Jews are white and privileged, so antisemitism is not real racism

The fuller answer

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Start with who Jews actually are

The claim describes a population that does not exist. The strongest thing you can do is describe the one that does, before you answer anything.

Pew Research Center’s survey of Israel, published in 2016, found 48 per cent of Israeli Jews identifying as Sephardi or Mizrahi. Forty-five per cent identified as Ashkenazi. Those families came from Baghdad, Sana’a, Casablanca, Tripoli, Aleppo, Cairo and Tehran. About 851,000 Jews were living in Arab countries in 1948, and fewer than 4,000 live in those countries now. That figure is a population count for 1948 rather than a count of departures. Iran is not an Arab country and belongs beside them anyway: nearly 60,000 Jews were there at the revolution of 1979, and a little over 8,000 remain.

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 177,600 Ethiopian Jews in the country in 2024, of whom 93,400 were born in Ethiopia. Somewhere above 80,000 Israelis descend from the Jewish communities of India. Bene Israel from Maharashtra, Cochin Jews from Kerala, Baghdadi Jews from Kolkata, Bene Menashe from the north east.

Give those figures with their limits, because somebody will check. Israeli official statistics classify a person born in Israel to an Israel-born father as of Israeli origin. Ancestry therefore drops out of the count by the third generation. Lewin-Epstein and Cohen show this understates Mizrahi numbers rather than inflating them. Ashkenazi and Mizrahi families have also been marrying each other for seventy years, and a growing share of Israelis are of mixed descent. The categories are real and they are blurring.

What survives every version of the count is the same. Jews of Middle Eastern, North African and Ethiopian descent are the largest bloc of Israeli Jews. The entry on settler colonialism uses that fact against the colonial framing. Here it does a different job: it answers the assumption that Jewish means European.

“But most of the Jews I know are white”

Often true, and pretending otherwise destroys everything else you say.

In Western countries a great many Jews, mostly of Ashkenazi descent, are read as white by strangers and receive the everyday advantages that follow. They are not stopped in the street more often. Their names are not filtered out of shortlists. Concede that before anyone pushes you to, and concede it early.

The argument is not that Jews are uniformly disadvantaged. It is three narrower things. That this whiteness was granted late and has been withdrawn before. That it was never extended to most of the world’s Jews at all. And that it is beside the point, because antisemitism does not select its targets for being low status.

Was Jewish whiteness ever secure?

No, and the record on that is not ancient history.

Racial antisemitism was a racial theory and said so openly. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes it as resting on the false idea that Jews are a biologically separate race. That idea was dressed in the language of nineteenth century race science. The people who wanted Jews dead did not think of them as white. They thought of them as another race entirely.

The Nuremberg Laws, announced on 15 September 1935, defined Jewishness by descent. Three or four grandparents who had belonged to the Jewish religious community made a person a Jew. That held whatever the person believed, practised or had been baptised into. Belief was irrelevant to the test. Ancestry was the test.

Exclusion in the liberal democracies is inside living memory too. In 1922 Harvard’s president proposed capping Jewish admissions at 15 per cent, having watched the Jewish share of the undergraduate body pass 20 per cent. A university committee rejected the explicit quota in 1923. Other universities in the United States and Canada adopted such limits through the 1920s and 1930s. Two Supreme Court justices cited that history in 2023.

In Britain the exclusion ran socially rather than academically and lasted as long. A study in the journal Patterns of Prejudice traces antisemitism in British golf from 1894 to 1970, across clubs, press and governing bodies. Lord Grade, later chairman of the BBC, has described being invited to play at Muirfield in the 1980s. The invitation was withdrawn once his home club was identified.

David Schraub’s term for what this produces is conditional whiteness: real while it holds, contingent on assimilation and on nobody deciding otherwise. David Baddiel puts it more sharply. Jews are Schrodinger’s whites, white or not white according to what the observer needs at the time. And he redefines the word itself. White, he argues, really means safe.

Where this backfires. Delivered at length, the history sounds like a bid for sympathy and people stop listening. Two sentences, then come back to the present.

The move that works: ask what the framework predicts

This is the part worth your preparation time, and it is what persuades somebody who thinks of themselves as antiracist.

Most working models of prejudice rest on one picture. A dominant group codes a subordinate group as inferior: stupider, dirtier, more primitive, less fit to govern itself. Find the group placed at the bottom and you have found the oppression. That picture is accurate about a very great deal, which is why it is used everywhere.

Antisemitism has never fitted it. It does not say Jews are stupid. It says they are clever and use it against you. It does not say Jews are weak. It says they are hidden, coordinated and in charge. Nazi propaganda did not describe a backward people. It described an enemy running finance, the press and Bolshevism at once.

