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A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’
(JTA) — Magda Teter’s new book, “Christian Supremacy,” begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11, 2017. Hundreds of white nationalist neo-Nazis who ostensibly gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a local park broke into a chant: “Jews will not replace us.”
Other writers and scholars would note how antisemitism shaped white nationalism. But Teter, professor of history and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University, saw something else: how centuries of Christian thought and practice fed the twin evils of antisemitism and racism.
“The ideology espoused by white supremacists in the US and in Europe is rooted in Christian ideas of social and religious hierarchy,” she writes. “These ideas developed, gradually, first in the Mediterranean and Europe in respect to Jews and then in respect to people of color in European colonies and in the US, before returning transformed back to Europe.”
In the book, subtitled “Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism,” she traces this idea from the writings of the early church fathers like Paul the Apostle, though centuries of Catholic and Protestant debates over the status of Jews in Europe, to the hardening of racist attitudes with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Antisemitic laws and theology, she argues, developed within Christianity a “mental habit” of exclusion and dominance that would eventually be applied to people of color up to and including modern times.
Teter is careful to acknowledge the different forms antisemitism and racism have taken, distinguishing between the Jews’ experience of social and legal exclusion and near annihilation, and the enslavement, displacement and ongoing persecution of Black people. And yet, she writes, “that story began with Christianity’s theological relation with Jews and Judaism.”
Teter is previously the author of “Blood Libel: On The Trail of an Antisemitic Myth,” winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award. At Fordham, the Catholic university in the Bronx, she is helping assemble what may be the largest repository of artifacts and literature dedicated to the Jewish history of the borough.
We spoke Thursday about how groups like the Proud Boys embrace centuries-old notions of Christian superiority, how “whiteness” became a thing and how she, as a non-Jew raised in Poland, became a Jewish studies scholar.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Your book was conceived and written during the COVID lockdown. Where did the idea for the book come from?
It’s an accidental project. I’ve been teaching the history of antisemitism for years, and I live in Harlem so questions of race and racism are very stark in my daily life. And since I grew up in Poland, and American history was not something we were taught or studied, I’ve never been satisfied with the various explanations for the strength of antisemitism and history of racism. And as I mentioned in my prologue, I watched the Raoul Peck documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which has a clip with James Baldwin saying that white people have to figure out why they invented the idea of the N-word and must “embrace this stranger that they have maligned so long.” You could also say that the European Christians created the idea of “the Jew” and that sort of caricature had absolutely nothing to do with flesh and blood Jews. I kept noticing these parallels, as an outsider, reading American and African-American history.
I was also thinking about this idea of servitude that was attached to Jews in Christian theology, and then in law.
You write in your book that “Over time, white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” What do you mean by servitude in this context?
In Christian theology, from the earliest Christian texts, the idea of servitude and slavery is attached to the concept of Jews and Judaism. Paul does it in his Epistles. He uses this quote from the book of Genesis that “the elder shall serve the younger,” which becomes really embedded in Christian theology. It is the Jews, the elder people, who should serve the Christians, the younger people. Later on in medieval theology and canon law, Jews are in a servile position, consigned for their sin of rejecting Jesus to perpetual servitude. So even though Jews were free people and could live mostly where they wanted to live, marry whoever they wanted to marry — nobody was sold and some even had slaves — that idea of Jews as confined to perpetual servitude to Christians created a habit of thinking of Jews as having an inferior social status.
That language became secularized in modern times, and we see the development of the [antisemitic] trope of Jewish power: that they are in places where they shouldn’t be. I worked on fleshing out the parallels between the idea and then legal status of Jewish servitude and the conceptual perception of Black people in servile and inferior positions.
Magda Teter’s new book explores how “white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” (Chuck Fishman)
What other kinds of parallels did you find between racism and antisemitism?
In the Christian theology, Black people, like Jews, will be seen as cursed by God. Jews were [portrayed as] lazy because they didn’t work physically — they made money and exploited Christians. Black people were [portrayed as] lazy because they were trying to avoid physical labor at the expense of white men. Both people were seen as carnal, both as sexually dangerous, and so on.
I was struck by the fact that the racist turn of Christian supremacy — justifying the enslavement of Black people on theological grounds — is a fairly late development, taking hold in the early modern period when Europeans established slaveholding empires.
