Erasure

Erasure is a quieter form of antisemitism, but it is one of the most common ways antisemitism survives in spaces that see themselves as informed, ethical, or anti-racist.

Instead of attacking Jews directly, erasure works by denying the basic facts needed to understand Jewish identity and Jewish vulnerability. It often takes the form of "corrections" delivered with confidence: Jews are only a religion, not a people; Jews are "just white Europeans"; antisemitism is really just "anti-Semitism" and therefore cannot apply to Jews; Jews are too powerful to be a meaningful target of racism; claims of antisemitism are mainly a tactic to silence debate. Individually, these statements can sound like political analysis. In practice, they remove Jews from the normal categories through which racism is recognised.

Erasure is also a way of stripping Jews of credibility. If Jewish history is reframed as myth, if Jewish peoplehood is denied, or if Jewish experience is treated as inherently suspect, then Jewish voices can be dismissed in advance. That dismissal becomes self-reinforcing: the less Jewish people are believed, the easier it is to claim antisemitism is exaggerated, which then makes it harder to name when it appears.

This section gathers examples of how erasure shows up in contemporary discourse, particularly in activist and political spaces. The aim is not to police language for its own sake, but to make visible the patterns that prevent honest conversation. If we want to challenge antisemitism effectively, we have to start by acknowledging Jews as a people with a real history, a real diversity of identities, and a real vulnerability to hatred that does not vanish just because it is inconvenient to see.