Antisemitism endures because it is useful

In “The Telos of a Hatred” (Fathom Journal, November 2025) I dismantle one of the most persistent misconceptions about antisemitism: that it is irrational, episodic or inexplicable. My argument is far more disturbing. Antisemitism has always served a purpose – a social, political, psychological utility. It reappears not because societies forget its horrors but because it remains useful to them.

Jew-hatred never dies because someone always needs it alive. In order to defeat antisemitism, we must understand that purpose: why Jew-hatred recurs, mutates and thrives even when old narratives are exposed.

This “telos” – the final purpose – has unfolded across 2000 years. In the ancient world, Jews refused to assimilate into imperial order. That stubborn moral independence turned them into the ideal “other”: a people who could be accused of disloyalty, separateness or treachery whenever unity was required.

In medieval Europe, Jews played another role – the scapegoat. When plague, famine or social fracture struck, Jews were cast as pollutants poisoning wells, murdering children, threatening Christian purity.

The modern world promised emancipation and equality. Instead, antisemitism evolved into a political technology. In the 19th century, nationalism needed traitors; in the 20th, totalitarianism needed “corrupting influences”; in the Soviet era, Marxist utopianism needed bourgeois saboteurs. Jews were conscripted into these roles involuntarily, repeatedly, predictably.

Antisemitism adapts because its function adapts.

And the most dangerous form of all is redemptive antisemitism – the belief that society can only be purified by the removal or silencing of Jews. In the 20th century’s horrors – the genocidal politics of the Holocaust, state-sponsored antisemitism in the Soviet era – hatred turned genocidal. In those regimes, antisemitism became “redemptive”, presented as a sacrament: annihilation was framed as purification, or as ideological necessity.

This ideology fuelled the Nazis and reappears today in Islamist movements and revolutionary political subcultures that treat the eradication of Jewish sovereignty as a moral duty. The vocabulary changes. The telos does not.

The new mutation

Today’s antisemitism wears easy disguises: anti-Zionism, “decolonisation”, anti-racism. These frameworks, however well intentioned in the abstract, become destructive when they are engineered to erase Jewish indigeneity, demonise Jewish sovereignty, or justify violence against Jews as “resistance”.

Across campuses, activist circles and online ecosystems, Jews once again serve a function:
to embody everything a movement opposes – whiteness, capitalism, colonialism, privilege, power.

This is why October 7 did not result in universal moral clarity. Instead, we witnessed the re-activation of ancient patterns: minimisation of Jewish suffering, denial of Jewish victimhood, glorification of Jewish death and an almost theological insistence that Jewish fear is illegitimate.

We are forced to confront the chilling realisation that antisemitism is caused by need. And when societies are fractured, polarised, or searching for redemption, their “need” for Jews increases.

Australia is not immune

This is deeply relevant to Australia today. Antisemitic incidents are at record highs. Jewish schoolchildren are told to hide their uniforms. Suburbs are vandalised. Pro-Hamas marches openly celebrate terror.

These are indicators that Australian political subcultures have rediscovered the utility of antisemitism.

For radicals – left and right – Jews are again becoming symbols, avatars, abstractions. This should terrify us. When Jews become symbols, history shows their safety evaporates.

The moral warning

If a society allows antisemitism to perform its “purpose”, the society itself corrodes. Antisemitism is a sign that social cohesion is fraying, that politics is descending into myth and rage, that truth is being replaced by dogma, that the nation is searching for someone to blame rather than the courage to repair itself.

In democratic societies, the presence of antisemitism is an indicator that the civic centre is collapsing. Australia has always imagined itself immune to this corrosion. It must abandon this illusion quickly.

In a sense we are left no real comfort. In a world scarred by renewed anti-Jewish attacks, rising global antisemitism and the resurgence of anti-Zionist rhetoric – not least since October 7 – “The Telos of a Hatred” is a warning and a call to clarity.

Antisemitism is not a battlefield with a clear enemy or a single flashpoint, but a shapeshifting ideology whose function – exclusion, scapegoating, identity-construction – remains constant.

Importantly, this also means confronting the uncomfortable fact that antisemitism is not just “prejudice”. It is social architecture – a way societies define themselves. And if that architecture serves antisemitic ends, then fighting antisemitism becomes a necessary act of civic defence.

The stakes could not be clearer: understanding the “telos” of Jew-hatred is not an academic exercise. It is vital to confronting antisemitism effectively. Hate is never simply about “blame” or “anger”. It is about who a society wants to be and who it wants to exclude.

As Jew-hatred serves a function, its defeat requires more than condemnation. It requires disrupting the function itself:

Calling out scapegoating wherever it appears;

Confronting the ideological machines that recycle antisemitic narratives under the guise of activism;

Holding institutions accountable when they permit or normalise the targeting of one minority to appease another;

Teaching the history clearly, honestly, without euphemism;

Insisting that Jewish dignity not be conditional – ever.

Antisemitism persists because it is endlessly adaptable, what Rabbi Sacks called the “mutating virus”. But there is a moment of hope embedded in this diagnosis: if antisemitism is constructed, it can be dismantled. If it is weaponised, it can be de-weaponised.

But only if society chooses to see it – clearly, analytically, unsentimentally – and refuses to let Jew-hatred serve its purpose.

Adam Slonim is a member of Jewish Labor, businessman and podcaster.

Full essay: fathomjournal.org/the-telos-of-a-hatred