How White Folks Became Jews: The War on Black Antisemitism and the Recalibration of Racial Regimes

Matt Seriff-Cullick

Abstract:

In this article, I examine recent and historical deployments of what I call the “Black antisemitism as betrayal” trope, arguing that it plays two important roles: first, it authorizes a rightward turn in Zionist actors’ public political alignments; second, it facilitates white supremacy’s disavowal of historical responsibility for antisemitism by casting Black Americans as Jews’ oppressors. In recent years, Zionist actors have taken this trope a step further, to the point that all white people—not just Jews—are cast as the primary victims of racism. I argue that this development signals the ascendance of a new racial regime centered on a configuration I call the “white-as-Jew,” which allows white supremacy to claim antisemitism as a form of white grievance. Finally, I argue that these contributions to anti-Black racism are core features of the Zionist strategy of securing power via alignment with white supremacy.

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From the first days of Israel’s most recent genocidal campaign in Gaza, the organization JewBelong shared dozens of pithy and inflammatory statements on social media and billboards that equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism while simultaneously denying,² defending,³ cheering,⁴ and/or eroticizing⁵ the genocide. An October 2023 statement, posted just 4 days after Al Aqsa Flood, revealed one specific facet of their political project: “Punch in the gut for tens of thousands of Jews who shelled out all that $ for BLM.” In what follows, I consider what kind of discursive work JewBelong and other Zionist actors are doing through their invocation of Black antisemitism, how this construction serves the recalibration of racial regimes, and why the articulation of anti-Black resentment is so central to Zionist propaganda. 

The narrative JewBelong invokes of Black antisemitism as a form of betrayal is a familiar one. It goes something like this: generous allyship by white Jews in the United States is met with betrayal in the form of antisemitism and/as anti-Zionism by Black leftists, justifying recriminations, withdrawal of support, and reactionary political pivots by white Jews. This narrative has been deployed repeatedly, with marked consistency, at least since 1967, when American Zionist organizations began to sound the alarm about Black antisemitism in response to the Black liberation movement’s increasing turn towards internationalism and anti-imperialism, including solidarity with Palestine.⁶

Since then, the Black antisemitism as betrayal trope has achieved the sort of mantra status that characterizes so much Zionist propaganda.⁷ This narrative is designed to attack the politics that Robin D.G. Kelley refers to as “Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity.”⁸ And as Black leftists pointed out immediately after its initial deployments in 1967, it serves more broadly to discipline the turn in U.S. Black politics towards internationalism and anti-imperialism and to discourage Black participation in discussions of United States foreign policy.⁹

Arguing that the Black antisemitism trope does even more discursive work than this, I explore the specificity of its structure, utilization, and role within the current recalibration of racial regimes. First, this trope authorizes a rightward turn in Zionist actors’ public political alignments prompted by perceived failures of allyship on the part of U.S. Black communities. Second, the betrayal narrative facilitates white supremacy’s disavowal of historical responsibility for antisemitism by casting Black Americans as Jews’ oppressors. In recent years, Zionist actors have taken this narrative a step further, offering it up as evidence of the inversion of structures of racial domination writ large, such that all white people—not just Jews—are cast as the primary victims of racism. 

Zionist actors, in lockstep with the revanchist right more broadly, have invoked Black antisemitism as a form of anti-white racism that positions all white Americans—not just Jews—as what one commentator calls the “new Blacks.”¹⁰ This narrative signals the ascendance of a newly dominant discursive and political strategy: the reappropriation and inversion of the terms of Black/white racial binarism to justify the redeployment of the legal and political tools of civil rights infrastructure to attack Black, Indigenous, and communities of color. This claim of inverted hierarchy rests upon a rhetorical formation that I refer to as the “white-as-Jew,” which allows white supremacy to disavow responsibility for antisemitism while claiming it as a form of white grievance.

Finally, I argue that these contributions to anti-Black racism are core features of the Zionist strategy of securing power through alignment with white supremacy. In other words, anti-Black racism is not an unfortunate side effect of Zionist political activity. It is neither a tactical pivot nor an unfortunate over-correction in response to the challenge of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity. Rather, anti-Black racism is a necessary component of any alliance with white supremacy, in which racial-colonial and anti-Black violences are deeply imbricated. 

To unpack the work done by the Black antisemitism as betrayal trope, I first attend to its narrative structure. This trope has a specific narrative arc, with a temporality of before and after that is marked and separated by a moment of betrayal. Before, Jewish support for civil rights was reciprocated in the form of Black Zionism. After, white Jews, abandoned and isolated by their erstwhile allies, are justified in their withdrawal of support for Black organizing and their turn towards reactionary and fascistic social forces. These two phases—before and after—map onto what are often described as the liberal and reactionary faces of Zionist political organizing. While both faces/phases offer resources for anti-Black counterinsurgency, the Black antisemitism as betrayal trope is significant for how it authorizes and catalyzes Zionism to pivot from progressive to reactionary phases/faces.

Second, I discuss the specific discursive work accomplished by recent articulations of the moment of betrayal, which marks the break from before to after. These narratives are used to refigure the relationships among Jews, whiteness, and Blackness in ways that emblematize and contribute to a contemporary recalibration of racial regimes. Exploiting the instability of Jews’ relationship to whiteness, these narratives articulate antisemitism as a form of white grievance, not just Jewish grievance. This in turn facilitates the resignification and redeployment of the terms of antiracism to justify “white fascist statecraft”¹¹ in the name of defending against anti-white racism.

The title of this paper, “How White Folks Became ‘Jews,’” inverts the title of Karen Brodkin’s 1998 book, How Jews became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America,¹² a classic text in the field of whiteness studies. Brodkin posits that white Jewish participation in anti-Black racism was part of the process by which European-descended Jews in the United States secured their unstable status as white Americans in the post-World War II period. However, Brodkin barely mentions Zionism in her text, except to say that “both the Holocaust and Israel gave Jews a degree of critical distance from mainstream American whiteness.”¹³ This argument not only conflates the historical trauma of the Nazi holocaust with allegiance to Zionism, but also frames Zionism as a caveat to U.S. Jews’ identification as white. By contrast, I argue that Zionism is deeply implicated both in white U.S. Jews’ participation in anti-Black racism to access the benefits of white supremacy, and in white supremacy’s strategic use of the figure of “The Jew” to defend, adapt, and further its project.