That’s right. In the summer of 2020, the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, we were all thinking about these issues of race and racism and America. And as I was in the middle of writing the article that became the book, I felt that there was a deeper history that needed to be told, and that slavery is not bound by color until the enslavement of Black Africans by Europeans during the colonial expansion of Europe.
After the French Revolution, when Jews were offered “emancipation” in much of Europe, there were deep debates about whether they could be citizens and be entitled to the same rights and protections as Christian citizens of France and England and other countries. How was that debate informed by Christianity?
In pre-modern Europe, there was obviously both a religious and legal framework under which Jews existed. They had their place in a social hierarchy. After the French Revolution, people are creating a new political reality. The idea of equality obviously challenged the social hierarchies that existed, including the idea that Christians were the superior religion. And that begins to play a role on two levels. One is the level of, well, “how can you be equal and be our judges and make decisions about us?” It’s fear of power — political power and political equality. That challenges the habit of thinking that sees Jews as inferior, in servitude and otherwise insolent and arrogant.
The other level comes from Enlightenment scholars who begin to place Jews in the Middle East and in the Holy Land, in Palestine. Jews are no longer seen as European. They are seen as “Oriental,” and they are compared to the non-European religions and practices that these Enlightenment scholars have been studying. Their differences are now also racialized. “They are not like us, they can’t assimilate. They can never be Frenchmen, they can never be Germans.”
And I guess it’s a short step from that to regarding people with dark skin as inferior and subordinate.
That’s right. Enlightenment scholars are also trying to to understand why it is justified to enslave Black Africans and they do it through “scientific” and other means. They classify Africans as inferior intellectually and they create this idea of race.
I began to think about these European politicians and intellectuals in terms of creating their identities, and what I ended up arguing is what we saw in Charlottesville, what we’re seeing in Europe. It’s not necessarily just about hate, but it’s about exclusion and rejection of Jews and people of color from equality, from citizenship.
And the common thread here is that whiteness and Christianity become inseparable. You write that “freedom and liberty now came to be linked not only to Christianity, but to whiteness, and servitude and enslavement to blackness.”
That’s right. White Christian “liberty” becomes embedded and embodied in law.
Did you see any pitfalls in drawing parallels between the Black and Jewish experiences? I am thinking of those in either community who might say, “How dare you compare our suffering to theirs!”
Yes, I was tempered. I think what some call “comparative victimhood” has paralyzed conversations about this subject, and I kept it in my mind all the time. What I hope comes through is that there’s incredible value in a comparative approach. Coming from Jewish studies as my primary field, the comparison with the Black experience gave me clarity on the nature of antisemitism as well as on the nature of the Jewish experience, and vice versa: The Jewish experience can also give clarity to some of the aspects of anti-Black racism.
What’s an example?
So, for instance, questions like, “Are Jews white? Are they not white? When did they become white?” That’s a whole genre of scholarship. And when you look at it through the lens of law and ideology, you begin to see that from a legal perspective, Jews were considered white in the United States because they could immigrate and they could be naturalized according to law. They did not have to go to court to become American. Their rights to vote were not challenged. There was discrimination, they couldn’t stay in hotels and in some places they couldn’t find employment, but by law, they were considered citizens. The debate about the whiteness of Jews is creating a fog of misunderstanding.
Black Americans were targeted by specific legal statutes from the very beginning in the Constitution and then in naturalization law and so on. And then there was the backlash even after the Civil War to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments [aimed at establishing political equality for Americans of all races].
Statues at the Strasbourg Cathedral depict Ecclesia and Synagoga, representing the triumph of the church, at left, and the servitude of Judaism, which is represented by a blindfolded figure, drooping and carrying a broken lance. (Edelseider/Wikimedia Commons)
How much do modern-day white supremacists, like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, see themselves as Christian? Or is this a kind of white supremacy that doesn’t name itself Christian but doesn’t even realize how many of its ideas are based in theology?
I think they might not be conscious of this legacy, but neo-Nazis take from the legacy of the Nazis who themselves were not thinking of themselves as Christian necessarily. But what I argue in the book is that white Christian supremacy becomes white supremacy. It never discards the Christian sense of domination and superiority that emerges from its early relationship with Jews and Judaism.
