ANTISEMITISM: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW – DAVID HARRIS

David Harris is executive vice chair of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), and author of Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press). On a visit to Australia, hosted by the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, David Harris addressed The Sydney Institute on Thursday 14 May 2026. In a most comprehensive and revealing paper, David Harris explained the fundamentals of antisemitism over millennia and, in particular, the reasons behind the growing antisemitism in Western democracies that has resurfaced in the twenty-first century.

ANTISEMITISM: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW

DAVID HARRIS

Let me begin with the story of the book. In 2023, out of the blue, I received a phone call from someone who described herself as the executive editor of Oxford University Press.

She wanted to discuss my writing a book for the publisher. In the world from which I come, those calls do not happen. It’s quite the opposite. One strategises for months and years about how to get the attention of a publisher, and then bites one’s nails, prays, and hopes. So, I immediately thought this was a prank call by one of my daughters-in-law or grand daughters.

Fortunately, she did not hang up on me, though she had every right to do so. She convinced me that she was who she said she was, and told me that, given surging Jew hatred, the publisher felt it was necessary to have a new book. To be sure, there have been other books written on the subject over the years, but, as she explained, they were somewhat out of date and mostly too scholarly, which I understood to mean having too many semicolons.

Of course, I accepted the invitation. I subsequently spent two long, lonely years with a very dispiriting subject about which I thought I knew something.

On a personal level, my mother, first in the Soviet Union and then in occupied France; my father, in Austria after the Anschluss in 1938 and until the war’s end; and my wife, in her native Libya as a member of the Jewish minority, which no longer exists there, had all experienced life-threatening antisemitism.

Plus, I had spent nearly 50 years in the Jewish world travelling the globe, including visiting this great country many times. Much of the work focused, of course, on antisemitism and its many manifestations.

However, none of this fully prepared me for the project. The more I studied, researched, and delved, the more shell-shocked I became.

First, many believe this to be the world’s oldest social pathology. This story did not begin yesterday, or on 7 October 2023, or in January 1933 when Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. This is a story whose roots predate Christianity, took on new life and form during the early Christian period, and then evolved again with the advent of Islam in the seventh century.

To fast forward, in the nineteenth century, we add a largely new element, racially based hatred, which imposed immutable characteristics on Jews and, in turn, culminated with the Holocaust. Most recently, as we see, there has been a resurgence of antisemitism and the adjacent debate about whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism, a topic to which we will return.

It became clear to me that, if we are talking about antisemitism, we have to begin with an understanding that we’re dealing with a shape-shifting virus. It is among the most adaptable, creative and, if you will, ingenious pathologies in human history.

Second, I came to understand on a deeper level the unique nature of antisemitism. Yes, it’s collective hatred of the Jewish people. We get that. But, ultimately, as it plays out, it is an enduring conspiracy theory.

Unlike other biases, where the targeted group is somehow seen as less intelligent, less able, less skilled, or less efficient, antisemitism is different. Antisemitism looks down, but it also very much looks up.

It looks up because it ascribes to one in 500 people on Planet Earth — that’s 0.2 per cent of the global population — inordinate powers: powers of infinite evil, of malevolence, of malign intent; powers to pull the strings of much larger communities and, yes, countries. You name it.

This tiny group, we’re told, triggers wars, pandemics, poisonings of wells, disappearance of Christian children, military defeats such as the stab-in-the-back myth later embraced by Hitler, which held that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s defeat in the First World War, economic crashes, unemployment, weather calamities and so on. Antisemitism is, yes, a convenient, off-the-shelf, marketable conspiracy theory.

Third, it’s also abundantly clear that antisemitism, at the end of the day, is an irrational belief. That doesn’t mean there aren’t individual Jews who, like others, break the law or trample on ethics, but this is not about individual Jews. This is about an entire people allegedly born in sin, who perpetually seek control and dominance.

I came across a relevant quote from Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels. He said: “You cannot reason a person out of a view that he did not reason himself into in the first place.”

Since antisemitism is inherently irrational, it defies logic. Thus, the Jew is said to embody the evil of Karl Marx, communism, and Bolshevism. Yet, at the same time, the Jew supposedly represents the evil of the Rothschilds, exploitation, and rapacious capitalism.

Furthermore, Jews are seen by the far-Right as not only non-white but subhuman, poisoning the rave. Recall the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, the first year of President Donald Trump’s first term. They marched chanting, “The Jews will not replace us.” Meaning replace “us,” that is, white people.

