On Boundaries and Prototypes
A Doctoral Candidate Engages Bilewicz, Cohen, and Feinberg (2026)
M. Clark · Doctoral Candidate, Industrial and Organizational Psychology
Bilewicz, Cohen, and Feinberg (2026) open the special issue Antisemitism and Psychology with a claim that deserves to be taken seriously before it is interrogated: that the study of antisemitism was not peripheral to the founding of social psychology but foundational to it. The authors trace authoritarianism research, conspiracy mentality, displacement of aggression, and social identity threat back to mid century efforts to explain anti Jewish hatred (Adorno et al., 1950; Lewin, 1941; Moscovici, 1987), and they document a measurable decline in disciplinary attention across the late twentieth century. That historical argument is well sourced and, to my reading, largely persuasive. What follows is offered in the spirit of scholarly engagement rather than dissent: three questions that the article itself raises through its own evidence, and that a psychologist in training is obligated to press.
All three concern boundaries and scope. The first asks why this prejudice possesses a dedicated conceptual apparatus, and whether that apparatus should extend to structurally similar cases. The second asks how the field distinguishes a political attitude from a prejudice when the two are empirically correlated. The third asks whether the field's reliance on the Holocaust as a prototypical genocide may reflexively reproduce the very mechanism the authors identify as a source of harm. None of these questions undermines the article's thesis. Each, I argue, follows from it.
Distinctiveness and the Scope of the Paradigm
Standing behind both of the preceding questions is a larger one that the article invites without fully addressing: why does this prejudice possess a dedicated conceptual vocabulary and a sustained research apparatus when structurally comparable hatreds do not? The term antisemitism was coined in 1879 to name hostility toward Jews specifically, and the discipline has since built around it a body of theory, the authoritarian personality, conspiracy mentality, secondary or memory defensive antisemitism, that has no precise equivalent for most other group hatreds. A skeptic might read this asymmetry as evidence that one group's grievance has been privileged over others. I want to argue the opposite, and then turn the argument back on the field.
The authors' central theoretical claim supplies the principled answer to the skeptic. Antisemitism, they contend, is not simply prejudice against a particular minority but a structurally distinctive form of prejudice, one that constructs its target as hidden, coordinated, and excessively powerful rather than as inferior or contemptible (Glick, 2002; Kofta & Sedek, 2005). This conspiratorial structure is what justifies a dedicated apparatus: the standard models of stereotyping, which assume that prejudice derogates the low status outgroup, do not predict a hatred organized around imputed dominance. If the claim of structural distinctiveness holds, then the dedicated vocabulary is earned by the phenomenon, not awarded to a constituency. The word has its own history because the prejudice has its own mechanics.
But the same logic obligates the field to ask where else that structure appears. The conspiratorial, envious template is not, in principle, unique to antisemitism. The article itself notes that other minorities perceived as high in competence and low in warmth, such as Armenian and Japanese populations, are vulnerable to the same scapegoating dynamic during periods of social strain (Cuddy et al., 2008; Glick & Fiske, 2001), yet these cases have received limited psychological attention. The honest reading of the asymmetry, then, is not that Jews have monopolized a concept but that the field has under developed the comparative study of envious, conspiracy laden prejudice as a general type. Antisemitism is the most fully theorized instance of that type because it is the most fully documented historically, not because it is the only instance. The contribution this special issue could most usefully prompt is the extension of its own framework outward, treating the antisemitism literature as a template for studying structurally similar prejudices rather than as a sealed specialty.
This reframing dissolves the appearance of ownership without minimizing the phenomenon. To say that antisemitism warrants its own apparatus because of its distinctive structure, and in the same breath to insist that the apparatus should generalize to comparable cases, is to take the authors' theory more seriously than a possessive reading would. It treats their model as science, which generalizes, rather than as advocacy, which does not.
The Discriminant Validity of Anti Israel Attitudes and Antisemitism
The article's treatment of anti Zionist expression is admirably careful, and that care is precisely what invites scrutiny. The authors report a consistent correlation between certain anti Israel attitudes and antisemitic prejudice (Cohen et al., 2009; Kaplan & Small, 2006), while in the same passage citing Kempf (2010), whose latent class analysis of German survey data found that most criticism of Israel is not motivated by antisemitism and that only a minor subset of anti Israel views may be so motivated. The authors hold both findings without resolving the tension between them, which is intellectually honest but methodologically unfinished.