In the United States, Black people serve as contrast figures to whiteness, in the law and in the culture. You cannot have whiteness without Blackness. For Christians, Jews serve as that contrast figure. Consciously or unconsciously, the Proud Boys are embracing that. They talk of “God-given” freedoms for white people. That is the Christian legacy.
You said that the Nazis didn’t necessarily see themselves as a Christian movement. But I must ask, even though it is not the scope of your book, was the Holocaust a culmination of white Christian supremacy? Because I think many Christian theologians would want to say that Nazism was godless, and a perversion of the true faith.
I’ll say that when exclusionary ideology is coupled with the power of the state, that’s where it can lead.
In the years since the Holocaust especially, there have been many efforts by Christian leaders to address the ideological failings of the past. You write about Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration by the Catholic Church absolving Jews of collective guilt in the death of Jesus and some Protestant documents of contrition. But I got the feeling you were disappointed that many denominations haven’t gone far enough in reckoning with the past.
There was a sort of a moral sense that something needs to be addressed after the Holocaust. But then it is not fully addressed. I don’t think anybody has addressed the issue of power — the roots of hate, yes, but not the dynamics of power. We’ll see where the book goes, but maybe theologians will begin to grapple with this legacy of superiority and domination, and the way hierarchical habits of thinking have been developed through theology and through religious culture.
What other impact do you hope the book may have?
White supremacy is very much in the air. We need to speak up against it, and make connections and allyships. I hope that maybe because the book deals with law and power, it may create bridges among people who care about “We the People” as a vision of people who are diverse, respectful and equal, and not the exclusionary vision offered by white and Christian supremacy.
A cross burns at a Ku Klux Klan rally on Aug. 8, 1925. (National Photo Company Collection)
I’d love to talk about your background. You’re not Jewish but you are chair of Jewish Studies at Fordham, a Catholic university. What drew you to the study of Judaism and the Jews?
I grew up in Poland with a father who from the time I was a little girl would point out to me that there had been Jews in Poland. We would drive through the countryside, and he’d say, “This used to be a Jewish town and there used to be a synagogue and there was the Jewish cemetery.” I grew up being very conscious of the past’s presence and this kind of stark absence of Jews in Poland, where in the 1970s when I grew up Jewish history was taboo.
As soon as Jewish books on Jewish subjects began to be published, including those that dealt with antisemitism, we would read it together. We would talk about it. He wouldn’t just shift the destruction and murder of Jews in Poland on to the Nazis.
There was no Jewish studies program in Poland when I was applying to universities, so I studied Hebrew in Israel, and then studied Yiddish in New York at YIVO. I came to Columbia University to get my PhD in Jewish history and my career went in the direction it did. I was a professor of history and director of the Jewish and Israel studies program at Wesleyan University. I came to Fordham eight years ago and created a program in Jewish studies.
Your previous book was about the blood libel, the historic canard that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. This one’s about antisemitism. I don’t want to presume, but is your interest in these subjects in any way an act of contrition?
I grew up in a very secular household. I did not grow up Catholic. But I think growing up in Poland made me very, very aware of antisemitism and the history of antisemitism. I got my PhD from Columbia University in Jewish history, which did not emphasize Jewish suffering, but Jewish life, and I have studied Jewish life and teach about Jewish life — not just about Jewish suffering.
However, in the last few years, antisemitism has certainly been on the minds of many of us. I also am committed to the idea of shared history, and therefore all my scholarship, as much as it is about Jews, it is also about the church and Poland and the law. Jews are an integral part of that history and culture. And, as such, I’m committed to that, to teaching about the vibrancy of Jewish life as much as the dynamics of what made that life difficult over the centuries.
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The post A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘Iran Says School Massacre’ and the Media Repeats: How a Regime Claim Became a Viral Headline
An Iranian flag flutters, as Israel and the US launched strikes on Iran, in Tehran, Iran, February 28, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
On Saturday, February 28, Israel and the US launched a joint military operation against the Iranian regime, targeting senior leadership, including Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei, and military commanders. The operation has also seen a significant targeting of military infrastructure, including air defense systems, missile launchers, and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) command centers.
