Faith & Spirit Quote by Jack Schwartz

There’s a cold clarity to Schwartz’s claim: hatred doesn’t disappear when society “progresses”; it upgrades. By framing anti-Semitism as something that can switch operating systems, he rejects the comforting story that secular modernity automatically civilizes prejudice. The line hinges on a historical pivot - “as faith gave way to materialism” - where older religious indictments (theological blame, ritual paranoia) don’t die so much as get reissued in modern, supposedly rational forms.

The intent is diagnostic, almost clinical. Schwartz isn’t moralizing; he’s mapping how a conspiracy theory survives by attaching itself to whatever worldview is currently ascendant. “Harnessing” is doing heavy work: it suggests opportunism, an ideology as a vehicle, not a cause. That verb also implies usefulness - anti-Semitism becomes a tool to explain complexity, to personify abstract systems like capital, media, cosmopolitanism, revolution, or “globalism,” depending on the political weather.

The subtext is a warning to people who treat anti-Semitism as a problem of “the other side.” Schwartz points out the symmetry: the Right can recast Jews as corrosive outsiders undermining nation and tradition; the Left can slide into narratives where Jews symbolize finance, bourgeois power, or hidden coordination. In both cases, the structure is the same: social anxiety seeks a face.

Contextually, this reads like a post-Enlightenment account of scapegoating in mass politics - a reminder that modern ideologies, even when draped in emancipation or order, can absorb very old animus and call it analysis. The sting is that secular language can make prejudice sound like critique.