Antisemitism

What makes antisemitism distinctive: the conspiracy structure

Conservative commentator and attorney Ben Shapiro — who holds a law degree from Harvard and has written and spoken extensively on antisemitism — has observed that what distinguishes antisemitism from ordinary racism is its conspiracy-theory structure. Most racism is group contempt: people who hate Black Americans or Latino Americans hate them simply for being who they are. Antisemitism is different: it imagines Jews as the secret authors of history's disasters — controlling banks, governments, media, wars, and social upheaval from behind the scenes.

This structural difference explains several otherwise puzzling features of antisemitism:

• Why it is found across the political spectrum. The left version blames Jews (or "Zionists") for capitalism, colonialism, and global finance. The right version blames Jews for Marxism, moral decay, and demographic change. The same group is blamed for opposite things because the underlying claim is not about what Jews believe but about hidden power Jews supposedly hold.

• Why educated people can hold antisemitic beliefs. Conspiracy antisemitism presents itself as a theory of the world, not a confession of hatred. A person who would reject crude racial contempt may accept the claim that AIPAC controls American foreign policy, that Jewish financiers engineered the 2008 crash, or that Israel orchestrated the September 11 attacks — all without identifying themselves as antisemitic.

• Why it is so durable. A theory that attributes all major evils to a single hidden actor cannot be falsified by events. Every new disaster confirms the conspiracy; every piece of contradictory evidence is itself evidence of a cover-up.

Important caveat: The conspiracy-theory element is what makes antisemitism distinctive, not the whole of it. Plain racial hatred of Jews — the contempt expressed in Nazi race theory, in "Jews will not replace us" chants, in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting — is also antisemitism, and is not primarily conspiracy-driven. Both forms are real, both are dangerous, and both are documented in the historical and contemporary record.

Postone's framework: antisemitism as fetishized anti-capitalism

Historian Moishe Postone, in his 1980 essay "Anti-Semitism and National Socialism," offered one of the most analytically powerful explanations for antisemitism's durability and cross-cultural appeal.

Postone argued that modern antisemitism is a distorted form of anti-capitalism. In modern economies, people experience two kinds of power:

• Concrete, visible power: factories, physical labor, agricultural production, the tangible making of things. This is associated with the nation, the working class, the productive "us."

• Abstract, invisible power: finance, interest, global capital markets, money that moves without labor, power that seems to come from nowhere and controls everything. This is what feels alien, intangible, and threatening.

When people seek to personify abstract power — to give a human face to the invisible forces that seem to control their lives — they turn to a group that has historically been associated with finance, commerce, and cosmopolitanism: Jews. Jews become, in the antisemitic imagination, the embodiment of the abstract, the hidden, the international, the rootless. The "Jewish banker" or "Jewish media owner" is a concrete symbol of impersonal, intangible, global control.

This explains why antisemitism functions as a complete worldview: it takes the genuinely mysterious and alienating aspects of modern economic life and provides a simple, personified answer. The abstraction of global capital becomes "the Jews." The impersonality of financial markets becomes "Jewish control." The sense of powerlessness in the face of forces no individual can understand becomes rage at a group imagined to be secretly pulling the strings.

Postone's framework also explains why antisemitism is not simply reducible to economic conditions or political movements. It is a way of making the world legible — and because it provides that psychological function, it outlasts the specific circumstances that give it particular form.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's working definition (2016), adopted by over 40 countries, the European Parliament and hundreds of institutions, states: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” It lists these contemporary examples, taking into account the overall context:

Antisemitism often operates through double standards applied specifically to Jews and to Israel as the world's only Jewish state. The following questions are offered not as accusation but as honest self-examination. If your answers reveal a consistent pattern of exception-making for Jews and Israel that you do not apply elsewhere, that pattern warrants reflection.

Do you apply different standards of evidence?

• Do you accept claims about Jewish misconduct or Israeli atrocities without the evidence you would require before believing similar claims about others?
• Do you treat Israel or Jews as guilty until proven innocent, while extending the presumption of innocence to other parties?

Do you apply different standards of empathy?

• Do you feel empathy for hostages, rape victims, refugees, and the persecuted — except when they are Jewish?
• Are you moved by civilian deaths in other conflicts but find reasons to discount or minimize Jewish civilian deaths — including the 1,200 killed on October 7, 2023, the rape and abduction of women, the taking of infant hostages?
• Do you know that approximately 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries after 1948, but consider only Palestinian displacement?

Do you apply different standards of military conduct?

