Riane Eisler is a cultural historian, attorney, and author of The Chalice and the Blade. Born in Vienna, she fled Nazi persecution with her family as a child. She now leads the Center for Partnership Systems, where her work examines how social institutions shape domination and cooperation, gender equality, human rights, and the prospects for a more caring society.

I wanted to speak with Eisler after writing about a controversy in wartime Ukraine involving Iryna Mudra, a former deputy head of the Office of President Volodymyr Zelensky, and Rabbi Yonatan Benyamin Markovitch, Kyiv’s chief rabbi and the city’s director of Chabad-Lubavitch. In that article, I tried to distinguish individual conduct from collective responsibility while tracing the antisemitic commentary that emerged around the dispute.

The subject was not abstract to me. I have spent much of the year in Kyiv, living through periods of heavy bombardment from spring into early fall. I have seen how war and martial law place a society under extraordinary strain. They do not create prejudice from nothing, but fear, exhaustion, and social dislocation can give old hatreds new opportunities. Naming antisemitism in such conditions is not a distraction from what Ukrainians are enduring. To my mind, it is part of defending the civic culture those pressures threaten to erode.

I drew in part on remarks by Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, whom two Jewish organizations elected chief rabbi of Ukraine in 2005, although the title remains disputed and has been claimed by more than one rabbi. I approached the controversy as an ongoing political and legal matter, not as a morality play with uncomplicated heroes and villains. My aim was to separate the actions of particular people and institutions from the broader Jewish community onto which blame is so often projected.

That distinction matters because conspiracy theories rarely remain confined to the facts of the event that supposedly inspired them. A researcher on antisemitism and prejudice emphasized to me that such narratives can draw on inherited traditions of blaming and shaming Jews even when they do not explicitly identify Jewish people as their targets. The history is familiar: false claims that Jews secretly control governments, finance, or world events have proved remarkably adaptable, resurfacing in different political vocabularies and national settings.

At the same time, I do not want to overstate the case. I would not claim, without evidence, that most conspiracy theories have antisemitic origins. The more difficult task is to recognize when familiar patterns of insinuation, collective suspicion, and coded accusation are at work without forcing every controversy into the same moral script. My work on Unadorned, a book to which Eisler contributed, deepened my interest in how prejudice is learned, rationalized, and passed between generations.

I asked Eisler to read the article and share her perspective on the reactions it prompted, the forms antisemitism takes today, and the methods she has seen used to confront it. Our conversation moves from childhood socialization, authoritarianism, and trauma to friendship, religious ethics, and institutional reform. It is informed, above all, by her experience as a Jewish child who escaped Vienna with her parents and survived a regime that made Jews the central target of its racial ideology and genocidal policy.

Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945, but antisemitism survived the collapse of the state that carried it to its most murderous conclusion. I wanted to know what Eisler’s life and scholarship might teach us about recognizing collective blame before it hardens into accepted wisdom—and about resisting it in societies already living under profound stress.

Riane Eisler: First of all, I think that the article was very good. Its distinction between the actions of an individual, in this case Rabbi Markovitch, and generalizations about a whole group of people, namely Jews, was important. You may or may not agree with the rabbi’s decision.

To act as a surety for an individual. However, that is an individual action. He acted in an individual capacity, rather than on behalf of Jews collectively. Criticism becomes antisemitic when an individual’s conduct is used to blame or shame Jews as a group. You make that distinction between agreeing or disagreeing with one person’s actions and generalizing those actions to all Jews.

Criticizing a Jewish person is not inherently antisemitic, although such criticism can become antisemitic through collective blame, stereotypes, or other anti-Jewish claims. I think it was a very good article. However, the problem of antisemitism remains. As I said to you earlier, Jews have frequently been treated as a prototypical out-group. Women have also been subordinated and blamed for human suffering, including through interpretations of the stories of Eve and Pandora. Authoritarian religious authorities have used interpretations of biblical and Qur’anic passages to justify hostility toward Jews.

That serves as a historical means of deflecting fear and anger about one’s circumstances onto an out-group. Jews have repeatedly been cast in that role, while women have been subjected to related patterns of blame and subordination.

Jacobsen: On that last point about gender, do Jewish women experience this phenomenon differently from men?

Eisler: I cannot speak for all Jewish women. I really do not know. Individual Jewish women are concerned about antisemitism, but so are individual Jewish men. This is not a question of women against men or men against women. My point concerns maintaining what I call a domination system, in which fear of those at the top, whether in the family or the workplace, can be redirected against an out-group.

