When more than 100 Congressional Democrats — and a solitary Republican crossing the aisle — voted last week to strip military aid from Israel, it revealed a growing cultural undercurrent in which Israel, and increasingly, Jews themselves, are becoming the preferred scapegoats for a generation’s economic and moral anxieties.
Recent polling reveals that 29 percent of Americans aged 18-44 now view Jews as a “threat to the unity of American society.” Among Gen Z, the numbers are even more concerning, as only 52 percent believe Israel has a right to exist. A new Yale Youth Poll found that 27 percent of 18-to 22-year-olds say Jews have “too much power.” Another 21 percent support boycotting Jewish-owned businesses, and 18 percent of 18-to 22-year-olds said Jews have a negative impact on the United States. Among voters overall, 35 percent agreed with ending all foreign aid to Israel. That share rises to 55 percent of voters aged 18-22 and 52 percent of voters aged 23-29. (RELATED: Post-Identity Antisemitism: The New Obsession With Israel)
These numbers signal a growing hostility in which Jews are becoming the proxy for a generation’s financial fears and cultural chaos. There has been a growing temptation to locate a single group to blame as today’s pressures are pushing many younger Americans to channel their anger toward Jews, especially Jews associated with Israel. (RELATED: Democrats at the Crossroads)
René Girard — the French theorist who argued that societies under stress instinctively look for someone to blame — believed that scapegoats appear when social pressures reach a breaking point. His work on mimetic theory showed that communities often redirect their frustration toward a group that seems both visible and vulnerable. That dynamic is now resurfacing in the hostility toward Israel and the Jewish people. Scapegoating is beginning to thrive as young people feel both morally burdened and mimetically inflamed. Similar dynamics unfolded in the Weimar Republic when economic instability and cultural fragmentation created fertile ground for the identification of Jews as the obstacle to national harmony and societal progress. Once a society’s younger members start viewing a minority as uniquely powerful and responsible for its problems, the cycle of rivalry and blame intensifies.
When shared meaning collapses, scapegoats fill the void.
Today’s Gen Z — raised in an algorithmic environment that amplifies outrage and competitive victimhood online — has inherited a cultural script in which Israel is increasingly portrayed as the central impediment to global justice. It is precisely the kind of move Girard warned against — one that reduces a complex conflict to a single group to blame — something that Girard called the “surrogate-victim-mechanism.” This shift is not simply political. It is sociological, as the collapse of shared norms, the fading trust in institutions like the family, the church, and — most visibly — the government, combined with the rise of performative online outrage and virtue signaling, has created the kind of environment where younger Americans feel normless and overwhelmed.
In my book, Politics of Envy, I argued that envy-driven scapegoating rarely stays symbolic for long. Once a society begins funneling its frustrations onto a single group, the pressure to move from metaphor to action grows. We are seeing early signs of that pattern now. A generation raised amid economic uncertainty and cultural fragmentation is searching for clarity. In that search, Jews are increasingly cast as the obstacle to the world they believe they were promised. When shared meaning collapses, scapegoats fill the void.
What we are witnessing now is a breakdown in the shared cultural framework that once kept social tensions in check. As common norms erode and institutions lose credibility, people begin searching for meaning in more proactive ways — sometimes through violence. Social media accelerates that collapse by rewarding outrage and identifying the villains. Scapegoating becomes a kind of social shortcut — a way to make sense of chaos by locating a single group to absorb the blame. The move from online to real-world consequences can happen quickly, especially when a generation feels economically squeezed and convinced that someone must be standing in the way of the future they felt they were promised. (RELATED: The New Brownshirts?)
