Editor's Notes: Even after his death, Rabbi Sacks' idea of antisemitism stays dangerously relevant

A non-living rabbi gave the most important speech at this week’s International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem.

I know this because I was listening. As a journalist, I observe for a living. As someone who once wrote speeches, I understand the architecture of rhetoric, the music between the words. And what I heard, again and again, was one sentence: “The hate that starts with Jews never ends there.”

This is how you know someone has won the argument: their ideas become assumptions. You cite them instinctively. Everyone already believes what they believed. The very air of intellectual discourse carries their thinking.

Sacks won because he understood something most Jewish thinkers refuse to acknowledge or lack the courage to say. Antisemitism reveals the failure of civilizations to take responsibility for their own disasters, moral collapses, and inability to build functioning societies. Jews serve as the most convenient scapegoat, the perpetual Other onto whom every failure gets projected.

Listen to how he put it in his 2016 speech to the European Parliament, a speech that should be taught in every school: “Antisemitism is about antisemites. It is about people who cannot accept responsibility for their own failures and have instead to blame someone else.”

This is the intellectual move that changes everything. Once you understand that antisemitism is a diagnostic tool for civilizational breakdown, you treat it as everyone’s problem. You ask societies why they keep reaching for the same poison. You demand they take responsibility.

At the Jerusalem conference, this framework was everywhere. Speaker after speaker described the “three vectors” of modern antisemitism: violent Islamist, progressive delegitimization, and far right. The underlying analysis was pure Sacks. Antisemitism appears when societies are in crisis, when the politics of hope collapses into the politics of fear, which metastasizes into the politics of hate.

Netanyahu coined a phrase, “World War Jew,” to describe what he sees as a coordinated global assault on Western civilization that begins with attacking the Jewish state. The idea is Sacksian, dressed in Bibi’s characteristic bombast.

The hate that starts with Jews never ends there.

Here’s what makes Sacks’ posthumous dominance even more remarkable: he was right about the mutation. In his European Parliament speech, he described antisemitism as a virus that defeats the immune system by constantly changing its structure. Medieval antisemitism was religious. Jews killed Christ. Nineteenth-century antisemitism was racial. Jews polluted the blood. Twenty-first-century antisemitism is political. Jews have the wrong nation-state.

The genius of this analysis explains why all the post-Holocaust infrastructure failed to prevent antisemitism’s return.

The education programs, the interfaith dialogue, and the antiracist legislation. We built an immune system for the last virus. The virus mutated. It put on different clothes. Now it dresses itself in the language of human rights, of anticolonialism, of social justice. It accuses Israel, the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, of racism, apartheid, and genocide.

Here’s the darkest part: it works. In France, 46 percent of Jews were considering emigration as of 2013. In the UK, the numbers are now climbing, higher than they’ve been in decades. These are numbers from our lifetimes. Sacks asked his audience in Brussels: “Would you stay in a country where you need armed police to guard you while you prayed? Where do your children need armed guards to protect them at school?”

The answer, increasingly, is no. Jews are leaving Europe. Again. And this time, America is busy importing the same ideological virus that’s killing Europe.

This is all necessary. It misses Sacks’ deeper point, though. The victim cannot cure the crime. You have to cure society.

Which brings us back to that haunting sentence, the one that traveled through every speech, every panel, every conversation. The hate that starts with Jews never ends there. This is a diagnosis. Sacks is telling us that when you see antisemitism, you are seeing a society in collapse, a civilization that has lost its ability to take responsibility for itself, a culture that has abandoned the hard work of self-examination in favor of the easy comfort of scapegoating.

First, they came for the Jews. Sacks knew how that story ends because he studied history. He watched it happen in real time in Europe in the 2000s and 2010s. He tried to warn people. He gave speeches at the European Parliament.

And then he died.

The ideas survived. They were true. Truth survives even when its prophet dies. At that conference in Jerusalem, in a room full of living, breathing, important people, the most important voice belonged to a man who would never give another speech, never write another essay, never see whether his warnings were heeded.

He was in the room, though. I felt it. Everyone felt it. His words were in every speech, his framework in every analysis, his warning in every call to action. The hate that starts with Jews never ends there. This is the closest thing we have to a unified theory of antisemitism, and it came from a rabbi who understood that theology and politics, history and prophecy, are different ways of seeing the same truth.

So here’s what I’m left with: a deceased rabbi won the argument. His ideas now structure how we think about the oldest hatred in the world. Ideas, even brilliant ones, can diagnose the disease. They cannot cure it alone.

Rabbi Sacks knew this, too. He ended his European Parliament speech with a plea: “Stop it now, while there is still time.” That was in 2016. Now it’s 2026.

The time is running out. We know what we’re fighting. We know who helped us see it clearly, even from beyond the grave.