as internal outsiders—close enough to blame, distant enough to dehumanize.

Illustrated scene portraying Jews as predatory figures exploiting women and corrupting social order, a recurring motif used to fuse antisemitism with moral panic and sexual fear.

Jews are rarely allowed to be banal. They are either too powerful or too weak, too modern or too archaic, too visible or too hidden. Antisemitism does not require coherence; it thrives on contradiction.

Perhaps I should return, briefly, to the position from which I began.

I did not write this to arrive at mastery. I did not write it to produce a theory that resolves itself neatly, or to compete with the vast scholarship that already exists. I wrote it because the question will not leave me alone. Because it has followed me through archives and conversations, through history books and headlines, through moments when it announces itself crudely and moments when it passes, almost politely, as critique or common sense.

I wrote it because encountering antisemitism repeatedly—sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly—forces a reckoning that cannot be delegated to experts alone. And because watching its recent resurgence, its growing confidence, its comfort in public space and moral language, makes neutrality feel like a form of evasion.

This essay does not offer answers so much as it records a pressure. An attempt to stay with the question rather than dissolve it. To understand not in order to excuse, but to recognize patterns before they harden again into inevitability.

I do not end with resolution. That would be dishonest.

Antisemitism endures because it answers questions societies refuse to ask of themselves. It converts structural anxiety into moral accusation. It offers clarity where none exists.

Perhaps the most unsettling realization is this: Antisemitism does not require Jews to exist in large numbers—or even at all. It can survive on memory, myth, and imagination alone.

Which means the question why us? may be the wrong one.

Or perhaps it is the only honest one—precisely because it never settles.

Lauren Daniel (b. 1973 in Munich) was born to Romanian parents who survived the Holocaust. She studied architecture at Cornell and now lives with her family in New York City. She has learned, perhaps too early and too often, that some questions are inherited, and that refusing to ask them does not make them disappear.

Cover image: A gravestone split through the Star of David—an act of desecration that targets memory itself, turning even the dead into objects of hatred