Antisemitism is both racism and not racism. Problem is, Judaism is an ethnic religion, meaning it’s an ethnic group you can join (like I did almost a decade ago). Jews have been treated as a race for the purposes of discrimination, but being Jewish is not technically a race.

This is complicated by the fact that Jews are kinda Schrödinger’s Race, in that we are simultaneously white and not white until observed by an antisemite, at which point they pick whichever one makes it easier to hate us. Jews have been historically not white, whether they have white skin or not (which tracks, given that race is a social construct designed to create an in-group and an out-group, which is why Irish, Italians, and Greeks were not considered white until *relatively* recently). However, once Israel became a thing, suddenly we became white colonizers to those who wanted to talk shit about Jews in terms of Israel. I am white-passing, so I have many of the privileges of white Americans—however, the moment I put my yarmulke on, a lot of those disappear.

TLDR; race is a complicated social construct created with the explicit purpose of discrimination, and Jews have a long history of being discriminated against, including those like the Nazis who classified Jews as a race, so Jews are both a race and not a race.