Jonathan Myers argues that the manner in which Jews have been cast as insiders and outsiders, victims and oppressors, moral exemplars and moral failures represents ‘bipolar antisemitism’. These contradictions are not incidental – they are central to the enduring logic of antisemitism. The consequence is that Jews are both hated, and deemed unworthy of sympathy and solidarity. Unless we understand ‘bipolar antisemitism’, we cannot fight against it, particularly in online debates that now dominate social interactions.
JEWS VIEWED IN CONTRADICTORY WAYS
Today, antisemites target Jews because of what they claim is ‘Jewish power’, one of the few things the far-left and far-right agree upon. That accusation always seems to rest upon nonsensical contradictions. We have all seen the peculiar train of thought of these arguments online, something so strange that it is easy to dismiss. Yet, these far-left and far-right opinions are important. They expose the deeper, hidden, and deadly logic of a ‘bipolar antisemitism’, the uniquely contradictory way that societies have stereotyped and stigmatised Jews. Understanding this thought process is vital for the battle against antisemitism.
The far-right buys into the fake belief that Jews have vast, even complete, ‘power’ and ‘influence’ over governments, media, financial institutions, and migration. They cast Jews as both hidden elites controlling a country’s economic levers for wealth creation (though apparently to benefit themselves), and conversely, as agents of national decline. The purpose of this supposed influence is so Jews can attain global domination. According to the far-right, the ‘Jews’ control ‘everything’ – which logically includes the far-right too.
The far-left agrees that the Jews are ‘powerful,’ though reframes antisemitism through language about race (including skin-colour), privilege, and power. They label Jews as ‘white’ or ‘white-adjacent’, therefore higher in the power hierarchy, and so disqualified from the category of potential victims of racism and oppression. Jews are expected to ‘check their privilege.’ The ‘white’ Ashkenazi Jew should even feel shame for having ‘white privilege’. And the far-left’s idea of perceived Jewish ‘power’ and ‘privilege’ means that Jews cannot be oppressed and so are underserving of sympathy.
A stark outcome of this disqualification appeared in a letter to the UK’s Metro newspaper in 2021. It argued that Jews are too privileged to be victims of racism. Dave Rich, Head of Policy at the Community Security Trust, responded that denying antisemitism on the grounds of supposed Jewish power simply reproduces an antisemitic myth. The paper apologised. Such attitudes also apply to Israelis and the Jewish state, which are accused of enjoying special protections, a ‘free pass’, denied others. These accusations draw upon old conflicting antisemitic narratives portraying Jews as inferior or lesser, yet also powerful or influential, as demonstrated by David Biale in Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (1986).
HOW BIPOLAR ANTISEMITISM WORKS
These examples demonstrate that there is something deeper and more pernicious at play than what we normally understand as antisemitism. This phenomenon is not simply a collection of seemingly absurd inconsistencies. Rather, bipolar antisemitism is a coherent system of hate: an old and uniquely contradictory way of stereotyping and targeting Jews. What bipolar antisemitism does is cast Jews in separate conflicting roles instead of a single consistent whole. For bipolar antisemitism, Jews actually are rich and poor, powerful and powerless, oppressor and oppressed, hyper-moral and morally corrupt. Bipolar antisemitism functions by holding both stereotypes of a set, and deploying whichever pole is useful in a given moment.
Despite its millennia-long existence, bipolarity is curiously under-recognised. A few commentators have come close to grasping it. Historian and diplomat Deborah Lipstadt, for example, has suggested that antisemites can punch down and up. They can punch down by portraying Jews as dirty and revolting. They can punch up by attacking a force they regard as rich and powerful. ‘They revile Jews but they also fear them,’ Lipstadt has said.
One reason why some analysts have not recognised bipolar antisemitism is that its characteristics tend to get muddled into a general category of ‘prejudice.’ Failing to understand how bipolar antisemitism targets Jews is a reason why social media content moderation mechanisms can fall short in detecting antisemitic material. That is a mistake because bipolarity underpins Jew-hate and its latest incarnation of antizionism, making it more than another form of prejudice or racism – as many politicians and organisations frequently presume. Racists stereotype other groups, often in demeaning or discriminatory ways. They stigmatise them as poor, violent, lazy, exotic, or criminal. However, racists imagine non-Jewish groups rarely as those things and their exact opposites.
Living in this contradiction is the defining difference between what antisemitism does to Jews because of its bipolarity and what racism does to other groups. Thanks to the bipolar logic at the heart of antisemitism, Jews are always open to condemnation, because if the antisemite does not hate them for being strong, then they can be loathed for being weak; if they are not rich, despise them for being poor. The bipolar nature of antisemitism means that those with an agenda (including bigots, conspiracy believers, followers of charismatic figures, and state actors) can promote their prejudices in any situation, not least online. Even the facts of Jewish victimhood, whether the Holocaust or October 7, can be portrayed as a scheme for Jews seeking some kind of dominance. That is demonstrated by the bipolar antisemitic claim that Jews supposedly manipulate Holocaust memory to enable alleged Israeli atrocities, or the notion that the sexual violence of October 7 is invented to justify IDF operations in Gaza.
