There is a phrase that has become liturgical in its repetition, an incantation recited by university presidents and politicians and editorial boards whenever the subject of antisemitism arises: antisemitism and Islamophobia. The two words are joined at the hip now, never permitted to appear alone, as though one cannot condemn hatred of Jews without immediately, reflexively, adding hatred of Muslims to the ledger. The pairing has become so automatic that to question it feels almost impolite.

But I want to question it — not because Muslim suffering doesn’t matter, but because the equivalence is false. And in Jewish tradition, language matters. Naming matters. The Torah’s first act of human vocation is God bringing the animals to Adam to see what he would call them. To name a thing correctly is the beginning of understanding it. To name it incorrectly — to call two fundamentally different phenomena by the same label — is to guarantee that we will understand neither.

As a rabbi, my concern here is not competitive. It is pedagogical. If we cannot accurately name what antisemitism is and how it differs from other forms of hatred, we cannot teach our children what they are inheriting, explain to our congregants why the world responds to Jewish suffering the way it does, or protect what we have not first understood.

That is why this matters. And that is why I am writing about it now.

I have grown tired of this false equivalence — not because I lack compassion for others who suffer, but because I can see what it is being used to do. The reflexive pairing of antisemitism with Islamophobia has become a tool for reducing Jewish legitimacy: for flattening a three-thousand-year-old people into a mere religious preference, for making Jewish collective identity something negotiable, something that requires another group’s suffering as a permission slip before it can be acknowledged. I am tired of watching it happen. And I believe a rabbi has an obligation to say so.

Four days ago, a man drove a truck packed with explosives into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan — one of the largest Reform congregations in the country — while 140 children under the age of five were in preschool inside. The attacker was a Lebanese-born U.S. citizen whose brothers were members of Hezbollah. The FBI called it a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community. Teachers sang songs to keep toddlers calm while the building filled with smoke.

It was not an isolated event. In the span of three weeks, four separate attacks on American soil emerged from the same ideological ecosystem — the worldview sustained by the Islamic Republic and spread by its proxies. And yet much of the media’s first instinct was not to name that ecosystem but to explain it away: to lead with the attacker’s family grief, to note that Temple Israel was “dedicated to the formation of a Jewish state,” as though a synagogue’s denominational history were relevant context for a preschool bombing.

After 9/11, after the Boston Marathon, after the Pulse nightclub, American society had little trouble calling such attacks what they were. That willingness is eroding — and the erosion is not accidental. It is the product of years of conditioning in which the word “Islamophobia” has made it taboo to connect jihadist theology to jihadist action. A society that cannot name the source of violence against its citizens cannot protect them. And a vocabulary that treats every honest identification of Islamist terror as bigotry leaves us mute precisely when clarity matters most.

Judaism is a tradition of distinctions. Havdalah is not a minor ritual afterthought; it is a theology of perception. We sanctify God by learning to distinguish — between holy and ordinary, light and darkness, seventh day and six days of labor. A rabbi, at his best, teaches people how to make distinctions that the modern world would rather erase.

Not every hatred is the same. Not every prejudice has the same roots. When we collapse unlike phenomena into a single moral category, we do not deepen understanding. We weaken it. We teach people to substitute slogan for thought.

So let us begin with what these things actually are.

Antisemitism, as the anthropologist Matti Bunzl argues in his important 2005 essay, is not merely prejudice against a religion. It is a racial ideology, born in the late nineteenth century, designed to police the boundaries of the ethnically pure nation-state. The term itself was coined in 1879 by the German pamphleteer Wilhelm Marr, who took great pains to distinguish his hatred of Jews from older Christian theological contempt. Marr didn’t care what Jews believed. He cared what Jews were. Their blood, not their prayers, was the problem. As Moses Hess wrote nearly two decades earlier, “The Germans hate the religion of the Jews less than they hate their race.”

Antisemitism has never been primarily about Judaism as a faith. It has been about Jews as a people. Conversion could not save you. Assimilation could not save you. Edith Stein, a Carmelite nun born Jewish, died in Auschwitz alongside Regina Jonas, the first woman ordained as a rabbi. One had given her life to Christianity, the other to Judaism. To the Nazis, there was no difference. Their blood was the verdict.

