What happens to the concept of antisemitism in an environment where people increasingly hate Jews not for who they are, but for what they do? What could it mean to “fight” antisemitism in the shadow of Israeli impunity and Zionist power, especially when Israel and formal Jewish diaspora leadership insist that the Jewish state and the Jewish people are one and the same? To answer these questions, we spoke to Elad Lapidot, a Jerusalem-born Jewish philosopher living in Europe, where he is a professor for Hebraic studies at the University of Lille, France, and the director of the Berlin Center for Intellectual Diaspora. Lapidot’s 2020 book Jews Out of the Question explores the failed paradigm of anti-antisemitism, which, he argues, emptied Jewishness of meaning by defining antisemitism as any discussion or perception of shared Jewish characteristics, be it religious, cultural, or political.
This discussion took place in August of last year, as background for a forthcoming essay exploring the concept of antisemitism in the wake of the Zionist Jewish communities’ successful conflation of Jews and Israel. But as the release of the Epstein files, the start of the Iran war, and the mainstreaming of right-wing figures like Tucker Carlson accelerated anti-Jewishness in the public sphere, we decided to release the conversation, with minor updates. In it, Lapidot argues that we can no longer deny the ways that Judaism has been subsumed by a genocidal Zionism. Rather than land on disavowal, however, Lapidot affirms the possibility of transformation.
Daniel May: In the preface to your book State of Others: Levinas and Decolonial Israel, you write, “The center of the unfolding catastrophe is not antisemitism, if that term means, as it should, anti-Jewish racism, the attribution of imaginary vices to individuals because of their Jewish descent. Today’s growing anti-Jewish sentiment would be better described as anti-Judaism, or anti-Jewishness, which is hostility to what Jewish people, as such, actually do. But the deep crisis of the hour does not arise primarily from sentiments toward Jews. Rather, it arises from what is currently being done in the name of Judaism.” There’s a lot to unpack in this claim, which is extremely helpful but also extremely provocative. Let’s start there.
Elad Lapidot: The argument I’m trying to make is that the current crisis is not primarily about hostility toward Jews, but about transformations within Judaism as a political formation. I’ll start with an anecdote: My partner and I were hiking recently on an international trail in Spain. People passing each other on the trail would say hello in different languages. I was joking about the possibility of saying “shalom” to people. And it immediately became clear to both of us that today saying “shalom” would be provocative. I was thinking about how the word “shalom,” which is a nice word, a word of greeting, opening, peace, has become a marker of hate, in a sense. And then it dawned on me that there was a different but comparable process with the word “heil.” In German, it basically means holiness, peace, wholesomeness—good things. But it became the word for evil. You would not utter it today, in Germany or anywhere. And the comparison between these two words was very heavy, but it was there. It was not an intellectual process. It was kind of an instinctive feeling.
Arielle Angel: When I published a piece about the need for new Jewish institutions, I wasn’t prepared, honestly, for how much anti-Jewish sentiment was going to come back—the position that Judaism, and therefore the project of building communal Jewish life, is actually indefensible. That feels new to me. People now often say that the idea of chosenness is central to Judaism, and therefore Judaism and Zionism share the same root, and you can’t actually separate them.
EL: Jewish nationalism was born in relationship to antisemitism, in the same moment. Racial antisemitism was a reaction to something real that happened for Jews in modernity, known under various names: emancipation, assimilation, modernization. According to that framework, Jews can be Jews at home, but in public there is no such thing as “Jewish,” there is no political meaning to being Jewish. We are all citizens. Antisemitism is a reaction to that; it emerges at precisely the moment that Jews stop acting as Jews in order to reinforce an innate quality, something essential, something inside of a Jew that is beyond what they do or say, like race.
Zionism appears, at least in part, as a reaction—even an appropriation—of antisemitism. To make sense of their Jewish identities during emancipation, even as they stopped doing Jewish things, Jewish people began to understand themselves not as a religion, but as a nation—which aligned somewhat with the antisemite’s racial classifications, and responded to their rejection with separation. In this context, notions such as “chosenness,” which earlier functioned within a theological or ritual framework, can be reinterpreted within a modern, national register.
What has been called Israel-based or anti-Zionist antisemitism is a misnomer in the sense that from the very beginning, it’s hostility against an explicitly Jewish political project that is being staged and managed and shaped and constituted as a Jewish project, and which by now, we all understand, has been widely embraced across the Jewish world. Of course, then we have to ask: In what sense is Israel a Jewish project? Is it continuous or discontinuous with what we used to call “Jewish” until the 19th century? This becomes even more complicated because the first generation of Zionists, at least formally, embraced secularism. But what we are experiencing since the ’90s is a revalorization of religion in the Zionist project. And so it’s becoming unclear in what sense we can still make this distinction between a religious and a nationalist agenda.