I want to make two clarifications at this point. First, this paper addresses racial regimes that are built upon two distinct, problematic binaries. One is the (gendered) Black/white racial binary that has long characterized U.S. racial regimes; the other is the binary distinction between Black and Jew. The former binary naturalizes each of these constructed racial categories, Black and white, and collapses the various histories and ongoing structures of domination that impact other “racially marked and colonially displaced/occupied peoples”¹⁴ in the United States. It also erases Indigeneity altogether and, with it, the ongoing genocidal, settler colonial history and structure of U.S. racial capitalism. The other false binary, between Black and Jewish people in the United States, erases the experiences of Black Jews and collapses the experience of all non-white, non-Black Jews into one. It also obscures the complexity of European-descended Jews’ historical racialization, which has varied in proximity to whiteness in different historical moments and places.¹⁵

In what follows, I interrogate Zionist discursive interventions around Jews’ relationship to Blackness and whiteness—all of which take for granted, and thereby reinscribe, the aforementioned binaries. They also build upon them in complex and conjuncturally specific ways. While my focus in the rest of this paper is not the deconstruction of these binaries as such, my intention is not to reify them but rather demonstrate the violences that are enabled or justified through the discourses under discussion here, each of which takes these binaries as a starting point.

The second clarification is that, while my focus is on unpacking elements of Zionist discourse, I am concerned not only with the rhetorical or discursive impacts, but with their material consequences. Dylan Rodríguez uses the term “lexical warfare” to help convey the inseparability of discursive and material elements of counterinsurgency and repression, arguing that “the lexicon is what gives order to his wretched fuckin’ beast of Civilization…Symbols, metaphors, [and] concepts actively destroy, humiliate, demoralize and kill. That’s what they do. I think it’s a remnant of a kind of classical, colonial, western thinking to draw this distinction between abstraction and materiality, between concepts and physical violence.”¹⁶ The concept of lexical warfare helps underline the stakes of Zionist rhetorical interventions. Alarmingly direct links between narratives of Black antisemitism and various forms of material violence include the “civil rights-washing” of genocide, counterinsurgent attacks on radical Black liberation movements, and the explicit justification of racial fascist statecraft, among others. 

My hope is that a close reading of the Black antisemitism as betrayal storyline, in its historical and contemporary deployments, can shed light on the ways that Zionist actors move between progressive and reactionary political positionings, the anti-Black racism that forms a throughline between them, the work of “White Reconstruction”¹⁷ that’s accomplished through the narrative of betrayal and reversal, and the importance, for Zionist strategy, of this contribution to anti-Black racism.

Method: Theoretical Grounding in Racial Regime Scholarship

This paper uses the work of scholars within the Black radical tradition to understand the adaptability of race, racism, racial capitalism, and white supremacy as organizing structures of society in the ongoing half century following the dissolution of formal Jim Crow apartheid and legally enshrined white supremacy, during the so-called “post-civil rights period.” Methodologically, the work of Jodi Melamed, Dylan Rodríguez, and Alana Lentin on racial regimes informs my approach in this paper. 

In Represent and Destroy, Melamed “investigates hegemonic complexes of official or state-recognized liberal antiracisms that emerged after World War II” when, she states, “white supremacy gradually became residual.”¹⁸ For Melamed, since World War II, when outright white supremacist racial dictatorship became politically untenable, the U.S. state incorporated some antiracist terms and claims into an official ideology calibrated to preserve and extend the reach of U.S.-led global capitalism and discredit or crowd out more radical, anticapitalist forms of antiracism. This “racial break” has “given rise to a new worldwide racial project, a formally antiracist, liberal-capitalist modernity that revises, partners with, and exceeds the capacities of white supremacy without replacing or ending it.”¹⁹ For Melamed, the new regime of liberal antiracisms achieved a state of “racial hegemony” that “portray[s] race as a contradiction to modernity rather than one of its structuring conditions,”²⁰ supplanting de jure white supremacy with a system that demobilizes antiracist critique and insurgency through a partial incorporation of its terms.

Melamed traces these state-sanctioned antiracisms through three successive phases: “racial liberalism (mid 1940s to 1960s), liberal multiculturalism (1980s to 1990s), and neoliberal multiculturalism (2000s).”²¹ She argues that each of these versions, with its unique characteristics, has functioned to constrain the possibilities of antiracist discourse to “nonredistributive” forms. They have achieved this by “disconnect[ing] race from material conditions,” even while constructing a new racialization that “naturalizes the privileges of those who benefit from present socioeconomic arrangements and makes the dispossessions of those cut off from wealth and institutional power appear fair.”²² This racialization has involved the construction of “newly privileged racial subjects” for each era—including the “white liberal, the multicultural American, and the multicultural global citizen,” alongside “newly stigmatized racial subjects, including the un-American, the overly race conscious, the monocultural, and the illegal.”²³

As discussed in further detail below, Melamed’s framework helps shed light on the ways purported liberal Zionist solidarity with Black liberation struggles has frequently operated within the framework of—and helped to consolidate—liberal antiracisms that are broadly compatible with the functioning of U.S.-led global capitalism. The withdrawal of support by Zionists responding to Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity has served to discipline such “materialist antiracism” and to consolidate the (re)construction of Black Americans as “stigmatized racial subjects” under the evolving terms of liberal antiracism. 

While Melamed’s articulation of the power of racial hegemony is helpful for understanding the counterinsurgent functioning of liberal Zionist organizations’ support for (certain elements of) Black liberation movements, it does not fully account for the overt anti-Black violence to which Zionist actors contribute at other times, or for the enduring centrality of alignment with white supremacy that characterizes Zionist strategy in both its liberal/progressive and reactionary modes. It is here that Dylan Rodríguez, in his “collegial departure”²⁴ from Melamed’s framework, offers helpful theoretical framing with his concepts of “multiculturalist white supremacy” and “White Reconstruction.” 

