ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the crisis of experience and identity underlying the convergence of queer and intersectional feminism with contemporary antisemitism and projective antizionism. Drawing on Critical Theory, it argues that the fervent identification of feminist and queer activists with movements that legitimise antisemitic and misogynistic violence cannot be explained solely by theoretical error or political misjudgement. Instead, it reflects a deeper erosion of the capacity for experience (Erfahrungsfähigkeit) and independent judgement in late-modern societies. Revisiting Horkheimer's and Adorno's analyses of antisemitism as an ideology detached from lived experience, the chapter conceptualises contemporary antizionism as a form of ‘antisemitism without antisemites and without Jews’, sustained by stereotypes, cultural codes, and schematic thinking rather than concrete encounters.
The chapter further links this loss of experience to damaged relations to body, identity, and nature, showing how queer rejections of fixed identity can, under conditions of alienation, be displaced into authoritarian collective identifications. Israel becomes a projection screen for unresolved ambivalences towards corporeality, identity, and universality, while Palestine is idealised as a site of redemptive belonging. The chapter concludes that the collapse of experience fosters nihilistic forms of politics in which moral passion replaces reflection, enabling the fusion of antisemitism, misogyny, and antifeminism under the guise of false liberation.
