The anatomy of the 'asajew'
Sharks circle for a spot of blood quantum.
All antizionism is an emotional reaction, as all antizionism is bigotry, and all bigotry is a tantrum.
Asajews
Asajews (bigotis semitus) are Jews who weaponise their Jewishness by prosecuting antizionist bigotry. They impart authority into their offerings by starting sentences with, “As a Jew…”, influencing public perspectives on diaspora and Israeli Jews while protecting themselves from the very bigotry they encourage.
The Asajew’s Jewish credentials are celebrated by mapping onto broader society’s needs, expectations, and prejudices. 99.8% of people are not Jewish—yet it is their conception of Jewishness that the asajew appeals to.
Those credentials allow the Asajew to misrepresent a minority using the broad brushstroke approach we associate with the Common Bigot (bigotis exterminus). The irony here is significant: authentic representations of Jewish culture are drowned out by society’s preference for the Jew created in his own image. We see this in all forms of racism, where a minority is celebrated only to the extent that they may mirror the expectations of their hosts or colonisers.
The asajews’ self-appointed authority comes at the expense of broader Jewry.
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Antisemitic and antizionist stigmas are not dispelled by the asajew’s capacity to piss out their own menorah candles. Every time these people are platformed by the ABC, anti-Jewish bigotry is not only redirected away from the asajew, but compounded. The asajews’ concerted effort to morally separate from the bad Jews is rewarded at all levels of Australian society.
The Jewish Council of Australia are a group of asajews who are called for comment on radio, television, and in major publications week in and week out. To their credit, they very clearly state that, despite their name, they have no desire to represent the majority of Jewish Australians.
That they are platformed so regularly—or even at all—tells us all we need to know about broader society’s relationship with the Jews. They cannot love our Jewishness. They can only love us to the extent that we leave what makes us Jews at the door.
The Jewish Council of Australia’s incessant platforming is by every measure a rejection of public Jewishness. Their representatives are selected not for being Jews, nor for representing Jews at large, but for their capacity to play the role of Court Jew for everyone else.
Libels about the Jewish religion, the Jewish race, or—more commonly—the Jewish state are scraped from the Asajew and reapplied to other Jews.
At face value, the asajew’s entry into public conversation is as much about fashion and mimicry as it is as self-preservation. The unsettling truth behind most asajews is that their bigotry comes from the same place as anyone else’s. Unlike most Jews, the asajews’ Jewishness plays no role on their position on Jews or Jewishness itself.
Tokenisation is anathema to genuine representation. The asajew’s autoerotic climax occurs in their ostracism from their own community. It is in the Jewish people’s rejection of the asajew that the asajew derives the bulk of their self-satisfaction.
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By being rejected by those who they paint as corrupted and sullied, the asajew assumes Christ-like purity in the eyes of the masses. The asajew believes himself to have been persecuted and crucified by the Jews, promising absolution for the sins of broader Jewry to any who are prepared to renounce their corruption and re-build themselves in the image of our non-Jewish gods.
Th asajew regards other Jews through the eyes of the non-Jew. As a result, their perspective is as congruent with mainstream antisemitic and antizionist bigotry as anyone else’s. Their capacity to legitimise bigotry is obscene—it’s no wonder they’re so well-liked.
Asavictim
Asajews do not decide to hoodwink, connive, and baffle. When Jews express our frustration at asajews, they only grow less inclined to listen or self-reflect. They find each other instead, and harden around the safety of antizionist parochialism.
Most of us are in autopilot. Most of our opinions are a manifestation of our emotional needs. The asajew’s emotional response to some coalescence of alienation, resentment, shame, and fashion produces what feels like a belief system built on the unassailable throne of ‘lived experience’.
When this ‘lived experience’ even remotely flirts with anti-Jewish-community animosity, the asajew is rewarded. This was my experience.
The asajew’s tweenage resentments are fed, cultivated, and re-coded by opportunistic antizionist bigots. These bigots present themselves as a Hitler Youth leader did: not as a bigot, but as a warrior in a war against a corruption of the context’s values. Their dedication to the emancipation of the oppressed, be they post World War One non-Jewish Germans or post World War Two non-Jewish Arabs, presents as an indication not of dogma or prejudice, but righteousness.
What begins as a youthful emotional response to home is coveted by campus crusaders and the antizionist lobby. Bigotry, resentment, and rigidity are passed off as “politics”. Today, the conflation of “political critique” and bigotry cements the antizionist’s capacity to ostracise Jews via a revised Jewish-adjacent proxy: not “semitism”, but “zionism”.
This is not deliberate. The antizionist does not consciously hunt the Jew. As a result, when their actions manifest in a Jew hunt, they are unable to reconcile the distance between their social justice campaign and the harm it produces. Fittingly, they blame the “Zionist” for shutting down their “political criticism”.
