(1) Encouraging people not to be antisemitic means absolutely nothing if those people don’t understand what antisemitism looks like to begin with.
Ask almost anyone in the world directly, and they’d probably agree that baseless bigotry and hatred is bad. The problem? The nature of antisemitism is that it makes the antisemite believe -- truly, genuinely believe -- that their feelings towards Jews (or any given euphemism) are not “baseless,” but rather, warranted because of the Jews’ alleged behavior. The vast majority of antisemites do not think they’re antisemitic.
To combat antisemitism, we must teach people what antisemitism actually looks like: tropes, conspiracies, stereotypes, and how these tropes, conspiracies, and stereotypes mutate and evolve.
(2) Antisemitism is tricky to fight because fighting it often results in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When an antisemite faces appropriate consequences for their hateful behavior -- whether it’s arrest for a hate crime or losing their job for their bigoted rhetoric -- they will interpret such consequences as “proof” of a Jewish conspiracy to silence them. For example, if an actor loses a work opportunity for going on a hateful rant against Jews, antisemites will think that this is definitive proof that the Jews do run Hollywood, after all. It’s an impossible, exhausting conundrum.
But the fact that we’re up against antisemitism’s very nature doesn’t mean that we should make antisemites’ jobs easier for them. We know that antisemites believe Jews throw money around to gaslight, silence, and manipulate. We have to think about the optics of such multi-million dollar campaigns.
(3) We have to think ahead, especially when it comes to social media.
Antisemitism today is spreading faster than it ever has before because of social media. Whereas in the past it would take decades or centuries for one antisemitic conspiracy to reach one end of the world to another, today, it happens in a matter of seconds, at the click of a button. Often, this antisemitism propagates in comment sections.
Anti-antisemitism campaigns shouldn’t be an opportunity for people to be introduced to new antisemitic conspiracies, and yet, that’s oftentimes what happens. After Mike Tyson posted the blue square campaign by the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, his comment section turned into an absolute cesspool. Some gems: “free Palestine” (of course), “Google who runs the porn industry,” “How much did (((they))) pay you to post this?” (for once, they wouldn’t be wrong).
People previously “neutral” on the issue of Jews will read the comments and be inadvertently introduced to the online of antisemitic conspiracies. And once you’re down that rabbit hole, chances are you’ll be stuck in that echo chamber for good.
(4) You cannot adequately understand antisemitism if you don’t understand who the Jewish people are...and have at least a basic grasp on our history.
Antisemitism isn’t just outright hatred, or even conspiracies, tropes, and stereotypes, but rather, oftentimes it also manifests as a negation of our very identity (e.g. the “Khazar Theory” conspiracy theory) or an outright revision of our extensively recorded history (e.g. pretty much all of the discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that relies on plain historical revisionism). How can anyone recognize those things as antisemitism if they don’t know the alternative?
Antisemitism is, specifically, bigotry aimed at Jews. To fight this bigotry, people must be able to recognize it, but they can’t possibly recognize it if they can’t recognize who Jews are -- and what we have been through -- in the first place.
(5) Universalizing antisemitism is counterproductive. In fact, it’s harmful.
For some reason (internalized antisemitism, perhaps?), Jews have been conditioned to believe that in order to get others to care about antisemitism, we must universalize our experience, get others to see us as “just like them.” But the truth is that people should care about antisemitism not necessarily because they can personally relate, but because Jews are human beings worthy of life. As Dara Horn argues in her book, People Love Dead Jews, much of Holocaust education has pushed the notion that “Jews were just like everybody else.” But what if we weren’t just like everybody else? Would that have justified our genocide?
We know, historically, that the universalizing of antisemitism hasn’t worked. Take the “11 million victims of the Holocaust” figure, for example. It’s an entirely fake figure invented by Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal, who thought that by de-emphasizing the anti-Jewish nature of the Nazi genocide, he could get the world to care more. Instead what happened is that the world has systematically stripped us of our experience of the Holocaust and turned our genocide into public property. This tactic has in fact opened the door to the pervasive form of Holocaust denial known as Holocaust inversion.
(6) We need to actually listen to the conversations the antisemites are having.
This is particularly important for two reasons: (1) antisemitism moves fast. Conspiracies adapt quickly to conform to their environments. We have to keep up. (2) oftentimes, I’ve noticed that when we fight antisemitism, we are “responding” to points antisemites make that...are not actually the points that they are making. We are missing each other in the conversation. If we’re going to address antisemitic conspiracies, stereotypes, and tropes, we need to address them head on, not respond to something else.
Antisemitism moves through misinformation and disinformation. You fight misinformation and disinformation with information. But such information has to directly address the misinformation/disinformation. Otherwise, it’s pointless.
(7) Partisanship is counterproductive. Worse -- it’s dangerous.
Antisemitism has always existed across the political spectrum. We really, really have to understand that at the end of the day, there’s no such thing as “left-wing antisemitism” and “right-wing antisemitism,” because not only do they recycle the same tropes, stereotypes, and conspiracies, but they feed off each other. When left-wing antisemitism rises, right-wing antisemitism rises too, and vice versa. Fighting one “kind” of antisemitism is like playing a useless game of Whack-A-Mole. It’ll get us nowhere. We have to tackle it at the root: antisemitism functions, in its basic essence, as a conspiracy about how the world works. It doesn’t matter if the conspiratorial person in question is ideologically left-wing or right-wing.
Of course, it’s natural that all of us have political biases, and we might be more inclined to “see” antisemitism on one side or the other. But we have to put our political blinders aside if our primary goal is actually protecting Jews. Otherwise, we are just handing antisemites the opportunity to weaponize our pain for their own game of political football.
(8) We are fighting against the current. In other words, we are coming at this from a disadvantage. We have to acknowledge this, accept it, and think of creative solutions to work around it.
Why are we at a disadvantage? For one thing, we are 0.2% of the world population. There are exponentially more antisemites than there are Jews in the whole world. Because antisemitism is embedded into the fabric of many societies -- present in their languages, religions, and institutions -- most of us (Jews included!) have to contend with at least some forms of subconscious antisemitic bias (an example of subconscious antisemitic bias? Thinking that to get people to care about us, we must universalize our experience of antisemitism).
And then, of course, there’s what I mentioned earlier: antisemitism works as a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Jews create campaigns to fight antisemitism, then the antisemite sees it as proof that Jews use our power and influence to manipulate the masses into thinking we’re the victims.
(9) There will never be a quick fix to antisemitism. There is no one campaign or organization or commercial or influencer that will fix things. It took 2000 years to get to where we are; it will take a whole lot of time to undo this, and in all likelihood, we will never dismantle antisemitism completely. But as Pirkei Avot 2:16 tells us, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”
On a personal level, I can tell you that, more than once, I’ve had followers who have argued with me, insulted me, and/or blocked me, and they came back months or years later and told me that something I had said had changed their minds. I always appreciate these messages more than these people know, because it proves my theory that learning takes more than a single infographic or reel -- it takes time. Untangling our antisemitic biases is a long process. It’s like peeling the layers of an onion. Instead of investing on quick fixes, we need to invest in long-term strategies.
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