I recently came across an interview with Victor Vakhshtayn, the Russian-Israeli sociologist now at Tel Aviv University, in which he discussed new antisemitism. The new antisemitism, in his account, is essentially anti-Zionism and is a form of contemporary leftist rhetoric. Indeed, hostility to Israel today often shades into hostility to Jews, and any analysis has to take that seriously. But the diagnosis is too narrow. Anti-Zionism operates at a level beneath any single political alignment. To call it specifically a feature of leftist discourse is to make the concept do political work that increasingly shields the Israeli state from moral criticism by recoding that criticism as ethnic hatred.

The concept of “new antisemitism,” current in public debate since the 1960s, attempts to name a third wave (following religious and racial antisemitism) in which hostility to Jews appears under the guise of anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel. The label has been politically useful but conceptually treacherous. Two recent attempts to specify what antisemitism means today, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition (2016) and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021), expose the difficulty of the task: each tries to draw a line, and each demonstrates how easily the line moves under pressure.

The IHRA definition fails because it conflates three distinct levels: hatred of Jews, anti-Jewish conspiracy theory, and discourse about Israel. Because the levels are not separated, the definition becomes available for political instrumentalization. It correctly identifies some anti-Israel discourse as antisemitic, such as holding Jews collectively responsible for Israeli state actions. Defenders of the IHRA definition  argue, fairly, that its examples were drawn from real patterns observed in contemporary anti-Israel discourse. The difficulty is that the formulations capture them without distinguishing them from legitimate political speech. It leaves room for the suspicion that any sufficiently sharp criticism of Israel is antisemitism unless it mimics criticism of “any other country” (whatever that means). Statements like “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” or “applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” are vague, and consequential in application: they license sanctions against speech that is, on any honest reading, political rather than antisemitic.

The Jerusalem Declaration is conceptually cleaner. It defines antisemitism as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility, or violence against Jews as Jews” and explicitly notes that criticism of Zionism, support for Palestinian rights, evidence-based criticism of Israeli policy, comparisons with settler colonialism or apartheid, and BDS are not in themselves antisemitic. This is an important correction: it protects the space of political analysis and debate. But the Declaration remains theoretically insufficient. It treats antisemitism as a harmful attitude or practice directed against Jews “as Jews” without explaining the deeper mechanism by which “the Jew” comes to function as an object of knowledge, causality, and world-explanation. It comes........

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