The Antisemitic Moment and the Collapse of Moral Language
Are we witnessing the emergence of a new “antisemitic moment”? Here, Manuela Consonni analyzes the profound shift brought about by October 7 and the war in Gaza. Navigating the tension between criticism of Israeli state violence, the resurgence of antisemitic tropes, and the crisis of moral categories inherited from the post-Shoah era, she examines the very conditions necessary for a political judgment capable of distinguishing between forms of suffering without pitting them against one another.
Are we in an antisemitic moment, to use Pierre Birnbaum’s definition in his study of the spread of antisemitism in France in 1898 during the Dreyfus Affair?1 Perhaps—but if so, it is a moment structurally different from the one he described. No longer centered on the Jewish citizen accused of treason within the nation-state, as in the case of Alfred Dreyfus, the present configuration revolves around the Jew, the Zionist, or the Israeli as a condensed signifier through which sovereignty, coloniality, genocide, victimhood, and moral legitimacy are violently reorganized.
Birnbaum’s “moment” designates not the mere presence of antisemitism, but a historical crystallization. In 1898, long-existing anti-Jewish motifs—Jewish power, treason, money, racial degeneration, religious hostility—coalesced into a public language capable of mobilizing crowds, structuring political divisions, and permeating both metropolitan and provincial France. Antisemitism became a shared grammar of interpretation: a way of reading events, assigning responsibility, and organizing collective emotion.
After October 7 and the war in Gaza, something analogous—though not identical—has taken place. Antisemitism is not simply increasing; it is once again becoming a grammar of explanation. The Jew, the Zionist, or the Israeli emerges as a figure through which the world is rendered intelligible: hidden power, media control, colonial violence, genocide, Western hypocrisy, racial domination. Some of these elements belong to legitimate and necessary criticism of Israeli state violence. Yet others transform Jews, Israelis, or “Zionists” into a totalizing explanatory object, collapsing distinctions between state, society, and individuals.
The empirical signs are unmistakable. The surge in antisemitic incidents across Europe and the United States, the normalization of violent rhetoric, the circulation of conspiratorial narratives, and the distortion or denial of the massacres themselves all point to a profound transformation of the public sphere. Antisemitism is not returning as a marginal pathology; it is re-entering as a structuring principle of discourse. And yet, the category itself cannot simply be transferred from the past to the present. It must be transformed.
If in 1898 the antisemitic moment was organized around the accusation that the Jew was not truly French, today the accusation is inverted. The Jew is no longer charged with insufficient belonging, but with excess: excessive sovereignty, excessive power, excessive violence, excessive immunity, excessive memory. The creation of the State of Israel has fundamentally altered the structure of antisemitism. It has provided antisemitic discourse with a concrete political object, but also with a reality that cannot be reduced to discourse: occupation, war, devastation, and the exercise of state violence.
Antisemitism is not simply increasing; it is once again becoming a grammar of explanation. The Jew, the Zionist, or the Israeli emerges as a figure through which the world is rendered intelligible.
It is here that the present moment reveals its full complexity.
The attacks of October 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza have produced a dramatic rupture—one that has irreversibly fractured what might be called the moral exceptionalism associated with Jews and Jewish history in the post-Shoah era. The Shoah functioned, for decades, as a foundational trauma grounding both the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination and a broader moral authority within global discourse. That authority is now subject to unprecedented scrutiny, challenged by the scale of destruction in Gaza, the humanitarian catastrophe, and the visible consequences of Israeli military and political strategy of occupation.
For Jews in Israel and in the diaspora, October 7 constituted a traumatic break: an event that reactivated existential fears of persecution and annihilation, deeply inscribed in collective memory. The brutality of the attacks, and the explicit ideological commitment of Hamas to the destruction of Israel, intensified a sense of vulnerability that has been politically mobilized, reinforcing defensive postures, legitimizing radicalized policies, and reshaping the internal and external coordinates of Israeli politics.
The war that followed has produced a similar effect : a field of heightened moral and political intensity. Within this field, criticism of Israeli policy is not only legitimate—it is a necessary condition for the exercise of judgment itself. If the violence of October 7 establishes one horizon of moral clarity, the destruction in Gaza establishes another—no less resistant to silence or deferral. It is precisely within this field, however, that a more elusive and troubling phenomenon emerges: the reactivation of antisemitism not as explicit doctrine, but as structure.