And for that same group, Jews are accused of being behind the Great Replacement Theory. The aim, we’re told, is to upend majority-white societies by bringing in uncontrolled immigration from non-white countries and thereby destroying the majority-white population. That’s from the far-Right. From the far-Left, Jews are not only white, but are seen as exemplars of white privilege, white supremacy, and white power.

So, again, which is it?

For some, the Jew is the consummate insider. For others, the Jew is the unassimilable outsider.

I can logically try to point out these contradictions. As a Jew, I can’t be both Rothschild and Marx at the same time, and I can’t be both white and poisoning the white race simultaneously. At least, I don’t think so. But, to the antisemite, that’s water off a duck’s back, because it’s not about rational conversation.

We can largely divide the long history of antisemitism into three eras. And I want to come back to that for a moment. Era number one, the longest, as I said, was religiously driven.

Let’s begin, for purposes of this conversation, with the Christian era, though we can go back before, when Jews challenged the rulers who had assigned to themselves godlike status and unquestioned authority. Along come the Jews as early dissenters to challenge their authority. In essence: “You may think you’re the last word, but not for us. We believe in something higher that supersedes you.” Those were surely not welcome messages. I can’t imagine any all-powerful ruler saying, “Really, can we discuss this? I hadn’t thought about that before.”

Then along came the early Christian era and, essentially, Jews are seen as committing two grave, unforgivable sins. The first is that Jews were accused collectively and in perpetuity of responsibility for the death of Jesus — a view reflected in centuries of Christian teaching and only formally repudiated by the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council in 1965.

That’s a pretty serious charge, and it’s a charge meant not just for the alleged perpetrators, but for all Jews for all time. This meant that I, born in 1949, without necessarily realising it, spent the first 16 years of my life being included in the community of those who killed Jesus.

Sin number two was that many Jews did not embrace the new theology, which was meant to supersede — hence the term supersessionism — Judaism. It was believed to take monotheism to a new level. It was not by accident that we now had the “Old” Testament, though we call it the Hebrew Bible, which was then superseded by the “New” Testament. So, once again, Jews were the stubborn dissenters.

And because we were the original monotheists, one couldn’t simply ignore the Jews. Somehow, Jewish validation was necessary for many Christians in order to convince themselves there really was no opposition to the notion that a replacement theology had arrived.

In the seventh century, we get yet another monotheistic religion, one that describes itself as the perfection of monotheism. It does not reject Judaism or Christianity per se; it even embraces Jesus and Moses as prophets. But, at the same time, it supersedes both and says: This is the ultimate truth.

Again, without going into the historical details, the Jews largely rejected this, whether in Medina or Khaybar or elsewhere, and the result once again became persecution and discrimination. I’m not going to recount the whole story. I simply want to lay the groundwork for the first era: religiously based antisemitism.

In theory, at least, there was an escape valve for Jews: conversion. Not necessarily in the first generation, where conversion may still be seen as suspect. But perhaps by the third or fourth generation, without computers and a database, you could probably get away with it — especially if you became a rabid antisemite yourself.

Then came the next phase, in the second half of the nineteenth century, starting in Germany, that dwelled on race and racial theories. Race became the organising principle and along came the word “antisemitism,” which had not existed before.

Today, there is a debate around a hyphen. Whether or not the word antisemitism should be hyphenated revolves around whether there is such a thing as a Semitic people. Many Arabs, in particular, insist that they, by definition, cannot be antisemitic because they themselves are Semites. Jews, however, say no, that’s too cute. The word was specifically designed to refer to Jew hatred. Therefore, we have to skip the hyphen in order to eliminate the upper-case S and not acknowledge a so-called group of people that, in practice, does not exist. The goal is to maintain the specificity of the term antisemitism.

Be that as it may, it culminated in the Holocaust, and the escape valve in era one, conversion, was no longer available in era two. If you were racially Jewish, and if you had all of these Nazi charts going to painstaking lengths to identify every possible combination of ancestry dating back generations, the escape valve was largely non-existent.

Then we enter a third era after the Holocaust. In some ways, this may be the most complex. In this phase, the post-war period, even for some antisemites, Adolf Hitler, the Nazi regime, and the Final Solution had been a step too far. They may not have liked Jews; they may not have trusted Jews; but they did not necessarily subscribe to Auschwitz, Birkenau, the crematoria, or Zyklon B.

