To describe the absurdity of the superposition principle in quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger devised a thought experiment, now known as Schrödinger's cat:
A cat is sealed in a box with a mechanism that might kill it. Until the box is opened and the cat is observed, it can be thought of as being in a superposition. Alive and dead at the same time.
Only when the box is opened, and the cat observed, does the superposition collapse. The cat is seen to be in the “state” of alive or dead.
Schrödinger’s cat is now used to describe the unintuitive nature of quantum mechanics, but antisemites use a similar idea to justify their incoherent reasons for Jew hatred:
A Jew, in their view, is a superposition of many different qualities, and when it suits them, the Jew collapses into the state that maximizes hatred towards them.
Jews are thought of as White and non-White
Jews, as a group, can collapse into being White or non-White depending on what is convenient for antisemitism.
In progressive activist spaces, particularly on American college campuses, Jews are regularly categorized as white exemplars of racial privilege and active participants in systems of oppression.
The framing has become routine. At Stanford University in 2022, flyers depicted an Israeli flag describing Zionism as "a form of white supremacy." At the University of Illinois in 2017, a student senator stated that "Zionist students" represent "white supremacy" on campus.
The intellectual architecture comes from intersectional theory. Israel is categorized as a settler-colonial state, an extension of European imperialism and white supremacy. Therefore, Jews who support Israel, or simply Jews in general, are placed on the side of whiteness and power.
Most Israeli Jews are Mizrahi or Sephardic, descended from families in the Middle East and North Africa rather than Europe, is either unknown or treated as irrelevant.
The rhetoric is explicit: "Zionism is white supremacy." "Jews are white colonizers." "Jews weaponize their minority status while enjoying white privilege." In 2019, Women's March leader Zahra Billoo described how Zionist organizations were enemies of communities of color and represented structures of white power.
Academic diversity frameworks have followed this logic. In many institutional contexts, Jews are categorized as white and therefore ineligible for inclusion in diversity programming. If Jews are white, and whiteness confers systemic advantage, then Jews cannot simultaneously claim marginalization.
Jews are described as holding disproportionate influence in finance, media, and politics. The newer progressive language frames this as structural privilege rather than conspiracy. Jews are embedded in white power structures, benefiting from and defending them.
The Jew, in this framework, is white. Definitionally. He is the colonizer, the oppressor, the face of entrenched privilege.
Step into white nationalist spaces, and the opposite claim appears with equal confidence and far older roots.
Nick Fuentes, organizer of the "America First" movement, has repeatedly stated that Jews are not white and cannot be considered part of Western identity. In a 2021 livestream, Fuentes argued that Jews "are not us" and that their presence represents foreign infiltration. The reasoning draws on nineteenth-century racial science that categorized Jews as Semitic, separate from and incompatible with the European race.
Contemporary white nationalist discourse has revived this framework. On forums like Stormfront, Gab, and Telegram, Jews are described as genetically other, racially distinct, and civilizationally incompatible with Europeans. The Daily Stormer's 2017 style guide instructed contributors: "The Jews are not white. They are a separate race, and they are at war with us."
At the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, marchers chanted "Jews will not replace us." The chant made explicit what the ideology assumes: Jews are not part of "us."
The Great Replacement Theory posits that Jews are orchestrating mass immigration and multiculturalism to destroy white majorities in Western countries. Jews comprise 2% of the American population, yet the fear is not of Jewish demographic replacement but of Jews as puppet masters importing non-white proxies to dilute white power.
The framing presents Jews not as traitors to whiteness but as never having been white to begin with. Their capacity to pass as white makes them more dangerous because they can operate from within. As researcher Chip Berlet notes, "Jews occupy a special place in the white supremacist imagination as the ultimate 'other' disguised as white."
Mutually Exclusive, Equally Functional
The same group is simultaneously described as the ultimate expression of whiteness and as fundamentally, definitionally non-white. These claims are logically incompatible. A Jew cannot be both the apex of white privilege and the racial enemy of whiteness. Yet these narratives coexist without apparent friction.
When Kanye West made antisemitic statements in 2022, claiming "Jewish people have owned the Black voice," white nationalist commentators praised him for naming "Jewish power," while the progressive left condemned him but continued describing Jewish institutional power in terms compatible with whiteness and privilege. The same comments were absorbed into two opposed frameworks without changing either.
The progressive activist and the white nationalist arrive at opposite conclusions using opposite premises, but they share a method: the Jew is defined by what the definer needs him to be at the moment of definition. When the accusation requires whiteness, Jews become white. When it requires foreignness, Jews become foreign. The charge adapts to fit the ideology. The target remains constant.
The Architecture of Scapegoating
Antisemitism has never required internal consistency. It requires a functional target. Historian Deborah Lipstadt notes that "the antisemite creates the Jew in the image required by the antisemite's ideology." The Jew is not observed and then categorized. He is categorized and then observed through that category.
This adaptability explains why antisemitism appears across the political spectrum and persists despite radical shifts in political debate. In medieval Europe, Jews were insufficiently Christian. In Enlightenment Europe, insufficiently rational. In nationalist movements, insufficiently national. In communist movements, they were capitalists. In capitalist societies, communists. The indictment changes, but the verdict remains the same.
The imposed fluidity serves a specific function: it allows antisemitism to persist where overt bigotry is socially unacceptable. The accusation becomes "Jews are white, and whiteness is bad" or "Jews are not white, and they pretend to be." The moral weight is transferred from antisemitism to anti-racism or the defense of civilization. The charge is ideologically laundered.
Schrödinger's Scapegoat
Schrödinger devised his famous thought experiment to show that our descriptions of reality become incoherent when applying quantum physics.
In Schrödinger's thought experiment, after the box is opened, there is some probability that the cat might be alive or dead.
What is striking about contemporary antisemitism is that the incoherence is not an accident. It is preserved. The Jew is allowed to be white and non-white, dominant and marginal, insider and alien, because the contradiction is useful.
The cat was a thought experiment. The Jew in the accusation is real. And unlike quantum mechanics, where observation collapses the wave function (superposition of states) into a single state, antisemitism keeps both states alive. The Jew remains simultaneously too white and not white enough, too powerful and too rootless.
When a group can be blamed in mutually exclusive ways without anyone feeling the need to resolve the tension, the goal was never description. It was permission. Permission to suspect, to exclude, to resent, and eventually to justify harm. The contradiction serves a purpose. It can be exploited without ever needing a resolution.
Schrödinger's cat exposed a flaw in a theoretical model. Schrödinger's Jew exposes something worse: a political culture willing to suspend basic standards of truth when doing so allows an old, abhorrent tradition to survive in a new language. The contradiction is not a failure of logic. It is a success of hatred.