There is something more frightening than hatred.

It is hatred that believes itself to be righteous.

I kept thinking about that while watching Gloria Z. Greenfield’s bone-chilling, must-watch documentary, A Collective Descent into Evil: The Lethal Obsession with Jews and the Jewish State. I’ve known Gloria since we were teenagers. She is a gifted filmmaker, committed to expressing her strong voice to calling out antisemitism. This film examines the long history of Jew-hatred and the ideological currents that have converged in our own time around an obsessive hostility toward Israel.

But as both a rabbi and a psychologist, I found myself drawn to one word in the title.

Because the most dangerous hatred does not begin with monsters. It begins with ordinary people who become convinced that their hatred is not hatred at all.

Instead, it is justice.

Nobody Wakes Up One Morning Evil

We like to imagine evil people as fundamentally different from ourselves. They are fanatics, terrorists, Nazis, psychopaths. We are decent people.

Psychology has spent much of the past century making that comforting distinction increasingly difficult to maintain.

Solomon Asch demonstrated how easily people can surrender their own perceptions to the judgment of a group. Stanley Milgram showed how ordinary people could inflict what they believed was serious harm when an authority assured them it was necessary. Albert Bandura described the mechanisms of “moral disengagement” through which people can participate in cruelty without relinquishing their image of themselves as moral human beings.

That last point is essential.

Human beings do not necessarily abandon morality before doing terrible things.

The people we hate become oppressors. Their suffering becomes deserved. Violence against them becomes resistance. Intimidating them becomes activism. Silencing them becomes creating a “safe space.”

Once we accomplish that linguistic transformation, cruelty can feel remarkably like virtue.

Jews have seen this play out before.

The Jew has been reinvented repeatedly to fit whatever a particular civilization considered most contemptible.

In Christian Europe, the Jew was the Christ killer.

For racial antisemites, the Jew was a biological contaminant.

For communists, the Jew could be a capitalist exploiter.

For fascists, the Jew could simultaneously be the architect of communism.

Logical consistency was never required.

Today the villain has acquired another name.

The Perfect Antisemite Is No Longer an Antisemite

Modern antisemitism has solved an ingenious public-relations problem.

In polite Western society, admitting that you hate Jews is unacceptable.

Insist that Zionism is uniquely evil. Describe the world’s one Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate. Hold Jewish students responsible for a government thousands of miles away. Demand that Jews publicly condemn Israel before being admitted into supposedly progressive spaces. Treat a Jewish desire for national........

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