The same week Hungarians voted out a sixteen-year authoritarian, the world’s richest man revived the Soros conspiracy to explain it away. That sequence captures where we are: democratic resistance still works, and the people who fear it reach for the oldest playbook they have, antisemitism.
The fight against antisemitism has never been separable from the fight to keep democracy intact. When civil rights groups treat Muslim public officials as suspects by default, when conspiracy frames migrate from fringe accounts to platform owners, when academic data contradicts the political narrative being used to crack down on universities, the work is to hold the line on what’s real and what’s being weaponized to break things that protect all of us.
The ADL’s new “100 days” report on Mayor Mamdani reflects the same problems we flagged two weeks ago. The evaluation leans heavily on suspicion of the mayor’s Muslim appointees, applying a level of scrutiny the ADL does not extend to other elected officials.
What the report ignores: Mamdani reappointed Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, whom the ADL itself rates positively, and named Phylisa Wisdom, a progressive Jewish activist and liberal Zionist, to head the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism. The ADL rated her “concerning.” Communal organizations should be building partnerships with leaders who show willingness to engage, not manufacturing adversaries.
The war with Iran has made the line between legitimate criticism and antisemitism harder to hold and more important to defend. Our new messaging guide offers a three-tier framework for navigating the conversation: what qualifies as legitimate discourse, what is explicitly antisemitic, and what unintentionally feeds tropes.
Criticizing the war or analyzing Israel’s role in U.S. decision-making is legitimate and necessary. Blaming “Jews” or treating all Jewish Americans as responsible for Israeli government actions is antisemitic. The guide also flags a middle category that too often gets ignored: rhetoric that places all responsibility on Israel while erasing Trump’s role as decision-maker, giving fodder to conspiracy without intending to.
Longtime civil rights leader Eric Ward, who serves on a Nexus advisory panel, has written a powerful new essay naming something the left rarely confronts about itself. The same movements that refuse to hold all Muslims responsible for extremist violence, or to conflate Chinese Americans with the Chinese state, suspend those instincts when the subject is Jews. Ward is not asking the left to soften its critique of Israeli policy. He is asking why principles understood as universal stop being applied universally at one specific border, and what that selective application costs the credibility of liberation movements.
We unpacked a new dynamic in antisemitic conspiracy theory: connecting “Jewish supremacy” with “the Epstein class.” When these two ideas are linked, the claim moves beyond criticism of Israel or inequality. It becomes the assertion that an all-powerful Jewish state works in concert with an all-powerful cabal to spread “Jewish supremacy” worldwide. That is conspiracy theory architecture, and when “Jewish supremacy” is the connective tissue, it is overtly antisemitic.
Within hours of Hungarians voting Viktor Orbán out of power, Elon Musk posted “*Soros Organization has taken over Hungary” to 1.8 million views. This feeds the antisemitic conspiracy that Soros pulls the strings behind anti-fascist movements. The reality: an authoritarian antisemite was voted out by a large majority of Hungarians. Musk knows exactly who he’s activating when he invokes Soros.
Musk has spent years building Soros into a personal villain on his platform, comparing him to X-Men villain Magneto and amplifying the idea that Soros funds protests, controls prosecutors, and orchestrates global instability. These are the same conspiracy frameworks that inspired the Tree of Life massacre. Coming from the owner of the platform that reaches hundreds of millions of people, the repetition is the strategy.
At a White House news conference this week, President Trump referred to the American Jewish community as “Israel”, complaining about “how Israel can vote for a Democrat.” This is the latest episode in Trump’s long history of invoking the antisemitic dual loyalty trope while policing how Jewish people vote. American Jews are American.
A new Brandeis University study finds that Jewish, Black, and Muslim students report comparable levels of campus hostility, and that Jewish students themselves rank antisemitism from the political right (60%) and traditional antisemitic stereotypes (62%) above antisemitism related to Israel (45%) or coming from the left (45%). The administration’s campaign against universities has been justified almost entirely as a response to left-wing campus antisemitism around Israel. Jewish students rank that concern fourth.
In an opinion piece for the Forward, Nexus President Jonathan Jacoby reflected on Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat through the lens of his own father’s history in the Hungarian resistance. His father operated underground in Budapest and Bucharest in 1943 and 1944, organizing rescue efforts for Jews under Nazi rule and smuggling Jews from Hungary to Romania and onward to Mandatory Palestine.
Jonathan writes that real resistance today means using the tools of democracy still available to us: voting, organizing, building coalitions, and standing up when democratic norms are eroded. His father had every chance to escape but kept coming back to rescue more. Neither, Jonathan writes, should we.
This is what we do: track real antisemitism, call out when it’s weaponized, and make clear the difference. If you’d like to support this work, you can donate here. We’d love to connect.
Antisemitism is not a feeling, and fighting it is not a vibe. It is concrete work. It looks like enforcing a content policy you wrote.
Six months ago, the FBI cut ties with the ADL and Southern Poverty Law Center. This week, the Justice Department indicted the SPLC.
