What antisemitism looks like now

Antisemitism does not call Jews inferior. It calls them clever, rich, organised and hidden. You need no qualification to use any of what follows and nobody’s permission to say it out loud.

Before anything below. Recognising a pattern is a hypothesis, not a verdict. Naming something wrongly costs you the standing you will need later, and costs the next person who is right. This page is for deciding, not accusing.

The one idea

It is not ordinary contempt pointed downwards. It is a conspiracy theory pointing upwards.

Three things follow. It recurs in traditions agreeing on nothing else, because a story about hidden power at the top fits whatever a movement thinks the top is. People alert to prejudice miss it, because they are listening for somebody called inferior and this arrives as flattery turned inside out. And facts alone do not reach it, because a belief treating every disproof as concealment has no exit. Which is why the entry on Jewish control says refuse the question, not answer it.

Where it comes from now

Three streams. Whichever you find easiest to name is not the one that tests you.

The far right. The organising idea is replacement: immigration engineered to displace a native population, with Jews engineering it. Marchers at Charlottesville in August 2017 chanted “Jews will not replace us”. At the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on 27 October 2018 a man murdered eleven worshippers. He had written that Jews were bringing non-white immigrants into the country. It is the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in US history.

The far left. The vocabulary is anti-imperialist rather than racial, and the object is a state rather than a people. The wide claim, that anti-Zionism is the newest antisemitism, is contested and gains you nothing asserted flatly. Take the narrow one. An argument about one state can carry the older story about hidden Jewish power, and sometimes does.

Islamist movements. The Hamas covenant of 1988 is the text to point at, because none of it is coded. Article 22 says Jews took control of the world media with their money, and has them behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and both world wars. Article 32 names the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. European conspiracy literature of the 1900s, imported whole.

And not only a text. On Yom Kippur, 2 October 2025, a man drove a car at worshippers outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in Manchester, then left it with a knife and continued. Two men were killed. The Home Secretary told the Commons it was an act of antisemitic terrorism, by a terrorist pledging allegiance to Islamism.

Be precise about the second death. That statement records one man killed by the attacker. Initial findings indicate the other sustained a gunshot wound during the armed police response, which the police watchdog is investigating. It was the first fatal antisemitic terrorist attack on British soil since communal records began in 1984, and saying it without the fence is how you get taken apart.

Then say the next part before anybody says it for you. Islamist movements are political movements and Muslims are not them. A reader sliding from one to the other has done what this page exists to oppose.

Which of them kills. Both do. Two synagogues, seven years and an ocean apart, from two different streams. Know the picture where you are rather than making a global claim somebody will refute in front of you. In your country’s annual figures, read the assault counts separately from the headline total.

And the honest part. Everybody sees clearly the stream furthest from their own politics. One of the three is your blind spot, and it is the one worth making yourself look at.

Why it gets denied so readily

Two moves, and knowing them in advance is most of what composure is.

High status, so not really a minority. Jewish success gets offered as though it settled the matter. A conspiracy theory about rich and clever people is not disproved by producing rich and clever people.

The complaint turned round onto the complainant. That move has a name, the Livingstone Formulation, given to it by David Hirsh: the reply that a charge of antisemitism was made in bad faith, to shield Israel from criticism. The entry on silencing criticism answers it.

The Soviet inheritance

Much of the vocabulary you will meet was manufactured, and by whom is on record.

A Soviet state campaign ran from 1967, after the Six-Day War. Roughly nine million copies of some fifty anti-Zionist books circulated, and Radio Moscow broadcast over a thousand hours a week in eighty languages. In 1975 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism a form of racism. What it produced was the old material with the word Jew removed.

Use it carefully. It tells you where a formulation was made, not what the person repeating it wants. As proof of motive it collapses.

The two questions

Most of this no longer says Jew, which makes recognition the skill rather than rebuttal. The vocabulary to notice: globalists, international financiers, rootless cosmopolitans, a certain lobby, the people who really run things.

Test the structure, not the word. Ask two things of the sentence in front of you.

1. Is a hidden group being placed behind the visible events?
2. Is that group’s power described as concealed and inherited, rather than won and open to challenge?

Four coded claims arrive often enough to have their own entries here. That Jews answer to a foreign state. That Jews answer for its conduct. That Jews kill for blood or organs. That Israel is the new Nazi Germany.

The line that keeps you credible

A warning first, because this is where advocates do themselves the most damage. Getting it wrong in public does not land only on you.

Hostility to Israeli policy is not antisemitism. A war’s conduct, a coalition, settlements, a court reform: that is arguing about a state, which is ordinary politics. Answer it with the word antisemitism and you forfeit the audience in one move, and hand over a grievance used against every case where the lineage is plain.

The rule underneath: contest the move, not the subject.

The most used test is Natan Sharansky’s, published in 2004. Three Ds. Demonisation, when Israel’s actions are “blown out of all sensible proportion” or compared to Nazism. Double standards, when the same conduct passes unremarked elsewhere. Delegitimisation, when Israel’s right to exist is denied “alone among all peoples in the world”.

Be honest about what that is. A prompt for thinking rather than a proof, and where a double standard begins is arguable. Conceding that costs you nothing.

Five things you can say out loud

“Antisemitism doesn’t call us inferior. It calls us clever, rich and organised. That’s why people watching for ordinary contempt walk straight past it.”

“Say that sentence again with the word Jews in it instead of Zionists. If it gets worse, you’ve got your answer.”

“Criticise the policy and I’ll argue the policy. You’ve moved to what Jews are like, and that’s a different claim.”

“Article 32 of the Hamas covenant names the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That isn’t my reading of the document. That’s the document.”

“I’m not asking you to agree with me about Israel. I’m asking why that sentence needs a hidden Jewish hand to work.”

Say them the way you talk, or they read as a script.

What it is like from inside

This is the part that changes minds.

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights surveyed nearly 8,000 Jews across 13 EU countries, fieldwork in 2023, published July 2024. Of those surveyed, 76 per cent said they conceal their Jewishness at least occasionally. EU figures, and no claim is made here about anywhere else.

What that describes is not mainly fear of violence. It is a running calculation. Whether to wear the necklace, whether to mention the holiday at work, which way to walk home.

And what people name most often is not the abuse. It is the silence of friends who would have said something for anybody else.

Answer these from memory

Fill in the blanks133 words

No scrolling. What are the two questions you ask of a sentence? Which stream is your own blind spot? What do you never answer with the word antisemitism?

Then the exercise, forty minutes this week. Take your five examples, run the two questions over each, and sort into three piles: plainly antisemitic, plainly political criticism, unclear. Expect unclear to be the largest.

If somebody uses a coded term in front of me this week, then I will ask what that sentence would mean with the word Jews put back into it, and say nothing further on the first pass.

If I cannot tell whether something is antisemitic or ordinary criticism, then I will leave it in the unclear pile and argue the substance, rather than reach for the word and lose the room.