The Map on the Road
How Antisemitism Travels as a Template
(A field note from work-in-progress to be presented at the 2026 Contemporary Antisemitism Conference in Haifa; this piece focuses on one line of inquiry rather than the full argument.)
On a road near Ardee in County Louth, Ireland, someone spray-painted swastikas, Stars of David and the words “Jew Rat” onto the asphalt. Gardaí have opened a hate crime investigation, and Louth County Council has condemned the imagery and said it will be removed as quickly as possible.
The paint will come off. What stays, at least for me, is a question of legibility: what makes a swastika feel culturally usable in public space right now?
I want to offer a modest claim, with respect for how much scholarship already exists on this subject. The debate over whether something is “antizionism” or “antisemitism” matters for law, policy and institutional response. Yet it often arrives after something more basic has already taken place: a role has been assigned to Jews, and the assignment presents itself as settled. I’m not arguing that Jews cause other people’s crises. I’m arguing that Jews are often used to organize them.
So the question I keep coming back to sits above taxonomy: what kind of social interpretation is happening in real time, and what does our language miss when it jumps straight to categories? What I want to foreground is the sequence: not only what an incident is, but what interpretive work it performs before classification begins.
Meaning happens fast
Public argument, at its best, moves through claims, reasons, evidence and the possibility of correction. But a swastika skips that process, arriving as verdict and compressing complexity into a single instruction: treat this as though it’s already decided. This does not mean that the symbol functions identically in every context, or that all audiences receive it in the same way. Rather, it means that the symbol arrives preloaded with a historically sedimented range of meanings that sharply constrain what interpretation can plausibly do next.
Placed alongside a Star of David, it makes Jewishness the canvas for that verdict; paired with “Jew” and “Rat,” it taps an extermination-era grammar in which Jews appear as contagion and threat. The “rat” trope has a specific history in the Nazi visual lexicon, including the infamous “rats” sequence in Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), which compares Jews to rats carrying disease.
Read that way, the road reveals more — a map unfolds on the asphalt: a template with routes already charted, ready to carry the next incident straight into an older story.
As sociologist Shaul Kelner asks, Can anyone make the case that these behaviors are disconnected? That we are seeing coincidence and not pattern?”
Portability is the point
One claim keeps resurfacing: antisemitism is unusually portable—it travels across time, place and ideology. My claim is that it does so because it functions as an interpretive template, a ready-made way of assigning meaning that can latch onto new events and fold them into an older moral story. Imagine autocorrect: type something different, but it keeps snapping your words back into the same familiar phrase, even when it’s wrong.
But portability alone does not explain why such symbols are chosen in the first place. Their usability also reflects perceived rewards: shock value, transgressive credibility (aka edgy clout), algorithmic amplification and the moral inversion that allows aggression to masquerade as critique.
David Nirenberg helps explain why the “snap-back” persists. He describes anti-Judaism as “a way of thinking,” a conceptual tool that can organize how reality gets interpreted: not simply bias or prejudice, but a ready structure for making sense of events. In other words, the interpretive work is already partly done before any particular event arrives. This inherited grammar helps explain antisemitism’s endurance: its ability to persist through changing idioms, alliances and rationales, even across settings that share very little on the surface. Robert Wistrich, tracing antisemitism at historical scale, emphasizes this durability and mutability, specifically how the content shifts, the targets and the slogans update, but the underlying route stays open.
With that in view, a swastika on an Irish road stops looking like a strange escalation and starts looking like portability in practice: a traveling template finding a surface.
And this is why language matters. Labels shape what we can see, what we can say and what institutions can hear. They can clarify, blur and also become a gatekeeping mechanism. As Nachum Kaplan put it, “Antisemitism will remain the only form of bigotry that requires peer review, occupying a unique taxonomical category: real, but highly conditional.” In such a climate, terminology becomes both essential and unstable: essential because precision protects reality, unstable because the burden of proof and the rules of debate keep shifting.
Another problem is slippage: when one term is asked to carry every form of anti-Jewish hostility, it can lose explanatory force even as the burden of proof keeps rising. The Bondi Beach attack is a recent example. In the immediate aftermath, the online ecosystem filled with confusion, false identifications and rapid reframing through conspiratorial, antisemitic and anti-Israeli narratives.
Dr. Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler writes that a misleading headline becomes a clip, a clip becomes a meme and fragments get recirculated stripped of origin and accountability. In her piece for The Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), she notes how “Zionist” often functions as a stand-in for “Jew,” allowing old tropes to travel through newer language and even evade moderation. The result is a familiar sequence: violence, then cognitive fog, then a new wave of hate that helps prime the next moment.
Disagreement here doesn’t undermine the argument. It’s one of the conditions the argument is trying to track. Even readers who disagree with this framing can recognize the warning: when one term is stretched to cover everything, it clarifies less while the burden of proof grows heavier precisely when clarity is most needed.
