The dark roots of ‘Jewish supremacy’

The use of Holocaust inversion by enemies of Israel has gone from being used only by pariahs to becoming chic.

Moshe Phillips | May 25, 2026

Dan Bilzerian. Screengrab via Youtube

Where did the epithet “Jewish supremacist” come from? Why would an organization that claims to “organize and mobilize pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans” use this slur at the same time unabashed Jew-haters are regularly employing it in their propaganda?

As the New York Post recently reported, a heated debate at Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop over a proposed boycott of Israeli goods spiraled after a member invoked “Jewish supremacism”—a remark that rightly outraged many Jewish members and ultimately prompted a public condemnation from the coop’s leadership.

Also recently, when a “Sesame Street” video celebrating Jewish American Heritage Month aired, antisemitic extremists like social-media personality Dan Bilzerian, who is running for the U.S. House of Representatives seat in Florida, tweeted: “No one wants any more of this Jewish supremacy nonsense.”

Where did this notion of Jewish supremacism come from?

In 2003, 29 years after he had become the Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, bigoted conspiracy theorist David Duke self-published a 350-page hate book titled Jewish Supremacy. Until recently, only notorious extremists like Duke and Nation of Islam demagogue Louis Farrakhan regularly used the epithets “Jewish supremacy” and “Jewish supremacists.”

Duke seems to have titled his book to function as a rhetorical reversal: It mirrors the familiar phrase “white supremacy” and redirects accusations outward. Duke had a long history of this tactic. The NAACP, the historic civil-rights organization that fights for racial equality, voting rights, and an end to discrimination against people of color, was founded in 1909 as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAAWP (National Association for the Advancement of White People) was an extremist group founded by Duke as a reactionary organization meant to mirror and oppose the NAACP.

Ever since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the use of Holocaust inversion by enemies of Israel has gone from being used only by pariahs to becoming chic. Holocaust inversion is a particularly disgusting form of Jew-hatred that falsely portrays Israel and Jews as Nazis; diminishes the historical nature of the Holocaust; and spreads the blood libel that Israel is committing genocide. Now, along with Holocaust inversion, we have adjacent, depraved and deliberate provocations of “Jewish supremacy” gaining such currency that the phrase is being used by both Jewish and non-Jewish haters of Israel.

Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV), an explicitly anti-Zionist protest group, used the taunt in its nakba message titled “ … ongoing catastrophe of Zionism,” which they issued on Yom Yerushalayim (“Jerusalem Day”), saying, “… we take it as our responsibility to confront Jewish supremacy … .”

Long before IJV started using the “Jewish supremacy” slur in Canada, J Street was using it in America at least as far back as February 2019.

This past March, J Street stated: “Yesterday, the Knesset passed a discriminatory law mandating death by hanging as the default sentence for Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis. National Security Minister and proud Jewish supremacist Itamar Ben?Gvir celebrated by wearing a noose pin on his lapel while popping a bottle of champagne in the Knesset.”

Earlier this year, IJV also criticized and used Passover as an opportunity to peddle its version of the “Jewish supremacy” conspiracy: “But as we gather around the seder table this year, we know that the story of freedom is far from complete. We see this same story used by Zionists and the Israeli state to justify Jewish supremacy and violent occupation of Palestinian lands.”

J Street also sent a Passover-themed email with the headline: “This Passover, those of us who care deeply about Israel must speak out against Jewish supremacy and grave injustice.”

In April 2021, Greg Epstein, the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University, who is also a member of J Street’s Rabbinic and Cantorial Cabinet, used the slur “Jewish supremacists” in a tweet.

A Jordan-based extremist academic named Joseph Massad, who has referred to the Palestinian Authority as the “Palestinian Collaborationist Authority,” has called Israel a “Jewish supremacist state.” The supermodel Bella Hadid, who has a history of antisemitic rants, has also called Israel that.

In the May 2023 issue of Foreign Affairs, a tirade appeared by three professors and longtime critics of Israel stating: “An apartheid-like Jewish supremacist colonialist state and occupier of Palestinian land with a radical extremist government.”

In 2021, a document by anti-Israel extremists at Harvard stated: “Zionism is unquestionably a racist, sectarian, exclusionary, Jewish-supremacist political ideology that has dispossessed, displaced and ethnically cleansed Indigenous Palestinians from their lands for over three generations.”

While it may be expected for extremist, campus-based haters of Israel to use the same slurs as David Duke, the idea that the Jewish community is giving J Street a free pass while it mimics a former head of the KKK on a regular basis is truly outrageous. J Street says it “organizes and mobilizes pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans,” but it really was created to lobby for a Palestinian state.

Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, called out J Street as a “cancer within the Jewish community” just hours before the start of the Shavuot holiday. J Street’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, responded with an email pleading: “We’re calling on you to help demonstrate the broad opposition to the ambassador’s remarks.”

Leiter is right about J Street, and their use of Duke’s antisemitic wording proves it.

Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel, AFSI, (www.AFSI.org), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.