I write this exactly a month after the deadliest single day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. Up to this point I’ve put off writing anything about Hamas’s October 7 attack and the subsequent war because I know I won’t do it well enough. It’s impossible to honor the scale of human suffering in Israel and Gaza over the last month. And it’s impossible to avoid the mire of qualifications, understatements, false equivalence, and all the other noxious distractions that characterize our public discourse. I’ll try to keep my aim here very, very limited.  

In recent years, even before the outbreak of the war, I’ve been shocked by the range of the coalition amassed around antisemitism: the usual fringe actors, but also agitators from the broader Islamic world; the post-colonial revolutionary wing of the Left; the racialized, “extremely online” Right; the resurgent Black Hebrew Israelites; Kanye West – and others. There was no top-down organization; it always seemed a grassroots phenomenon, spontaneous and stochastic and ecumenical in a way that few other ideologies are.  

Next to everything else – and this is not at all the most important point to make here – antisemitism is unbearably lazy. It’s tedious watching people take it up as though they’ve discovered it themselves, and as though it were a mark of intellectual courage. In a literary/aesthetic sense, it’s ugly for the same reasons. An example: if I wrote a novel featuring a garden-variety 21^st century antisemite, with dialogue taken verbatim from any of his flesh-and-blood prototypes, I’d be justly panned for taking part in such derivative and cliched world-building. It’s all been seen and said countless times before. The element of cliché in antisemitism – and the implausibly hokey, comic-book-villain nature of most of its manifestations – is puzzling for such an ancient prejudice.

I have a hypothesis about why these cliches persist. In the liberal democratic West, and with good reason, antisemitism is one of the last remaining taboos in polite society. I don’t know, twenty or thirty years from now, if that will remain the case. The world is changing. But for now, children in the U.S. and through much of Europe receive a comprehensive primer on the Holocaust; we learn from an early age to guard against the species of evil that spawned it. Ask any American or Western European who was the single most detestable human to ever live, and you’ll almost certainly get the same answer.

But the human proclivity to bristle against authority – to push boundaries, to be “edgy,” to slaughter sacred cows for a laugh – finds a natural target in the Jews. For a certain caliber of middle schooler, nothing is as hilarious, or as “brave,” as carving a swastika in the school bathroom. These kids (most of them, I’d hope) outgrow this urge when they outgrow spitballs and fart jokes. A charitable reading of human nature would hold that these kids “know not what they do” – that this isn’t really antisemitism, but preteen anarchy. 

But hordes of others grow up, and, having never had a streak of contrarianism before, discover as adults the terrifying thrill of “unorthodox opinions.” I’ve spent more than a reasonable amount of time lurking in conspiracy circles online – Flat Earth, 9/11 Trutherism, and uglier stuff – and hear the same “conversion” testimonies ad nauseam: after a life of complacency (living as “sheep”), these individuals start asking the “real questions.” For this sort of person, there is no better “final boss,” no better shibboleth, no better badge of intellectual “courage,” than the repudiation of Jews as a protected class. 

Every generation has its share of people like this – people who, having asked no meaningful questions during their formative years, turn into paranoid, impressionable adults who renounce every solid judgment they took for granted growing up. Taboos, they think, exist only to hide “forbidden knowledge” — why else would they exist? Why else wouldn’t THEY want you to poke around there? In the decades after the Shoah, when antisemitism in the West became anathema – again, only in polite society – the pressures against these expressions formed a perverse attraction for newly-minted anti-establishment types. 

For the deeply anti-social (e.g. most Neo-Nazis) and for those under the strain of public psychotic breaks (e.g. Kanye West) – for people who strive for extremes of incivility – the anti-Jewish canon offers a ready stock of images and phrases to draw on. For as long as Jewish history is taught to children, children will grow up with a deep sympathy for the plights of the Jewish people. For as long as some of those children grow up susceptible to the thrill of cheap “gnosis,” they’ll continue to reject the sympathies of their youth, and Jews will bear the brunt of this. 

Naturally this is a very shallow reading of a very old problem. I haven’t addressed the issue of deeper cultural inheritances, or the web of structural causes for the persistence of antisemitism. I’m talking about only a fraction of it – and specifically why the same cliches, the same “conclusions,” keep surfacing out of the same “benign” liberal cultural ferment. I’ll end this with another, and better, cliché: the price of liberty – including the liberty to express heinous ideas – is eternal vigilance. We need to be aware of the sort of world which our liberties are making.