In May 2024, Nancy Fraser received word from the University of Cologne: congratulations, you are this year's Albertus Magnus Visiting Professor.
A few days later came a second notice: the rector wished her to "clarify" her views on Israel and Palestine. Someone had told him that Fraser was one of four hundred American philosophers who had signed an open letter — a letter condemning Israel's invasion of Gaza as a settler-colonial land grab and warning of an impending genocide.
"Clarify" is a decorous word. Its actual meaning was: publicly retract your views. Fraser refused. The appointment was withdrawn. The rector denounced her publicly to the German press. Then the hate mail poured in, one piece from Israel, worded with considerable imagination: "Even the descendants of the Nazis can't stand you, you Kapo bitch."
A third-generation representative of critical theory, blacklisted by a country whose founding creed is "facing the past," in the name of "defending historical memory."
Fraser did not turn this into an indictment. In NLR 158 she uses the experience to do something bolder: she defines Gaza as a "world event" — not a regional conflict but a mirror, in which every country sees only itself.
Germany's Reason of State: A Misplaced Reparation
Begin with Germany. For its logic is the most refined, and the most distorted.
Germany has an unwritten reason of state (Staatsräson): the national interest of Germany is inextricably bound to the national security of Israel. To support Israel is not foreign policy; it is the foundation of the nation. The origin of this logic is not hard to fathom — the historical debt of the Holocaust. A state that committed such crimes ought to stand with the fate of the Jews.
The trouble is that "the fate of the Jews" has been quietly swapped for "every action of the State of Israel."
Fraser takes this swap apart cleanly. Germany ought to have bound its responsibility for the Holocaust to the obligation to uphold universal human rights, or at least to a particular duty of reparation toward the Jewish people. It did not. It bound the responsibility to unconditional support for a state — a state whose record of action includes the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the prolonged occupation of Palestinian territory, house demolitions, administrative detention, targeted assassinations, settler violence, and the tactics of starvation and indiscriminate bombardment against Gaza.
To package these actions, label them "national security," and then demand that all Germans support them unconditionally in the name of "historical responsibility" — this is not the repayment of a moral debt. It is the transfer of that debt onto another people.
Susan Neiman has given this mechanism a precise name: philosemitic McCarthyism. Its hallmark is a reified, closed, stereotype-bound "love" — not a care open to "the other," but a wall. It deploys an exaggerated love for one Semitic people to supply the psychological fuel for the oppression of another. The suffering of Palestinians does not exist within this discourse; it is rendered invisible, made to physically disappear.
Fraser goes further, saying something that will discomfort many: this philosemitic McCarthyism is antisemitic in both senses of the word. It is anti-Arab (direct oppression) and anti-Jewish (treating Jews as instruments rather than ends). Its true purpose is to elevate the self-esteem of the German establishment — "look, we have reconciled with our past, and the way we prove it is by supporting Israel more resolutely than anyone." The welfare of Semites was never part of the calculation.
Habermas's Silence
If philosemitic McCarthyism is Germany's national malady, then the intellectual circles' acquiescence in it is its most concentrated symptom.
Around 2019, the entire system of German cultural institutions began to enforce an unwritten rule: anyone deemed "close to" the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement was forbidden to speak, perform, or exhibit at any state-funded venue. Palestinian novelists were struck from the Frankfurt Book Fair, Palestinian artists had their exhibitions withdrawn by museums, a South African Jewish artist's show was canceled — not for the quality of the work, but for their stance.
Against this backdrop, Jürgen Habermas — heir to the Frankfurt School, perhaps Germany's most important living public intellectual — issued a statement called "The Principle of Solidarity." Its core message: for a German, even to raise the question of whether Israel harbored genocidal intent in Gaza was out of bounds. This, the "democratic ethos of the Federal Republic," would not permit.
Fraser's response is measured and sharp. She does not say outright that Habermas is wrong; she merely points to certain facts: the concern for "human dignity" expressed in that statement did not extend to the Palestinians of Gaza, nor to the Muslims in Germany facing a rising Islamophobia. Later, when an open letter was circulated to protest Fraser's blacklisting by the University of Cologne, Habermas refused to sign.