The Iranian regime, like its terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, has embedded its infrastructure within civilian locations. As protests broke out at the beginning of 2026, the movement of weapons and military equipment into protected civilian locations, such as schools and hospitals, was widely observed. This prompted Iranian civilians to take protective measures and warn one another of the dual use of protected spaces.
Geolocation/Correction/Additional Info:
1. Confirmed geolocation: The Imam Ali school in Arak, Iran (34.088253, 49.687137) @GeoConfirmed .
2. The photo is from as early as January 8th, 2026 – Per earliest reports it just depicts them as “Security forces”.
3. This school appears… https://t.co/6y7INfX8Fx pic.twitter.com/JWAZJ34bch— Tal Hagin (@talhagin) January 27, 2026
When the IDF targeted an IRGC compound in Minab, southern Iran, Iran’s state broadcaster, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), immediately claimed that the US had purposefully targeted the Shajareh Tayyebeh school full of young girls.
Al Jazeera soon published the story, blaming Israel for the deaths of children.
The Western media, without questioning the credibility of the source, immediately reported on the strike and followed Al Jazeera’s lead by holding Israel responsible.
In doing so, the media further amplified and legitimized claims from the same regime that has spent the past two months executing its own civilians in the streets protesting for freedom.
The same outlets that included a caveat about their inability to independently verify the number of protesters killed by the regime were the same ones that published and continuously updated alleged casualty figures without any verification other than a regime source.
This is not to say that innocent civilians may not have died in the strike, but they were certainly not the target of Israel or the US. Moreover, a civilian building was purposefully exploited by the Iranian regime, putting civilians in immediate danger.
The school, reportedly intended to be for the children of military personnel, was built directly next to an IRGC naval base, according to anti-regime media.
Independent geolocation analysts further indicated that the Shajareh Tayyebeh school was located in the same premises as the Sayyid al-Shohada barracks of the IRGC Navy’s Asef Brigade. While it remains unclear whether many civilians were present in the area at the time of the strike, witnesses have reported that the school was not targeted but rather the adjacent IRGC buildings, where missiles were reportedly being stored.
This information was, of course, omitted from IRIB’s reporting of the strike. As a result, when Western outlets covered the story, the school’s proximity to — and apparent integration with — an IRGC military complex was missing from the coverage.
The Iranian Embassy in Austria continued with the disinformation campaign on behalf of the regime, sharing a now-viral image on X of a backpack that reportedly belongs to one of the schoolgirls killed in the strike.
However, research analysts have found the photo to be AI-generated, as a Google Gemini watermark was detected hidden in the image.
Adding to the uncertainty surrounding the already disputed casualty figures, basic questions remain unanswered, most notably who exactly was killed in the strike.
As of the time of writing, The Telegraph reported 165 casualties, including 81 pupils, citing Iranian sources. That leaves 84 individuals not identified in the public breakdown. And given that the school was located within an IRGC compound, it is legitimate to ask whether any of the remaining casualties were affiliated with the regime, a distinction that has not been clarified.
The disinformation does not stop at pro-regime sources. A widely-circulated photograph online purported to show a misfired IRGC missile that had fallen inside Iranian territory and struck the school, shifting the blame onto the Iranian regime.
However, independent analysts found that the school was located more than 1,000 kilometers from where the photo was taken. They also show that the structure in the photograph faced a direction inconsistent with the alleged missile trajectory, making it unlikely that the image depicted the Shajareh Tayyebeh school.
The Iranian regime has taken a page out of Hamas’ notebook. For the past two and a half years, Hamas has made exaggerated and false claims, which the media repeatedly amplified before doing their own due diligence. Corrections, when they came, rarely traveled as far as the original headlines. That same cycle of rapid accusation, viral spread, and delayed scrutiny is now playing out in Iran.
The nature of war between Israel and the Iranian regime means that vast amounts of information are released in real time, often before facts can be fully verified. When reporting omits key context or relies heavily on regime-affiliated sources, narratives can solidify before the truth has a chance to catch up, leaving the public with a distorted understanding of events.
