by Rabbi Mordecai Griffin

One of the most insidious features of contemporary antisemitism is not its volume, but its disguise. In the modern West, hostility toward Jews rarely presents itself openly. Instead, it is often reframed through the language of politics, ethics, and “foreign policy critique,” with the term Zionist functioning as a proxy for Jew. This rhetorical substitution is not incidental. It operates as a form of gaslighting: denying Jews the ability to accurately name the hostility directed at them, while insisting that their perceptions are exaggerated, manipulative, or imagined.

This dynamic is evident in recent public discourse. As Vice President of the United States J.D. Vance recently stated, “Almost no Americans are antisemitic,” suggesting instead that what Jews are experiencing is merely “backlash” to U.S. policy regarding Israel. Framed this way, antisemitism is not denied outright but redefined out of existence. The claim is problematic not only because antisemitic incidents are empirically documented, but because it obscures a more fundamental question: why hostility is so frequently and uniquely fixated on Israel, and why Jewish concerns are treated as suspect when raised.

Gaslighting functions by redefining reality. When Jews observe that accusations leveled against “Zionists” closely resemble centuries-old antisemitic tropes—allegations of global control, dual loyalty, bloodlust, or conspiratorial power—they are often accused of bad faith or of attempting to silence legitimate debate. Yet these tropes are well documented long before the modern State of Israel existed. Medieval claims of Jewish world domination, later systematized in texts such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a fabrication produced by the Russian Okhrana in the early twentieth century—reappear today with striking continuity, with “Zionists” simply replacing “Jews” (Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 1967).

The pejorative use of the term Zionist has a clear and traceable modern genealogy. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Soviet Union deliberately recast antisemitism as “anti-Zionism” in order to legitimize hostility toward Jews while preserving ideological respectability. Soviet propaganda from the 1950s through the 1980s routinely portrayed Zionists as racist, imperialist, disloyal, and globally subversive—charges indistinguishable from earlier antisemitic narratives (Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union, 1988; Weinryb, Antisemitism in the Soviet Union, 1975). Accusations of “Zionist sympathies” functioned as a comprehensive pretext for purges, discrimination, and exclusion from public life.

This framework was internationalized in 1975 with United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, which declared that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The resolution emerged not from neutral human-rights analysis, but from a coalition of Soviet-bloc and Arab League states explicitly opposed to Jewish national self-determination. Notably, no other national liberation movement—despite far more violent or expansive histories—was subjected to comparable categorical moral condemnation. Although the resolution was repealed in 1991, its conceptual logic continues to shape academic, activist, and media discourse (UNGA Res. 3379, 1975; repeal Res. 46/86, 1991).

Zionism itself long predates modern geopolitics. Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel is embedded in the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple literature, daily prayer, and rabbinic liturgy. Expressions such as “Next year in Jerusalem” are not political slogans, but religious formulations recorded centuries before the emergence of Christianity or Islam (Mishnah, Ta’anit 4:8; Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 110b). From within Jewish religious and historical self-understanding, Zionism reflects the continuity of Jewish peoplehood and collective memory.

At this point, it is important to distinguish between historical analysis and theological affirmation. Historically, modern political Zionism emerged in the nineteenth century as a response to European antisemitism, pogroms, and the collapse of Jewish emancipation (Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 1896). Theologically, many Jews understand the Jewish return to the Land of Israel as bound up with divine promise and covenant. While the latter claim is a matter of religious belief rather than secular historiography, both dimensions help explain why Zionism is experienced by the vast majority of Jews not as an abstract political ideology, but as an expression of collective identity.

Another common rhetorical maneuver is the abrupt pivot to “Israeli” or “U.S. foreign policy.” While policy critique is legitimate in principle, this framing is frequently employed not to examine specific decisions, but to divert attention away from antisemitism itself. Scholars of antisemitism have long identified obsessive or disproportionate focus on Jews or Jewish collectives as a defining feature of antisemitic ideology. When moral outrage is directed almost exclusively at the Jewish state—while graver abuses elsewhere provoke comparatively little attention—this selectivity becomes analytically significant (Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession, 2010).

The gaslighting becomes most apparent when Jewish testimony is dismissed outright. Jews who report feeling targeted are often told that they are overly sensitive, politically motivated, or acting in bad faith. This pattern is historically familiar. From medieval Europe to Tsarist Russia to Nazi Germany, Jews were repeatedly assured that hostility toward them was rational, justified, or imaginary—until it escalated beyond denial. As Hannah Arendt observed, antisemitism has consistently relied on the claim that Jews are dishonest about their own persecution (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951). This logic also underlies attempts to question the validity or veracity of the Holocaust itself.

The irony is that the category “Zionist” depends on the very reality it seeks to deny: Jewish peoplehood. If Jews were merely a religious community with no collective identity, there would be no need to invent a political slur distinguishing “acceptable” from “unacceptable” Jews. The distinction exists precisely because Jews constitute a people, and because denying that peoplehood has long been central to antisemitic thought.

Identifying this pattern is not an attempt to silence debate. It is an insistence on intellectual honesty. Jews, like any other people, are entitled to disagreement, critique, and internal diversity. What they are not required to accept is the erasure of their history, the denial of their identity, or the delegitimization of their collective existence—followed by the claim that none of this is really about them.

When antisemitism hides behind rhetoric, naming it is not paranoia. It is historical literacy and moral clarity.