While he agrees with Melamed that “serial racial formations have (perhaps temporarily) decentered official white supremacy,”²⁵ Rodríguez contests the notion that racial hegemony has been achieved, pointing out that relations of violent coercion, rather than consent, continue to define the experience of Black and other non-white people in the United States. He also draws attention to ongoing and resurgent white supremacist violence that has pervaded recent decades of reform, challenging the assertion that white supremacy has “gradually become residual.” Rodríguez argues that “white supremacy’s continuities—and continuous violences—define rather than recede from the socialities, institutions, cultural logics, and statecraft”²⁶ of recent racial formations, even as these formations anticipate “the bodily presence and delimited inclusion of human groups previously marginalized or excluded from the domain of political coalitions, historical blocs, and social subjectivities”²⁷ in the United States. For Rodríguez, the partial diversification of privileged subjects and spheres is calibrated to serve the interests of white supremacy—and its project of Civilization—not just U.S.-led global capitalism. Rodríguez proposes “multiculturalist white supremacy” as a framework for understanding how contemporary racial formations “become increasingly capacious, flexible, and promiscuously inclusive as monopoly-based systems of racial dominance” are superseded.²⁸

This framework supports Rodríguez’s broader project of articulating a theory of White Reconstruction, which he describes as a “specific mobilization of institutional rhetorics, cultural and discursive regimes, political-juridical strategies and (militarized) racial statecraft that 1) sustain anti-Black and racial-colonial (domestic) war as the condition of racial capitalism and the U.S. social formation, and 2) constitute a political and cultural field of distinctly post-apartheid struggles for hegemony.”²⁹ Rodríguez’s project is helpful for understanding the centrality of white supremacy as an ordering logic for Zionist relationships with Black insurgency, both in their outwardly progressive counterinsurgent modesand in their moments of recrimination and attack. Rodríguez’s focus on “anti-Blackness and racial-colonial power as distinct, though significantly coterminous (and often symbiotic) formations of dominance”³⁰ also provides a helpful framework within which to think about the symmetries and resonances between the anti-Palestinian and anti-Black violences to which Zionist actors contribute. 

Like Melamed and Rodríguez, Alana Lentin’s project in The New Racial Regime explores the “adaptive nature” of racial regimes in a moment wherein “whiteness is partially detached from actual white bodies.”³¹ Building on the work of Rodríguez and others, Lentin offers specific insights regarding the roles that Zionism, antisemitism, and anti-antisemitism play in contemporary operations of power. Lentin situates her analysis within Cedric Robinson’s theorization of “racial regimes,” drawn from his last book, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning.³² Within Robinson’s framework, racial regimes are “conjuncturally specific and fluid formations” in which “race is proposed as a justification for relations of power” and “made to appear natural—just the way things are—existing outside of any traceable history.”³³ These racial regimes must be continually patched or recalibrated in response to challenges from insurgent political movements, utilizing “both repression and the retrofitting of critical ideas,”³⁴ in both reactionary and progressive guises that are in fact deeply imbricated.

My inquiry into Zionist narratives about Black antisemitism leans heavily on Lentin’s analysis, including her clear explication of Robinson’s theory of racial regimes, her demonstration of the methodology of “aggressively exposing” these regimes’ “histories and social relations,”³⁵ and her dissection of Zionism’s role in contemporary adaptations of the racial regime. This latter category includes Lentin’s focus on the role of anti-CRT (critical race theory) and anti-DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) politics in racial regime recalibration; Zionists’ “two-pronged tactics” that simultaneously attack and instrumentalize the terms of critical race and ethnic studies; and her insights about the ways the figure of the Jew has been deployed as a proxy for the European subject to justify racial-colonial violence.

Lentin exposes antisemitism as “always already in service of the European state, and by extension, the west and white supremacy.”³⁶ My hope is to contribute to this project by lingering on the question of the distinct work done by Zionist claims of Black antisemitism. The Zionist claim that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, so foundational to the so-called “war on antisemitism,”³⁷ finds some of its earliest precedent in the formulation of Black anti-Zionism as Black antisemitism.³⁸ This narrative continues to have a life of its own, meriting attention as a distinct war on Black antisemitism.

The Before and After of the Black Antisemitism as Betrayal Trope

The Black antisemitism as betrayal narrative bemoans the supposed rupture of what is often referred to as a historic alliance between Black and Jewish communities in the United States. The trope first reinscribes and romanticizes the idea of this alliance, then attributes its violation to the Black left or Black communities in the United States generally, and finally implies that Jews may (or must) abandon their commitments to Black liberation, and to progressive politics generally, in the interest of self-preservation. As such, the trope constructs a specific storyline with a distinct before and after, separated by the moment of betrayal. 

The before chapter of the trope references a well-established historiography that analogizes anti-Black racism and antisemitism, recounts Jewish participation in the civil rights movement, and—in the hands of Zionist actors specifically—narrates Black Zionism as a form of historical reciprocity towards Jews.⁴⁰ Invocations of this history invariably include a specific list of scenes: Jewish participation in the Freedom Summer; Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Jewish institutional support for Black Lives Matter statements in 2020.⁴¹

The after phase of the “Black antisemitism as betrayal” narrative is a phase of justified reaction and recrimination. In this formulation, Zionist actors decry Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity as antisemitic. They denounce such solidarity as a failure of reciprocity for Jews’ generosity, turn away from antiracist and progressive politics altogether, and openly partner with repressive, fascistic, and openly antisemitic forces. The invocation of Black antisemitism serves to justify and/or catalyze a swing to the right by Zionists. 

