While Israel launches continued assaults upon Palestinians, the internet war on the issue of Israel has, as always, brought quiet currents of antisemitism to the fore of our country’s collective consciousness. As a Jew, I sometimes fear these arguments for what they uncover.
While public opinion pieces and talking heads have called attention to antisemitic criticisms of Israel, I find the frequent delegitimization of antisemitism among Zionists to be far more alarming. To be more specific, recent Zionist discourse has cheapened and profaned the popular understanding of antisemitism, reducing the historical suffering of Jews to tasteless rhetoric in defense of the state of Israel.
An exceptionally ridiculous, but highly publicized incident involving Zionist journalist Eve Barlow inaugurated the most recent iteration of this discourse. Barlow recently published an article in Tablet magazine addressing an issue of supreme importance to Diaspora Jews concerned for their safety: anti-Zionists on Twitter have been referring to her as “Eve Fartlow.” Barlow entitles her article “The Social Media Pogrom.”
For readers unfamiliar with Ashkenazi Jewish history, pogroms are race riots targeting Jews which were common in 19th and 20th century Eastern Europe. The term is now used to categorize antisemitic or racist mob violence in general. Russian Jewish poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik immortalized the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, in which Russian Christians raped and murdered numerous Jews, with the poem “In the City of Slaughter”: “A tale unfold horrific to the ear of man: a tale of cloven belly, feather-filled; of nostrils nailed, of skull-bones bashed and spilled; of murdered men who from the beams were hung, and of a babe beside its mother flung.”
To compare fart jokes on the internet to the rape and murder of Jews is a depraved and insensitive act, especially as Israeli mobs attack Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah in an act all too reminiscent of a pogrom itself. It is all the more insensitive considering Barlow admits that her ancestors, like mine and many others, fled Russia to avoid the pogroms.
Insensitivity aside, categorizing what is best defined as cyber-bullying as a pogrom or other type of antisemitic violence invalidates the very real work American Jews do to combat antisemitism. Antisemitism is real and it is omnipresent. It results in dead Jews, gunned down in synagogues or stabbed on the street. It is a central ideology of white nationalism, and is disseminated widely by organizations like Fox News, in addition to QAnon and other near-mainstream groups.
Barlow does not address these issues, rather she attacks activists and organizers of color: “When I swiftly blocked [Linda Sarsour] for my own protection, she posted a picture of her block by me and tweeted that she was ‘honored.’ Her intentions here are obvious: She was sending a bat signal out to go beat this Jew; permission for an online lynching,” she wrote.
Once more, this is distasteful, considering America’s very real and ongoing history of lynching Black Americans – and the few notable incidents in which Christian Americans lynched Jews. However, the comparison is also completely inane. A reader would almost be forgiven for finishing Barlow’s article and coming to the conclusion that antisemitism is nothing more than a shadow of online harassment (at best), merely the phantom of the whiny bourgeoisie. Barlow and her supporters have reduced antisemitism to an insubstantial bit of rhetoric.
Barlow continues: “Lo and behold, it turns out that vehement online anti-Zionism inspires people to engage in antisemitic violence offline, endangering Jews as a result.”
I have been attacked for being a Jew, and like most American Jews, I have witnessed antisemitic violence on the news. It does not begin with fart jokes. It begins with the belief that Jews are a physiologically distinct and sometimes inhuman race allied with immigrants, Black people, and Muslims in a war to undermine and destroy white, Western, Christian civilization. In the case of the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, antisemitic violence begins when mainstream news agencies speculate on whether Jews are to blame for illegal immigration. Nowhere in the Jerusalem Declaration, or any other landmark definition of antisemitism, does anti-Jewish hatred include fart jokes or getting blocked on Twitter.
I am not suggesting that the internet does not enable and contribute to real-life antisemitism. White supremacists use symbols, lists and browser extensions to identify Jews and particularly Jewish journalists online. They use messaging boards and social media sites– both mainstream and lesser-known– to coordinate campaigns that harass and dox Jews. White nationalists use the same forums and sites to encourage, coordinate, announce and livestream antisemitic terrorist attacks. And, as Barlow argues, antisemitism is indeed prevalent on Twitter– though in the form of death threats and Holocaust nostalgia aimed at Jews, rather than fart jokes aimed at Zionists. The unifying factor in the vast majority of online antisemitism is the ideology of white supremacy, which– in its inextricable relationship with systems of power in the Western world– poses a very real threat to the Jewish community. In all the documentation on how antisemitism germinates online and explodes into physical violence, there is no argument for a connection between anti-Zionist tweets and real-life lynchings.