Solidarity with whom? And on what basis?
This question is posed to Habermas, but it is also posed to all who stay silent. When an intellectual world-renowned for "communicative rationality" selectively decides whose dignity is worthy of solidarity and whose is not, what he exercises is no longer reason but the rhetoric of power. Solidarity, once it carries a nationality clause, is no longer solidarity — it is loyalty.
America: Spring on Campus, and the Falling Knife of June
Fraser's story takes an almost theatrical turn in its American chapter.
In the spring of 2024, tents went up on the campuses of more than 140 universities. It was a sight American radicalism had not seen in years — Fraser herself says that for an "old '68er," it felt exactly like the early days of the anti-Vietnam War movement. The participants spanned every ethnic and confessional spectrum one could imagine: Palestinian, Latino, African, Asian, white; Christian, Muslim, Jewish. The actions were almost entirely nonviolent — marches, vigils, encampments, sit-ins.
Then came June. The knife fell.
The repression was a multi-party collaboration. Right-wing Zionist organizations weaponized the charge of "antisemitism," conservative politicians issued orders, militarized police cleared the encampments, universities expelled students, banned student organizations, and withheld degrees, major law firms rescinded job offers to graduates, and online trolls tracked protesters and reported anyone suspected of being of Arab descent to immigration authorities.
All of this was carried out in the name of "combating antisemitism." And the definition of "antisemitism" had been quietly rewritten to mean: criticizing Israel, or expressing solidarity with Palestinians.
Here Fraser makes a brilliant historical excavation. She points out that America's philosemitic McCarthyism was not invented from thin air; it has a genealogy. The original McCarthyism — the anti-communist purge of the 1950s — already contained a philosemitic component. The Cold War demanded the isolation of the Soviet Union, and isolating the Soviet Union required a remaking of domestic political culture. A key ideological operation was to bind communism and Nazism together as "twin totalitarianisms," denying "Judeo-Christian civilization" through their shared "atheism." The concept of the "Judeo-Christian tradition," which in the interwar years had been used by liberals to urge Christians to protect Jews from Nazi persecution, was recast during the Cold War as an anti-communist weapon. American Jews were invited to break with the Bolsheviks and prove their patriotism by joining the "anti-communist crusade."
Philosemitic McCarthyism has crossed the Atlantic.
Then came Trump's second term. Trump's McCarthyite tactics come straight from his mentor Roy Cohn — the right-wing Jewish lawyer who had been McCarthy's own chief enforcer. Trump's first-term "anti-woke" war on the universities used the McCarthy playbook. The second term pushed the philosemitic element to center stage.
The investigation list of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights reads like a roll call of the Ivy League: Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Duke, Northwestern, Penn, Virginia, UCLA. The outcome of the investigations was "fines" — Columbia University, $200 million; Cornell, $60 million; Northwestern, $75 million; Brown, $50 million; Harvard, first $200 million, then in February 2026 Trump unilaterally raised it to $1 billion.
Fraser's anger in this passage is barely concealed. She points out that these universities count large numbers of Jews among their students, faculty, alumni, and donors, and that they possess enormous endowments and could have united to refuse the extortion.
And yet, nearly all the universities capitulated.
This is not cowardice; it is institutional logic. The operation of a university depends on its endowment, federal funding, and reputation rankings — and these three things happen to be exactly what can be politicized. When the instruments of an institution's survival are held in the hands of the very power it claims independence from, "independence" is a piece of rhetoric. The Gramscian balance between coercion and consent has tilted entirely toward coercion. The "relative autonomy" of civil society turns out to be conditional — the condition being that it not touch the core interests of power.
Another Judaism
At this point Fraser's argument takes an unexpected turn. She stops speaking of Germany and America and turns to an older question: the internal tension of Jewish identity.
This turn looks like a digression; in fact it is the deepest cut.
