Why treating antisemitism as a misunderstanding has led us in the wrong direction
A real sense of exhaustion has settled over Jewish public life in the last few years. It is not only grief or fear, although there has been plenty of that. It is the exhaustion of having to constantly explain and defend ourselves at the same time.
Anyone who has spent time online or in public-facing spaces knows the pattern. Long threads defining what Zionism actually means. Carousels clarifying Jewish indigeneity. Infographics carefully separating legitimate criticism of Israeli policy from antisemitism.
The effort is often thoughtful and well-argued, built on the assumption that if people understood more, hostility would soften. There is a logic to this instinct. If the problem is misunderstanding, then better information should resolve it. If people knew the history, if they grasped the complexity, if they could see the distinctions clearly enough, then the accusations would lose their force.
Much of what is referred to as hasbara operates within this assumption. It treats hostility as a knowledge gap, something that can be addressed through context, explanation, and moral clarity. But that assumption begins to break down in practice.
In the places where explanation is supposedly most needed, it often seems to fail. Not always, and not completely, but consistently enough to raise a more uncomfortable possibility. What if the problem is not a lack of information?
Political psychology is not especially kind to the idea that people revise identity-driven beliefs when presented with better facts. When a position becomes tied to identity, contradiction does not necessarily weaken it. It often hardens it. Information is filtered through prior loyalties, social incentives, and group belonging. The goal is not to arrive at a neutral conclusion, but to maintain coherence with a position that already feels necessary. In that sense, explanation runs into a structural limit. It is not that the facts are wrong, but that they are not doing the kind of work we assume they are.
But even this does not fully capture what is happening. It explains why hostile beliefs are resistant to correction, but not why the interaction itself so often takes the same shape. Accusation followed by explanation, then another accusation, then another explanation. The pattern is familiar enough to feel almost scripted.
As one widely circulated paraphrase of Sartre puts it, the antisemite does not accuse the Jew because he believes something was stolen, but to watch the Jew turn his pockets out to prove his innocence.
Taken seriously, this suggests that the accusation is not primarily a claim to be tested. It is a mechanism that produces a response. Once the explanation begins, it rarely concludes. Each answer invites another demand, not because the previous one failed, but because resolution was never the point.
Over time, the effect is cumulative. Speech becomes more careful, more anticipatory, more oriented toward pre-emption. The issue is not only the persistence of the accusation, but the position it creates. Jewish existence begins to appear as something that must be explained in order to be sustained.
There is also a more specifically Jewish way of recognising this pattern. One might describe it in theological terms, as a recurring condition of exile: not reducible to any single political moment, never fully dissolved by reason, and reappearing in whatever language a society currently finds legitimate.
Others will reject that framing, and that is fair. But even without it, the pattern is difficult to ignore. Hostility toward Jews does not remain fixed. It adapts. It borrows the moral vocabulary of each era and presents itself as something principled—justice, enlightenment, anti-racism, anti-capitalism, nationalism, anti-nationalism—whatever carries authority in that moment. It is rarely weakened by contradiction, because contradiction is not its weakness. Reinvention is its strength.
What follows from this is not that Jews should withdraw from public argument altogether, or that facts no longer matter. There are still audiences worth reaching and contexts where explanation is necessary. But it does require a clearer sense of what explanation can and cannot do.
It cannot, on its own, secure legitimacy in environments where legitimacy is not actually being negotiated in good faith. Treating it as if it can has consequences. It pulls Jewish life into a defensive posture, where speech is shaped less by what needs to be said than by what will be challenged, misread, or used against it.
The alternative is not silence, but a different orientation. One in which Jewish identity is not presented as a case to be argued, but lived without constant reference to its justification. This does not eliminate hostility, but it does refuse the role that hostility assigns.
What we Jews need now is not better branding or better hasbara. It is the confidence to understand that some forms of hatred are not waiting to be reasoned with—and that dignity begins when you stop organizing your entire self-presentation around that hope, but around the aspiration to be a nation that produces culture, language, and identity from within; loudly, and without any sort of defense, just because we exist, fully and without permission.