The Double Burden of Being a Jew
First, the pain of loss and terror. Then, the slander that somehow, you are at fault.
For Jews, a national tragedy always delivers two blows. The first is the event itself, the horror of the attack, the trauma of realizing our vulnerability, and the knowledge that we will always rank high on the list of targets for the unhinged and unstable. The second blow, in some ways more surreal, comes when you log into social media and see people blaming a Jew, or more accurately “the Jews”, for the horrific event that just took place.
The question of whether an attacker was Jewish should be irrelevant unless one is trying to show a pattern. This is why people point to the more than 65,000 jihadist attacks since 1970, which have killed tens of thousands globally. There is a clear, undeniable pattern. But to invent that a shooter was Jewish, despite being born to Christian mother, growing up Christian, attending a Christian school, and then returning to attack that same school, is not about truth.
There is no pattern of Jewish terrorism. It does not exist. There are no Jewish suicide bombers, no Jewish car rammers mowing down families, no Jews storming mosques or churches with religious slogans before stabbing worshippers. On the vanishingly rare occasions when Jews commit violent crimes, they are not carried out in the name of Judaism.
To accuse Jews as a group is therefore not about exposing a truth, but about perpetuating a lie. And there is an added perversity here. Being Jewish is not just a religion, it is also an ethnicity. To smear millions of people because one person with Jewish ancestry might have done something terrible is not only illogical, it is the very definition of racism. Between 1982 and August 2025, 84 out of the 155 mass shootings in the United States were carried out by white shooters. Nobody argues that “whiteness” itself is the cause or takes the ethnicity of those shooters as evidence of collective guilt. Yet with Jews, the logic is reversed and the rules are suspended.
For centuries this has been the pattern. Jews were accused of poisoning wells during plagues and blamed for famines, revolutions, and wars. The old blood libel claimed Jews kidnapped Christian children to use their blood. Today the libel takes a new form, arriving through tweets, doctored photos, and conspiracy theories. The mechanics change, but the instinct is the same. A tragedy happens, and the finger points toward the Jews. What makes this especially frightening today is the speed at which these lies spread through bots, propaganda networks, and countless anonymous accounts.
For the propagandists, facts do not matter. The moment a tragedy occurs, the same script is pulled out. It was a Jewish false flag, a government operation, a staged plot. The conclusion is always the same. Jews did it. Jews were behind it. Jews benefited from it.
The far more obvious explanation for these acts of violence is that the conspiracies themselves are inspiring people to commit them. If you tell people, day after day, that the world is controlled by a secret cabal of Jews, that society is rigged beyond repair, that their lives are meaningless and powerless, eventually someone is going to take that message to heart. If you convince them that nothing they do in their ordinary lives matters, then violence becomes the only way they believe they can make a mark. Carrying out an attack suddenly feels like a way to finally be noticed.
For years, demagogues like Candace Owens , Stew Peters, and Nick Fuentes have fed their audiences a steady diet of despair, paranoia, and scapegoating. They insist the world is collapsing, that evil elites are laughing at ordinary people, and that Jews are somehow behind it all. They build a narrative where violence begins to look like the only logical response. And then when someone radicalized by those exact words picks up a gun, they act surprised. They insist it must have been staged. They insist the Jews did it. In reality, they are just covering their tracks. They know full well that the most obvious culprit is the ideology they themselves have been spreading.
This is the cowardice at the heart of antisemitic scapegoating. The demagogues never accept responsibility for the culture of hate they foster. They immediately deflect to Jews, because Jews are the scapegoat that history has trained them to blame. And so Jews carry the burden twice. Often as victims of the violence itself, and once more as the universal scapegoat when tragedy strikes.
None of this compares to the unbearable grief of those who have actually lost loved ones. Their pain is hijacked and twisted by those who see every tragedy as an opportunity to stoke their ideology of hate. For Jews this is the familiar rhythm of history. Violence comes first, then blame. It was true in medieval Europe, in 19th-century Russia, in Nazi Germany, and it is true today. The instinct to scapegoat Jews for the evils of others is alive and well. That is the burden of being Jewish after a tragedy. Mourning the dead, fearing for the future, and then watching in real time as the same lies are recycled yet again, realizing that for millions, the lessons of history have still not sunk in.