Matthew Schmitz is the editor of Compact.
The scourge of rising antisemitism in recent years has found its latest manifestation in the government’s release of millions of files about sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Though many people regard the files as a window on the workings of a corrupt elite, others have seized on them specifically to promote antisemitism. A hatred once confined to the fringes is working its way closer to the center of public life, reflecting declining trust in institutions and the rise of conspiratorial thinking.
The latest batch of files, released on Jan. 30, contains a great deal of interesting information. But in many quarters, careful weighing of evidence has given way to wild speculation and barely concealed expressions of animus.
Denunciations of out-of-touch elites and the “money power” are a recurring feature of American politics. But in response to the Epstein files, antiestablishment voices have advanced the claim that Jewish networks and interests are corrupting American society.
In doing so, they have revived two ancient slanders against the Jewish people: the medieval blood libel, which states that Jews engage in ritual killings of children to advance their power; and the 1903 hoax “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which asserts that Jews use blackmail to subvert democratic societies.
Both claims are false, but that has not kept them from spreading. Candace Owens, who has a top 10 podcast on Spotify, responded to the Epstein files by accusing Jews of “ritualistic murder” — a reference to the blood libel. “We are ruled by satanic pedophiles who work for Israel,” she told her audience.
Tucker Carlson, speaking to an even larger audience, presented child sex abuse as a modern form of ritual murder. “There are rituals involving children underway … rich and powerful people, sexually abusing young people,” he said. Carlson’s guest responded, “our government has been blackmailed on behalf of a foreign, malign, malignant interest.” The listener is left to understand that the foreign interest is Israel, a frequent target of Carlson and his guests.
Progressive influencers got in on the act. Ana Kasparian, the host of a popular left-wing online news show, described Epstein’s network as a “pedophile ring/Israeli blackmail operation.” The month before, she asked an Israeli interlocutor, “Why are you monsters always slaughtering innocent children and shaking us down for money?” Briahna Joy Gray, former press secretary for Bernie Sanders, called Epstein’s network a “ring of billionaire pedophiles with ties to Mossad” engaging in “full-on blackmail.”
Conspiracy theories about Jewish power are not confined to the ideological fringe. One of Britain’s most important papers, the Times, published a story about Epstein’s supposed links to Mossad, using the files as evidence. The story turned out to be based on claims from Charles C. Johnson, a Holocaust denier. As if that weren’t bad enough, the author of the story shared it with her followers on X alongside an AI-generated image that falsely showed Epstein standing next to Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
It was not an isolated incident. The Epstein case has made it possible for people with some strange beliefs about Jews to have their claims treated seriously by the mainstream press. One example is Maria Farmer, an alleged Epstein victim who received an admiring profile in the New York Times despite making statements such as “All the Jewish people I met also happen to be pedophiles that run the world economy.”
Farmer isn’t the only one playing with this sort of rhetoric. Leftists who have long prided themselves on opposing all forms of racial hatred while pursuing class-based politics increasingly describe class differences in racial terms. The change is observable not only in the positions of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has promised to raise taxes on “richer and whiter neighborhoods” (while declining to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada”), but also in the way politicians such as Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) have begun to talk about the “Epstein class.” The phrase can be taken as an association of exploitative wealth with Jewish identity.
Today’s antisemitism differs from the kind that flourished in the middle of the 20th century. Nazis justified their hatred of Jews in racial and supposedly scientific terms. This emphasis distinguished their outlook from an older tradition of anti-Judaism, which had focused on real and imagined differences between the beliefs of Christians and Jews. Now the older form of anti-Judaism is making a comeback. Given widespread secularization, this may seem surprising. But with their baseless talk of pedophile rings and selective condemnations of Israel, the new antisemites have updated theological anti-Judaism for the era of unbelief.
Indeed, the new antisemitism may be best understood as a symptom of the breakdown of religious authority. Conspiracist thinking flourishes when people are alienated from institutions. The decline of religious attachment has cleared the way for wilder sorts of speculation. Though many of the new antisemites make a show of being religious, none evince much interest in the statements of their church hierarchies. Tucker Carlson may be an Episcopalian, but no Episcopal bishop would endorse his views. Candace Owens’s Catholicism bears little resemblance to what Pope Leo proclaims. This reflects the anti-institutional nature of the new antisemitism. It also suggests that the cure lies in stronger and more trustworthy religious bodies.
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