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How to Understand Anti-Jewish Prejudice
(Atlantic) Yair Rosenberg - Recent anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. include the 2018 massacre of 11 congregants in Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue by a white supremacist; shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, killing three, in 2019, by assailants tied to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement; and the 2022 hostage-taking in a Colleyville, Texas, congregation by an Islamic extremist. What unites all of these seemingly disparate anti-Semitic actors is their adherence to a conspiracy of Jewish control. The Pittsburgh white supremacist believed that Jews were responsible for flooding the country with the brown people he hated, as part of the "great replacement" of the white race. One of the Black Hebrew Israelite sympathizers in Jersey City wrote on social media about how Jews controlled the government. And the British Islamic extremist who targeted the Texas synagogue did so because he thought American rabbis held sway over the U.S. authorities and could free someone from prison. A conspiracy theory about how the world works that blames sinister string-pulling Jews for social and political problems is more likely to get people killed. And thanks to centuries of material blaming the world's problems on its Jews, conspiracy theorists seeking a scapegoat for their sorrows inevitably discover that the invisible hand of their oppressor belongs to an invisible Jew.