The New Antisemitism Doesn’t Deny Jewish Suffering, It Weaponizes It

A few weeks after Oct. 7, 2023, I was invited to speak at a university in California. About 40 minutes into the conversation, a graduate student raised her hand.

She said: “I want to acknowledge that what happened on Oct. 7 was terrible. But I also think we need to be careful about how we use that tragedy, because it’s been weaponized to silence criticism of Israel.”

I paused before answering. Not because I didn’t know what to say, but because I wanted to understand what I was actually hearing.

She had just acknowledged that 1,200 people were massacred. And her immediate next move was to describe that massacre as something that could be “weaponized.” As if the horror of it were a political instrument rather than a human reality. As if the most important thing to say about Jewish death was: be careful how you use it.

I have spent more than 13 years working in Jewish communal life in America, trying to explain antisemitism to audiences who genuinely want to understand it. In that time, I have watched this particular form of bigotry change its vocabulary, its ideology and its political clothing while keeping something constant underneath: the desire to marginalize Jews while making them carry the weight of society’s discomfort.

What I watched in that California classroom is one of the newest and most dangerous forms that desire has taken.  Let’s call it the “Victim Inversion Engine.” It’s one of the many engines that fuel anti-Jewish bigotry, which I have been writing about. It works like this: the history of Jewish suffering is systematically denied, minimized or turned against the Jews themselves. Their victimhood is either erased or weaponized against them. And the moral weight their history should carry – the weight that should make the world especially sensitive and alert to threats against them – is systematically dismantled.

What makes this especially dangerous in 2026 is that it is happening at a moment when moral language itself has become a form of power.  Social and political movements are determining who is allowed to claim harm, whose suffering is recognized and whose pain is treated as morally relevant.

Increasingly, and dangerously so, Jews are being pushed outside that circle.

The new antisemitism does not always deny Jewish suffering outright. More often, it reframes that suffering as manipulative, suspicious or politically illegitimate. Jewish pain is treated not as a warning sign of danger, but as an obstacle to someone else’s narrative. The result is a culture in which Jews are expected to prove their humanity or something else, before they are permitted to grieve.

That is why the weaponization of Jewish suffering matters so much right now. Because once a society begins treating Jewish fear and/or pain as inherently dishonest, Jewish trauma as inherently political or Jewish victimhood as uniquely undeserving of empathy, it creates a moral exception around Jews. And, as history has repeatedly shown, societies become dangerous for Jews long before they become physically violent toward them. The danger begins when Jewish suffering stops counting as suffering.

This is not Holocaust denial. It is something more sophisticated, sinister, yet more socially acceptable. It is like Holocaust weaponization – the rhetorical move that takes Jewish suffering and turns it into a liability rather than a human reality.

It sounds like this: “Jews use antisemitism accusations to silence critics.” Or: “Israel’s conduct in Gaza is just like what was done to Jews in Europe.” Or the softest and most common version: “I acknowledge what happened on Oct. 7 – but …” And one more thing, that is very dangerous as well: when someone start their criticism of Israel with the words: “As a Jew …” You already know what is coming….

That pivot is doing a great deal of work. In the hands of someone committed to honest inquiry, it introduces complexity. In the hands of someone running the victim inversion engine, it introduces doubt about whether Jewish suffering deserves to be treated as suffering at all.

Jewish students on campuses across America experienced this in real time in the weeks and months after Oct. 7. They were told their fear was not legitimate.  Some were told that naming what was happening to them was itself a form of manipulation. Some were told that their Jewishness, in the context of Israeli military action, disqualified them from claiming victim status.

Think about what that means. The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors – some of them the children of people who escaped persecution by the skin of their teeth – were being told that their experience of anti-Jewish hatred did not count as a legitimate experience of hatred. That the history behind their fear was not a history that entitled them to be concerned.

Every other form of antisemitism attacks Jews in ways that can, at least in principle, be countered with evidence and argument. The religious accusations can be examined. The economic myths can be fact-checked. The conspiracy theories can be exposed. But the victim inversion engine attacks the ground on which Jews stand to make their case after they have been harmed individually or collectively. It does not say your evidence is wrong. It says your evidence does not count.

Once a society accepts that logic – once it decides that Jewish claims of victimhood are inherently suspect, that the memory of Jewish suffering is a political tool rather than a human reality – it has removed the last moral guardrail between Jews and violence. This is not hypothetical. This is the pattern that preceded every major act of collective violence against Jews in modern history. The victim was recast as the aggressor first. The moral permission was established first. And then violence followed.

I told that graduate student: the people who were murdered on Oct. 7 do not belong to a political argument. They belong to their families. And the first moral obligation – before context, before analysis, before any political response – is to let them be human beings who were murdered.

She did not agree with me. That is fine. But several students in the room shifted in their seats, as if something had been named that had been floating unnamed for weeks.

That is the point of naming it. Hatred that has no name is harder to resist. Once you know what the victim inversion engine sounds like – once you can recognize it when it arrives wearing the language of social justice and political analysis – you can begin to push back against it.

The engines that fuel antisemitism have always run on confusion. The antidote is always clarity.

Oz Laniado is the Executive Director of StandWithUs for the Southwest and Mexico, an international nonpartisan education organization that supports Israel and combats antisemitism.  He is the author of The Engine of Blame: Thirteen Forces That Keep Antisemitism Alive, (https://engineofblame.com/)