The very word antisemitism is intimidating.
Jews hear that word and it triggers the horrors of persecution and singular discrimination going back centuries.
You can imagine, then, how we’re feeling these days now that antisemitism is at record levels. Hardly a day goes by without another incident against Jews, usually under the cover of demonizing Zionism.
It’s understandable that our response has been to express alarm, rise up and fight. We do this in myriad ways, from lawsuits to public condemnations to demands for greater safety for Jews to official statements from Jewish organizations to calls to “eradicate” the hate for good.
We’ve made so much noise and expressed so much alarm in our fight against antisemitism that we’ve unwittingly reinforced the message that antisemitism is this all-powerful, traumatizing monster.
Well, maybe it is.
But has anyone ever asked whether we can reframe this monster to crush its ego and drain it of its perceived power? We always assume that the best way to fight a monster is to punch back with force. But sometimes, you can do more damage with humiliation.
One way to humiliate antisemites is to frame them as the ultimate losers.
Calling them antisemites or racists or bigots has little impact. They hear that all the time. It only makes them look more fearsome and intimidating.
“Loser” is different. They’re not used to hearing that. Loser is the label that stings, the label that shrinks them.
This doesn’t mean we’re downplaying the threat of antisemitism. On the contrary: It means we’re reframing it in a way that emasculates it. Nothing is more emasculating than to be seen as a loser.
It also happens to be true. Anyone who expends so much energy focusing all their rage on Jews, and shows consistent signs of ignorance and hypocrisy, has earned the loser label.
It’s important to remember that Jew-haters, whether from the left or right, don’t operate in good faith. They project all the ills of society onto the Jews under the cover of Zionism. Their goal is not to criticize Jews or Israel but to annihilate them.
How does one respond to such genocidal fury? With talking points to correct the lies? With more condemnations? With calls for censorship that only turn the haters into free speech martyrs?
We’ve been doing much of that for years and somehow, things only seem to get worse.
We need to acknowledge once and for all that the world will never buy the narrative of Jews as victims, no matter how true it might be. Jew-haters see us not as losers but as winners, as a people that knows how to succeed and gain influence.
And in many ways, they’re right! Which group has done more to contribute to the welfare of America and the world than the Jews? Those who hate and envy Jews may have heard that Jews represent less than .2% of the world’s population but have won 22% of its Nobel prizes. We hate saying stuff like that, but at some point, especially when we’re under siege, we need to own our success and play up our winning side.
Given that even our enemies acknowledge our success, why not run with it? Why not use that ingrained perception to frame Jews as winners and Jew-haters as losers? At the very least, it will be more credible than the failed victim narrative.
The more scared we appear, the more alarmed we look, the more the haters feel they’re winning. This doesn’t mean we deny danger or suppress genuine alarm; it means recognizing that we fight it best when wearing a winning body armor of strength and pride.
Jew-haters must feel they have a lot to lose by hating Jews, especially when they cross the line from free speech into bullying and harassment and even violence. After all, losers should be afraid of winners, especially when justice is on the side of the winners.
We have a tendency in the Jewish world to analyze everything to death, and I do plenty of that myself. We try to distinguish between antisemitism from the left and right and invest rivers of digital ink trying to understand why so many hate us so much.
That’s all good and well, but sometimes it’s worth taking a time-out from the analyses and surveys and talk about effective ways to frame our fight.
It’s not enough to call out and condemn Jew-haters. That makes them look ominous and boosts their egos. We must crush their egos by diminishing them, by planting in their heads the psychic nightmare that deep down, they really are losers.
I guess you can call it psychological warfare, or a way to fight back without showing fear or weakness.
Being a winner hardly means being perfect. It means being resilient in the marathon of history. We will stumble and take nasty hits and be thrown off balance and even be condemned by much of the world, but in the long run, the Jews prevail. Winners find ways to prevail.
Winners also don’t live in fear. Despite all the animosity inflicted on us, which can make us look like losers, we shouldn’t be afraid to act as winners. At a time when our enemies have tried everything to demolish Jewish self-esteem, there’s nothing wrong with denying them that power and regaining our collective mojo.
There’s also this: America hates losers.
In that sense, Jews are the last group it should hate. Yes, we’re winners, we love America and we know that Zionism is a winning idea that benefits America.
This reframing is obviously not a silver bullet. There are no silver bullets in the eternal struggle against the world’s oldest hate.
But Jews have been on the defensive for so long we’ve forgotten what it’s like to go on the offense. Reframing our fight against antisemitism along the winner-loser axis is a good start. It gives us a chance to turn the tables on our enemies, to remind them that no matter how much hate they show and how much noise they make, we won’t be intimidated.
The modern Jew-haters must relearn a lesson of history: In the long run, the haters will lose and the Jews will win.