Grooming is not solely the domain of the pedophile. It can be carried out by an individual, a cohort, an algorithm, or even just an environment that rewards specific behaviours and punishes other.
Whether it is at university, art school, in the music industry, or on the internet, the young asajew finds a language that embraces them—both as a thinker and a moral superior. They’re handed a megaphone. They’re revered. The ego adores reverence.
In many ways, the asajew is as much a victim of antizionist bigotry as the rest of us. We do not choose fight or flight. It chooses us. The asajew is chosen by society to join the upside-down triangle in the sky. The selection process is subconsciously engaged in. The geese fly east, shitting through sun roofs all the way to Qatar.
It is not difficult to understand why Asajews do what they do.
Jews make up 0.2% of the global population. They are persistently implicated in conflicts they did not choose and judged by standards applied to no one else.
In moments of social fever, amputating the parts of oneself subject to vilification can produce a feeling of safety—whether it be the safety of the crowd, or the safety of perceived moral elevation.
The parts a Jew marks for removal change with context. In some centuries it was Judaism; in others, genealogy itself. Many Jewish families grew disconnected from the Jewish religion, or converted out, over centuries in exile. When antisemitism replaced antijudaism, Jews burned identity documents, falsified family trees, and went to great lengths to get false passports and birth certificates printed.
Today, it is not religion (“Judaism”), nor blood quantum (“semitism”) that attracts the torches and pitchforks. It’s Jewish self-determination (“Zionism”).
Antizionism offers some Jews relief: the promise that they’ll be spared suspicion by joining the prosecution.
The influence Asajews wield in public discourse is disproportionate. Their Jewishness is not something they inhabit. It is something they deploy.
For many asajews, the Holocaust becomes their primary connection to Jewishness. In this respect they are indistinguishable from non-Jews. This is ironic, given their frequent claim that mainstream Jewry hijacks the Holocaust.
Two Types of Asajews
i. The Petulant Child
Some Asajews were raised in Jewish families embedded in Jewish life. They often develop resentment toward aspects of that upbringing. Early critical engagement hardens into cynicism when questions are met with dogma. That experience is not unique to Jews. What is unique is the reward system in place for Jews who amputate parts of themselves deemed impure by society.
Rebellion is a rite of passage for most young people. Young people just don’t know as much stuff as older people. With less life experience, less historical context, less information, less developed frontal lobes, and an algorithmically augmented penchant for the sensational, all young people are drawn to absolutes. Young Jews are no exception. Moral certainty offers identity, belonging, and something to direct anger toward.
Antizionism is the ultimate Jewish rebellion: a rejection of one’s people and of a part of oneself rendered unclean by prevailing bigotry. Again, this process is by and large a subconscious manifestation of emotional drivers, as opposed to a mature response to the real world.
All antizionism is an emotional reaction—as all antizionism is bigotry, and all bigotry is a tantrum.
Toddlers have tantrums because their developing brains lack the language and emotional regulation skills to cope with big feelings like frustration, anger, and disappointment, leading them to act out when overwhelmed by unmet needs, desires, or developmental conflicts like wanting independence but still needing help.
Tantrums are to toddlers what antizionism is to asajews. The problem is that this antizionist tantrum is received as serious, logical, responsible, and culturally authoritative—as opposed to the snot-nosed, confused, and inconsolable mess that it is.
This is dangerous. The Asajew’s authority is central to the broader antizionist population’s moral and intellectual claims about the Jewish state.
Unlike other youthful ideological dalliances, antizionism does not mature into informed critique. The point at which it does is the point at which it ceases to be antizionism.
This is because antizionism is incompatible with critical engagement. Its directive is elimination. “Criticism of Israel,” when undertaken by an antizionist, is posturing. All evidence of “Zionist” corruption is retroactively fitted to a rejectionism that casts Jewish sovereignty as illegitimate. Discussion becomes show trial.
No other state’s right to exist is popularly questioned, because no other state exists in the public mind’s eye so boiled down to libels. Crimes elsewhere do not become grounds for elimination because other states, despite their indiscretions, are not imbued with centuries of conspiracy.
Asajews help antizionists rubber-stamp eliminationism. Useful Asajews are elevated and paraded as good Jews, leaving the rest of us to absorb libels validated by a capitulation to fashion. One parochialism is traded for another—far more popular and far more dangerous.
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ii. The Grifter
The overwhelming majority of Asajews were not raised as Jews, but instead predominantly as members of their host nations with Jewish ancestry. When they invoke Jewishness, it rests almost entirely on heredity—on DNA—rather than lived experience of Jewish culture, history, law, or communal responsibility. They remain separate from any Jewishness except when social capital is conferred by outing themselves as Jewish.
The asajew avoids antisemitic and antizionist libels not by rejecting them, but by capitulating to them—on the condition that they only apply to other Jews.