The Jew, in the antisemitic mind, is not a believer who can be argued out of his belief. He is an ontological fact that must be dealt with. The Jew is imagined not simply as mistaken but as corrosive: too powerful and too weak, too tribal and too cosmopolitan, too visible and too hidden. Antisemitism does not merely criticize Judaism. It demonizes Jewish being.

Bunzl further argues that the two phenomena arise from different political formations. Antisemitism belonged to the age of racial nationalism. Islamophobia is a late twentieth- and twenty-first-century phenomenon, bound up with immigration and civilizational anxiety. Antisemitism says: the Jew is an alien presence within us. Islamophobia says: Islam is an alien force coming toward us.

Now consider Islamophobia. The term describes a genuine phenomenon: bigotry directed at Muslims, suspicion of Islamic practice, hostility toward Muslim communities. This is real, and it deserves moral condemnation. But it is a fundamentally different kind of thing.

Islam is a universal, missionary faith practiced by people of every ethnicity on earth — Indonesians, Bosnians, Nigerians, Persians, Turks. There is no “Muslim race.” When a Muslim leaves Islam, the so-called Islamophobe loses interest. The prejudice tracks the belief, not the blood.

A Jew who leaves Judaism, by contrast, remains a Jew — in his own eyes, in the eyes of his community, and, most fatefully, in the eyes of his enemies. Einstein was an agnostic. Freud was an atheist. Neither was made less Jewish by his unbelief, and neither was shielded from the hatred that pursued Jews as Jews. The antisemite does not ask what you believe. He asks who your mother was.

This is the categorical error at the heart of the false equivalence: it treats a form of racism and a form of religious prejudice as though they were the same species of hatred. One targets a people. The other targets a faith.

Here it is worth pausing to address a question that honest people sometimes ask: Why does the distinction matter? Isn’t hatred just hatred?

It matters because the misdiagnosis determines the treatment. Islamophobia, rooted in what people think and do, can be engaged through education, exposure, and the ordinary processes by which democracies accommodate religious difference.

Antisemitism resists this treatment because it is not about what Jews think or do. It is about what Jews are. No amount of Jewish good behavior has ever cured it. Jews have been hated as capitalists and as communists, as cosmopolitans and as clannish, as secular corrupters and as religious fanatics. The hatred reshapes itself around whatever the Jew happens to be. This is what makes antisemitism sui generis — not because Jewish suffering outranks anyone else’s, but because the mechanism of this particular hatred is unlike any other.

Consider a thought experiment that reveals the difference starkly. If every Muslim in Europe left tomorrow, Islamophobia in Europe would fade. It might persist as a cultural memory, but it would lose its object and, over time, its energy. Now imagine that every Jew on earth vanished. Would antisemitism disappear? History answers clearly: no. Antisemitism thrives in countries where Jews have not lived for generations. It flourishes in Japan, in Malaysia, in Pakistan — places with virtually no Jewish population at all. The conspiracy theories, the cosmic suspicions, the sense that a hidden hand controls the world — none of this requires an actual Jew. Antisemitism does not need Jews. It needs the idea of Jews. No other hatred on earth works this way. And no framework that treats it as interchangeable with a prejudice that does require its object can possibly understand it.

To collapse this into a generic category alongside Islamophobia is to lose precisely the information you need to fight it.

The false equivalence also does something to Jewish identity itself. When antisemitism is recategorized as a religious prejudice — parallel to Islamophobia — Jews become merely a faith community. A group of people who happen to share beliefs, no different in kind from Christians or Muslims.

But this is not what Jews are. Jews are a people — an ancient, covenanted people whose identity encompasses religion, yes, but also language, land, shared history, collective memory, and mutual obligation. A Jew who never sets foot in a synagogue is still a Jew. This is a reality as old as the covenant at Sinai, understood by both those who love the Jewish people and those who hate them.

Scott Abramson argues persuasively that this flattening is often not accidental. The equivalence is frequently deployed to imply that Jews, like Muslims, are merely a religious group rather than a people — and if Jews are reduced to a faith community alone, then Jewish nationhood can be cast as artificial. The false equivalence does political work: it quietly dissolves Jewish peoplehood.

