In the wake of the recent antisemitic shooting in Sydney, Australia we have witnessed a disturbing but increasingly familiar pattern. On December 14, 2025, two gunmen—a father and son—opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach, killing at least 15 people and injuring more than 40 others in what Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called an act of antisemitic terrorism. However, this anti-Jewish violence has become the occasion not for serious reflection on bigotry, hatred, and communal safety, but for a coordinated campaign to silence Palestinian rights advocates, anti-Zionist Jews, and critics of Israeli state policy.
The response from Zionist institutions and figures was swift and revealing. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the attack on Australia’s recognition of Palestinian statehood, declaring that its policy “pours fuel on the antisemitic fire.” Deborah Lipstadt, President Joe Biden’s former Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism, immediately used the occasion to target Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s newly elected mayor, writing on social media that his refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” helped “facilitate (not cause) the thinking that leads to Bondi Beach.” Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams was more direct, claiming the attack in Sydney was “exactly what it means to ‘globalize the intifada.’” The New York Times and other major outlets—most of which have still refuse to acknowledge Israel’s genocide in Gaza—amplified these narratives, treating the attack as vindication for those who have long argued that pro-Palestinian activism inherently endangers Jews.
The shooting was an anti-Jewish attack, and must be mourned and condemned as such. Yet, the speed with which it has been weaponized reveals something profound about how accusations of antisemitism function today. Notice the narratives being constructed: the attackers, identified as 50-year-old Sajid Akram and his 24-year-old son Naveed Akram, are depicted as “normative” Muslims whose religion naturally produces antisemitism, which in turn manifests as anti-Israel activism. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declared the attack “the result of the antisemitic rampage in the streets of Australia over the past two years,” explicitly linking campus protests and pro-Palestinian activism to mass murder.
Meanwhile, Ahmed al-Ahmed, the 43-year-old Muslim man whose refugee parents had just arrived from Syria and who wrestled a gun from one of the attackers and was himself shot in the process, is portrayed as a rare exception: the “good Muslim” whose heroism is invoked to highlight the supposed antisemitism of his coreligionists. Australian officials praised al-Ahmed as “a genuine hero” whose actions saved “many, many” lives, yet the broader discourse uses his exceptional bravery to reinforce the narrative that Muslims are inherently prone to antisemitism unless proven otherwise through extraordinary acts.
The clear message is that Muslims, Palestinians, and their supporters are inherently antisemitic—and therefore their critiques of Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide must be dismissed as bigotry rather than engaged as political analysis and protest. The attack becomes evidence not of the need to address actual antisemitic violence, but of the danger posed by student protesters, by critics of Israeli policy, by anyone who invokes the phrase “from the river to the sea” or supports BDS.
The tragedy has been turned into a moment where the attackers’ antisemitism is weaponized against those who criticize Israel for genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. Historian Simon Schama exemplified this on Wednesday when he slandered progressive Jews and others as shedding “crocodile tears” over the killings, suggesting our grief is insincere because of our opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza.
The tragedy has been turned into a moment where the attackers’ antisemitism is weaponized against those who criticize Israel for genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing
In titling this post “The End of Antisemitism,” I don’t mean that anti-Jewish hatred has disappeared—far from it. Rather, I’m arguing that the term “antisemitism” has become so divorced from its 19th century origins, so thoroughly inverted and weaponized, that it no longer serves as a useful framework for understanding or combating anti-Jewish hatred. What began as a concept to name a specific form of modern racial hatred has been transformed into a tool for silencing dissent and expanding state violence against our most vulnerable populations.
To understand this transformation, it is helpful to trace the term’s historical trajectory. And if antisemitism has a history—if it therefore has a beginning—then it can also have an end.
The Origins of a Racial Category
The term “antisemitische” was, as best we know, coined in the 1860s by Jewish historian and linguist Moritz Steinschneider, who used it to describe the racial prejudices of his contemporaries, like Ernest Renan, who believed that Jews were part of an inferior race lower than that of Europeans. The context matters: 19th century philology was dividing humanity into racial categories based on language families, distinguishing “Semitic” peoples from “Aryans” or “Indo-Europeans.” This wasn’t neutral scholarship. The emerging race science portrayed Semitic languages and peoples as static, corrupted, deteriorating, and without a history of their own, while Indo-European languages and “native” Europeans were characterized as dynamic, healthy, progressive, and in charge of their own future.
The term ‘antisemitism’ has become so divorced from its 19th century origins, so thoroughly inverted and weaponized, that it no longer serves as a useful framework for understanding or combating anti-Jewish hatred.
Antisemitism, then, was born as a modern racial ideology, distinct from but building upon medieval Judeophobia. While older forms of anti-Jewish hatred primarily centered on religious difference, modern antisemitism portrayed Jews as a fundamentally separate race or nation, inherently incompatible with and dangerous to Western nations. This ideology blamed Jews for the brutal disruptions of industrialization, capitalism, urbanization—for everything disruptive about modernity itself. It insisted on Jewish exceptionalism, drawing on biblical notions of chosenness to argue for Jews’ fundamental incompatibility with Christian Europe and its white settler colonial offshoots. By the early 20th century, antisemitism had become the basis of political movements across Europe, culminating in Nazism’s genocidal program.