Antisemitism, shall we say, at least in the Western world, got a bad name.

In Moscow, however, in conversation with some Arab leaders, a new strategy was developed called anti-Zionism. It’s not that there weren’t others who were anti-Zionist in the past, but this became a kind of global ideology with a plan, if you will, including at the UN, through the media and, later, social media, that would seek to mask antisemitism, give it a different face and even, if you will, a certain “respectability.”

Of course, this is where the controversy begins.

In every conversation I have about the book, we always come back to the subject of whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism. I contend that it is.

I’m perfectly happy to listen to others’ views, but I believe at the end of the day that the intent of the Soviets was clear — and my witnesses begin with knowledgeable people from the Soviet Union such as Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky, among others, from that era. They would be the first to tell you that, for the Soviets (and Arabs), the words “Jew” and “Zionist” were interchangeable. It all depended on when, where and what needed to be said in that particular moment.

Anti-Zionism became a linguistic escape from accusations of antisemitism, while attempting to deny to the Jewish people the right of self-determination championed for others, including the Palestinians.

Now we come to phase, let’s call it 3.1, which is the surging Jew hatred that we’ve seen in Australia, Britain, the United States, and Canada, that includes and goes beyond anti-Zionism. Some of this is post-book publication. Unfortunately, every day, it seemed, there was a new incident that I felt needed to be added to the book. At a certain moment, the publisher said: “This is a book. At some point, we have to stop.” So, we stopped before the terrorist massacre at Bondi Beach, for example.

More broadly, many ask, what explains the dramatic change in the environment?

What seemed to have happened, at least in my interpretation, was the arrival of an expiration date. An expiration date that, in effect, said: “Enough already. Enough about the Holocaust. We’ve listened for 80 years or thereabouts. We’ve heard your stories. Time to move on. There have been other great tragedies, even other Holocausts.”

Increasingly, as well, there was the attempt by some in the pro-Palestinian community to appropriate Holocaust language, Holocaust imagery, and even Holocaust inversion. Truth be damned. The victims of the Holocaust became the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The victims of genocide become the perpetrators of genocide.

I would remind us all, parenthetically, that the word genocide did not even exist until the middle of the Second World War. Earlier in the war, Winston Churchill, after receiving reports of Nazi mass killings in Eastern Europe, said: “We are witnessing a crime without a name.” Along came Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who had managed to escape Europe and come to the United States. He combined a Latin root and a Greek root to coin the word “genocide”.

So, here we have in the West what seems to be an expiration date, the weakening of Holocaust education, consciousness and awareness, the growing attempt to weaponise the term against the State of Israel and the Jewish people and, it must also be said, a growing immigrant population that, in some cases, brought antisemitism with them from their countries of origin in the Islamic world.

We also have another phenomenon in Western liberal societies. I’m generalising, of course, and there are exceptions. After the Second World War, as the Holocaust became better understood, and as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi and others wrote their books and memoirs, there descended upon the world a kind of taboo. We couldn’t control what people thought, of course, but what people said mattered.

So, in mainstream societies — yours, mine, Canadian, British and others — there was largely a no-go area. If one expressed antisemitic views, there were consequences. You might be expelled from a political party, lose an election, violate a hate-crimes law, breach a code of conduct, or be disinvited from social gatherings.

We’ve reached a point, at least today, where the taboos have been lifted and the consequences have largely vanished. In the United States today, in the United States Congress, we have people who are elected officials working on the budget, as you just did this week, or on foreign policy or defence, who are antisemitic. Antisemitic without apology and without consequence, to the point where, as we speak, there is a candidate to be the next senator from the state of Maine who had a longstanding Nazi tattoo. You may have heard the story. It’s not just any Nazi tattoo. It’s the tattoo that was specifically used by SS concentration camp guards.

In today’s polarised, fragmented America, the fact that this candidate had that tattoo is no longer disqualifying because the larger goal is to defeat Donald Trump and gain power — in this case, a Democratic majority in the United States Senate. So, Democrats rush to endorse this candidate, Graham Platner, and minimise or dismiss the significance of the tattoo. I can offer you other examples in both political parties.

The consequences are diminishing and the firewalls of liberal democracy, Holocaust awareness, Holocaust education and the spirit of multiculturalism, Australian style, or pluralism, American style, have eroded. It’s not that we don’t know where we need to go to extinguish antisemitism. I think we do. We just don’t know how to get there.

What do I mean? I’ll mention just a couple of examples in the remaining time.