As I’ll show below, both the before and after chapters of this storyline serve to bolster the project of White Reconstruction. Demonstrating a pop cultural illustration of this dynamic, I return to JewBelong, whose Instagram quote opened this paper. Like many, I was introduced to JewBelong through the Black Shabbat scenes in two episodes of The Real Housewives of New York City (RHONY) that aired in August 2021.⁴² These episodes were filmed amidst the upswell of Black and Black-led insurgency that began in the summer of 2020, in response to which Bravo added its first Black cast member—JewBelong board member Eboni K. Williams. Williams is apparently tasked with educating the other castmates about her experience as a Black woman in the United States, while gracefully and delicately holding them accountable for their privilege and ignorance. 

In the episodes in question, Williams teams up with JewBelong founder Archie Gottesman to host what they call Black Shabbat at Gottesman’s home, an event designed to host Black leadership and “listen to their stories.” The Black attendees’ Zionist credentials are implied early on: three of the four of them, including Williams, have previously traveled to Israel together.⁴³ Williams and Gottesman invoke the classic historiography of historic alliance, arguing that Black and Jewish people “share a unique experience” of oppression under white supremacy.⁴⁴ Gottesman and housewife Leah McSweeny heap praise upon Williams for being willing to openly participate in Jewish spaces: “It’s really fucking brave of Eboni to do what she’s doing,” says McSweeny. Williams solemnly affirms that, as a Black person, she has “paid the price” in her own community for her allyship with Jews. Ultimately, however, the event is torpedoed by Housewife Ramona Singer’s brazen and chaotic antics, as she hijacks the conversation to disrupt any discussion of anti-Black or anti-Jewish oppression to assert her own history of victimization, as a non-Jew, by Jewish New Yorkers, and to complain to the caterer about political correctness, pronouns, and gender-neutral language. The episode stages a kind of hammy dramatization of an urbane Black-Jewish solidarity that is consolidated in the face of imbecilic white racism and antisemitism.

The contrast between this image of the JewBelong team—beleaguered champions of Black-Jewish cooperation—with the October 2023 JewBelong statement decrying Black antisemitism and speaking to a purported collective regret on behalf of Jewish allies of Black struggle is, on its face, rather stark. And indeed, the shift in tone happened quitesuddenly. What changed? In 2022 and early 2023, JewBelong propaganda expressed a sort of equivocal relationship towards the (Black) left, focusing on calling in their presumed allies. For example, a 2022 billboard campaign in San Francisco and Berkeley complained, “For a town that loves social issues, you’ve been pretty quiet on antisemitism.” An Instagram post in December of that year warned, “Hey Jewish and Black people! When we fight, white supremacists chuckle.”⁴⁵ In early 2023, JewBelong billboards quipped that “Being woke and antisemitic is like being a vegan who eats meat.” While their language certainly insinuates a concern with Black/left/woke antisemitism, these are cheeky admonishments, not outright attacks. Even as recently as October 10, 2023, three days after Al Aqsa Flood, JewBelong was still speaking in this before voice: “You don’t need to be Black to stand with Black Lives Matter. And you don’t need to be Jewish to stand with Israel.”⁴⁶

Twenty-four hours later, however, JewBelong’s strategy seemed to have changed. On October 10th, media began to report on BLM chapters who were speaking out in solidarity with Palestinians,⁴⁷ including, most prominently, a BLM Chicago account that posted images of a paraglider with the message “I stand with Palestine.”⁴⁸ On October 11th, JewBelong posted the statement with which this paper opened: “Punch in the gut for tens of thousands of Jews who shelled out all that $ for BLM.” This was followed in subsequent weeks by an escalating series of statements, including several referenced above, directly attacking “progressives,” “woke,” and “elite colleges.” In a transparent attempt to court the support of the far right, they positioned themselves as victims of cancel culture. A November 7th post reads, “If you haven’t been cancelled two or three times, you’re living a small life. Speak out.”⁴⁹ On November 27th, they implored Jews to divest from any organization that does not “stand up for Jews or Israel.” This last statement made barely-coded reference to Black antisemitism, ending with the rebuke that “Allyship must be a two-way street.”⁵⁰ Failures of allyship are often used as dog whistles to allude to Black antisemitism, as they’re almost invariably grievance narratives preceded by the familiar rehearsals of Jewish support for civil rights or Black Lives Matter.⁵¹

In ways that played out transparently over social media, the rightward shift in JewBelong’s political positioning was marked by the invocation of the Black antisemitism as betrayal trope. This points to the power of the invocation of Black antisemitism to publicly justify a rightward swing. The JewBelong example also helps illustrate how both chapters of the betrayal storyline—before and after—offer substantial resources for anti-Black counterinsurgency. 

During the “Black Shabbat” episodes, the before phase in JewBelong’s betrayal storyline, Gottesman and Williams play out a version of Black-Jewish solidarity that casts them in the signature subject positions of racial liberalism, the first modality in Melamed’s genealogy of postwar official antiracisms. Melamed writes that under postwar racial liberalism, “liberal white Americans became felicitous national citizens and privileged racial subjects … whereas other whites were racially stigmatized as prejudiced or intolerant and scapegoated as the cause of continuing structural inequality.”⁵² Simultaneously, racial liberalism deployed a “Black excellence” framework “to prove that America was making strides in freeing itself from the corrosive effects of white supremacy.”⁵² Racial liberalism replaced a biological model of race with a cultural one, and conferred esteem on Black Americans who conformed to specific cultural formations, while stigmatizing others who “did not accord with U.S. national cultural normativity” as “ridden with pathologies.”⁵²

In the “Black Shabbat” scenes, Gottesman’s virtue as white liberal subject is contrasted with Singer’s ignorance and buffoonery. Meanwhile, Williams and the other Black attendees at the dinner are cast as paragons of Black excellence, privileged subjects who are contrasted with the antisemitic Black community to whom Williams refers in absentia when she notes that she has “paid the price in her community” for her willingness to participate in Jewish spaces. The individual attitudes of “prejudiced or intolerant” white people and the cultural pathologies of Black people are thus “scapegoated as the cause of continuing structural inequality.”⁵² The scene stages a narrative of white Jewish Zionist solidarity with an eminently palatable form of Black antiracist struggle aimed only at changing attitudes rather than addressing structurally embedded white supremacy. Coming as it did in direct response to a moment of global Black and Black-led “materialist antiracist” uprising, this performance of liberal antiracism that is broadly compatible with the functioning of U.S.-led global capitalism can best be understood through the lens of counterinsurgency, a type of “domestic warfare” in Rodríguez’s terms, that refers to “pacification, isolation, and domestication strategies”⁵⁶ that complement violent state repression to shore up the project of white supremacy.