Even in its early history, however, the term was being weaponized not only by non-Jewish racists but also among Jewish communities themselves. Jewish traditionalists leveled accusations of antisemitism against scholars engaged in Higher Biblical Criticism. They argued that the new higher criticism represented “the antisemitism of today,” and threatened to strip Judaism of its foundational claims by questioning the divine authorship and historical reliability of the Torah. What became known as the Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis was not merely a scholarly theory but an assault on Jewish identity itself. In another instance, Jewish nationalists, including Zionists, deployed it against more assimilated Jews, accusing them of “Jewish self-hatred” for their commitments to integration and universalism. The pattern was established: a term meant to name hatred could also be used to police Jewish identity and silence Jewish dissent.
Post-Holocaust Transformation
After 1945, two interconnected ideas fundamentally altered how antisemitism was understood. First, the Nazi Holocaust came to be seen as evidence that anti-Jewish hatred was uniquely and exceptionally insidious—more dangerous than other forms of bigotry and violence. This view required a willful blindness toward the genocides that were part and parcel of European colonialism outside Europe, treating the Holocaust as utterly unprecedented in history rather than as another manifestation of European racial violence now turned against other Europeans.
Second, there emerged among western leaders a consensus that the State of Israel was owed to the Jewish people as compensation for the Holocaust and the world’s indifference to it. This proved a convenient solution to the “Jewish Question” that had preoccupied Europe for more than a century, allowing western nations to avoid confronting their own legacies of anti-Judaism while supporting the creation of a Jewish state on someone else’s land.
The founding of Israel in 1948, of course, came at the direct expense of the Indigenous Palestinian community which became a target of Anglo-Zionist dispossession since at least 1917. In the Nakba, which had begun (or accelerated) in 1947, Israeli forces destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages, murdered thousands, engaged in widespread sexual assault and hostage-taking, and forcibly displaced approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes into what we now call the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and into Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
Almost immediately, pro-Israel groups in the United States and Western Europe began deploying a new strategy: to speak out against these abuses, against the violations of Palestinian life and rights, was, they claimed, itself a manifestation of antisemitism. This eventually became known as the “new antisemitism,” which supposedly existed alongside “classical” antisemitism. The argument insisted that Israel spoke for all Jews worldwide—an idea initially rejected by many Jews but eventually embraced by major Jewish institutions, for whom the allure of state power proved irresistible.
Here’s the bitter irony: what has permitted Israel to violate the very international law that had been created partly to prevent a recurrence of WWII’s genocidal violence was precisely its ability to capitalize upon antisemitic notions of Jewish exceptionality and Jewish difference. By insisting that Israel deserved special treatment because of Jewish suffering, by claiming that any criticism of Israeli policy was an attack on all Jews everywhere, the Israeli state and its supporters reinforced and exploited the very logic of antisemitism they claimed to oppose.
The Contemporary Inversion
Over subsequent decades, as Israel’s human rights violations became increasingly visible—through the intifadas, the apartheid system, settlement expansion, the 2006 and 2008–2009 wars on Gaza—the accusations of antisemitism intensified rather than diminished. The 1975 UN General Assembly declaration that Zionism was a form of racism—passed as post-colonial nations gained representation—was treated as proof of antisemitism rather than as a legitimate political analysis of settler colonialism. The BDS movement, a nonviolent call from Palestinian civil society to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel, has been criminalized in more than 30 U.S. states in the name of “combating antisemitism.”
By insisting that Israel deserved special treatment because of Jewish suffering, by claiming that any criticism of Israeli policy was an attack on all Jews everywhere, the Israeli state and its supporters reinforced and exploited the very logic of antisemitism they claimed to oppose.
The weaponization reached a new level with the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism by governments, universities, and institutions worldwide. In practice, this definition has been employed almost exclusively to silence criticism of Israel and to target Palestinian rights advocates. Meanwhile, actual “classical” antisemitism has grown dramatically: the Tree of Life synagogue massacre, the white supremacist march in Charlottesville where participants chanted“Jews will not replace us,” the rise of QAnon and Christian nationalist movements that traffic openly in antisemitic conspiracy theories.
The recent emergence of the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther—released on October 7, 2024, as part of the broader Project 2025 agenda—marks perhaps the culmination of this inversion. As the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace has noted in this space, this document creates a framework of a “Hamas Support Network” that encompasses virtually all progressive advocacy: Palestinian human rights organizations, campus activism, diversity and inclusion programs, ethnic studies departments, even challenges to unfettered executive power. Notably, Project Esther contains no mention whatsoever of what we might think of as “classical” antisemitism—no discussion of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, or the actual violent threats facing Jews today.
