One of the most reliable websites for Jewish matters is the Jewish News Syndicate, jns.com, whose Editor-in-Chief, Jonathan Tobin, is a constant source of intelligent and well-informed commentary on world Jewish affairs. Since the start of the recent Gaza conflict with the Hamas pogrom on October 7, 2023, I turn constantly to the JNS for news and analysis of the latest developments.
On February 11, 2025, Tobin published a critique of a Super Bowl ad run by Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, entitled “Super Bowl antisemitism ad is no way to tackle Jew-hatred.” Here is Tobin’s description of this 30-second piece:
It featured two mega-celebrities—rapper and actor Snoop Dogg, and NFL great Tom Brady [. . .]. In it, they spout various reasons why people hate each other before concluding that “things are so bad that we have to do a commercial about it,” before the two walk off together in a gesture of amity.
After this introductory presentation, the body of Tobin’s article consists in a demonstration of why this kind of generalized critique of “prejudice” and “hate” is “no way to tackle Jew-hatred.”
I have no quarrel with anything Tobin says in the article about the need to talk about antisemitism specifically as opposed to lumping it with the classic American example of racism of whites against blacks. But I could not help but note his inability to tell us just what is so special about antisemitism, as opposed to all other varieties of hostility among ethnic, sexual, religious, and other groups. There is lots of hatred between Muslims and Christians, for example, and there have surely been many times more Christians killed by Muslims in Africa and elsewhere than Jews—not to speak of Muslims and Hindus killing each other in India and Pakistan. Tobin wants to insist on the specificity of this hatred; yet he never puts his finger on what is really unique about it.
Thus he continues:
[T]he FCAS [Foundation to Combat Antisemitism] produced an ad that it supposed would appeal to the widest possible audience and therefore went all-in on universalizing the problem.
This is the same premise of most Holocaust education programs that have been employed in the United States in the past few decades. They are rooted in the belief that the only way anyone can be deterred from hating Jews is to depict the Holocaust and antisemitism as essentially no different than any other form of prejudice. In this way, as the FCAS ad seemed to be telling us, Jew-hatred is no different from disliking any group or people other than the majority. The solution, then, is for everyone to play nicely with each other the way Snoop and Brady—a black celebrity and a white one—appear willing to do.
But if history, as well as the present-day surge in Jew-hatred teaches, it is that antisemitism is not like other varieties of prejudice, be they major or minor. It is a specific virus of hate that targets Jews not merely as a function of bad behavior or a lack of awareness of our common humanity, but as a means of acquiring and holding onto political power.
To antisemites of every variety—be they left-wing, right-wing, Islamists, and yes, blacks—Jews aren’t merely the “other.” They are in the crosshairs to be despised and subjected to singular prejudice and discrimination, no matter their age, background, what they do or where they reside. They are, instead, an almost superhuman force for evil that must be eradicated. They alone are to be denied rights that even other discriminated minorities are given. And in so doing, various groups can wield power and pretend to be forces for good.
This description indeed distinguishes antisemitism from all other varieties of prejudice, but it gives no reason for this distinction, and what at first appears to serve as its specific explanation, that “It is a specific virus of hate that targets Jews . . . as a means of acquiring and holding onto political power,” can only combine a medical metaphor (“virus of hate”) with a political reference (“means of acquiring and holding onto political power”) in a way that is hardly specific to antisemitism, or indeed to group prejudice as such.
And this is not just a matter of sloppy writing; the use of “virus” or similar terms to describe antisemitism is well-attested in the literature, both historical and fictional. One never describes other ethnic prejudices in such terms; whether it’s whites hating blacks, or Hindus hating Muslims, defining the hated group as the “other” seems to provide a sufficient explanation. Why then is antisemitism so different? Why indeed is there a specific word for this prejudice alone?
And why is it so difficult for one who is deeply concerned with it and writes about it constantly to explain to the reader what is so special about Jew-hatred? For it is certainly not that it is a means to political power.
Readers of these Chronicles know that this is far from the first time I have dealt with this issue, and perhaps even that Adam Katz and I published a book in 2015 entitled The First Shall Be The Last: Rethinking Antisemitism—a book sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), but which the Institute has subsequently sought to ignore, presumably as having broken the taboo on attempting to explain what it is that is so special about this prejudice.
I bring this up now because, at the time when the book was published in the era before October 7, 2023, antisemitism was not the dominant issue in Jewish affairs that it has become since that day. At that time, it even seemed possible to treat it as it was addressed, or rather not addressed, in the Super Bowl ad: as just another example of intergroup hostility. But what was a greater shock to the Jewish community even than the barbarous Hamas-led massacre of 1200 innocent civilians—and even before the IDF began its retaliation—was that the world’s reaction was far less one of sympathy for the Jewish victims than of support for the cause of the torturers, rapists, and murderers who carried it out.
