God save us from your philosemitism: D’varim [5785] GKW Serm 28

Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 2 August 2025¹

1. On Thursday, I received a message on Facebook from a total stranger, a resident of our city. This individual – let’s call them Ash (not their real name) – told me that by being willing to walk through Brighton without my eyes constantly darting hither and thither on the hunt for omnipresent antisemites hiding in the bushes, I’m “living in a bubble”. Ash rebuked me, saying that they “would have expected [me] to be proud of [my] fellow Jews”. Ash told me: “Israel needs you … Let’s see your visibly Jewish self,” and demanded to know: “Where [were] you while … [the hostages were] being starved and tortured?” Ash said: “[In Brighton] are 5,000 anti-Israel, antisemitic, violent, aggressive supporters of Islamic resistance against Jews. You cannot hide from it. You must confront this, before it’s too late, before something really bad happens.” Ash ended by instructing me: “Do something visible and meaningful for your community … Sing Ha-Tikvah with us on the street […T]he lack of support from Jews is embarrassing and shocking.“
2. Oh, one other thing: Ash isn’t Jewish. They mentioned that at the start of their message.
3. Well! The phrase ‘thank you for your feedback’ springs to mind. I’m frightfully sorry, non-Jewish Ash, that my behaviour as a Jew falls short of your expectations for my racial group.² Obviously, as a Jew, my main purpose in life is to act in a way that meets with your approval, to be the sort of Jew you want me to be. I’m enormously grateful for your guidance on what I, as a Jew, should do and think, and how I can avoid embarrassing and shocking you.
4. Ash’s message is a perfect example of what is known as ‘goysplaining’. Goysplaining is where someone who isn’t Jewish tells someone who is, what our experience is, or should be. If we don’t believe what Ash thinks we should believe, if we don’t do the things Ash says we should do, we aren’t good Jews.
5. Goysplaining, you may not be entirely surprised to hear, is a form of antisemitism.
6. Sometimes goysplainers insist that our duty, as Jews, is to condemn and disavow Israel. ‘You should learn from your own history of being victims,’ they intone paternalistically. That’s antisemitic because it treats us less favourably than other people: why are Jews, as a group, subject to a duty to call out Israel while Christians and Sikhs and osteopaths aren’t? Such a view is discriminatory in the most literal sense.
7. Sometimes, though, goysplainers demand that we offer Israel our uncritical support. That, too, is antisemitic. Telling us that, as Jews, because we’re Jews, we ‘should’ or ‘must’ think and feel particular things, must have exactly the relationship with Israel and Zionism that we’re instructed, must be scared of Muslims, must vote against the Labour Party, must hold opinion X on Palestine or attend demo Y on date Z… that’s all goysplaining.
8. Of course, these Ash-type goysplainers don’t think of themselves as antisemites. If anything, they probably think of themselves as philosemites, Jew-lovers.
9. Philosemitism has always been with us. The Rokei’ach, in his 13th-century commentary on the Megillah,³ suggests that Esther’s reason for not telling King Achashverosh⁴ that she was Jewish⁵ after her forced marriage, was because she was worried that all the Persian elites would start forcing Jewish girls to marry them: with a royal stamp of approval, Jews would become trendy, avant-garde, the zeitgeist.
10. And here’s the thing: the philosemites who spooked Esther almost certainly self-defined as good people, maybe even heroes; certainly not bigots. ‘Hey, I don’t hate her because she’s Jewish, I’m marrying her because she’s Jewish!’
11. But in fact, philosemites are rather icky.
12. Think about the sort of man who, accused of sexism, comes back with something like: ‘But I love women! My bedroom walls are covered with pictures of them!’ Creepy, right?
13. Philosemites don’t really love Jews at all. They are in love with a particular archetype, stereotype or ideal of The Jew that exists in their imagination, and they resent any real-life Jew who doesn’t fit that mould.
14. Ash claims to be a passionate supporter of the Jews, yet their message to me wasn’t remotely supportive. On the contrary, it was accusatory, aggressive and patronising. And Ash sent it precisely because I’m Jewish. Ash doesn’t make similar demands of Christians, Sikhs or osteopaths – not even chiropodists – but only of Jews. And telling us what we should think, feel and do in order to qualify as ‘proper Jews’ is antisemitic.
15. In the words of the scholar Hannah Rose: “[P]hilosemitism [is] rooted in the same myths and stereotypes as antisemitism, which essentialises Jews under assumptions placed on them by other communities […f]or example, by seeing Jews as European, pro‑Israel and anti‑Muslim.”⁶
16. Ash was not “embarrass[ed] and shock[ed]” about anything other than my failure to conform to their very particular mental picture of a fully westernised, pro-Israel, anti-Muslim Jew.
17. In today’s Torah portion, we read of Moses’s great act of delegation, by which he handed over some of his powers to a series of more junior leaders. Moses says that they should be wise and canny and ידעים לשבטיכם, well-known among the tribes.⁷
18. Why that last requirement? Is not someone wise and canny sufficiently competent to hold a leadership position?
19. Of course not. I may be wise and canny, but there’s a reason I’m running this place rather than a church. You can’t lead people without some understanding of who they are and what they’re going through. As a midrash explains Moses’s stipulation of tribal knowledge: “You will know them because you matured amongst them.”⁸
20. The Jewish people has faced many challenges over our history, and many challenges since October 7th. And noöne who isn’t a member of the Jewish people can fully understand what it’s been like. An outsider’s perspective is never the same, so an outsider’s view of how we, as Jews, ‘ought’ to react, is simply not valid.⁹
21. Of course, despite all this commonality, we undergo our Jewish experiences in manifold and varied ways. Some of us have worn a yellow ribbon every single day and rebuilt their life around the campaign for the return of the hostages. That’s an entirely legitimate expression of Jewish identity. And some of us have been so horrified by the fate of the Gazans that they’ve been campaigning for an immediate ceasefire. That’s an equally legitimate expression of Jewish identity. That’s how diversity works.
22. A ‘proper Jew’, for Ash, is one who spends every weekend protesting at the Clocktower draped in an Israeli flag. And, granted, some do that, and their right to do so is valuable and must be protected. But those Jews who act differently aren’t wrong, or embarrassing, or shocking. They’re just… different.
23. And people like Ash don’t like it, can’t stand it, when Jews are different. They need us to be exactly the way they imagine us to be, otherwise their fantasy doesn’t work, the bubble bursts, and they lash out. When we don’t do as we’re goysplained to do, we rapidly transition from being the subject of their philosemitic adoration to the object of their antisemitic disillusionment.
24. Moses was the first to warn the Jewish people against allowing ourselves to take orders from outside the tribe. Those who hold sway over us – those we allow to hold sway over us – should be those who’ve felt similar emotions, shared common stories, experienced the same joys and risks, dreams and disappointments.
25. Those who were born Jewish are qualified by their upbringing. Those converts who have hitched their wagons to our people’s star through commitment, learning and responsibility, are qualified by their act of personal transformation.
26. Those who, like Ash, choose to remain firmly outside our Jewish tent, saccharescently fawning over half of us while spitting irate venom at the rest, are not worthy of our respect. That remains so even if, by chance, today, we happen to be the ones who fit their criteria for the ‘right’ kind of Jew. Such behaviour isn’t support and it isn’t allyship. It’s imperialism and it’s antisemitism.
27. The competence standards for leaders laid down by Moses are eternally relevant, and remind us of the inestimable superiority of true allyship over performative whiteknightism. They encourage us to respect our own diversity and cherish the variety of experience it brings to our people. כן יהי רצון: may this be God’s will.