The virality of these libels—especially when voiced by asajews—is enabled by a non-Jewish, race-science-inflected understanding of Jewishness that positions blood as the most important criterion for collective guilt. Nazis used blood quantum to determine who was a Jew in the twentieth century, and exterminated six million. Antizionists use blood quantum to determine which Jews may be weaponised in the twenty-first.
This asajew is Jewish by biological technicality; their nazification of their own Jewishness is what gives them the capacity to become an instrument of harm. Their political instincts and moral reflexes are indistinguishable from those produced by a life lived as a non-Jew.
A Chinese Australian raised with no exposure to Chinese culture remains Chinese. But it would be racist to claim DNA grants authority to speak on Chinese civilisation. Authority flows from experience, not blood. The same holds for Jews.
Rather than resisting libels, the asajew reinforces them.
“As a Jew… [insert antizionist libel].”
We’ve all heard it.
Here’s an egregious example of an Australian asajew:
I can’t sit here another minute—suffocating under the fear, grief, and shame of being Jewish in 2025.
Struck dumb in the face of the unanswerable question: how can a people—ostensibly my people—endure Nazi dehumanisation followed in short order by genocide, and then just a few decades later, perpetrate the same?
After the Holocaust, the world said: “Never again.” And yet plain as day: never again is right now.
Ginger Gorman, “The Great Silence” – pub Aug 1 2025, The Big Smoke.
For many asajews, the Holocaust becomes their primary connection to Jewishness. In this respect they are indistinguishable from non-Jews. This is ironic, given their frequent claim that mainstream Jewry hijacks the Holocaust.
They object not to its minimisation, but to its centrality—to its role in sustaining Jewish continuity and claims to survival.
The familiar credential follows: “My grandparents were in the camps…”
Holocaust invocation establishes unchallengeable Jewish credentials, supplies emotional authority, and grants license to redeploy the Holocaust for any narrative required. What Jews mean by L’shana haba’ah b’Yerushalayim is irrelevant.
Race Science Authority
When the asajew speaks, their authority arises from race-science—not cultural experience.
Modern antisemitism reframed Jews as foreign aliens condemned by blood. Wilhelm Marr coined the term “antisemitism” in the late 19th century. He and his contemporaries believed they were advancing a scientific critique of The Jew, rejecting the religious persecution of Jews while advancing what they considered to be a modern re-evaluation of Jews’ place in European society.
Calls for Jews to “go back to Palestine” were commonplace across Eastern Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the post-Holocaust era, antizionism replaced antisemitism as the primary libel system against Jews, borrowing the language of human rights and genocide.
Antizionists replace the corrupt Jewish race with corrupt Jewish sovereignty. “Zionism” performs the same role as “semitism”, allowing Jews to be targeted without being named.
Libels adapt to context. Where religion once justified vilification, then race, sovereignty now does. Jewish state sovereignty, or zionism, has attracted the same level of ire that the Jewish race once did.
Jews who do not parrot antizionist libels are labelled as “zionists”, and framed as anathema to society’s moral centre.
Casting the Jewish state as colonial, genocidal, and apartheid by design makes its destruction appear as morally necessary as the elimination of the Jewish people did.
It was not free speech, political organisation, academia, debate, or public appeals to morality that saw antisemitism’s permission structure revoked. In fact, it was a public appeal to morality that granted the Nazis permission to exterminate 6 million Jews.
Yet today, we continue to pour resources into “combatting antisemitism”—failing to recognise that antisemitism is not only actionable under law, but socially unpalatable. Jewish and non-Jewish organisation’s fixation on producing educational resources about “antisemitism”, or organising trips to The Holocaust Museum for those found to be trading in antizionist bigotry, is evidence of a gross miscalculation.
Antisemites are deplored by most antizionists. The mission here must be to ensure that antizionism is as well understood as antisemitism—as opposed to expecting that by understanding antisemitism, a bigot will now have an understanding of antizionism. Conflating antisemites with antizionists serves only to entrench antizionist bigotry. We’re dealing with permission structures: the permissibility of antisemitism has been revoked for decades.
The permissibility of antizionism remains, and will continue to remain if we don’t deal with it as a specific pathway for harming Jews. It is the pathway, not the result, that separates antisemitism and antizionism. We cannot undo results. But we can block roads. Both must be blocked, which today means that our attention should specifically be tailored to dealing with antizionism as its own specific pathway.
Antizionism is not criticism of the Jewish state. It is a bigoted fixation on the Jewish State’s inherent barbarism and illegitimacy. The virality of antizionist libels—especially when voiced by Asajews—is ultimately enabled by an antisemitic reduction of The Jew to his blood quantum, as opposed to his cultural experience. Yet the asajew’s pathway for causing harm does not require classically antisemitic tropes, relying entirely on a distinct formation of anti-Jewish bigotry masquerading as social science.