AA: There is also a way to argue, on the flipside, that the project of Israel is essentially a project of assimilation into the Western world order—that there’s nothing inherently Jewish about what Israel is doing, and that it actually represents assimilation into a colonial framework. But then, of course, there’s a way to read this that’s very direct: This is what Jews are doing in the world. Secular Jews, religious Jews, cultural Jews, all kinds of Jews.
EL: You’re absolutely right. That was the strategy we on the Jewish left used for a long time, to say Judaism was colonized and the Zionists are Jewish antisemites, in that they reject what the antisemites reject—the diasporic, exilic, “parasite” Jew—and want instead to become real Europeans. But when so many people who call themselves Jewish are doing things that we have a problem with and calling it “Jewish,” we cannot just dismiss it, or claim that it’s not real Judaism. If you look at statistics, at least in Israel, the support for Netanyahu and the Gaza war, including the most racist genocidal statements, is correlated to how religious people are—the more religious, the more supportive. There were times when you could expect the Haredi communities not to go to the army, not to celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut, Independence Day, not even to speak Hebrew. And that’s changed.
DM: I wrote about the fatal entanglement of Zionism and Judaism after attacks on Israeli embassy workers in DC and a hostage rally in Boulder. And a central critique I’ve heard of that piece is “What difference does it make?” If Jews are being attacked because they are connected to a state that is doing all these horrifying things, in an environment where Judaism and Zionism are intertwined, they’re nonetheless still being attacked because they’re Jews, right?
There’s a parallel if we look at something like early Christian anti-Judaism. There were attacks on Jews for refusing Jesus, which was something concrete that Jews actually did. In other words, anti-Judaism can still be something we want to condemn as wrong, even if it’s not strictly antisemitic.
EL: Well, I think the content of the critique makes a huge difference: If the critique has nothing to do with what you’re doing or not doing, that could be prejudice or racism. But you cannot say it’s illegitimate if it’s something that you’re doing. We do have to separate the forms of critique, of course. Killing people, whatever the context, I will be against it. But the content of the critique has to be addressed. Even regarding long-standing practices such as circumcision, critique can be read as engagement rather than prejudice. It’s the beginning of a conversation.
Here we’re talking not about circumcision, but genocide in Gaza. And I think today, we may be reaching the end of the ability to say, “I’m Jewish, but I have nothing to do with Israel.” There is a state that is committing horrible acts in the name of being Jewish. Now if someone found out, for example, that your grandfather was Jewish, and starts calling you out on Gaza, that seems akin to racism, because it really has nothing to do with you. But if you identify as Jewish, and are doing things in the world as a Jew in a moment when Jewishness is being used to enact genocide, then you cannot say it’s antisemitic or racist to associate you with it, because you’re associating yourself with it. As Jews, we are called today to take a position.
DM: This is exactly what we are trying to struggle through. Hannah Arendt makes this argument in The Origins of Totalitarianism that modern antisemitism had to hang on something that was actually happening. If we understand antisemitism as inflating Jewish power into this mythic force, how do we recognize what is myth or lie in a moment of enormous Jewish power? How do you think your way through these distinctions when there are aspects of the antisemitic myth that the current moment seems to bear out?
EL: This is why I’m interested in how the tropes of antisemitism, even when they are projected racially, are transposed from a long tradition of anti-Judaism. As you said, Daniel, you can trace antisemitism back to the anti-Jewish idea that Jews are are the murderers of God, which has some theological bearings, as Jews refused to acknowledge Jesus as God.
How do we understand the Jewish response? During the war, there were images of kids with kippas on their heads, destroying humanitarian aid to Gaza. Judaism is mobilized in committing atrocities, while at the same time the Israeli prime minister lauds the tactics of Genghis Khan over those of Jesus Christ. Jews are actively assuming the role of the anti-Christian barbarian, so to speak—enacting a certain role that they were cast in.
AA: It’s quite psychoanalytic. It reminds me of the concept of repetition compulsion—an unconscious desire to return to or reenact a painful event or relationship. Jews are putting themselves in a position to reenact the experience of being objects of antisemitic ire by taking on the content of these painful accusations, by substantiating them.
So what do we do? If we are talking about something that has become embedded in Judaism, then is the project of reclaiming Judaism itself fundamentally flawed? Where does this leave us? And how do we talk about antisemitism in a way that’s actually responsible to the reality of what’s happening, without essentially writing off any and all antisemitic or anti-Jewish behavior?