As usual, this sermon represents my own views and does not purport to incriminate anyone else.

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Shavua tov!

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Notes

1. Deuteronomy 1:1-13 ↩︎
2. We needn’t get into a debate about whether Jews are a race, an ethnicity, a people etc, here. Let it just be said that philosemites racialise Jews and that Ash’s comments were directed at me based on their perception of my race. Read on… ↩︎
3. Recounted in Nachal Eshkol to Esther 2:10 ↩︎
4. Hence ‘Ash’. ↩︎
5. Esther 2:20 ↩︎
6. Hannah Rose, “The new philosemitism: exploring a changing relationship between Jews and the far right”, International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (2020): i, 5. ↩︎
7. Deuteronomy 1:13 ↩︎
8. Sifrei D’varim 13 ↩︎
9. This is to be contrasted with A telling B how B ought to behave or react as a human. So, for example, when I gently hint that Israel should be flooding Gaza with aid so as to avoid Gazan children starving to death, I am not ‘diasporasplaining’ to them how they, as Israelis, should respond to experiences I don’t share with them. The reason they should seek to avoid children starving to death is nothing to do with the fact that they’re Israeli, but is because they’re human beings. I would have the same expectation if those blocking access to aid were Qataris, Peruvians or osteopaths. By contrast, Ash’s demands of me are specifically made of me as a Jew. ↩︎