You may be afraid that your parents will punish you physically or emotionally, while also being told that an out-group deserves punishment. Those messages can become entangled in early childhood, particularly in domination-oriented families where physical or emotional punishment is used to train people to obey orders from those who are bigger, stronger, or more powerful. These patterns can become deeply embedded, and that is the problem.

How do you deal with something embedded not only in the individual psyche but also in the cultural inheritance from more rigidly domination-oriented times, meaning more violent, authoritarian times? That is very difficult to address. People need to be willing and open. Unfortunately, some people who hold strong prejudices against women or Jews have also experienced trauma, although trauma does not necessarily lead to prejudice.

Jacobsen: I ended the article by asking readers to apply its argument more universally. Beyond simply condemning antisemitism, I wanted them to consider what happens when the category “Jew” is replaced by another group: women, Black people, Native Americans, Ukrainians, Russians, or Kazakhs.

Across different countries, political systems, and historical circumstances, prejudice often follows a recognizable pattern. The argument against collective blame should therefore hold in principle, even when the histories and power relationships differ. What gives this case particular force for me is that I am living in Ukraine and addressing an ongoing controversy in a country defending itself during wartime. That context adds layers of fear, trauma, identity, and national survival.

To what extent can the argument against collective blame be applied to prejudice directed at other groups, and where must we remain attentive to the historical differences?

Eisler: Yes, of course. It can be, and it is. In the United States, you have anti-immigrant sentiment, antisemitism, and anti-Muslim sentiment. These can involve an in-group defining itself against an out-group. I see that as a habit of domination that helps maintain the system of domination. It can distract people from the sources of their difficulties. Helping people recognize that distraction may be one way to combat racism, antisemitism, and misogyny. However, that is a rational argument, while these prejudices can have strong emotional foundations and can be learned early in life.

Jacobsen: These prejudices are not rational. Some of the commentary I encountered invoked a supposed “Jewish mafia” controlling the country or society. It portrayed Chabad-Lubavitch as a supranational, “parasitic” criminal syndicate operating under the guise of religion and directed by a global ethnic minority. These are familiar antisemitic conspiracy claims.

Such rhetoric often adopts the language of personal victimhood, casting an entire out-group as an omnipresent source of harm. The group becomes a proxy for everything a person believes is wrong with society. In this case, the targets are Chabad-Lubavitch, Orthodox Jews, or Jews more broadly, regardless of their political views or religious affiliations.

The imagined chain of influence eventually reaches the individual: “As a Ukrainian or Russian living in Ukraine, I am being victimized by a deliberately organized system that targets me personally.” That seems to connect with your point about the role of emotion. Stagnation, humiliation, and genuine hurt can all feed a sense of victimhood, even when there is no evidence that the group being blamed has caused the suffering.

This is different from the clergy-perpetrated abuse I have investigated, including in an earlier piece on Orthodox Christian communities. Those cases involve identifiable victims of sexual abuse and assault. The people harmed did not deserve what happened to them. Some call themselves survivors and others thrivers, although recovery does not depend on accepting any particular label.

In the conspiracy narratives we are discussing, the distress may be real, but the explanation invents a collective persecutor and assigns blame to people who bear no responsibility. That emotional investment can make the belief exceptionally difficult to uproot. At the individual level, getting to know Jewish people may help challenge such prejudices. But what, in your view, can work at the societal level when these beliefs are so deeply embedded?

Eisler: Knowing Jewish people can be very important. Friendship is one way to counter antisemitism. The difficulty is that prejudice can be embedded in culture, religious interpretations, and childhood assumptions, sometimes without conscious awareness.

However, friendship offers a possible approach: reaching out within one’s community, town, or city and treating people with kindness, including people who hold antisemitic views. That can sometimes be successful. There was the case of Larry Trapp, a Ku Klux Klan leader who had severe disabilities resulting from diabetes.

Michael Weisser, then a cantor, and his wife, Julie, befriended him, offered practical assistance, and eventually cared for him. Trapp renounced the Klan and converted to Judaism in 1992. It is an unusual example, but we can learn something from that friendship and helpfulness.

If you are speaking with a Christian, you might appeal to Jesus’ teaching to treat others as you would want them to treat you, expressed in Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31. A related, earlier teaching appears in Leviticus 19:18: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Ultimately, however, I believe the system itself must change.

That means changing institutions, including education, religion, and families. Movements toward change exist in all three, but so do movements toward more rigid systems of domination.

Antisemitism, racism, and misogyny can all involve patterns of exclusion, collective blame, and hierarchy. In my view, they can also redirect hurt, pain, and trauma toward others, though those are not their only sources.

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Riane.