The “Black Shabbat” scenes help clarify that JewBelong’s liberal posturing and its subsequent anti-liberal, anti-Black vitriol—the before and after phases in the Black antisemitism as betrayal storyline, respectively—share a common ideological underpinning. In Lentin’s terms, “The defining feature of this racial regime is that it manifests in reactionary and liberal forms which are both derived from the same transformation of capitalism and are still with us today. The construction of a divide between the two is a mystification that serves to conceal the imbrication of liberalism in a fascism that is always racial.”⁵⁷ In other words, while the Black antisemitism claim catalyzed a rightward pivot in JewBelong’s public image, this transition is best understood as a tactical shift rather than a fundamental ideological change.

The two phases—the liberal before and the reactionary after—map onto what have elsewhere been described as the liberal and reactionary faces that are so characteristic of Zionist political organizing. Prominent Zionist organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) lean heavily on their historical civil rights credentials for credibility and moral authority.⁵⁸ This “civil rights-washing”⁵⁹ obscures these organizations’ direct, material attacks on U.S. Black communities and Black liberation movements in partnership with reactionary and fascist state and non-state actors. And it obscures the counterinsurgency of Zionist organizations’ civil rights work itself. 

The former category, direct attacks by Zionist organizations on Black organizing, has been well documented by American Muslims for Palestine,⁶⁰ the Drop the ADL Working Group,⁶¹ and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.⁶² This category includes virulent Zionist attacks on radical Black, Chicano, and Indigenous Peoples’ movements in the late 1960s;⁶³ intervention by multiple Zionist organizations to oppose affirmative action in the 1970s;⁶⁴ support for the South African apartheid regime;⁶⁵ infiltration and surveillance of progressive movements, Black liberation organizations, labor organizations, and anti-apartheid activists (sharing their findings with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the FBI, Israel, and South Africa);⁶⁵ sponsorship of the “Deadly Exchange” programs that facilitate training of U.S. Law Enforcement personnel with Israeli military and police forces;⁶⁷ recent attacks on Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives;⁶⁸ and participation in attacks on the Black left in the name of ant-CRT, anti-DEI, and anti-woke movements.⁶⁹

The latter category, Zionist actors’ counterinsurgent efforts at pacification, cooptation, and demobilization through the promotion of a liberal civil rights frameworks, includes discursive interventions like the promotion a carceral lexicon of hate as a substitute for racism or white supremacy, and the cooptation of the language of critical race theory, ethnic studies, diversity, and Indigeneity.⁷⁰ It also includes material, organizational interventions, including the lending of institutional support to community and political organizations whose political visions do not present a fundamental challenge to white supremacy and settler colonialism⁷¹ and pressuring these organizations to promote moderation.⁷² Lentin points out that Zionist actors “create an ideological divide between palatable ‘moderate’ Black leaders and their purportedly radical, violent counterparts, deemed to pose a specific threat to Jews.”⁷³ This strategy was honed in the late 1960s, when the Black Power movement increasingly embraced Palestine solidarity as an extension of their anti-imperialist commitments. Zionist organizations made it a key function of their strategy not only to attack Black Power and anti-colonial formations, but also heap praise and support upon moderate Black American leaders and organizations.⁷⁴ Other organizational interventions by Zionist actors in their recuperative, progressive phases/faces include what Emmaia Gelman identifies as “astroturfing:” the creation of “dozens of small, opaque organizations” simulating a grassroots movement while “repackaging Israel advocates as DEI and civil rights trainers”⁷⁵ or even impersonating progressive organizations to make it appear as though a critique of anti-Zionism is coming from within the Left.⁷⁶

The recuperative counterinsurgency strategies of the before phase/face of Zionist organizing, which operate under a framework of liberal antiracism, are therefore not fundamentally distinct or divergent from the violent and repressive strategies of the after phase/face, wherein Zionist actors do not simply withdraw support for Black liberation movements but in fact openly partner with state projects of domestic warfare against Black populations in the United States.⁷⁷ There is nonetheless significant variation in the degree to which these positions are openly admitted or championed by Zionist actors—the degree to which they are willing to throw their institutional and moral weight behind revanchist and fascist politics. I am interested in the moments of pronounced, public pivots toward this stance because of how the betrayal moment in the Black antisemitism as betrayal trope facilitates, justifies, and/or catalyzes the sometimes lurching public movement from progressive to reactionary, from pacification to outright attack. 

The Betrayal Moment in the Black Antisemitism Trope

The ADL has exhibited this type of public rightward turn in recent years in what has been called a “mask off” moment,⁷⁸ a “[response] to the political winds shifting,”⁷⁹ or an “abandonment of its stated mission.”⁸⁰ This shift has included, among other things, the shuttering of anti-bias programs unrelated to antisemitism, erasure of references to white supremacy in their definition of racism, and “deletion of 134 model lesson plans on topics such as transgender identity, white privilege, how the Covid-19 pandemic fueled anti-Asian racism, school integration, and the impact of boarding schools on Native Americans”⁸¹ (and, even more recently, the deletion of civil rights from the ADL’s agenda as a whole⁸²). In announcing this shift in strategy, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt captured it succinctly by directly quoting one of JewBelong’s recent Instagram posts⁸³ in a 2024 public address. The post reads: “Fellow Jews: clearly we did not tikkun olam our way into the hearts of those we thought were our allies. New plan: put on your own oxygen mask first.”⁸⁴ This quote sums up the narrative of Black antisemitism as betrayal: We Jews were good allies to Black folks, but they were not good allies to us; now our attacks on Black communities and alignment with white supremacy are justified and can be championed out in the open.

