Why Antisemitism Cannot Solve Antizionism

Over the past several decades, Jewish communities worldwide have faced a sharp and unprecedented rise in anti-Jewish hostility—classrooms turning hostile, campuses erupting, Jewish identity becoming increasingly vulnerable again. We name these incidents antisemitic and expect protection. Yet protection rarely comes.

Each time, we respond the same way: we label the incidents as antisemitism, invoke existing legal tools, and we expect protection. But the strategies that once safeguarded Jewish life are no longer working.

In 2025, two landmark cases at MIT and Haverford College exposed this crisis with painful clarity. In both rulings, the courts held that anti-Zionism was political criticism—not Jew-hatred. As the First Circuit wrote in the StandWithUs case against MIT:

“We therefore reject plaintiffs’ claimed right to stifle anti-Zionist speech by labeling it inherently antisemitic.”

These words should shake every Jewish institution to its core.

Jewish students—targeted, intimidated, and isolated—were not protected under antisemitism law. The message was unmistakable: if hatred comes through “anti-Zionism,” the system will not protect you.

This is not a failure of the courts. The courts did not see antizionism as hate; they saw it as politics. It is a failure of our communal understanding.

So what went wrong?

For decades, we assumed that antisemitism law could defend us. But today’s hostility is not driven by the older racial framework of antisemitism. Antizionism is now the dominant engine of anti-Jewish hatred—and the Jewish community has not yet adapted to this historic shift.

Why did our protections fail?

Why are Jews still unsafe even after decades of fighting antisemitism?

And what must change if we want safety in the antizionist era?

To answer these questions, we must finally identify the core problem we have been unable to name.

Antisemitism emerged in 1879 as a modern racial-ideological hate movement when Wilhelm Marr coined the term to frame Jews as an existential racial threat to German society. Marr believed that only the triumph of one people—and the destruction of the other—could resolve the supposed struggle between Jews and Germans. He created the League of Antisemites (Antisemiten-Liga), the first political organization expressly devoted to excluding and removing Jews from Germany. Although the League formally adopted racial doctrine only in 1912, Marr’s writings laid the ideological groundwork that later fed directly into the racialized antisemitism of Nazism and, ultimately, the Holocaust.

For over sixty years after Marr coined the term “antisemitism” in 1879, much of European Jewry underestimated the danger of this new racial ideology. Many believed that emancipation, cultural integration, or the promises of European liberalism would protect them. Marr’s agitation was disturbing but widely dismissed as marginal—noise rather than an existential program. Yet across these decades, antisemitic libels hardened and spread, political movements radicalized, and the ideological scaffolding of Nazism quietly took shape. What had seemed like fringe rhetoric became the architecture of genocide.

Only after the Holocaust did the world finally condemn antisemitism as a racist hate movement—through the Nuremberg Trials, the founding of the United Nations, and later international legal and definitional frameworks (1948–2016). But by then, half of European Jewry had been destroyed.

This historical lesson raises an essential question: If antisemitism is already a universally........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)