Breaking the Symbol |
Antisemitism is, at its core, a symbol problem.
Confronted with the sheer volume of lies and distortions circulating about Jews and Israel, the instinct is to correct the record: disprove the claim, supply the missing context, argue the facts. It is a reasonable instinct. It also does not work.
The facts were never the point. They are in service of the symbol. Every accusation and every distortion draws its persuasive power not from who Jews actually are, but from what Jews have been made to represent. Refute one falsehood, and the symbol does not disappear. It simply recruits another.
The strategic task, then, is not merely to correct individual claims, but to erode and delegitimize the symbol that gives them their force.
To see why that works, it helps to understand what the symbol actually is. This is not metaphor. It is a mechanism, and a familiar one to anyone who has studied how groups learn to hate other groups. No population can be hated as a population; it first has to stop being seen as individuals. This is the basic operation of dehumanization: a person collapses into a category, and the category hardens into a threat. Jews stop being neighbors, classmates, artists, parents, friends. Israel stops being a society of nine million ordinary, quarrelling, diverse human beings. What is left is a symbol, and a symbol will absorb whatever a given moment needs it to mean: greed, conspiracy, colonialism, the accumulated resentment of an era looking for somewhere to land.
If dehumanization is what builds the symbol, then reversing that process is what should break it. And the reversal has a clear shape. A person, unlike a category, cannot be hated on principle. Hating a person takes a reason, something specific they did. A face gets in the way of the symbol. So does a family, a private grief, a sense of humor that does not translate. A situation, unlike a caricature, has competing truths and moral residue that refuse to resolve into a clean verdict. Once Jews and Israelis become emotionally real and morally complicated, the symbol starts to crack, not because anyone argued it down, but because it no longer fits what is standing in front of you. Proximity and familiarity, under the right conditions, erode prejudice in ways that argument alone cannot touch.
This is the premise on which the Shofar Fund, the philanthropic venture fund I advise, is built: identify and back the initiatives that generate this kind of contact and complexity at scale, the ones that make it harder to encounter Jews and Israel as symbols and easier to encounter them as people.
So, practically, what breaks a symbol? Two things, in our experience: humanization and complexity. We invest upstream, at the point where perception is still forming and has not yet hardened into conviction. Each initiative operates in a different sector of American and global life, but the underlying instruction is the same: replace abstraction with human beings, and caricature with complexity. The single question we ask of any prospective investment is whether it makes Jews and Israel harder to see as symbols and easier to see as people.
Sometimes the answer is exposure, plainly understood: warmth, humor, familiarity, the slow accretion of ordinary contact that makes a person........