Historical Precedent: Be A Good Dhimmi.
Every form of anti-Jewish vilification produces internal validators: conversos, court Jews, Soviet “anti-Zionist Jews.” This is a structural feature of persecution.
Such systems divide Jews into good and bad. The good Jew agrees Jewish difference is the problem and is rewarded for disavowal.
Soviet antizionist Jews insulated the regime while Jewish culture and identity were suppressed. The logic was explicit: we cannot hate Jews—look at the Jews who agree with us. Plus, we absolutely hate antisemitism!
Asajews play the same role today. They provide moral cover while Jewish institutions are harassed and communities placed under suspicion.
The reward structure is clear: safety, status, and visibility are exchanged for distance from other Jews. Mainstream media steps over 100 Jews to hand pick a willing dhimmi.
Contemporary Consequences
The effect of asajews on the Jewish population is profound.
In media, they are platformed as the authentic Jewish voice against a parochial or “Zionist” mainstream. Laura Tingle’s February 7 ‘analysis’ of the Herzog visit positions the antizionist Jewish Council of Australia this way, as does most Australian media. The Jewish Council are incessantly platformed, in the last week appearing on ABC radio here and on JJJ Hack here. (I will upload my responses to these in further detail later in the week.)
In academia, asajews function as moral alibis, allowing hostile frameworks to present themselves as scholarship. In activist spaces, they reassure non-Jews that exclusion and intimidation target only “Zionists,” a category stretched to include synagogues, schools, and Jewish life itself.
Their presence changes what non-Jews feel permitted to say and do. Bigotry is reclassified as critique. Threats become resistance. Violence becomes blowback.
This is how eliminationist ideologies move from rhetoric to action.
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How to proceed
Asajews do not merely misrepresent Jews. They provide cover for an eliminatory ideology that has always relied on Jewish collaborators.
Fashion, social capital, and safety are purchased through a bending to the bigots’ knees.
But remember: betrayal does not require agency or ill intent. More often than not, the asajew is a pawn, a rube, or a well-meaning fool.
While they attract an extreme amount of hatred from the Jewish community, I would ask only a few things:
Jews: ignore them.
Non Jews: ask yourself whether your Jewish alibi is representative of anything more than their own pathology. Ask yourself whether, in any other circumstance, you’d hinge generalisations about an entire people using only the anecdotes of one or two.
Asajews: Ilan Pappé, Edward Said, and Peter Beinart are not your friends.
Antizionism depends on asajews to legitimise it. Given how few asajews there really are, our frustration should lie not with them, but with the non-Jewish world’s opportunism.
The asajew carefully distinguishes between antizionism and antisemitism in order to maintain the legitimacy of the former. Almost all other Jews have attempted to delegitimise antizionism by forcing it to resemble already-stigmatised paths to hurting Jews like antisemitism. The phrase, “antizionism is antisemitism” is not only technically untrue, but it has been a gift to the asajews.
What if the most strategically sound road forward was to accept the distinction between these two bigotries? Instead of attempting to conflate one with the other, we must make the point that they are both seperate pathways. Antisemitism and antizionism are both bolstered by the same underlying antipathy and lead to the same overt harms.
Much like water in its liquid form may cause a flood and mass-drowning, and water in its solid state may fall as hail and lead to blunt force trauma and death. We may as well say, “from now on we refer to all H20 as water. water kills. Mass hail-related casualties are water casualties. Organisations will now be mailing out snorkels to help deal with the water”.
Rain, steam, and hail are different physical arrangements of H20, just as antijudaism, antisemitism, and antizionism are different delivery systems for anti-Jewish bigotry. Dealing with hail requires a different approach to dealing with floods. The snorkels aren’t working.
But without establishing how antizionist libels and rhetoric differ, we allow not only the asajew, but the opportunists using them to continue to foster an environment of anti-Jewish vilification and violence.
The stigmatisation of antisemitism does not bleed into the stigmatisation of antizionism. It seems to instead position the antizionist as the yin to its yang. For asajews to be reckoned with, antizionism must be distinguished as both a different way to harness anti-Jewish bigotry, and bigotry that today results in more harm to Jews than the antisemitism of yesteryear.
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If you’re interested in learning more about combatting antizionism, I’d highly recommend reaching out to Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ) at maaz.aus@maazaction.org. Trainings are run regularly online. Here are some slides from an Australian MAAZ training.
Email maaz.aus@maazaction.org if you’re interested in attending a 60-90min online training on combating antizionism.
 | A guest post by
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In the Passover story, the Wicked Son isolates himself from the community. Like the Wicked Son, the Asajew distances themselves from the collective experience of the people they claim to represent, shaping Jewishness to serve external expectations while silencing genuine voices.
Things have never ended well for the asajews. Were any of them scholars of history, they may know this. Their poor parents