Why naming can become part of the trap
Categories are necessary, but they can also get weaponized as a detour. When the first question becomes “what do we call this,” attention shifts from the act and its effects to a debate about admissible language, intent and Jewish credibility. The issue isn’t precision, it’s sequence. Because in many cases, careful naming is exactly what enables accountability; however, when definitional debate functions as postponement rather than clarification, it does the work of delay and dismissal.
After incidents like this, public conversation often moves quickly into definitional sorting:
Is this antisemitism or antizionism?
Is it about Israel or about Jews?
Is it hate or politics?
Those questions carry real stakes, as institutions need categories to act, journalists need language to describe and lawyers need terms that can be adjudicated. Yet the sorting can also obscure what the symbol is doing. When a swastika enters public space, it assigns a role, turning Jews into an object inside someone else’s moral framework, presenting that role as self-evident. It seeks to recruit the passerby into recognition, asking less “do you agree?” than “you see it too, right?”
Seen this way, the antizionism-versus-antisemitism debate often fails to clarify what is happening in real time because it presumes a shared arena of good faith, where meaning remains open, evidence registers and persuasion is still the point. The swastika signals that this stage has already been bypassed. Meaning is usurped by verdict.
What follows is circulation. Anything placed in public space will travel; social usability determines how — whether it meets resistance or finds uptake. This depends on the moral permission and social reward available to those targeting Jews. Historically, inversion supplied that permission, laundering aggression through righteousness and allowing extermination-era symbolism to circulate as critique rather than hatred.
Inversion and the moral laundering of aggression
Deborah Lipstadt has spent years warning about Holocaust distortion and inversion dynamics that flip moral reality by recasting Jews as perpetrators. One familiar form is the Nazi analogy: a move that uses the most discrediting symbol in modern European history as a tool of supposed righteousness. Inversion transforms it from something that should be disqualifying to something that feels urgent and principled. It turns extermination-era symbolism into a posture of virtue. Simply put: it makes antisemitism feel good.
This helps explain the social stickiness of the phenomenon — the way it takes hold. Inversion offers emotional clarity and moral elevation while simultaneously degrading reality. In that atmosphere, “solidarity” functions as permission rather than restraint. Long before anyone articulates a doctrine, the reflex is already in place: Jews are assigned a role, and the assignment feels like common sense.
I often return to a line of inquiry Hannah Arendt helped open. She showed how ideology destroys judgment by replacing factual reality with internal consistency, and analyzed what happens when political systems function without truth. I wonder about what occurs one step earlier: what happens when judgment collapses at the level of social interpretation — before ideology hardens, before institutions act, before belief coheres?
The pivot that seals the frame
The mechanisms that give antisemitism its moral and social force also shape how it is received in public discourse. By the time a symbol or act reaches debate, attention often shifts from the act itself to the person raising the concern. Claims of antisemitism are not always addressed on their merits; instead, they are scrutinized, contested, or reframed in ways that protect the underlying template.
In some recurring patterns, the person who names antisemitism becomes the controversy — not through engagement with the substance of the claim, but through suspicion directed at the act of naming itself. David Hirsh’s “Livingstone Formulation” describes a familiar pattern in public debate: instead of engaging the substance of a concern, it is recast as bad faith, “weaponizing antisemitism” to silence legitimate criticism of Israel.
I want to suggest a small extension of Hirsh’s insight. At the core of the Livingstone Formulation is a mechanism, a pivot, that protects the template from scrutiny. It’s a shift of focus — away from symbols, structures, and effects and onto the alleged motives of the person raising the alarm. Thus, naming becomes suspect, and the warning sign becomes the problem.
The pattern becomes self-sealing.
The incident triggers a demand for definitional proof, drawing focus toward Jewish motive; this focus becomes the rationale for dismissal. Over time, speed is rewarded: the faster the countercharge, the safer the framework, and the more the incident spreads before people have time to register its meaning or question the burden it places on its target. Conversation stays focused on policing Jewish perception rather than on why a swastika has become a socially usable cue. Simply put, the debate turns the incident into a referendum on Jews, which is exactly how the template survives.
None of this implies that every claim of antisemitism is beyond challenge, or that evidentiary standards should be abandoned. The concern is structural: that the standards themselves shift depending on who is speaking and what is being named. When recognition becomes conditional on passing an ever-moving evidentiary test, the template gains room to travel while the target gets tasked with proving that the road is real.
The paint comes off. The map remains.
Louth County Council says the graffiti will be removed and Gardaí are investigating. That is important, as public space should not carry extermination symbols or dehumanizing tropes. Yet the deeper issue remains: what the episode reveals about what has become culturally usable and therefore socially doable.
So yes, labels matter, language matters and categories deserve seriousness and care. At the same time, the argument over naming often arrives after the meaning has already been assigned.
I would imagine the task is to recognize a traveling template early, while interpretation is still in motion, and then rebuild the guardrails that keep moral argument tethered to reality before symbols harden into verdicts.