Antisemitism today often operates without self-awareness. It does not necessarily present itself as hatred of Jews; rather, it emerges through abstraction, generalization, and moral inversion. Jews, wherever they are and whatever their positions, are rendered collectively responsible. The distinction between state and people collapses; political critique becomes ontological accusation. The figure of the Jew or the Israeli is transformed into a symbolic operator through which global injustice is explained.
This is why the present moment cannot be understood as a simple confusion between antisemitism and criticism. What we are witnessing is their entanglement.
On the one hand, there is the reality of state violence—visible, devastating, and morally urgent. On the other, there is the use of antisemitic grammar within the very language that seeks to denounce that violence. Antisemitism does not oppose critique; it traverses it, inhabits it, and at times reshapes it from within.
And there are distortions which emerge from within Israel itself. The political instrumentalization of antisemitism—through its extension to encompass dissent, the stigmatization of opposition, and the conflation of critique with betrayal—risks emptying the concept of its analytical precision. When internal critics are labeled as traitors or supporters of the enemy, antisemitism is stretched beyond its capacity to discriminate and thus loses its ability to identify and name actual antisemitic phenomena. Applied indiscriminately to virtually any form of external criticism, it generates a structural distortion: antisemitism is trivialized through overuse, yet becomes increasingly difficult to identify precisely where it manifests, even as it continues to spread and intensify. The result is a paradoxical configuration: antisemitism is both overextended and under-recognized—invoked where it does not apply and overlooked where it takes shape most clearly.
This moment also signals a deeper transformation. The centrality of Jewish victimhood, which shaped much of the late twentieth-century moral landscape, is increasingly displaced or contested. The figure of the victim itself becomes unstable, subject to inversion, appropriation, and competition. In some cases, the imagery and moral vocabulary of the Shoah are redeployed to describe Palestinian suffering, producing a reversal that is not merely rhetorical, but structurally embedded in contemporary forms of antisemitic imagination: Jews as Nazi perpetrators, Palestinians as retroactively positioned victims (the new Jewish victims) within a reconfigured moral narrative.
Antisemitism does not oppose critique; it traverses it, inhabits it, and at times reshapes it from within.
What is at stake, therefore, is not only the presence of antisemitism, but the collapse of a shared moral language. The categories through which violence is judged—genocide, responsibility, victimhood, justice—no longer operate within a common semantic field. They fragment, diverge, and become instruments of mutually exclusive interpretations.
If we are to speak of an antisemitic moment today, it must be in this transformed sense: not as a repetition of 1898, but as a new historical configuration in which antisemitism operates as a grammar of intelligibility—structuring perception before argument and judgment before evidence. In such a moment, the task of critique can no longer be limited to taking positions. It must instead aim at something more demanding: the reconstruction of the very conditions under which judgment remains possible.
It is precisely at this point that the ethical horizon re-enters—not as sentiment, but as discipline. The refusal to replace one suffering with another is not a gesture of equivalence; it is a condition for preserving the recognition of suffering itself. The failure to sustain that distinction after the Shoah marked a historical and moral collapse; to repeat it after Gaza would signal not only error, but the erosion of the very language through which responsibility can still be articulated.
Without that discipline, suffering ceases to anchor responsibility in a specific historical and moral context. It becomes instead an instrument of moral substitution, whereby one suffering is invoked to replace, neutralize, or overwrite another. In this way, suffering is transformed into a transferable moral currency—circulating across contexts while dissolving the very responsibility it ought to impose.
The refusal to replace one suffering with another is not a gesture of equivalence; it is a condition for preserving the recognition of suffering itself.
This is the risk that Giacomo Debenedetti, the Italian literary critic, identified already in 1944.2 His warning—formulated as a critique of the “excess of love” extended to the Jews as a way of redeeming one’s own guilt, one’s indifference, and one’s shame—resonates today with an almost prophetic force, all the more so in the moral collapse we are now witnessing:
“It is clear that this offer of love, instead of accumulating only to be discharged in bursts of passion when it is already too late to remedy anything, would be far more useful if it were diffused into a durable and reflective solidarity, capable of warding off evil in a permanent way.”
Debenedetti’s insight names a structural danger: that moral response, when governed by affect rather than judgment, oscillates between absence and excess—between indifference and overidentification—without ever stabilizing into responsibility. If we—humanity as a whole—once again pass over these deads with indifference, if we trample upon and deny the meaning that rises from the blood and the suffering, then we relinquish not only the past, but the very possibility of orienting ourselves toward the future. We would, once again, have blasphemed hope for a change.