It is this that is unique in antisemitism: it is, as Tobin points out, the hatred of the Jews as “an almost superhuman force for evil that must be eradicated.” But why the Jews have been singled out for this hatred is never explained—and after writing a book and a good number of Chronicles on the subject, I am very much aware that the term “explain” in the normal sense in which the word is used in the social sciences is inadequate to provide a cogent explanation. For our book, we chose as its title “the first shall be the last,” a quote from the Sermon on the Mount that indeed gives the basis of the explanation, but which can only be understood—as it has not been either by ISGAP or by the rest of what may be called the “antisemitism community” in the world of scholarship—in a context that accepts the primacy of the sacred as the basis of human culture.
The Jews are the descendants of the creators, or better, the discoverers of monotheism, which is the basis of Western civilization. This is not to belittle the Classical or Greco-Roman element of this civilization, which is the source of the West’s scientific as well as esthetic and political traditions. But that the sacred is far more fundamental is reflected in the simple fact that the very idea of hating the Greeks or the Romans for their historical priority, let alone considering them “an almost superhuman force for evil,” is altogether inconceivable.
In a word, the power—staying power and emotional power—of antisemitism lies in the impossibility of attempting to explain it clearly without further arousing it. This is indeed the effect of the reference to the Jews as “the chosen people”—chosen, that is, by God. And indeed, if a Jew makes a non-Jew aware that he, but not his interlocutor, is a member of the “chosen people,” he has already supplied the latter with a good reason for hating him.
And yet if the non-Jew didn’t somehow himself believe in this chosenness, he would have no reason to treat the Jew’s belief, real or simply presumed, as anything but a pathetic delusion, like that of the inhabitant of an insane asylum who believes he is Napoleon or Genghis Khan. That is the paradoxical force behind antisemitism.
Today, in most countries, Jews are indeed more successful than most—for, all other things being equal, the unusual pressures they have experienced over the centuries have no doubt provided them with a major evolutionary incentive to improve their intelligence. But it is not the fact that they may have higher IQs or make more money on the average than non-Jews that provokes their hatred; these advantages are consequences of the hatred that has over the centuries caused them countless tragedies—of which the Nazi Holocaust, as we have just been shown, was by no means the last.
“The first shall be the last”; it is Jesus who says this. Almost certainly writing after the sack of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the text’s putative author would have been able to verify this prophecy’s application to the Jews who rejected Jesus. But although the Romans later drove the Jews out of Judaea and changed its name to “Palestina,” antisemitism as we know it began as a Christian phenomenon—while Islam was from the outset anything but Jew-friendly.
And what is truly paradoxical is that even as the Jews thus ended up as “the last” in the Abrahamic world, this prophecy, and with it, the whole edifice of antisemitism, has continued to treat them as “the first” whose pride must be humiliated.
For the Jews, or the Hebrews, were indeed the first true monotheists. And to put it in more anthropologically relevant terms, they were the discoverers of the unity of the sacred—of its fundamental identity across all the different religious observances and beliefs that had existed until that time—the first to realize that sanctity or “God-ness” is not an attribute to be distributed among different gods, but a single human-related phenomenon, one that is the basis of humanity itself.
The sacred and the sign, language and religion, were, as Roy Rappaport had insisted in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge 1999), coeval, had a common origin—a great insight that has never received the acceptance it deserves. For language and the sacred are indeed the twin marks of humanity that distinguish it—that make it first—among all living creatures.
October 7, 2023 was a horrible tragedy for its victims, and on the part of its perpetrators, an unalloyed manifestation of human evil. But just as we may hope that its ultimate outcome will be the defeat of fanatical Islamism and the emergence of a Middle East in which Israel will thrive in peace with its neighbors, we must never forget that the Jews, as heirs to the Hebrews’ firstness in the discovery of the oneness of the sacred in the souls of all humanity, may never be able to fully redeem themselves to their fellow humans for this indelible mark of priority.
The lessons of human history are the truths of anthropology, of the human logos, which combines the qualities of the sign and the sacred. The sign, we (think we) understand: it is a means of communication, more efficient than the signals of animals because it is mediated by a consciousness that the sign allows us to share among us in a new way. But what we need to know as well is that we would not be human without what the sacred provides: the protection provided by the aura of holy untouchability that we naturally associate with religious services, but which is present in a small but crucial way in all but the most animalistic human interactions, most of which are mediated by words or gestures, that is, by signs that protect both the speaker and his interlocutor by deferring conflict over the objects of their common desire.
The sign and the sacred were coeval, born at the same moment; one could not exist without the other. And as the Bible shows us at Babel, signs are arbitrary; but the sacred is One. The Hebrews did not invent either language or religion, but they were the first to grasp that in sharing the sense of the sacred, all humanity is one—and worships the One God, whatever name we give him.
Hence religious Jews just call him HaShem, “the name”—for which the closest Greek, or Christian, equivalent is the logos.