This use of Black antisemitism to justify a lurch to the right is hardly a new phenomenon. It played a central role in the consolidation of neoconservatism through the figure of Norman Podhoretz, a progenitor and leading figure of the movement who served as the editor of the AJC’s Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995. The magazine had an “outsized influence that defined the post-World War II intellectual, political and artistic preoccupations,”⁸⁵ publishing works by Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Martin Buber, and Hannah Arendt. Podhoretz is often described as having pivoted the influential magazine drastically to the left when he took over in 1960, and then again to the right in the late 1960s and beyond, when he made Commentary into “the bible of the neoconservatives.”⁸⁶

Podhoretz’s rightward turn is credited by his biographers in no small part to his deep resentment of what he viewed as Black antisemitism. Nathan Abrams writes that Podhoretz “became increasingly fearful” of radicalism and militancy within the civil rights movement and its allies among the New Left,⁸⁷ in particular as he felt that “Black anti-Semitism was interlaced with the New Left’s negative response to Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, as expressed by SNCC and others.”⁸⁸ Benjamin Balint writes that Podhoretz was horrified by Black militants’ anti-Zionism and that after experiencing “rejection at the hands of those regarded until now as allies,” Podhoretz “declared full-scale war on the Left, and turned toward a decisive affirmation of America.”⁸⁹ Spurred on by Black opposition to Zionism, which he conflated with antisemitism, Podhoretz filled Commentary’s pages with articles denouncing Black antisemitism by Earl Raab, Maurice Goldbloom, Murray Friedman, and Carl Gershman.⁹⁰ The narrative of Black antisemitism signaled and structured Commentary’s swing to the right, and subsequent years saw this narrative develop into a drumbeat of coverage, with headlines like 1979’s “Black Anti-Semitism on the Rise,” 1994’s “Facing Up to Black Anti-Semitism,” 1995’s “Black Anti-Semitism on the Rise,” and 2018’s dedicated issue entitled “African Americans vs. American Jews.”⁹¹

In articles like these, writes Abrams, “Podhoretz openly called for Jewish self interest. Commentary proposed that Jews vote with the right wing while abandoning their traditional liberalism and concern for the (Black) underdog.”⁹⁰ Abrams observes that “this appeal to Jewish parochialism was increasingly accompanied by negative assessments of the Black community. African Americans were collectively portrayed as simultaneously passive and volatile: while they did not do enough to help themselves, they were, at the same time, unwilling to put up with the slow pace of legislative and social reform.”⁹³ In other words, the narrative of Black antisemitism as betrayal was deployed not only to reprimand Black communities in the United States for their antisemitism, but also to explicitly call for Jewish alignment with white supremacy and elaborate and advocate for neoconservatism generally.

Yet, the conventional narrative of a rightward swing by Podhoretz and Commentary in the late 1960s obscures the deeper roots of anti-Black racism and anti-antiracist sentiment that were present from the earliest days of Podhoretz’s time leading the magazine. According to Abrams,

In 1963, Podhoretz went on to publish his notorious essay, “My Negro Problem—And Ours,”⁹⁵ the only essay Commentary ever published in Podhoretz’s own voice. Recounting scenes from the author’s childhood that paint his Black peers as the true oppressors, Podhoretz confesses his own anti-Black racism, his envy for Black people’s supposedly superior masculinity, and the “insane rage” he feels at the “thought” of Black antisemitism. Podhoretz goes on to propose that racist attitudes are so deeply entrenched in both Black and white people equally that the only solution is a campaign of mass miscegenation that erases racial difference altogether. 

Despite its anti-liberal posture, the essay embraces a fundamental logic of racial liberalism, painting racism as a matter of individual attitudes and thereby seeking to undermine materialist antiracisms. But it also articulates a crisis for racial liberalism in the mid-1960s, by which time, Melamed states, “racial liberalism’s hegemony broke apart and collapsed under the pressure of its own contradictions.”⁹⁶ Disillusioned by the possibility of change under racial liberalism, Podhoretz attacks its signature privileged “white liberal” subject. But unwilling to yet openly align with the right wing, he ends with his famously unhinged suggestion of mass miscegenation to eliminate race altogether. A few short years later, when Black anti-Zionism in the context of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War launched the Black antisemitism as betrayal trope, Podhoretz began to openly embrace reactionary politics. Podhoretz eventually became known as neoconservatism’s “foremost intellectual” and “the conductor of the neocon orchestra,”⁹⁷ a shift that has powerfully shaped the trajectory of U.S. imperialist and domestic warfare.

In this sense, Podhoretz’s trajectory mirrors and prefigures that of JewBelong and the ADL. For all three, a hostility towards all but the most moderate, reformist versions of Black struggle framed a purportedly progressive era. And all three responded to expressions of Black anti-Zionism and Black radicalism by deploying the Black antisemitism as betrayal trope, using it to justify and consolidate public shifts towards the right. 

The Black Antisemitism Trope and the Recalibration of Racial Regimes

If all the Black antisemitism trope did was attack Black/Palestinian solidarity and authorize rightward shifts by Zionist organizations, it would be harmful enough. But throughout history, and even more acutely in recent years, this trope has become particularly useful for the recalibration of racial regimes to reinforce white supremacy. White supremacy via this trope can not only disavow antisemitism by displacing it onto Black communities, but also simultaneously internalize antisemitism as a form of white grievance.

Zionism has long served white supremacy by displacing responsibility for antisemitism from European society onto Arabs and Muslims generally, and Palestinians in particular. The prevalence of the Black antisemitism trope reveals how this tactic is also reproduced in respect to Blackness. The specter of Black antisemitism displaces anti-Jewish violence from its historical grounding within European racialism,⁹⁹ Christianity,¹⁰⁰ white supremacy, and fascism,¹⁰¹ and marks it instead as an extrinsic peril associated with a reviled racialized minority. 