Such bipolar antisemitism is nothing new. During the Holocaust, German soldiers forced Polish Jews to publicly denounce their alleged complicity in starting World War II – as if Jews in the shtetl were geopolitical operators. ‘Undoubtedly, this had an influence on uneducated people’, noted a Jewish survivor ‘nobody wanted to ask how old Leizer and lame Ruchel could possibly have started a world war.’ Jews were at once powerful orchestrators of armed conflict, yet lacking in power to stop the terrible attacks they faced.
Bipolar antisemitism’s caricatures of Jews are found throughout millennia, but from the Medieval era onwards they hardened into stereotypes. European Jews were understood as powerless, a marginalised subordinate group whose humiliation served as punishment for their killing and rejecting of the Christian god (as if one can kill a god). Simultaneously, Jews were depicted as powerful agents of the Devil – accused of possessing dangerous magical abilities and wielding treacherous power through secret plots. It reflected the fantasy about Jews in the wider Christian culture, which imagined Jews as a danger to society: as people who were always insincere, always concealing a hidden reality beneath outward public behaviour. Indeed, bipolar antisemitism allowed Medieval Christians to simultaneously envy Jews as rich usurers and to distain them as impoverished ghetto-dwellers. Such attitudes continued during the Enlightenment. Yet after European principalities had forced Jews to live in ghettos, Johann Heinrich Schulz, a Lutheran pastor in Prussia, accused Jews of forming ‘a state within a state.’
HOW BIPOLAR ANTISEMITISM APPEARS TODAY
These inherent contradictions continue to appear nowadays, which is why it is so important that those who have influence over social media networks understand bipolar antisemitism. Antisemitic content on social media often uses bipolar tropes: Jews as cultural corrupters and morally self-righteous, political or industrial elites and racial outsiders, powerful lobbyists and meek Holocaust victims. Indeed, in 2021 the Anti-Defamation League reported that such conspiracy stereotypes dominate online antisemitism, alongside Holocaust denial erasing Jewish victimhood altogether. Memes caricaturing Israel are likewise bipolar. Israel is seen as self-assured and militarily strong, while simultaneously composed of the wretched survivors of numerous pogroms and the Holocaust. Hamas taunts Israel about how it values life, yet Israel is accused of murdering children in Gaza (a remnant of the medieval blood libel which claimed that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood for baking Passover matzah). Similarly, there are accusations that Israel harvested Palestinians’ organs, a claim recently repeated by Jeremy Corbyn.
The different parts of the political spectrum adapt their bipolar images of Jews to fit their needs. The far-right depicts Jews as masterminds of multiculturalism and demographic replacement, even though the far-right also claims to like Israel for its alleged ethnocentrism. The far-left portrays Jews as privileged ‘whites’ upholding racism based on ‘critical race theory’ and ‘intersectionality.’ These are theories that deny Jews minority status, while conveniently allowing the far-left to ignore the fact that Jews are overrepresented in every Western society as victims of racism when compared to their proportion of the population. As David Baddiel argued Jews Don’t Count (2021).
Social media inflames the hatred because these are platforms on which everyone can be a judge. Users, with an exaggerated sense of righteousness, accuse Israel’s military of being technologically advanced and savagely stupid, with complex geopolitical issues ‘explained’ in 20-second videos. Jews outwardly proclaiming high ethical standards but, as demons in disguise, inwardly seeking destruction, debauchery, and non-Jewish children’s blood. Such users zealously believe they are in the right. As Kurdish academic Dastan Jasim has written ‘This new iteration of supremacy is not racial in the traditional sense, but moral.’
HOW TO FIGHT BIPOLAR ANTISEMITISM
Rebutting antisemitism on social media is vital as it dominates most people’s interactions in contemporary societies. People have hundreds of ‘friends’ online, far more than their actual friends and family. They talk online to more people than they speak to in person. Many people ‘learn’ about Jews and the Middle East from social media.
The problem is too many organisations approach online antisemitism as being just about debunking single stereotypes, such as that ‘all Jews are rich.’ That is not enough. What is needed, particularly for social media companies and those building large language models for artificial intelligence, is to grasp the peculiar logic of bipolar antisemitism. The point is that Jews are condemned no matter what they do. Bipolar antisemitism is why there are claims that Jews, the victims of antisemitism, are themselves ‘antisemites.’ That is why online we see comments claiming that Jews, the victims of Nazism, are today’s Nazis.
In policy terms, we may need to rework such statements as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, and other hate crime frameworks, to explicitly acknowledge bipolar antisemitism. Such redefinition is also vital to promote solidarity among minority groups. Once people recognise Jews as victims of hate and oppression within the bipolar context they will understand how Jews can be accused of apparent privilege. So when someone says ‘how can Jews be oppressed if they’re powerful?’ the answer lies in exposing the contradictory, and fundamentally antisemitic logic at play designed to ensure that Jews are always condemned.
Bipolar antisemitism’s ability to shift blame endlessly, to cast Jews both as weak and strong, insider and outsider, saint and sinner, is a form of ideological flexibility that explains the endurance of Jew-hate. Only when we identity and name this perverse logic as bipolar antisemitism, can we confront it effectively.