There is also the question of what happens to honest discourse about Islam when the false equivalence holds. Sam Harris has argued, with characteristic bluntness, that the term “Islamophobia” was designed to make it impossible to criticize Islam as a system of ideas without being accused of bigotry against Muslims as people. There is considerable truth in this. We do not speak of “Christophobia.” No one who writes a book criticizing evangelical theology is accused of racism against Alabamans. But criticize certain doctrines within Islam — doctrines about apostasy, about blasphemy, about martyrdom, about the role of women — and the word “Islamophobia” descends like a portcullis, cutting off conversation.

There is something else the term obscures, and it must be said plainly. A phobia is an irrational fear. But not all fear of Islamist violence is irrational. Journalists were murdered at Charlie Hebdo for publishing cartoons of the Prophet. Salman Rushdie lived under a death sentence for writing a novel. Theo van Gogh was assassinated on an Amsterdam street for making a film. On September 11th, nineteen men flew planes into buildings in the name of jihad. These are not figments of prejudice. They are historical facts, carried out by people who cited Islamic scripture and invoked Islamic authority. No Jews hijacked planes to avenge an insult to Moses. No Christians murdered cartoonists to defend the honor of Jesus.

Whatever else one wants to say about the state of the world, this asymmetry is real, and pretending it does not exist is not tolerance — it is denial. To say so is not to indict all Muslims, the overwhelming majority of whom are as horrified by these acts as anyone. It is to insist that when violence is carried out in the name of a religion, citing its texts, the religion must be part of the conversation. The word “Islamophobia” makes that conversation impossible by treating every honest question as a symptom of bigotry.

Antisemitism, by contrast, has never been a response to anything Jews actually did. The fear at the heart of antisemitism has no rational basis. It never has.

Daniel Schultz is right to warn that critique of Islam can become reductive — that it sometimes codes “non-Western” as backward in ways that reproduce old colonial patterns. That caution is worth taking seriously. But even once it is taken, the category problem remains. Free societies depend on the distinction between challenging ideas and demonizing human beings. And the people who suffer most when that distinction collapses are Muslims themselves — reformers, dissidents, feminists, freethinkers — trying to do from within their tradition what Jews and Christians have done within theirs. To flatten the conversation with a false equivalence is to abandon them.

None of this means that bigotry against Muslims is acceptable. It is not. The Torah’s most frequently repeated commandment — appearing thirty-six times — is the obligation to love the stranger. A rabbi who would teach his community to despise Muslims, or to look upon their suffering with indifference, has failed at the most basic level of his vocation.

But love of the stranger does not require intellectual dishonesty. Compassion does not demand that we mislabel what we are seeing.

So how do we push back?

We refuse lazy language. We oppose anti-Muslim hatred clearly and unapologetically — but we refuse formulations that erase the specificity of antisemitism. When a politician pairs the two words reflexively, we ask: do you understand why these are different? And if not, we teach.

We educate Jews, especially younger Jews, about peoplehood. If Jews think of themselves only as practitioners of a religion, they will have no language with which to explain why hatred of Jews is not reducible to prejudice against a creed.

We teach a moral discipline that has become rare: ideas may be criticized; people may not be essentialized. This distinction protects Muslims from bigotry and protects honest discourse about Islam from suppression. It is the foundation of a free society.

And we recover the courage to distinguish. Not to harden our hearts, but to sharpen our minds.

Antisemitism and Islamophobia are both real. They both demand our resistance. But they are not the same thing. They do not arise from the same roots, operate by the same logic, or respond to the same remedies. Every time we pair them as though they were identical, we make it harder to fight either one.

Hate has no place in our world, although I don’t think it’s going anywhere soon. But we owe it to ourselves and to our children to make sure they understand the origins — to know what antisemitism actually is, where it comes from, why it operates like no other hatred on earth, and why the easy pairing that the world keeps offering them is a false comfort built on a false equivalence. That is the work of education. That is the work of a rabbi. And it is work that cannot wait.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)