Beware the Bursting Bubble

By Abe Greenwald

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

Sometimes, you start to wonder if the current rise in anti-Semitism is a bubble that’s getting close to bursting. The events of this past week or so have me thinking about it. There was the Center of Attention media study revealing the world’s obsession with Israel, the canceling of Ed Sheeran for ditching Macklemore, the protests and walkouts over Benjamin Netanyahu’s presence at UNGA, the release of the anti-Israel propaganda film NAZA, a million new iterations of the genocide lie, and more hate-fueled assaults on Jews. Doesn’t such obvious overkill expose the whole campaign as preposterous? Isn’t it just too exhausting for its supporters to keep up with?

 

That’s the hope, but I’m reluctant to indulge it all that much.

 

We have to remember that to talk of anti-Semitism in terms of bubbles is to use a metaphor, and I’ve become increasingly convinced that thinking metaphorically about the topic may do more harm than good.

 

Anti-Semitism seems to resist metaphor altogether. It’s not, for instance, a disease or virus that one catches by chance. To describe it as such recasts the anti-Semite as a kind of victim.

 

The problem in trying to wrap your head around anti-Semitism is that it’s as singular a phenomenon as the Jews are a people. It’s so unlike any other form of bigotry that it constitutes a different category.
Anti-Semitism is a theory of how the world functions.

 

But, also unlike any other prejudice, it is spread most effectively by those who don’t necessarily believe its core theory or hate its targeted group. You don’t need to hate the Jews to believe the lie that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. In fact, to believe and transmit any slanderous lie about Israel, you need only have been told it under certain circumstances: You must sufficiently trust the source (such as the mainstream media); the claim of the lie must be couched in a moral concern (such as humanitarianism) that has no explicit connection to bigotry; and you must not know a whole lot about Israel, the Jews, and their enemies. The anti-Semites behind the original lie are obscured by multiple degrees of separation, allowing their claim to advance far beyond the bounds of the bubble itself.

 

Of course, it can be reassuring and therefore tempting to think of anti-Semitism as a bubble. But that’s only because we take the metaphor so superficially. We don’t consider what actually makes a physical bubble burst. Something like a soap bubble bursts, for example, because its wall becomes too thin and surface tension tears it apart. It’s an inevitable outcome of the bubble’s continued growth. Sadly, there’s no guarantee that political, cultural, or economic trends must comport with a comparable dynamic.

 

In the case of anti-Semitism, it’s as if the opposite applies. Left alone, it will grow and grow until someone takes action to stop it. If anything, the anti-Semitism inside the bubble is contained by a membrane of civil norms and social taboos, and once those wear thin and the bubble bursts, Jew-hatred is unleashed in all directions. I fear that might already have happened.