The unresolved problem is one of discriminant validity. If a measured anti Israel attitude correlates with antisemitism in one population and dissociates from it in another, then the two constructs are not being cleanly separated at the level of measurement. The Harber et al. (2026) contribution to this issue offers one mechanism for the overlap, proposing that conspiratorial thinking about Israel mediates the relationship between anti Israel attitude and traditional prejudice. That is a substantive theoretical advance. But a mediation model presupposes that the predictor and the outcome are distinct constructs, and the field has not yet established that distinction with a validated instrument. The authors themselves concede the point obliquely when they note that the application of both the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition and the Jerusalem Declaration in psychological research remains limited (Della Pergola, 2024; Shanes, 2022).
This is the crux. The article synthesizes an empirical literature built atop definitions that the discipline has not operationalized into shared, validated measures. When the construct of interest is contested at the definitional level, a correlation between it and a neighboring attitude cannot tell us whether we have detected a single underlying disposition or two distinct ones that happen to co occur under conditions of conflict. The work of Crandall et al. (2002) on the normative expression of prejudice suggests a further complication: if anti Israel framing functions as a normatively permissible channel for prejudice in some contexts, then the same surface attitude may carry different psychological content across persons. The measurement question is therefore not pedantic. It determines whether the field can responsibly label an attitude prejudicial at all.
I do not raise this to suggest the correlation is spurious. The convergent evidence across Cohen et al. (2009), Bulska and Winiewski (2018), and Feinberg (2020) is difficult to dismiss. I raise it because the authors have assembled exactly the evidence that makes the discriminant question unavoidable, and the next generation of work in this area will be judged on whether it can specify, at the level of the instrument, where political criticism ends and prejudice begins.
Prototypicality as Mechanism and as Method
The article's account of competitive victimhood is, to my mind, its most theoretically generative passage, and it contains a tension worth naming. Drawing on Noor et al. (2012) and Mazur and Vollhardt (2016), the authors argue that the Holocaust functions as a prototypical genocide, and that this prototypicality is itself a mechanism of harm: groups seeking recognition of their own unacknowledged suffering come to view Jews as competitors in victimhood, which in turn fuels antisemitic prejudice. The claim is that the symbolic centrality of the Holocaust generates resentment in adjacent groups.
If that mechanism is real, it raises a reflexive question about the discipline's own practice. The field of prejudice research has, by its own account, treated the Holocaust as the reference case against which other genocides and other prejudices are measured. The Studies in Prejudice project (Adorno et al., 1950), the Milgram obedience paradigm (Milgram, 1963; cf. Dolinski & Grzyb, 2020), and Lewin's (1941) work on internalized stigma all take the Holocaust as their formative context, and the present article reaffirms that lineage. The question I cannot avoid is this: if treating the Holocaust as prototypical genocide is a mechanism that generates competitive resentment in the wider population, does the discipline's own reliance on that prototype risk participating in the dynamic it describes?
This is not an argument for displacing the Holocaust from its place in the historical record, nor a claim that scholarly attention is a zero sum resource. It is a question about reflexivity. Vollhardt's broader program on inclusive versus exclusive victim consciousness suggests that the framing of a prototypical case shapes whether other groups experience solidarity or competition (Mazur & Vollhardt, 2016). If so, then how psychologists frame the Holocaust, as a unique and incomparable event or as the most fully documented instance of a recurring human capacity, may have downstream consequences for the prejudice the field seeks to reduce. The authors gesture toward this when they note that other high status minorities perceived as powerful, such as Armenian and Japanese populations, have received limited attention. That observation cuts both ways. It can be read as a call to extend the antisemitism paradigm outward, or as evidence that the paradigm's prototypicality has crowded out comparative work.
My own view, tentatively held, is that the most defensible path is comparative rather than singular: to study antisemitism as a theoretically distinctive prejudice, as the authors compellingly argue it is, while resisting the framing that treats its prototypical case as sealed off from comparison. The article's own cross cultural evidence supports this. Keller and Shan (2026) found that in China, perceiving Jews as successful and powerful was associated with positive rather than envious attitudes, which suggests that the antisemitic syndrome the authors describe is not a human universal but a culturally conditioned configuration. A prejudice that varies this much by context is one that comparison illuminates rather than diminishes.
Conclusion
Bilewicz, Cohen, and Feinberg (2026) have made a genuine contribution in recovering antisemitism as a central object of psychological inquiry and in arguing for its theoretical distinctiveness. The three questions I have raised are not objections to that contribution but extensions of it. The first asks the field to treat its distinctive structural model as science that generalizes, extending it to comparable prejudices rather than confining it to a single case. The second asks the field to do the unglamorous work of construct validation before it labels an attitude prejudicial. The third asks the field to turn its reflexive instruments on its own framing practices. All three arise from the article's own citations, which is the surest sign that the authors have written something worth arguing with. A discipline that founded itself on the study of this hatred owes it that level of seriousness.
References
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This essay responds to an open access article. The original is available from the American Psychologist at the DOI listed above. A general audience companion to this piece appears on my Substack.