The First Moral Failure of the Digital Civilization
Poll after poll over the past year-and especially in recent months- have shown that young registered voters are becoming five more time likely than their elders to express unfavorable views of Jews. Younger cohorts are more willing to repeat classic tropes about Jewish power, to justify hostility toward Jews or Israel as morally righteous, and to treat antisemitism not as a prejudice but as ethical positioning.
This pattern cuts across politics. The rhetoric differs, but the outcome is the same. As one blunt formulation puts it: America is becoming more anti-Semitic because its young people are becoming more anti-Semitic.
In contemporary identity politics, Jews often fail the expected script: They are too integrated, too successful, too resistant to victim-only identity, too committed to self-definition. Jewish claims to dignity and security are treated with suspicion rather than solidarity. This is a return of an ancient pattern: Jews are tolerated as symbols—but resented as actors.
Historically, Jews have always been hard to categorize. They are both ancient and in the avant garde of modern developments. A small people with global reach. Often vulnerable, yet remarkably resilient. Deeply scarred by history, yet still capable of acting in it. Older moral systems did not find this threatening; they often respected it. Today’s moral framework does not, Complexity itself has become suspect.
Moral judgment is now formed quickly, online, and under constant pressure. Instead of thinking things through, people are trained to react. Among many young people, morality has collapsed into a simple equation: victims are good, power is bad.
There is little room in this equation for peoples who survive catastrophe without converting suffering into a permanent identity. Jews did not disappear. They rebuilt. They organized. They defended themselves. That is no longer admired.
Jews today are not resented because they are weak. They are resented because they are still standing.
In this way of thinking, Israel becomes more than a country. It becomes a problem. It represents Jews who refused to vanish, Jews who insist on continuity, Jews who defend themselves. In the new moral language, these are not achievements. Jewish self-defense is reframed as aggression. Jewish survival is recast as domination.
This is why antisemitism among the young often presents itself as moral confusion rather than open hatred. It arrives wrapped in claims of justice- drenched conspicuously in the silence about Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the many other moral black holes that conform the universe in which young people live today. Moral outrage is not universal; it is curated.
At bottom this is not about Jews. It is about whether a civilization can still tell the difference between power and tyranny, between responsibility and oppression, between survival and domination.
Young people are not becoming antisemitic because they lack morals. They are becoming antisemitic because of how morality itself is now taught and absorbed.
They are being trained-implicitly and relentlessly- to see Jews as morally suspect precisely because Jews are strong, organized, and continuous. The obvious question is: who is doing the training?
We are entering a machine age in which, long before machines replace moral thinking, humans are already outsourcing moral judgment to systems that reward speed, outrage, and certainty. Antisemitism among the young is one of the earliest signs of what happens when that transfer goes wrong.
Young people today are being formed inside algorithmic moral environments: compressed, accelerated, decontextualized systems that reward emotional certainty over historical understanding. In this environment, morality is no longer something wrestled with; it is something delivered with certainty.
Jews. however, require context. Jewish history cannot be grasped in a short clip. Jewish survival cannot be reduced to a slogan. You cannot flatten a people whose identity is built on memory, argument, law, and disagreement.
Previous generations learned morality through history—slowly. Moral judgments were mediated by time, teachers, books, and memory. That world is gone.
A culture that cannot tolerate the differences and antagonisms in one society, but yes in others will not tolerate human agency for long—especially once machines begin to outperform humans at almost everything except moral responsibility.
The real question, then, is not simply why young people are becoming antisemitic. It is what kind of civilization they are being prepared to build: one capable of handling history, complexity, and responsibility- or one that reduces moral judgment to online outrage and tribal resentment?
Antisemitism has always been an early warning system. It reveals failures in moral architecture long before it becomes an existential threat to Jews themselves
A culture that treats success as guilt and resilience as crime will not stop with Jews. Jews are simply the first test case. And a civilization that fails this test-at the very moment it hands moral authority to machines- is not just misjudging Jews. It is forfeiting the idea of human judgment altogether.
Rabbi Moshe Pitchon is the author of several books on Jewish thought, religion, and politics. His forthcoming book, Judaism and AI: Dignity and Moral Responsibility, appears next month. He is also the CEO the of TCHWUSA (taichihealthwellnessusa.net.)