Judaism is founded on a fundamental contradiction: it worships a god who belongs to everyone and yet is lord of the "chosen people" — at once universal and tribal. Those who understand themselves as Jews have always had to wrestle with this ambiguity. And Gaza has driven that wrestling to the tearing point.
The question facing diaspora Jews is this: how to relate to Israel? The community is splitting along a clear fault line. On one end is a growing anti-Zionist camp — "Not in our name!", the slogan of organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Not In Our Name. Looking upon a regime conducting ethnic cleansing in the name of a Jewish state, they feel an ontological nausea: to compress the rich tradition of Jewish thought into an apologia for Netanyahu's messianic nationalism is itself an erasure of Jewish history.
In this passage Fraser does something academically beautiful: she excavates a genealogy of a buried "another Judaism." It was not invented after the fact; it has been there all along. Certain Orthodox currents opposed Zionist state-building from the very start, regarding it as "idolatry" that pre-empted the Messiah. Reform Judaism insisted that Jews were not a "nation" in the nation-state sense but a faith-based community. The mass Bundist movement of Poland and Russia rejected Zionism — they saw it as defeatism and bourgeois escapism, and advocated Jewish cultural autonomy within a multicultural workers' state. Jews of the Middle East and North Africa regarded Zionism as an extension of European colonialism and constructed an Arab-Jewish identity. Even "cultural Zionists" such as Martin Buber opposed the establishment of an ethno-nationalist settler-colonial state.
For us, to reduce Jewish thought to the messianic delirium of the Israeli far right and its American enablers is a negation of our reality and our history.
The significance of this genealogy is that it shatters the equation "Jew = supporter of Israel." This equation is maintained jointly by the Israeli right and by the philosemitic McCarthyites of Germany and America — the former need it to monopolize the representation of Jewish identity, the latter need it to define "what counts as antisemitism." Once you see the existence of this other genealogy, the equation falls to pieces. To criticize Israel is not antisemitic — and this is not only a political judgment but a historical fact: Jews themselves have always been criticizing it.
Japan: Two Parallel Lines That Never Meet
The final section of the essay lands in Japan — Fraser's "unexpected discovery."
She gave a lecture on Gaza in Kyoto. She found something that would be unimaginable in Germany and the United States: Japanese society harbors a widespread pro-Palestinian sentiment, and this sentiment goes unchallenged, requires no defense. Yet at the same time, the same society is just as widely, and just as unchallengedly, pro-American. The two sentiments run in parallel, like two lines that will never intersect.
The cleverness of this observation lies in its being a contrast. In the United States and Germany, a pro-Palestinian stance exacts a price — one's position, degree, reputation, even personal safety. In Japan, it does not. This difference is itself part of the "world event": the same Gaza is processed into something entirely different in different political cultures, yet each mode of processing lays bare the structure of that society itself.
What Is a "World Event"
Fraser does not give a strict definition of "world event," but from her usage one may infer it: a world event is a crisis so large that it cannot be absorbed by any single frame. It is at once military, moral, political, and identitarian. Every country that looks into it sees its own lesion — Germany sees a historical debt not yet paid off, misdirected; America sees that the autonomy of civil society is a scrap of paper; the Jewish community sees the tearing of identity.
Gaza is a world event precisely because it cannot be contained within the image of "Auschwitz." The entire logic of philosemitic McCarthyism rests on a single premise: to protect Jews = to support Israel; to question Israel = to march toward Auschwitz. Gaza has blown this equation apart. As footage of the Israeli Defense Forces' bombardment, of starving children, of destroyed neighborhoods floods every screen, the moral ledger of "who is the victim and who is the perpetrator" — once seemingly settled — is reopened everywhere, and with violent intensity.
Fraser's essay was written in early 2026. The ruins of Gaza remain, the reckoning has not come, and the fissures in the world order are still widening. But she has already pointed to something more important than any particular event: a new McCarthyism is taking shape, dressed in the garb of "anti-antisemitism," doing the work of suppressing dissent. To recognize it, to name it, is the first step of resistance.
For the thing McCarthyism fears most — whether philosemitic or anti-communist — has always been to be called, accurately, by its name.