• Do you condemn Israel for civilian casualties caused by an enemy that deliberately positions combatants in hospitals, schools, mosques, apartment buildings, and tunnel networks beneath them — while excusing that enemy's deliberate use of civilians as shields?
• Do you hold Israel to a standard of zero civilian collateral damage that you do not apply to any other military in any other conflict?
• Are you aware that Israel distributed leaflets, made phone calls, and sent text messages warning civilians before strikes — and sent ground troops into danger rather than relying solely on air power — and do you weigh that against the civilian death toll?
• Do you compare Israel's civilian-to-combatant ratios unfavorably without comparing them to those of other modern urban conflicts (e.g., Mosul, Fallujah, Dresden)?

Do you apply different standards of language?

• Do you use the word "occupation" for Israel's presence in the West Bank but not for other territorial disputes or military presences around the world?
• Do you use the word "genocide" for Gaza but not for conflicts with vastly higher death tolls and clearer evidence of eliminationist intent?
• Do you use the word "apartheid" for Israel — where Arab citizens vote, serve as judges and members of parliament — but not for states with legally enforced ethnic or religious segregation?
• Do you expect Israel to accept a ceasefire that leaves Hamas intact and in power, while not expecting Hamas to release hostages or cease attacking Israeli civilians as a precondition?

None of these questions is a conclusive test. Criticism of Israeli government policy is not antisemitism. But a consistent pattern of applying uniquely harsh standards, uniquely withholding empathy, and uniquely demanding of Jews and their state what is not demanded of others — that pattern has a name.

The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), signed in 2021 by over 200 scholars of Holocaust studies, Jewish history, and related fields, offers an alternative definition: "Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility, or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)." The JDA explicitly states that the following are NOT antisemitic: supporting Palestinian rights, criticizing Israeli government policy, supporting a boycott of Israel, or describing Israel's founding as involving ethnic cleansing. JDA proponents argue that the IHRA definition, by treating some criticism of Israel as antisemitic, conflates political criticism with racism and has been used to suppress legitimate debate on university campuses and in public discourse.

One of the oldest antisemitic canards is the claim that Jews exercise illegitimate control over governments, financial systems, and media. In contemporary form it most often targets AIPAC and Jewish-American donors, framed as evidence that Jews control American foreign policy. Measuring this claim against documented reality reveals a consistent double standard:

AIPAC vs. direct foreign government funding of American universities

AIPAC is an American lobbying organization composed of American citizens — Jewish Americans and non-Jews — exercising First Amendment rights. It does not take foreign money and is not registered as a foreign agent. Its annual direct lobbying expenditure is approximately $3–4 million (OpenSecrets.org).

By comparison:

• Qatar — a foreign government — has donated hundreds of millions of dollars directly to American universities. Harvard received over $200 million from Qatari sources. Georgetown operates an entire campus in Doha funded by the Qatari government. A 2019 U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report found that American universities received at least $6.5 billion in potentially undisclosed foreign donations, with Qatar and China among the largest sources.

• China has operated Confucius Institutes — Chinese government-funded and directed programs — on hundreds of American university campuses. The FBI and Department of Education have documented Chinese government-linked donations to U.S. universities totaling billions of dollars. FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress in 2023 that China's influence operations on American campuses represent a national security concern.

The asymmetry: concern about foreign influence on American politics is routinely directed at Jewish Americans exercising domestic First Amendment rights, while direct foreign government funding of American universities at orders of magnitude greater scale receives a fraction of the scrutiny.

Other influence operations not described as "control"

• China's TikTok (operated by ByteDance, subject to Chinese Communist Party direction under Chinese law) reaches approximately 150 million American users and controls what content those users see and share. The FBI has described it as a potential intelligence and influence tool.

• China, Russia, Iran, and Qatar have all been documented paying American social media influencers and running influence operations on U.S. platforms. The FBI, ODNI, and State Department have published reports on each. None of these operations is described as those countries "controlling" American policy or media.

• Birth tourism — traveling to the United States to give birth and secure citizenship for a child — is practiced extensively by Chinese nationals (estimated 50,000–80,000 annual cases before the pandemic) and Russian nationals. The resulting American citizens, raised abroad by foreign-national parents, represent a longer-term mechanism of foreign influence that is rarely described as such.

The test

When an American citizen of Jewish background donates to a pro-Israel PAC, it is described by critics as evidence of illegitimate Jewish control of American foreign policy. When a foreign government funds billions of dollars in American university programming, when a CCP-linked platform shapes the information environment of 150 million Americans, or when foreign nationals travel to American hospitals to secure citizenship for their children — these are treated as unremarkable facts. The asymmetry is not about the scale of influence. It is about which group's participation triggers the "control" framing.