Antisemitism is confusing in a way that would be impressive if it weren’t so ugly. It’s like a virus that keeps mutating, not because it has a plan, but because society keeps providing new hosts, new excuses, new costumes. People say it’s ancient hatred, which is true. They just forget the second part. It’s also weirdly modern, always updating itself like an app you didn’t ask for.

My family story is not unusual, which is its own kind of punchline. My father went to the UK from Poland in 1933 with his grandparents and managed to escape the Holocaust. His father never made it out. No one knows what happened to him. That’s the phrase you end up saying a lot when you’re Jewish, “No one knows what happened.” It’s a sentence that sits in the room with you, like an extra chair you just can’t fold away.

On my mother’s side, her father was born on the boat from Russia around the turn of the 20th century and she was the first generation born in Britain. She was almost nine when Israel declared independence. She used to tell me about her experiences in elementary school in Stepney Green, and how the other kids would say, “Jew go home.” She was born in the UK, speaking English, doing British homework, eating whatever war-time rations that British children ate that could technically be described as food. Home was literally the place in which she was standing. But apparently, she’d missed the memo.

That’s the first layer of the confusion. Being told to go “home” when the people shouting it have no idea where your home is supposed to be. Or maybe they do. Maybe they like the vagueness. “Go home” is perfect as a slur because it’s both specific and meaningless. It’s a command that doesn’t require a destination, only your disappearance.

Then history did its thing and a Jewish homeland became real. You’d think, logically, that would simplify the shouting. But it didn’t.

Now we have Israel, and suddenly the same world that spent centuries telling Jews we don’t belong anywhere has developed a passionate opinion that the one place built around “maybe stop killing the Jews” is illegitimate. So “Jew go home” becomes “Jew go back to where you came from,” which is a fun little game because where we “came from,” in many cases, includes the places where Jews were being killed en masse and had to escape from. Poland. Lithuania. Ukraine. Germany, Russia. Places where Jewish cemeteries outnumber Jewish neighborhoods. Places where entire family trees just end.

It’s like being told, with total confidence, to return to a house that burned down, then being called dramatic when you mention the fire.

And because antisemitism is unusually adaptable, it doesn’t even need to keep its story straight. It never has. One day Jews are pathetic, weak, cowardly, parasites. The next day we’re masterminds running finance, media, war, disease, the weather, and the playlist at your gym. We are both too foreign and too influential. Both the problem and the puppet master. Both capitalist exploiters and revolutionary subversives. It’s internally contradictory, but it’s emotionally useful to people who need a villain. They don’t want a coherent theory. They want a target.

People still tell you, with a straight face, that Jews control everything. I would like to invite them into my living room for a quick demonstration. I don’t even control the television remote in my own home. If the global Jewish cabal is meeting about world domination, it is doing so without consulting my calendar, my bank account, or my kids, who have their own opinions about what we’re watching and categorically ignore my alleged world dominant authority.

As for Jews being wealthy, my overdraft would like a word. If the stereotype is true, there’s been a clerical error. I’m not even asking for the full “control the banks” package. I’d settle for “control the interest and overdraft fees” or “control the price of eggs and cottage cheese.” If there’s a secret Jewish finance committee, it has skipped my address for years. Maybe the invitation went to Poland in 1933 or Russia in 1902.

What makes modern antisemitism especially slippery is how it borrows legitimate public issues, then crosses a line into myth and collective guilt. This is where the conversation gets exhausting, because you’re forced into a logic test while everyone else gets to emote.

You can criticize Israel without being antisemitic. Of course you can. Governments deserve criticism. Israeli governments deserve plenty. But there’s a recognizable moment when criticism becomes something else. When “Israel” turns into “the Jews,” when every Jew on the planet becomes responsible for a cabinet decision they didn’t vote on, when the right of Jewish self-determination is treated as uniquely unacceptable, when old conspiracies get reskinned as political commentary. The language sounds modern. The machinery underneath is medieval.

It’s also the only topic where people feel comfortable applying a moral group project to strangers. No one stops random British Catholics to demand they answer for the Vatican. No one sees a Sikh guy at a bus stop and starts interrogating him about the Indian government. But Jews get asked to agree with imaginary pledges, denounce things on cue, prove they’re the “right kind” of Jew. It’s like living with a permanent pop quiz you never enrolled in.

And then there’s the internet, where everything bad gets a turbo boost. Old myths spread faster online, and they spread better when they’re attached to whatever everyone is already angry about. A war. A pandemic. A financial crash. Social change. Migration. A protest. A rumor. Antisemitism plugs into the moment like a cheap charger and suddenly it’s everywhere, recirculated by people who would swear they’re not prejudiced, they’re just “asking questions.” The questions are always the same. Just new terminology.

The adaptability is the point. Antisemitism works as a universal blame machine. It gives simple villains for complex problems. It can be worn by the far right, the far left, religious extremists, nationalists, conspiracy hobbyists, and people who just enjoy the emotional release of hating someone with a history attached. You can swap the costume and keep the accusation. That’s why it doesn’t die.

So yes, it’s confusing. You can be told you don’t belong, then told you belong too much. You can be accused of being rootless, then accused of having a homeland. You can be called a foreign invader in the country you were born in and a European colonizer in the country you moved to. You can be told you’re cowardly and bloodthirsty in the same breath, depending on which poster someone saw that morning.

At least in Israel the hatred is more honest in one specific way. You’re not singled out as an oddity, a lone representative of a “problem” people want to poke. You’re part of a loud (sometimes too loud), complicated, stubborn collective that doesn’t pretend the world is fair. It’s better to be collectively hated than individually victimized, not because it’s pleasant, but because there’s clarity in it. If someone hates you for being Jewish, they don’t have to squint at your surname first. The mask drops faster.

Confusing isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is when people insist the confusion is your fault. Like the contradictions are yours to resolve. Like the world’s oldest, most adaptable prejudice is just a misunderstanding you can clear up with the right tone of voice, the right disclaimer, the right performance of reassurance.

I’ve tried. Jews have tried. We’ve written books, taught classes, built museums, testified, apologized for surviving, apologized for not dying quietly enough, apologized for existing in the wrong place, then for existing in any place at all.

Antisemitism doesn’t want clarity. It wants permission. And it keeps getting it, dressed up as politics, satire, justice, tradition, “just a joke,” “just a question,” “just my opinion,” “just history.”

Meanwhile, I’m still here, still confused, still apparently in charge of the world, and still unable to find the remote when my kids hide it between the cushions on the couch.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)