So a detector calibrated to find low status returns nothing when it is pointed at Jews. Worse than nothing. It reads Jewish success as proof that there is no problem here, which is the exact material the conspiracy theory is made from. The prosperity offered as evidence that antisemitism has ended is the thing antisemitism talks about.

Ask the question out loud, because the question does the work. What does your model predict about a hatred that attributes too much power to its target? If the answer is that no such hatred can be serious, the model has a hole in it. That is a finding about the model, not about the hatred.

Then produce the document, because the question on its own is only a question. The most widely used measure of antisemitic attitudes in the world is the ADL’s Global 100, which puts eleven statements to people in a hundred-odd countries and counts how many they accept. Read the eleven. Five of them ask whether Jews have too much power or too much control: in business, in international finance, over global affairs, over the United States government, over the global media. The rest cover loyalty to Israel, thinking themselves better than other people, caring only about their own kind, deserving the hatred they get, talking too much about the Holocaust, and causing most of the world’s wars.

Not one of the eleven asks whether Jews are inferior. Not stupider, not dirtier, not less able to govern themselves. The people whose job is to measure this prejudice had to build their instrument upside down, because the ordinary shape does not fit. That is not an advocate’s claim about how antisemitism works. It is the standard questionnaire, and anybody can read it.

Then give the scale, in one line. Pew’s 2025 report on global religion counted nearly 15 million Jews in 2020, 0.2 per cent of the world’s population. That is fewer than the 16.6 million alive in 1939. Two people in every thousand, fewer than before the Holocaust, imagined as the hidden management of the world.

Baddiel’s hierarchy of racisms falls out of the same mechanism. Antisemitism is ranked last because it fails a test built around a different prejudice.

Where this backfires. Asked at speed, “what does your framework predict” sounds like a debating trick. Say plainly that you are not scoring a point, and that you think the framework is right about most things and blind about this one.

“But the antisemitism charge gets used in bad faith”

Sometimes it is, and conceding that is what buys you everything else.

People do use it to put a political position beyond argument, and most of the room has watched it happen. So do not ask anybody to accept the charge on trust. Ask them to test it: say what the sentence claims about Jews, and let that be answered. A charge you can argue with is not a gag, and whoever refuses to argue with it is the one closing the subject. The entry on claims that antisemitism is used to silence criticism of Israel carries the test and what to do when the accusation is being made badly by people on your own side.

“But Jews are over-represented in…”

That reply is coming. Meet it as a structure rather than with a counter-statistic.

Producing figures concedes that a headcount explains how institutions work, and no figure ever closes it. Whatever you supply becomes further evidence. The entry on claims that Jews control the media, the banks and world events sets out what to do instead. It carries the substitution test, and the signal for when to stop talking.

The only thing to add here is the join between the two claims. The privilege claim and the conspiracy claim run on the same fuel, which is attributed power. One says that the power means Jews cannot be victims. The other says the power is the crime. Naming that in a single sentence often lands where argument does not.

Is antisemitism a historical concern?

No, and there is current data to hand.

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights surveyed 7,992 Jewish people across 13 member states between January and June 2023. Eighty per cent said antisemitism had grown over five years. Seventy-six per cent hide their Jewish identity at least occasionally. Thirty-four per cent avoid Jewish events or venues because of safety. Four per cent had been physically attacked for being Jewish in the previous year.

One further figure from that survey is worth carrying. Seventy-five per cent said they are held responsible for the actions of the Israeli government because they are Jewish.

Dara Horn’s formulation is the one to reach for when somebody replies that the Holocaust is taught in every school. People love dead Jews. Commemoration of the murdered sits perfectly comfortably alongside indifference to the living. A story about the Nazis lets everybody in the room feel like the good ones.

Four lines you can use

“More Israeli Jews come from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco and Ethiopia than from Europe. ‘Jews are white’ is a fact about my family, not about Jews.”

“Yes, I get read as white, and I get the benefits. It didn’t help my great-grandparents, and it isn’t what antisemitism goes after.”

“Antisemitism doesn’t say we’re inferior. It says we’re in charge. What does your model do with a racism shaped like that?”

“The standard survey for measuring antisemitism asks eleven questions. Five are about Jews having too much power. None asks whether Jews are inferior. Go and read it.”

“You’re offering Jewish success as proof there’s no problem. That success is what the conspiracy theory is made out of.”

Your next step

If somebody tells you this week that Jews cannot face racism because Jews are white, then ask one question and stop there: “what does your theory predict about a prejudice that says its target is too powerful?” Let the silence sit rather than filling it.

And the obstacle, with the answer written in advance. If the demographic figures have gone out of your head under pressure, use the shape instead of the detail: “look up how many Israelis came from Iraq and Morocco, then tell me Jews are European.” Find the numbers afterwards and put them on the same card as your other lines.