Few US Senate primaries this year carry greater implications for the Democratic Party's future than Michigan's August 4 contest. One of the race's leading candidates is Abdul El-Sayed, whose positions and endorsements place him squarely within the antizionist movement.
To many Americans, the fact that El-Sayed has affectionately referred to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as his "favorite Jewish uncle" would seem to settle any suggestion that his antizionism reflects anti-Jewish bigotry. El-Sayed plainly does not dislike Jews categorically. He admires one of the country's most prominent Jewish politicians and embraces him in explicitly Jewish terms.
That apparent exoneration reveals something important about how modern Western societies learned to recognize the villainization of Jews.
Since World War II, Nazism – which targeted all Jews for elimination – has been the West's definitive prototype of anti-Jewish bigotry. Measured against that prototype, an ideology that welcomes and even elevates Jews who share its own views appears disqualified from being anti-Jewish. Sanders's place in El-Sayed's political and personal imagination, therefore, appears to vindicate El-Sayed against any charge of villainizing Jews.
The prototype underlying that conclusion, however, was built on a fundamental mistake: treating anti-Jewish bigotry as inherently premodern.
The West traced a symbolic archive of images and accusations against "the Jew" back to centuries of religious hostility. Yet those origins tell us where the archive developed, not what the phenomenon essentially is.
Religion supplied the historical setting in which that archive accumulated around the Jew as the figure rejecting a supposed redemptive truth, but the Jew's role was portable. Once religious power gave way to modern secular forces, those forces inherited the archive, stripped it of God, and reconstructed it in the languages of race, psychology, and metaphysics.
But the West came to interpret anti-Jewish bigotry differently – as an ancient pathology that modernity had not yet eliminated. It therefore viewed Nazism as that pathology's definitive culmination, rather than as one modern form of anti-Jewish bigotry among others. Instead of remaining vigilant for other distinctly modern forms, the West built its postwar moral architecture around preventing Nazism's return.
After Auschwitz, Western societies rightly became extraordinarily sensitive to fascism, racial hierarchy, and explicit Jew-hatred. But the postwar order did not stop at recognizing Nazism's characteristics as dangerous. It went further and conferred moral authority on their perceived opposites. Anti-racism. Universalism. Internationalism. Nazism's traits became the map of evil, and the inverse of that map became the territory of good.
That framework overlooked a fundamental feature of anti-Jewish bigotry: it has never belonged to a single political ideology. Jews can be blamed for capitalism by one movement and communism by another, for racial inferiority in one context and racial supremacy in another, for refusing assimilation and for dissolving the nation, sometimes by the same accuser in the same decade.
Postwar Western culture trained itself to recognize the villainization of Jews primarily through Nazism's particular characteristics rather than through the role assigned to the Jew. In doing so, it sensitized itself to ideological form rather than symbolic function.
The consequence was that another modern anti-Jewish ideology could assume the shape of anti-Nazism – thereby not only avoiding being identified as anti-Jewish bigotry, but also acquiring moral authority within the postwar order.
That is exactly what antizionism did. Propagated by the Soviet Union and its Arab nationalist allies, antizionism reconstructed Zionism and Israel as enemies of humanity through a set of distinctly modern libels. Drawing on Nazi imagery and Holocaust inversion, it recast Jews as the new Nazis, perpetrators of the very evils – racism, colonialism, apartheid, and genocide – around whose rejection the postwar moral order was being built.
The maneuver's real sophistication lay in routing those accusations through that moral order's own sanctified values. Where Nazism had cast Jews as racially alien pollutants corrupting European societies, antizionism portrayed them as the inverse: hyper-white invaders of non-European lands.
By the logic of the story the West told itself after World War II, antizionism should be incapable of reproducing anti-Jewish bigotry. In fact, the West did not merely fail to recognize antizionism as bigotry; it hailed antizionism as anti-Jewish bigotry's natural opponent.
Antizionism reproduces an underlying structure of Nazi thought: the image of a conspiratorial hidden power undermining a redemptive future. And yet, because it does so under the mantle of anti-Nazism, it avoids being widely understood as bigotry.
This is why Sanders's place in El-Sayed's imagination appears sufficient to resolve any apparent contradiction between his antizionism and his affection for a prominent Jew. Antizionism can welcome and elevate Jews who affirm its premises while organizing itself against Jewish collective existence. Its willingness to embrace individual Jews is then treated as evidence that antizionism cannot possibly constitute anti-Jewish bigotry.
The West spent so long guarding against Nazism's return that it failed to notice another anti-Jewish ideology developing in its midst. This happened not despite the framework it had built to prevent the villainization of Jews, but in that framework's name. Antizionism did not merely walk through the gap this left behind; it occupied the position from which the gap was policed.