EL: I think first of all, we need to put aside the question of antisemitism. I’m sorry to push this comparison again, but I think we are there: There was anti-Germanism—even Jews were attacked because they were Germans. And, sure, we should condemn it. It was a problem. But it’s not the problem, and it’s not our problem. Our problem is that Judaism today has for some groups become an ideology of genocide. We need to face that now; any moral understanding of Judaism needs an immediate response to that. Are you working to stop the genocide? And what are you doing to stop it?
Maybe one answer to that is to say, “I renounce Judaism, I will become Catholic or Muslim or whatever.” It’s still a statement on Judaism, and I respect it, but I don’t think it’s the right strategy. I think within Judaism, historically, there were more powerful strategies. I go back to, “Give me Yavneh.” In this origin story of Talmudic Judaism, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai breaks with the biryonim—the militant defenders of Jerusalem who bind Judaism to a logic of sovereignty and violence—and chooses another path. Instead of preserving the political order, he asks the Roman general Vespasian for Yavneh and its sages, creating the conditions for a Judaism rebuilt around study rather than statehood. The rabbis understood that certain moments require a radical reinvention. Of course, it’s not a direct comparison because we are not under Roman siege, we are Rome; we are, structurally speaking, aligned with imperial power. Still, I do think it’s inspiring, because it’s an example of acting within the tradition, while fundamentally reshaping it. I’m not sure how it should look, but we’re in a historical moment of that magnitude, which calls for something like this. Maybe we even need a new name as Jews. The tradition holds in itself very powerful resources for radical reinvention, and we need these resources in this moment. The question is not whether such a reinvention is needed, but what institutional, linguistic, and political forms it could take today.
DM: I want to return to the first point you made, which is that antisemitism and anti-Judaism are not our problem. I think politically, they are. On the one hand, “the rise of antisemitism” has become such an accepted story among the Jewish mainstream and that bleeds into the broader non-Jewish elite, in the media and politically. On the other, we have the rise in popularity of an actually antisemitic right. So I don’t think that we can simply say that’s not our concern, because I think, I think it has to be.
EL: Of course, we can’t ignore antisemitism, and there are different ways to approach it. For me, the most effective strategy has been to show that what is being paraded around today as anti-antisemitism is basically the new antisemitism. In the 1930s, antisemitism was rooted in fascism, nationalism, chauvinism, and racism—and that was used to oppress Jews. Now the agents of anti-antisemitism embrace similar ideologies, but in the name of the Jews. When Trump bans immigrants or attacks universities, or when the [right-wing German party] AfD says, “We are limiting Muslim immigrants in the name of protecting Jews,” Judaism becomes the symbol of nationalism, of racism. Historically, antisemitism was embedded in a larger worldview that is returning today, but has instead taken the name of the Jew not as an opponent, but as a symbol. And that’s something that generates a hate of Jews, obviously.
I find it commendable when pro-Palestine solidarity activists insist on saying, “This is not against Jews. We are in solidarity with Jews and against antisemitism.” Every time I hear it, I say to myself, “Wow. I find it remarkable that they continue to insist on this distinction. I don’t know if I would be so strong.”
DM: More and more folks are saying “Fuck it. We’re not going to say that anymore. We’re done. Judaism is what Judaism does, and what Judaism does is Zionism, and what Zionism does is exterminate us.”
AA: The natural extension of that is: Anyone who wants to be Jewish in any kind of sense is essentially a Zionist. I understand exactly where it comes from, but I don’t find it at all a helpful tendency in the movement writ large.
EL: Well, that’s exactly the point: What is being created with this bogus fight against antisemitism is a new wave of antisemitism. And what we are doing is trying to act against antisemitism by enacting a new performance of Judaism that is in solidarity with those who are weak and repressed or victims of genocides—one that is not aligned with the powers that cynically use “the fight against antisemitism” to justify genocidal policies.
There is a distinction to be made here: Fighting antisemitism may involve fighting prejudice against Jews. But fighting anti-Judaism, which we recognize has a point, is not fighting prejudice: It involves changing Judaism or insisting on what Judaism should be: a Judaism that is not the ideology of oppressive state power, but aligned with those subjected to it.
DM: So, in short: you cannot have a meaningful approach to antisemitism within a Zionist Judaism.
EL: That’s kind of the bottom line. Zionism, surely as it is embodied in the current State of Israel, is not opposed to antisemitism because it reproduces its own Jewish form of racism.
Log in
North Sea flood of 1953
Meenu Batra (right) with her children at the top of the Port Isabel lighthouse in the early 2000s (Courtesy/family)
