Postsecular Antisemitism: Adorno, Habermas, and the Frames of Exclusion

This article introduces the concept of postsecular antisemitism to name a condition in which prevailing frameworks struggle to register antisemitic harm that operates through the entanglement of religious and secular grammars. It argues that the assumption of normative separability between religious and secular domains, inherited from the secularization thesis and only partially challenged by the postsecular turn, continues to pre-structure what becomes legible within social theory. To develop this argument, the article stages a comparison between early and late Critical Theory. Whereas Horkheimer and Adorno refused to separate religious and secular elements into discrete explanatory domains, Habermas's influential postsecular approach assumes their normative separability even as the secularization prediction is abandoned. Drawing on recent cases of digital antisemitism, which make religious–secular entanglement visible, the article shows the limits of Habermas's procedural model and extends it through a constellational reconstruction of Adorno's approach. The analysis demonstrates how antisemitic harm can be displaced from critical scrutiny through its assignment across the religious–secular divide, clarifying how classificatory distinctions organize a gap between harm and the frameworks meant to register it. In doing so, it opens onto a broader reorientation of social theory beyond inherited assumptions of religious–secular separability.