One peculiar but critical feature of this facilitated disavowal and displacement through the trope of Black antisemitism is that it is often accompanied by narratives that seek to redefine European-descended Jews’ relationships not just to Black and white communities in the United States, but to Blackness and whiteness as such. The most common way this appears in Zionist propaganda is through a denial that European-descended Jews have gained access to whiteness in the United States. A recent JewBelong instagram post reads “Person #1: ‘Jews have white privilege.’ Person #2: ‘Cool, tell that to the Nazis. Or the guy who just spray-painted a swastika on our synagogue.’”¹⁰² Zioness founder and CEO Amanda Berman frequently expounds on this theme, describing European-descended Jews as “white-passing”¹⁰³ or saying that they “look white,” “in some ways experience whiteness,” or are “perceived as white.”¹⁰⁴ In these formulations, antisemitism signals European-descended Jews’ ongoing distance from whiteness.

A recent article in Commentary by David Christopher Kaufman takes these claims a step further, arguing that ostensibly resurgent antisemitism negates “the idea that African Americans are ‘incapable of racism,’” demonstrates that “white people certainly can and do experience racism,” and shows that “America’s Jews [have become] America’s ‘New Blacks.’”¹⁰⁵ The phrasing here is critical. It is not that antisemitism proves Jews’ distance from whiteness. Rather, the claim is that antisemitism proves that Jews can experience anti-white racism and that white people in general can experience anti-white racism as antisemitism. Furthermore, this vulnerability to racism makes Jews—and therefore whites—the new Blacks.¹⁰⁶

This formulation, while convoluted, is by no means unique. It echoes language used in the wake of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers’ strike of 1968, one of the most acute moments of consolidation for the Black antisemitism trope. In the wake of the strike, a committee on racial and religious prejudice appointed by Mayor John Lindsay stated that “an appalling amount of racial prejudice—Black and white—surfaced in and about the school controversy. The anti-white prejudice has a dangerous component of anti-Semitism.”¹⁰⁷ Here again, it is not Black anti-white prejudice and antisemitism; it is Black anti-white prejudice as antisemitism. This formulation reverses the logic of James Baldwin’s landmark essay, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.”¹⁰⁸ Instead, Black people are anti-white by virtue of their antisemitism. In the language of the Commentary article, it is not only Jews who are the “New Blacks;” it is white people writ large. 

This narrative inverts the historical power relationships of racism. The podcast School Colors, which chronicles the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers’ strike, includes an audio recording of a conversation between AJC Directors Irving Levine and Milton Himmelfarb, wherein Levine asks, “Is there something that you would characterize as Black fascism rising?” Himmelfarb responds, “Fascism is one word. Irrationalism. Totalitarianism. Hatred!”¹⁰⁹ In the liberal/progressive phase, Zionist propaganda emphasizes hatred as an individualized, decontextualized, interpersonal substitute for racism that indexes structures of power and domination. But here, in a moment of supposed betrayal, we see the addition of language that explicitly names structures of domination, only to claim their inversion: Black antisemitism as tantamount to fascism and totalitarianism.

This shift—from an ahistorical language of interpersonal hatred that negates structural racism in the liberal/progressive phase, to a charge that racial power structures have been inverted to make white people an oppressed group in the reaction phase—has precedent, but has escalated in frequency and centrality in recent years. It has made Zionist propaganda particularly useful to white supremacy in a moment when dominant political discourse and statecraft are likewise shifting from multiculturalist counterinsurgency towards open white supremacist revanchism. The narrative of Black antisemitism as betrayal exploits the instability of European-descended Jews’ relationship to whiteness, positioning the white-as-Jew as a victim of Black fascism, thereby effectively allowing white supremacy to disavow its own antisemitism and simultaneously internalize it as grievance. This in turn serves the project of using antisemitism as the tip of the spear in current escalations of state repression, on and off college and university campuses, and against communities of color, immigrants, queer and trans communities, and liberatory organizing and scholarship.¹¹⁰

This white-as-Jew narrative, used to justify anti-Black violence as a form of white self-defense against antisemitism, recalls a similar maneuver used to justify attacks on Palestinians in a defensive war to protect whiteness. Lentin calls attention to how the figure of The Jew has been made to serve as a stand-in for the white subject in need of protection from the racialized Arab/Muslim Other. Lentin questions the narrative that Germany specifically, and the West generally, support Israel out of a sense of guilt for the Nazi holocaust. Instead, she argues, the war on antisemitism is a “proxy war against the west’s racialized outsiders, embodied by the figure of the Palestinian against whom Jews, through our purposeful amalgamation with Zionists, can be easily counterposed.”¹¹¹ This war becomes a war for the defense of Western civilization itself because “Jews themselves become a proxy for the western subject—homo europaeus—in need of saving from the marauding other. The presence of Jews and the need to defend them from harm become a means to enact punitive policies and violent action while protecting the state and institutions from criticism.”¹¹² The protection of the Jew, as the proxy for the Western subject, authorizes racialized state violence against Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian communities.

Lentin’s framework is informed by Palestinian scholar Anna-Esther Younes’ analysis of the war on antisemitism, which “operates according to the logic previously epitomized by the ‘war on drugs.’”¹¹³ Building on Younes, Lentin elaborates that, while feigning concern for the protection of Jewish people, the war on antisemitism in fact proceeds “by managing, criminalizing, and targeting migrant, refugee, and of color communities with the figure of the Palestinian anti-Semite as its main culprit.”¹¹⁴ I suggest that the war on Black antisemitism constitutes an entangled but distinct theater of war within the broader war on antisemitism. By displacing antisemitism onto Black people and then formulating Black antisemitism as anti-white racism, Zionist narratives of Black antisemitism as white grievance use a parallel maneuver to the one Lentin describes. Feeding white supremacy’s domestic warfare against U.S. Black communities and on Black insurgency, the Black antisemitism trope posits the figure of the vulnerable Jew as a stand-in for whiteness under attack.

