In the furore over Derek Hook's article ‘White Anxiety’ and Donald Moss's ‘On Having Whiteness’, an under-reported but important issue is how easily and strongly antisemitism surfaced. Derek Hook is not Jewish but was assumed to be so by some of his abusive critics on the grounds probably that no white person would make the kinds of statements he was alleged to make (themselves, of course, a distortion of his actual article). Moss is Jewish, which makes it easier for his critics to see him as an adversary; not so much a ‘race traitor’ as a Jew who has relinquished his provisional whiteness. In both cases, one issue amongst the many to do with ‘academic freedom’ is how and why the racialisation of hatred can occur so strongly, often as antisemitism, in the context of psychoanalytic explorations of racism and especially of whiteness.