President Trump awarded America’s highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, posthumously to Master Sergeant Rodney Edmonds. Why? Rodney Edmonds had been taken prisoner by the Nazis and placed in a POW camp together with 1,200 other American prisoners of war. He was the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer.

The German officers summoned him, put a gun to his forehead, and said: “Deliver the names of all the Jewish soldiers.” There were between 200 and 300 Jews among the 1,200 POWs. Rodney Edmonds responded with four words: “We are all Jews.” The Germans blinked. Edmonds survived.

Let me now flip it.

I spent some time in Denmark over many years. Even as a child, I learned about and was fascinated by the Danish rescue of Jews in 1943. It was an inspiring exception to the fate of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. There were a few other exceptions. I learned later that Albania was one such exception. So, too, Bulgaria, though more complicated because Sofia was a Nazi ally.

In Denmark, I would simply ask random people — cab drivers, waitresses, and others — to help me understand what their parents and grandparents did in 1943. Why did they go to such lengths when they learned from a German official about the planned deportation? The answer, if I could aggregate it, was another four words: “They were fellow Danes.”

It didn’t matter what house of worship they attended, or whether they attended one at all; whether they wore a skullcap or not; whether they prayed in Hebrew or Latin, or didn’t pray at all. They were simply fellow Danes.

In truth, I would argue, we don’t need to look very far for the antidote to Jew hatred. It’s somewhere between those two points: “We are all Jews” and “They were fellow Danes.” The challenge is not the destination. It’s the journey.

People invoke, usually as their first policy prescription, education, education, education. Sure, it makes perfect sense. Young people are not born to hate. They are taught to hate, whether at home, in a schoolyard, on a playground, on sports fields, in a house of worship or, increasingly, through social media as they get older. Education is a key part of the strategy, but it cannot be the alpha and omega. There are many complications along the way that we can discuss.

Hate-crimes laws — both the legislation itself and the implementation of those laws — are logical responses as well, but complicated ones, because there are delicate balances between freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to protest and what might be proscribed. Moreover, how many foreign actors are trying to move Jew-hatred forward in our school systems? Are they being tracked, monitored, and confronted?

In the United States, the organisation with which I now work, ISGAP (Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy), has documented billions of dollars flowing, principally from Qatar, into major American universities and school systems. Much of this activity has been informed by ideas associated with the extremist Muslim Brotherhood and forms part of a broader effort to shape narratives and influence institutions.

Yet here we encounter one more complication.

Bizarrely, Qatar is nonetheless viewed by the United States as a valued ally. It hosts an important American military base. It regularly positions itself as an indispensable intermediary, whether regarding hostages taken on 7 October, discussions involving the Taliban, or contacts with Iran. I could keep going.

All of the potential strategies cry out for attention, and all of them come with complications.

We also have, unfortunately, the weaponisation, or instrumentalisation, of antisemitism today. It is not as if everyone begins from the same starting point. For example, many on the Right are perfectly happy to have the conversation about surging antisemitism, but immediately point the finger at others. Speak to many on the Left, and they point the finger in the opposite direction.

This was illustrated, for example, by a member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib, an outspoken pro-Palestinian advocate. When Jews were killed at a kosher food store in Jersey City, just across the river from New York City, she tweeted: “White supremacy kills.” It was subsequently revealed that the murderers were self-declared Black Hebrews, who contended that white Jews were impostors. She deleted the tweet, though not before it had been preserved and circulated, and then appeared to lose interest in the perpetrators.

That’s not serious. It’s not serious whether it comes from the Right, from the Muslim community, or from the Left. Yet this weaponisation continues.

I hope all that changes for the sake not only of the Jewish community, but also for the sake of the liberal democratic structures built since the Second World War — and for the pluralistic and multicultural societies we have sought to advance.

The fight against antisemitism must never be seen as a Jewish fight alone. Rather, it must be seen as the fight of the silent majority, or one day, I hope, the loud majority to defend the essence, the foundational principles, of liberal democracy.

It means understanding that when 15 Australian Jews are killed on Bondi Beach for the simple act of celebrating the first day of a Jewish holiday, something fundamental is at risk for the entire nation.

I want to believe the majority of Australians — and, in the case of antisemitic murders in the United States, the majority of Americans — will say: “Not on my watch.” “Not in my country.” And understand that, at the end of the day, we are all linked together.

Because, as history has amply demonstrated, what begins with Jews never ends with Jews.