In a time of instantaneous reporting and with clear evidence that narratives are being deliberately shaped for strategic purposes, rigorous scrutiny by the media is essential to ensure the truth prevails.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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History Is Not Over: From Cyrus to Today’s Iran
Protesters gathered on Jan. 24, 2026, at Joachimsthaler Platz in western Berlin, Germany, to rally in support of anti-regime demonstrations in Iran, calling for US military intervention. Photo: Michael Kuenne/PRESSCOV via ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
In 539 BCE, a Persian king made a decision that changed Jewish history.
Cyrus conquered Babylon and founded a nation in exile. The Jews had lost their Temple, their sovereignty, and their center. He could have absorbed them into his empire and tightened control. Instead, he allowed them to return to Jerusalem and rebuild. That decision altered the course of Jewish continuity. Our presence in the Land of Israel today traces back to that moment.
Jewish memory holds Cyrus in a rare place of honor. He was not Jewish. He did not belong to our covenant. Yet his choice shaped our destiny. History records his decree. Our tradition preserves it. That act still echoes through our prayers and our national life.
History does not disappear. It accumulates. One decision becomes a foundation for generations.
Today, the Iranian people live under a regime that governs through coercion. Protesters have filled the streets demanding dignity and paid for it with imprisonment and violence. Women have risked everything to challenge laws that strip them of agency. Families live under surveillance and fear. The regime’s ideology has isolated Iran from much of the world and directed hostility outward, including toward Israel.
The Iranian people are not synonymous with the regime that rules them. They carry a civilization older than the Islamic Republic. They carry the legacy of Persia, which once intersected with Jewish survival in a decisive way.
As Jews, we understand exile. We understand what it means when rulers decide the limits of your freedom. We also understand what it means when a ruler makes a different choice.
Jewish values are anchored in memory and responsibility. We are commanded to pursue justice. We are taught that every human being is created in the image of God. We are told to remember our own experience of oppression so that we do not become indifferent.
When I teach self-defense, I speak about responsibility in the present moment. If danger is forming, clarity matters. Early action changes outcomes. Waiting for harm to fully unfold reduces options and increases damage. Self-defense is rooted in awareness and accountability.
History functions in a similar way. Cyrus acted at a critical moment. His choice redirected a people’s future. That decision still shapes Jewish life more than 2,000 years later. A single act of leadership can move through centuries.
The regime in Tehran has chosen a path of repression and confrontation. That choice is shaping the lives of millions of Iranians today and influencing the security of the broader region. Regimes are temporary. The consequences of their choices are not.
Wishing for change in Iran is not an expression of hostility toward its people. It is a recognition that societies thrive when citizens are free to speak, build, and lead without fear of their own government. A different Iran would serve its citizens first. It would reduce instability across the region. It would allow the country’s ancient culture to reemerge from beneath layers of coercion.
Nothing in history stands alone. The decree of a Persian king continues to reverberate in Jewish life. The decisions made in Iran now will shape futures we cannot yet see. Jewish memory teaches that liberation can begin with one moment of moral clarity.
A Persian ruler once enabled Jewish restoration. The Iranian people today seek their own restoration. History is long. Memory is longer. The question for us is how we carry that memory forward and how we allow it to inform our understanding of freedom, responsibility, and the power of timely choices.
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Tsahi Shemesh is an Israeli-American IDF veteran and the founder of Krav Maga Experts in NYC. A father and educator, he writes about Jewish identity, resilience, moral courage, and the ethics of strength in a time of rising antisemitism.
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Big Tents Need Moral Boundaries: The High Cost of Institutional Cowardice
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivers a speech during his inauguration ceremony in New York City, US, Jan. 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper
In the vocabulary of modern leadership, the “big tent” is a sacred cow — the hallmark of pluralism and the supposed proof of a movement’s vitality. But as we navigate the geopolitical shockwaves of early 2026, we are witnessing a fundamental law of institutional physics: a tent without a frame will eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
The recent joint military operations against Iran have provided fertile ground for a virulent strain of demagoguery. We are seeing a shift from legitimate foreign policy criticism to “vice-signaling” — the intentional, ostentatious breaking of moral taboos to prove one’s “authenticity” to a radicalized base. Equally dangerous is the growing unwillingness to shun those who egregiously violate these taboos.
When an institution stops enforcing its boundaries, it becomes a host for pathogens that eventually kill the original mission.