The antisemitism that permeated the culture of Germany in the decade before the Holocaust did not spontaneously originate with racist ideology or religious animosity. Rather, a growing number of scholars, including German historian Gotz Aly in his book, Why the Germans? Why the Jews?, suggested that the virulent hatred toward the Jews in Germany in the 1930s and 40s was rooted in envy of the advantages enjoyed by the Jews. The fact is that the National Socialist Party itself — the Nazi Party — was itself propelled by envy, and today’s Democratic Socialist movement similarly uses envy as the engine of its appeal. New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani has tapped into that same dynamic, using envy as the emotional fuel for his brand of Democratic Socialism — and antisemitism — in New York City. Mamdani has consistently referred to Israel’s retaliatory actions in Gaza as a “genocide” — a word he had used to describe previous Israeli military conflicts, long before October 7. He has also said that the United States, through its support of Israel, is “subsidizing a genocide.” (RELATED: Mamdani Peddles the Myths Fueling Democrats’ Antisemitism)
Gotz Aly pointed out that sociologist Werner Sombart documented the cultural milieu that reigned throughout the decades before the Holocaust. In a sociological analysis of academia during the pre-Holocaust period in Germany, Sombart found that on average, “Jews are quite a lot more clever and industrious than we are,” and he used that insight to justify prohibiting Jews from holding academic chairs in universities. Regretting that it was “regrettable” that most of the time, if there were two candidates, “the stupider one, not the Jew was chosen.” Aly pointed out that Sombart was “not a racist” even though the logic of racial antisemitism drove his arguments. Still, Sombart — like many German intellectuals — later embraced virulent antisemitic ideas. In his 1934 book, German Socialism, he deemed the Nazi regime a legal form of state, recommending that Jews be stripped of their rights. He warned that “In order to liberate us from the Jewish intellect, which should be a main task of the German people and above all of socialism, it is not enough to shut out all the Jews … the entire institutional culture should be reconfigured so that it can no longer serve as a bulwark of the Jewish intellect.”
Aly documents dozens of instances of antisemitic writings by envious Gentile professors during the decades prior to the Holocaust. He recalls that the economist Gustav Schmoller warned that “despite their obvious intellectual superiority,” he found it proper to admit only small numbers of Jews to the higher ranks of the military or civil service. As a result, dozens of brilliant Jewish scholars were excluded from academia just because they were Jewish.
University of Berlin historian Dietrich Schafer wrote a scathing evaluation aimed at preventing Georg Simmel, one of the founders of modern sociology, from being given an academic chair at the University of Heidelberg. The son of Jewish converts, Simmel, whose work is still studied and respected by sociologists, was denigrated by Schafer as “an Israelite through and through, in his external appearance, his demeanor and the character of his intellect.” Envious and resentful descriptions of Simmel’s talents were woven through Schafer’s evaluation of the popular lecturer, who was accused of possessing a “pseudo-intellectual manner that is greatly valued by certain circles of listeners in Berlin.” Schafer even mocked Simmel’s students who “flooded to and settled in Berlin from the eastern countries semester after semester … There’s not a lot that’s positive to be gleaned from his lectures, but people do get a momentary prick of excitement and intellectual enjoyment.” Obviously, Simmel was not hired at the University of Heidelberg.
Despite the discrimination, their intellectual advantage contributed to the growing envy toward what became known as the “Jewish advantage.” As Aly pointed out, the economic rise of entrepreneurial Jews was the main reason that hatred for Jews became part of the culture of the broad masses. Tax records reveal that in Frankfurt in the early 20th century, the average Jew paid four times as much in taxes as the average Protestant and eight times as much as the average Catholic. In Berlin, Jews accounted for 30 percent of city tax revenues, even though they constituted only 15 percent of the tax-paying population, and only 5 percent of the total population. In 1934, sociologist Jakob Lestschinsky noted that German Jews had more advantages than comparable classes in the non-Jewish population. Prior to World War I, German Jews earned five times the income of the average Christian.
History has shown that the kind of hostility directed toward the Jews in the past does not remain symbolic; it hardens into policy, exclusion, and eventually violence. That is the danger when Mayor Zohran Mamdani-style calls for envy become a political tool for mobilization. Once a society convinces itself that one group’s success is the source of everyone else’s frustration, scapegoating stops being symbolic and begins shaping real behavior. The lesson for us is not that history repeats itself, but that envy — when weaponized — can move quickly from resentment to action. It is a warning worth remembering.
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