Instead, it provides a playbook for using antisemitism accusations to attack students, sanction Palestinian human rights organizations like CAIR, Al-Haq, and Al Mezan, dismantle DEI and affirmative action programs, defund ethnic and Middle East studies programs, attack transgender rights, undermine international law, and—most crucially—to further the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. It offers a roadmap for the rise of racist nationalist states worldwide, all performed in the name of protecting Jews.
Toward an End and a Beginning
In what should be plainly obvious by now, none of these efforts undertaken in the name of combating antisemitism have made the world safer for Jews. They have not reduced hate crimes or challenged racial supremacist ideologies. They have not stopped attacks on Jewish communities. They have not addressed the Christian nationalist movements that see Jews as pawns in an apocalyptic drama. Instead, they have become mechanisms for expanding state power through violence against the most vulnerable populations—Palestinians first but foremost, but also students, activists, refugees, transgender people, and anyone engaged in solidarity work.
This is why I argue we have reached the end of antisemitism—not as a lived reality of anti-Jewish hatred, which persists and must be opposed, but as a useful analytical category. The term has been so thoroughly emptied out, inverted, and weaponized that it now describes its opposite: not a defense of a vulnerable people against state violence but a mechanism for expanding state violence against vulnerable peoples.
The task ahead isn’t to abandon the fight against anti-Jewish hatred. It’s to reclaim that fight on the basis of an ethical framework that rests upon common humanity rather than exceptionalism. This means recognizing that anti-Jewish hatred has always operated within larger systems of racial, colonial, and religious domination—not apart from them. It means reconnecting Jewish safety with universal struggles for justice rather than with nationalist or militarized projects. It means building bonds of genuine solidarity, divorcing anti-Zionism from anti-Jewish hatred, and pushing back against those who weaponize Jewish history to persecute others.
Rather than parsing endlessly over whether to hyphenate or capitalize the term—as if any of this would have material impact—we need new frameworks rooted in history and solidarity, not fear and censorship. We need to stop treating the term “antisemitism” as if it names a timeless, transhistorical hatred, and recognize it instead as what it has become: a weapon in the hands of those who would silence critique, expand state violence, and perpetuate genocide.
If antisemitism as we’ve known it is ending, then something new must begin: a genuine commitment to opposing all forms of hatred and violence, including anti-Jewish hatred, rooted not in the logic of exceptionalism but in the recognition of our shared vulnerability and our common struggle for liberation.
https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/end-of-antisemitism/
--------------------------------------------------------
My Comments :
Not least because I myself am repeatedly touching
on this very subject and have been using the analyses and arguments named by
the author, to underline and defend his position, I could not agree more.
In Holland - as in the many other European
countries (and far beyond) - people seem to pretend to be totally ignorant of
the closely interrelated two USA Policy Documents –
Project-2025-and-Project-Esther - that have been written by the
ultra-Christian-orthodox, extremely racist and ditto fascist, plus
unapologetically theocratic (so anti-democratic and wholesome authoritarian)
Heritage Foundation.
The purposely built-in interrelation of these two documents consisting of the use of pro-Palestinian sympathies - directly connotated to (imho the highly legitimate Resistance Movement) "Hamas", in order to establish the (“to be severely punishable by the USA-Justice system”) accusation of pro-terrorism, on the progressive, left leaning, UDHR minded side of the USA population.
I do also regularly use the very same arguments, against the structural, extreme abuse by pro-Zionist forces all over the world (including by Zionist Christians), of the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
Thirdly I - on a daily base - do consider the
obsessive worldwide advertisement by pro-Zionist forces of Islamophobia (in a
great variety of explicit expressions), a cynical strategic and geo-political tool,
to desperately try to justify the presence of the century plus Zionist settler
Movement on Palestinian territory,
In the process opportunistically changing cause and
consequence of the (totally justified) resistance (both by verbal criticism as
by the manifestation of material counter-violence) from both Islamic
individuals and Islamic States against the Zionist crusaders, trying to replace
the autochthonous Palestinians, by allochthonous (politically) Zionist Jews.
The latter lately by the employment of outright genocidal tactics, though the
tool of mass-murder had also been widely used by the Zionists during the Nakbah and
during other instances in the timeline of establishing a mono-ethic Jewish
State in Palestine : reaching "from the river till the
sea".)
In Holland the ultra-Zionist (pro-Eretz-Israel)
Jew, Geert Wilders has been engaging from the nineties, in loudly replicating the
Mossad delivered message of "Eurabia" throughout Europe.
Entertaining this advertorial exercise in order to
try to establish the (false) perception, that Zionism is all about fighting the
“Umvolkung” of Europe (instead of the “Umvolkung” of Palestine by Zionist
settler colonials).
The infamous Mossad couple Litmann-Orebi (Gisele Orebi operating under the
alias Bat Ye'or) had been trying to indoctrinate the western populations from
the eighties onward, into the supposed existence of a secret agreement between
the ME oil producing States, to cease the then existing oil-boycott against
Europe, in exchange by the promise, to allow the gradual "overtaking"
of the (Christian) West by "the Islam": quoted by the Mossad couple through the suggestive sound-byte "Eurabia".