The Case of the Hollowed Right
Consider the recent trajectory of Tucker Carlson. What began as a debate over “America First” isolationism has curdled into something far more dangerous.
In recent weeks, Carlson has platformed “Khazar theory” genetic tropes — suggesting Jews should undergo DNA tests to prove their provenance — and hosted uncritical interviews with Holocaust revisionists under the guise of “just asking questions.”
This is not a policy debate; it is the systematic dismantling of the moral taboos that once kept overt bigotry out of the mainstream. When a leader uses a massive platform to single out the world’s only Jewish state as the sole source of domestic suffering, they aren’t making a fiscal argument; they are constructing a “permission structure” for hate.
By framing this as “skepticism,” Carlson avoids the social consequences that such rhetoric once commanded, even while he uncritically associates with avowed bigots like Nick Fuentes.
It is hard to imagine a pundit cozying up to David Duke without facing immediate social ostracization — a “moral guilt by association.” Yet today, the outrage often lasts only for a news cycle, leaving few lasting consequences for those who sanitize hate.
The Danger of Permission Structures
The real threat, however, isn’t just the demagogue; it’s the silence of the moderate. Since October 7, 2023, the boundaries have been trampled because those inside the tent refuse to act as the “immune system.”
When we fail to hold our own side accountable — whether it is the Left’s refusal to condemn the dehumanization of Israelis in the name of “resistance,” or the Right’s willingness to ignore antisemitic dog-whistles to preserve a voting bloc — we are complicit. This is true not only in political associations but also within religious institutions.
As I have written regarding the responsibility of the Christian faithful to denounce those who espouse bigotry in Christ’s name, all institutions must draw a clear moral boundary and shun those who cross it, while attempting to maintain the benefits of the affiliation. If the local pastor or the Vicar of Christ stays silent as the Cross is used as a bludgeon against the neighbor, the silence becomes permission.
The Democratic Vacuum and the “Mamdani Reversal”
This rot is cross-partisan. On the Left, the refusal to enforce boundaries against an illiberal fringe has led to the “Mamdani reversal.” In New York City and on elite campuses, we see a movement so focused on “intersectional solidarity” that it can no longer condemn the targeting of civilians if the perpetrators fit a certain ideological profile.
When a “human rights” organization cannot unequivocally condemn terror because it might offend a “coalition partner,” it has ceased to be a moral arbiter; it has become a hostage to its own “big tent” philosophy. While groups like the DSA may not fully control the Democratic Party, their hand is firmly on the wheel, steering it toward illiberalism and anti-Americanism, with only a brave few willing to call out these fundamental taboo violations.
A Principled Path Forward
To save our institutions, we must return to a disciplined moral order. This is not a call for the reactionary excesses of “cancel culture,” which often lacks objective standards. Instead, we must solve this in a principled way by restoring universal moral taboos.
As I’ve outlined in my work on the “Lawful but Awful” zone of social behavior, there are four essential principles for this restoration:
- The Red Line: Limit actionable taboos to overt bigotry, dehumanization, and the endorsement of violence.
- The Consensus Test: Distinguish between subjective offense (partisan) and a “Shared Moral Violation” (universal).
- The Private Mechanism: Enforce standards through civil society, never government coercion.
- The Open Door: Ensure the goal of consequence is correction and redemption, not permanent destruction.
Reclaiming the Obligation to Say “No”
True pluralism requires “definitional clarity” — the courage to say that while many are welcome, those who actively undermine the core tenets of the mission cannot be given the keys to the kingdom.
Leaders must stop treating moral boundaries as “divisive” and start seeing them as “protective.” The Left long ago ceded this ground by allowing reverse discrimination to be normalized within social justice “power dynamic” frameworks. Now we see a similar rise of illiberalism on the Right, rooted in distortions of theology or in foreign policy critiques that only hold up if their double standards against the Jewish state are ignored. If this parasitic fringe is not immediately exorcised, it will corrupt and destroy its host.
A positive vision for an organization can be broad, but we must reclaim the right to draw a clear moral boundary. We must say “no” to those who cross it. Only then will our “yes” mean anything at all.
Erez Levin is an advertising technologist trying to effect big pro-social changes in that industry and the world at large, currently focused on restoring society’s essential moral taboos against overt hatred. He writes on this topic at elevin11.substack.com.