In a moment of resurgent white fascist statecraft, the opportunity for white supremacy to disavow antisemitism and rearticulate it as grievance is a singularly potent offering on the part of Zionist actors. White liberal narratives have never taken seriously Black radicals’ documentation of fascism’s continuity with colonial and anti-Black genocide, so the extermination of European Jews in the Nazi holocaust has continued to be described as fascism’s singular apotheosis. Given this, the absorption of antisemitism into a narrative of white grievance—instead of white supremacist violence—serves as a uniquely powerful maneuver for rehabilitating fascism.¹¹⁵

And indeed, the white-as-Jew framework has been taken up enthusiastically by the state, materializing these narrative maneuvers directly into fascist statecraft in the context of the Trump Administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. The Task Force is a facet of Project Esther, “an initiative launched by the Heritage Foundation in October 2024 that frames pro-Palestinian advocacy as ‘terrorism’ and seeks to dismantle the broader left by branding critics of Zionism as threats to national security.”¹¹⁶ The Task Force substantially organizes its attacks under the rubric of anti-DEI, claiming that DEI ascribes a blanket, binary status of oppressor or oppressed to all people according to their identity, and that this binary specifically excludes or even targets Jews. Administration officials have argued that “antisemitism and DEI are inextricably linked and said the task force’s mandate is widely understood internally to include both issues.”¹¹⁷ From there, these officials generalize the supposed peril of DEI from one that targets Jews to one that targetsall white people. A White House official told the Washington Post that “the same campus culture that labels Jews as oppressors also isolates White students in favor of promoting racial minorities.”¹¹⁸ Task Force member Josh Gruenbaum claimed that “History has shown that antisemitism is oftentimes the canary in the coal mine for deeper civil rights issues.”¹¹⁹ In this case, since antisemitism is purported to be a phenomenon perpetrated by, and on behalf of, Black, Palestinian, and other people of color,¹²⁰ the “deeper civil rights issues” are understood as anti-white civil rights issues. 

Here again, the logic employed is the defense of the white-as-Jew, not just the Jew-as-white. The figure of the white-as-Jew has, in other words, become a critical link in the rhetorical and ideological chain that the current administration has established to redeploy civil rights legal infrastructure (as opposed to simply dismantling it) as a weapon wielded against Black, Indigenous, and communities of color in the United States.¹²¹ While the trope of Black antisemitism as betrayal is not new, its deployment toward a wholesale reversal of racial hierarchies is characteristic of the present moment’s adaptations of the racial regime.

A key claim of this logic is that DEI and CRT target Jews and, by extension, whites. A 2021 article by Pamela Paresky argues that “despite its laudable goal of opposing racism and white supremacy, CRT relies on narratives of greed, appropriation, unmerited privilege, and hidden power—themes strikingly reminiscent of familiar anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.”¹²² Even a superficial review of the history of European antisemitism reveals that its reliance on conspiracy is the result of maneuvers of displacement and diversion by ruling classes, who have throughout history cast responsibility for the exploitative conditions of racial capitalism onto the figure of the conspiring Jew. Effectively, the ruling classes have, over time, purposefully constructed the antisemitic figure of the powerful, greedy Jew as scapegoat to embody the ills of racial capitalism, only to—in recent years, as exemplified in the quote above by Paresky—denounce all critiques of racial capitalism on the basis of their resemblance to the antisemitic figure of the greedy Jew. 

Through the logic of racial inversion, Zionist narrations of the reversals that accompany the moment of Black antisemitism as betrayal facilitate new technologies for the recalibration of the racial regime. This narrative not only authorizes rightward shifts in the public politics of Zionist actors, but also constructs a narrative of inverted racial hierarchies that serves to justify newly dominant strategies of white fascist statecraft. Both represent valuable contributions by Zionist actors to white supremacy’s twin projects of domestic warfare against Black insurgency and genocidal warfare against Palestinians.

Conclusion: Zionism’s Parallel Solicitations to White Supremacy

Zionist strategy has always appealed to white supremacy for protection and inclusion in its project of domination in exchange for Zionist collaboration in racial/colonial violence. Theodor Herzl famously appealed to European imperial powers for defense of the Zionist project, vowing in return that it would form a “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”¹²³ Herzl promised service to white supremacy’s project of racial-colonial domination against Arabs and Muslims in exchange for protection from, and inclusion in, the project of European Civilization. In many ways, the Zionist construction of Black antisemitism shines a light on a series of parallel maneuvers with respect to anti-Black violence. I read Zionist participation in anti-Black discursive and material violence as a parallel solicitation of white supremacy for inclusion in its project of domination, for which anti-Black violence is a necessary rite of passage.¹²⁴ As such, I argue that collusion with anti-Black violence is not a byproduct of Zionist backlash, but rather a fundamental element of Zionist strategy and Zionism itself. 

In other words, the JewBelong billboards dotting freeways throughout the country are not speaking solely, or perhaps even primarily, to Jews. With their specific discursive interventions, these billboards target a non-Jewish, white, fascistic public. They make the case that white Jews—on whose behalf Zionists arrogate to themselves the right to speak—can be valuable partners in the project of white supremacy. The JewBelong billboards defaming Zionists’ erstwhile Black allies announce their willingness to participate in anti-Black violence through counterinsurgency, direct attack, and the elaboration of a logic of racial inversion that all serve the recalibration of racial regimes. 

The parallel between Herzl’s solicitation of Western imperial powers on the one hand, and contemporary U.S. Zionists’ solicitations of white supremacy on the other, is one of many throughlines in Zionist strategy that apply similar tactics against both Palestinian and Black racialized others. Zionism facilitates a displacement of antisemitism from the West onto Palestinians, just as it facilitates a displacement of antisemitism from white supremacy onto Black people. Zionist propaganda constructs the white-as-Jew to facilitate the internalization of Black antisemitism as white grievance, just as the broader war on antisemitism positions the figure of the Jew as a proxy of homo europaeus to authorize colonial and genocidal war against Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. This mirroring is not accidental. It speaks to the intertwined nature of imperial racial-colonial and domestic anti-Black warfare that Black Power and other Third World liberation movements have articulated since at least the late 1960s. Attention to this mirroring compels an understanding of Zionism as not just anti-Arab or anti-Palestinian racism, but also as inextricable from the entire project of white supremacy, which rests heavily on a foundation of anti-Black racism.