Oldest Hatred Finds New Converts: Young Catholics and the Scourge of Antisemitism

Author Mary Eberstadt warns that antisemitism is resurfacing among young believers, fueled by internet subcultures and often cloaked in the language of “anti-Zionism," and why the Church must respond

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with one of antisemitism’s most devastating critics. On the TCA podcast and radio show, Conversations with Consequences, I interviewed my friend and mentor Mary Eberstadt, who was speaking out long before its recent troubling resurgence.

Mary is a modern-day prophetess. Her books and articles are a litany of predictions about social trends. Adam and Eve After the Pill takes on a post-hormonal contraceptive society; How the West Really Lost God connects the breakdown of the family to the decline of religiosity; and my personal favorite, Primal Screams, explains and predicts with uncanny prescience what happens to humans in their innate search for meaning when it cannot be found in the intact family unit.

Unfortunately, Mary was ahead of the curve on antisemitism as well. In a piece for The Free Press, she describes joining the Coalition of Catholics Against Antisemitism (CCAA) at the Franciscan University at Steubenville—with some surprise that such a coalition remained necessary in the year 2023. On our show, the word she used was “baffled.” She recalled saying, “Do I really have to give a speech? I mean, isn’t this stuff obvious? I’ll help with the mission statement, but why go to all the trouble of a conference? Then October 7th happened and the conference was weeks later.”

It is “impossible,” she said, “to relay the gravity” of the mood among the participants.

It’s not surprising that Mary was weighing in on antisemitism right before it exploded, as she has an exceptionally keen cultural sense. Now her voice is needed more than ever, and it was an honor to hear her take firsthand.

A few takeaways:

Mary has likened antisemitism to “moral pornography” and argues it is being fueled by fringe internet figures to vulnerable young people. She said:

“A lot of study has been devoted to what being on the internet all the time is doing to us. It is making us anxious. It is also delivering dopamine hits. I think a fair analogy here is to compare antisemitism online to pornography online, because they’re very similar phenomena in some ways. They deliver thrills. Illicit thrills to people who really don’t want to be caught at what they’re doing online. And the irony here is that some of the young Catholics who understand that pornography is bad for them and who try to stay away from it, who buy software to keep it off their laptops and their phones, some of these are the very people who, when no one’s in the room, are opening antisemitic websites and trading antisemitic memes around, not understanding that there’s a connection there.”

“Kids today,” she continues, “are facing things that no generation in history has had to face because of the internet.” As Catholics, she argues, “We believe that evil lurks in dark places and online can be a pretty dark place.” The challenge is to educate them that antisemitism is no exception.

Just look no further than the rise to notoriety of Carrie Prejean Boller, the former beauty queen who recently “hijacked” – to borrow from Francis Beckwith and Josh Blackman’s recent piece in The Free Press – a recent meeting of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission to spew antisemitic tropes in a session devoted to, of all things, antisemitism.

She “reignited the scurrilous charge that Jews are controlling American and global policy” they wrote, and repeated tropes like “the Jews killed Jesus” and that Catholics can’t be Zionists, both positions that they and Eberstadt point out the Church long rejected in its watershed document on Jewish-Catholic relations, Nostra Aetate.

Mary touches on the notion that some people are hiding behind the phrase “anti-Zionism.” To wit: “I’m not antisemitic, I am just anti-‘Christian Zionism.’” These, she argues, are just masks for antisemitism.

“When people start talking about the Jews as if they are a monolith, that is a sign that they are stereotyping and scapegoating individuals. And when people use phrases like some popular podcasters use, say, ‘Judaism is demonic,’ ‘Zionism is demonic,’ ‘I hate those people, those Christian Zionists’ -all of this language is indicative of something that is deeply unchristian,” she states. She goes on with a quote she had read that morning that struck her with its Lenten relevance, “This is the central program of the Lenten season, to listen to the word of truth, to live, speak and do the truth. And to reject lies that poisoned humanity and are the door to all evils.

“That was Pope Benedict the 16th. And my point is that if antisemitism, swapping antisemitic memes, trash talking the Jews, is not an example of lies that poisoned humanity, it’s hard to think of something that is. So we have right here in stark form in this single sentence, the struggle between what it is that the Church teaches and what it is that some young Catholics are choosing to engage in.”

Mary points out—on a hopeful note—that the young people today, many of them converts with a needed zeal for the faith, “are traditionalists trying to be good” and “embracing the teachings that their Boomer parents and others had a lot of trouble with. So for example, generally speaking, this is the generation of Catholics that embraces Humanae Vitae and the disciplined teachings about sex and marriage and procreation. And that is wonderful. It’s been wonderful to see that renaissance.”

“The problem is it’s the same generation that’s letting itself be dragged into the mud with this kind of hatred or crypto hatred or whatever it is that some of them think they are feeling about Jews and Judaism.”

It’s a problem we cannot silently abide by. As Beckwith and Blackman say in their conclusion, “People of all faiths need to stand up now to prevent their doctrines from being hijacked, once again, by antisemitism. We must never forget what happens if faith is corrupted by the world’s oldest hatred.”

It is entirely false and heretical to insist, as beauty queens like Boller do—who think they know better than popes—that “Catholics are not Zionists.”

But it is an immutable truth that Catholicism does not tolerate antisemitism, even when dressed up as an internet meme.

Listen to the full interview with Mary Eberstadt here.

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Ashley E. McGuire