“Moral panic”: Jewish Chronicle used ‘antisemitism’ twice as often as during the 1930s

CORRECTION (17/11/25): We have updated the pronouns in this article to reflect Prof Neve Gordon’s correct gender. We apologise for the initial mistake.

A new treatise by Queen Mary University of London law expert Prof Neve Gordon has exposed the “moral panic” and weaponisation of antisemitism by right-wing, pro-Israel media (and others). In particular, the Jewish Chronicle (TJC), which was at the forefront of the ‘Labour antisemitism‘ scam targeting Jeremy Corbyn and the British left with a string of libels that ultimately cost it a series of defamation payouts and settlements.

The Jewish Chronicle and the weaponisation of antisemitism

In his paper, “The weaponisation of antisemitism: The Jewish Chronicle and the production of a moral panic,” published on the peer-reviewed Sage Journals site, Prof Gordon analyses TJC’s use of the word ‘antisemitism.’ He concludes that the data show that it “has been exaggerating and instrumentalising a Zionist notion of antisemitism to foment moral panic… [and] continuously reassert a notion of Jewish victimhood” to attack “individuals, groups and institutions”:

This article maps the word antisemitism on the pages of The Jewish Chronicle (TJC), the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper, examining first the frequency of the term over a period of 100 years before zooming in to interrogate the ways in which ‘antisemitism’ was invoked during the 9 months before and 9 months after October 7, 2023.

The data reveals that TJC has been exaggerating and instrumentalising a Zionist notion of antisemitism to foment moral panic, mobilising the language of trauma and injury to continuously reassert a notion of Jewish victimhood. Building on the work of media scholars who investigate victimhood, I argue that the newspaper puts into motion a justificatory framework that operates by claiming injury and then using the alleged injury to set in motion a series of oppressive actions against individuals, groups and institutions.

By way of conclusion, I show how TJC has been using ‘antisemitism’ as a ‘consoling idea’ to consolidate and sustain Jewish group identity while simultaneously invoking the term to shield and legitimise violent forms of racial governance and as a weapon against Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists.

Jewish Chronicle gives apology and compensation out of court to Labour member for “litany of lies”

Prof Gordon goes on to graphically illustrate the nature and scale of the “moral panic” — and to identify its primary targets. He points out that during the period in which TJC was attacking Jeremy Corbyn and the British left – and again during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, when the Israel lobby went into overdrive to defend the apartheid colony – it used the word ‘antisemitism’ twice as often as it did during the rise of Hitler and the nazis in Germany in the 1930s (emphases added):

In 1938, at the height of the Nazi clampdown on Jews in Germany (which unlike the final solution, was not shrouded in secrecy), antisemitism was mentioned in 352 articles. This is substantially higher than its average appearance, but much less than during Jeremey Corbyn’s 2015 election as Labour leader, his 2019 national election bid and Israel’s latest war on Gaza, when the number of articles using the term antisemitism was 506, 675 and 672 respectively. In other words, in 2019 and 2024 TJC invoked the word antisemitism almost twice as much than during the years leading to the Holocaust (Graph 1). Moreover, TJC included substantially more words in the 1938 edition than it did in 2019 and 2024, with an average of 65,000 words per issue in 1938 as compared to 35,000 words in 2019, indicating that in the more recent editions the frequency with which the term antisemitism appears is proportionally much higher.

Prof Gordon reaches the same conclusion as many Jews who oppose the lies of Zionism and the crimes of Israel. He argues that false claims — made to defend Israel — that anti-Zionism is antisemitism are dangerous, because they divert attention from the real antisemitism that still exists. And that real antisemitism, he notes, exists on the right much more than the left:

The issue is that even though TJC spouts the term right and left, the way it is invoked and mobilised has paradoxically displaced the risks of the real antisemitism in favour of weaponising the term to continuously threaten and silence all those who dare voice demands for Palestinian equality and liberation. Indeed, the oldest surviving Jewish newspaper has used antisemitism not so much to fight racism but to defend a racist regime and to cover-up horrific violations and genocide it has carried out. It has devalued the term antisemitism; and by doing so, has harmed the Jews it claims to represent.

And Neve Gordon is not writing from a remote academic standpoint removed from real life and from the realities of Israel as a colonial and racist state — as his academic career history shows, he worked for eighteen years at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, witnessing the apartheid state close up.

Featured image provided by the author