There is a black hole at the heart of civilization, an abyss into which reason, decency, and historical memory have collapsed time and time again. It has devoured empires, corrupted ideologies, and stained the conscience of humanity with an indelible mark. It is the black hole of Jew-hatred, an affliction so ancient, so irrational, so perversely adaptable that it remains, even now, a defining pathology of our times.
And what is antisemitism, if not the most persistent and shape-shifting of hatred? It is not simply bigotry in its usual form; it is an entire counterfeit worldview, a grotesque mirror inversion of reality, where the Jew is always at once too weak and too powerful, too assimilated and too alien, the capitalist banker and the revolutionary subversive.
It is a hatred that does not require reason, does not demand proof, and does not subject itself to the rigor of rational thought. It is the hatred of the obsessive, the conspiratorial, the deranged – yet it thrives in the drawing rooms of polite society as much as in the basements of fanatics.
Kanye West, in his latest plunge into the abyss, has merely vocalized what has been lurking beneath the surface. “Jews were better as slaves,” he said. “You have to put your Jews in their place and make them into your slaves.”
One could be tempted to dismiss this as the ranting of an unstable mind, as the pathological mutterings of a man unhinged. But that would be a mistake. Because West is not alone in his derangement. He has simply spoken the unspoken, dragged into the daylight a festering ideology that has for too long been allowed to mutate in the shadows.
This is not just the language of personal hatred; it is the language of a larger, more dangerous phenomenon: a world that, once again, finds itself seduced by the pleasure of scapegoating the Jew. What West has said – his fantasy of Jews as slaves, his insistence that they must be “put in their place” – is not some aberration, some singular madness born of one celebrity’s fall from grace. It is a distillation of something older, something far more ingrained in the very fabric of human history.
There is something uncanny about the persistence of antisemitic rhetoric. The Jew-as-master, the Jew-as-slave, the Jew-as-puppet-master, the Jew-as-threat – these tropes appear and reappear like a fever dream that humanity cannot wake from. There is no logical coherence to them, no internal consistency, yet they persist with an almost supernatural force, defying time, geography, and ideology.
The ancient Greeks saw Jews as dangerous for their refusal to assimilate. The medieval Church saw Jews as dangerous for their alleged infiltration into Christian society. The 19th-century racial theorists saw Jews as a biological pollutant. The 20th-century Communists saw them as capitalist oppressors, while the fascists saw them as revolutionary agitators.
And now, in our time, the far-right sees them as globalists, the far-left sees them as colonialists, and the Islamists see them as infidels.
WHAT DOES this say about the world, that a people so few in number, so battered by history, remain at the center of an ever-changing conspiracy? What does it reveal about those who hold onto this delusion, that their hatred requires no evidence, no logic, merely the certainty that the Jew is guilty of something?
It is no longer fashionable to admit to being antisemitic. No politician of reputation, no academic of standing, no so-called activist wants to be caught embracing the rhetoric of the Third Reich or the medieval blood libels.
Evolving hate
And so, the hatred has evolved, as it always does. It hides behind slogans, cloaks itself in the language of human rights, and drapes itself in the moral certainties of progressivism. It is no longer simply “the Jew” who is hated – it is the Zionist, the Israeli, the settler, the oppressor. The targets change; the fundamental logic of the hatred does not.
Kanye West’s words are simply a crude version of what is being spoken in universities, in certain media outlets, and in so-called human rights organizations.
When Hamas terrorists take Jewish women and parade them through the streets of Gaza, the world is told not to overreact. When synagogues are attacked, it is explained away as “blowback” for Israel’s actions. When mobs chant “Gas the Jews,” we are informed that what they really mean is “Free Palestine.”
The inversion is complete. The victim is now the oppressor, the hostage is now the criminal, and the people who suffered genocide are now accused of committing one. This is not simply the corruption of history – it is its systematic murder.
Antisemitism has always been a barometer of civilization itself. The way a society treats its Jews is not about the Jews at all; it is about the moral clarity of that society.
And what are we seeing today? A world where the most grotesque accusations against Jews are met with indifference. A world where the violent fantasies of tyrants, terrorists, and demagogues are excused as grievances.
A world where the defenders of civilization are accused of being its greatest threat, and the true barbarians are indulged as misunderstood victims.
When a Kanye West can say what he has said and still have a platform, still have defenders, and still have his words shrugged off as mere provocation, we should all be alarmed. Because this is not about one man’s rant. It is about what society is willing to tolerate.
Antisemitism is not just a Jewish problem. It is a societal disease, an intellectual rot, a spiritual collapse. And if history has taught us anything, it is that what begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews.
The question now is not whether this hatred exists – we see it, we hear it, we know it is alive. The question is: Who will have the courage to stand against it?
The writer is the director of We Believe in Israel.