He was a quietly wonderful man with a quick sense of humor, and when he laughed, he would cover his mouth — a gentle, self-conscious habit to hide his teeth. He loved the opera. Born in Philadelphia in 1892, he was the son of a German-Jewish immigrant. Growing up, I had never really considered his heritage; to me, he was simply my grandfather. If his goal was to assimilate truly into a changing American century, he succeeded, and his Jewish identity seemingly became secondary.
In 1918, my grandfather changed his surname from Sinsheimer to Spencer. In late 1918, even as World War I was drawing to a close, the domestic hysteria remained at a fever pitch. Driven by the Espionage and Sedition Acts, being of German descent was dangerous enough; being a German-Jew compounded the vulnerability. Yet, Philadelphia had a large, established Jewish population, and none of his brothers or sisters felt the need to alter their names. For my grandfather alone, the pressure was felt differently. It was perhaps a choice born of angst — or at least, a calculated bid for smoother sailing in a fracturing world. He married a Protestant, they raised my mother in her faith, and she later married a Catholic. By the time I was born, my parents had decided to bypass religious education entirely. Today, I have no religious or cultural affiliation.
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Years ago, my DNA results arrived, mapping my heritage in cold percentages: my top two matches are Scotch-Irish at 25% and Ashkenazi Jewish at 20%. It is an old revelation, but it carries a chilling historical echo. Under the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, this biological data would not just be an interesting dinner conversation; it would be a legal verdict. Technically speaking, the Third Reich would have classified me as a Mischling of the second degree — defined precisely by having one Jewish grandparent.
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The absolute absurdity of this arbitrary standard is that it treats heritage as a crime of blood, entirely independent of lived experience. I have no religious or cultural connection to Judaism, yet to a bureaucratic apparatus driven by ideology, my actual life, choices, and convictions would mean nothing. The metric is everything.
Imagine if the Nazi regime had possessed the technology of modern DNA sequencing. The bureaucrat would no longer have needed family trees, baptismal records, or marriage certificates. Forgery as a means of escape would have been eliminated. A simple saliva sample could have become another instrument of classification. The same prejudice would have existed; only the efficiency would have been industrialized.
As a Mischling of the second degree, my life would have been dictated by these perfected, arbitrary legal thresholds. I would not have faced the immediate horrors of the death camps, but I would have been systematically choked out of civil society. The Third Reich would have placed strict limitations on my military service, barred me from civil service careers, restricted my marriage opportunities, and capped my social advancement. I would have even been denied Nazi party membership — not that I ever would have wanted it, but the institutional door would be slammed shut regardless.
In the eyes of the regime, my grandfather was not a man who loved the opera; he was a bureaucratic contaminant. My lack of faith would have offered no shield. My status would be determined bureaucratically rather than spiritually. The impurity of my blood heritage would have mattered more than my convictions.
This reveals the ultimate, enduring truth about discrimination: antisemitism is never actually about what Jewish people believe or do — it is entirely about what the antisemite needs to believe about them. It is as Jean-Paul Sartre famously observed: “If the Jew didn’t exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.”
Yet, historical bureaucracy is one thing; the labels assigned to us by current culture are another. I see this playing out in real time today. As someone with libertarian and generally conservative leanings, I spend a considerable amount of time reading political commentary from across the spectrum. What strikes me is not how different the extremes are, but how structurally identical they remain.
In many extremist right-wing spaces, the response to a chaotic, globalized world is a retreat into a century-old psychology. The vile conspiracy theories flooding comment sections — painting Jews as hidden puppet masters manipulating finance, media, and politics — are merely a modern repackaging of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The vocabulary changes, deceptively swapping ancient tropes for contemporary buzzwords such as “globalist,” but the structural myth remains identical: the extremist requires a singular, malevolent architect to make sense of their own economic or cultural anxieties.
Yet when I turn to the fringes of the political Left, particularly in discussions surrounding Israel and Gaza, I encounter a different expression of the exact same impulse. While recognizing that rigorous, legitimate geopolitical critique of any sovereign nation’s policies is entirely valid, my focus is strictly on the precise moment where political debate gives way to what social theorists call the “anti-imperialism of fools.” By looking at the world purely through the lens of who has power and who doesn’t, the left-wing ideologue completely ignores the long, painful history of Jewish persecution. Millions of distinct individuals are reduced to a singular, bloodless symbol of colonialism and systemic power.
This ideological distortion is anchored in a bitter modern paradox: today, Israel stands as a more formidable force for the Jewish people than ever before in history. Yet, that very strength serves to feed the machinery of both extremes. For the Right, a powerful state is twisted into “proof” of an international puppet master; for the Left, it is “proof” of the ultimate colonial oppressor.
The accusations differ. The mechanism does not.
In both cases, Jews cease to be human beings and become abstractions. They become explanations for complex problems, vessels for political frustration, and convenient repositories for anxieties that have little to do with the actual lives of Jewish people. The antisemite of the Right and the antisemite of the Left may despise each other, but both require the same thing: a Jew onto whom they can project upon.
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The results mirror a similar Left-Right dichotomy that my grandfather was exposed to in 1918 and beyond, when the revolutions in Europe would heighten the fears of both sides regarding communism. Whether it is the Nazi bureaucrat measuring the lineage of a Mischling of the second degree, the modern right-wing conspiracy theorist, or the left-wing ideologue, the mechanism is identical: they do not see the human being covering his mouth when he laughs. They see a projection.
A century ago, my grandfather changed his name to escape the trap of what others needed him to be. Yet today, the world is still trying to write its worst anxieties onto his descendants — blind, as it always has been, to the quiet man who just loved the opera.
Andrew Moore is a small-business owner and author of the Primus Aeternus series.