The “danger” facing Zionist victims of cyber-bullying is apparent in the reception to Barlow’s article; she has cried wolf to a wide and receptive audience. Her delegitimization of antisemitism was amplified in subsequent publications and broadcasts, such as The Focus, YNET, The Spectator, and Fox News. Dominic Green’s Spectator article on the issue, “Seth Rogen’s Jewish Problem,” stems from the titular actor’s tweet of a fart emoji in response to Barlow’s article. It is worth mentioning that “the Jewish problem” distastefully references 19th and 20th century nationalists’ debates on whether Jews could fit into Western society, a debate which – in Germany– ended in the Final Solution.
Green begins by invoking antisemitic tropes, describing Rogen as a “dirtbag… saddest of American male specimens, the pot-smoking, pot-bellied, moob-stricken man-child… soy-soaked… [and] pear-shaped.” From there, he manages to delegitimize antisemitism through careless analogy.
In response to the term “Eve Fartlow,” Green writes: “It’s not much of a pun; perhaps it originates in a subliminal association about Jews and the release of gas.”
There we have it. Green suggests an internet fart joke is actually an allusion to Zyklon-B, the gas Nazis used to exterminate Jews in the Holocaust. The leaps and bounds these Zionist Jews take would be astounding if they did not dishonor the suffering of our ancestors and undermine our contemporary efforts to defeat antisemitism. (Green is not alone in cheapening the Holocaust; the state of Israel does it quite regularly, whether by comparing European recognition of Palestine to the Holocaust, or by publicly approving Polish Holocaust denial).
Green continues, comparing Rogen and other anti-Zionist Jews to Nazi-appeasing Neville Chamberlain, and accused them of attempting to get on the good side of the “anti-Jewish left.”
Appeasement is a touchy issue among the Jewish community. We have a certain word for appeasers: kapo, referring to those Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in return for preferential treatment.
It is dishonest and hypocritical for Zionists to accuse anti-Zionists of betraying the Jews. After all, America’s most Zionist president Donald Trump has a long history of antisemitism, frequently trading in tropes of Jewish greed and disloyalty, such as when he referred to Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister” to a crowd of American Zionist Jews, who cheered him on. Further, the Canary Mission’s blacklist of pro-Palestinian students and their personal information has left many young Jews vulnerable to harassment and threats. In fact, the state of Israel regularly cozies up with Holocaust deniers and prominent antisemites such as Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Hungarian President Viktor Orban. Considering the latter propagates messages that Hungarian Jewish billionaire George Soros leads a global plot to destabilize the West, thereby threatening Diaspora Jews with antisemitic conspiracy theories, Israel’s alliance with Orban feels very much like a betrayal.
There is antisemitism on the anti-Zionist left, most commonly in the regurgitation of antisemitic tropes, and in the conflation of Jewish identity with Zionism. Non-Jewish leftists could certainly do more to combat antisemitism within their ranks. It is the unfortunate task of leftist Jews such as myself to call out and correct the antisemitic behavior that threatens our community and our justice movements. However, it is disingenuous to draw a false equivalency between antisemitism on the left and right. The antisemitism (or delegitimization of antisemitism) on the Zionist right is married to power and presented to large audiences and cheering crowds.
To understand who is and who is not being a kapo, I suggest looking at power dynamics and the price of allegiance.
To be an anti-Zionist risks censure from major universities and publications, published articles and blacklists calling you a kapo, even arrest and deportation. You find yourself allied with young Muslim, Black, and queer students, refugees, immigrants and other marginalized peoples.
To be a Zionist risks fart jokes on the internet. You find yourself allied with politicians, well-endowed PACs, mega-churches, (antisemitic) organizations such as Christians United for Israel, and the United States and Israel and their security apparatuses. International news corporations amplify your ideas on prime time.
At the end of the day, Zionist journalists like Barlow and Green can sit comfortably. They are on the side of the system and the nation. If I protest antisemitism in the streets, I can die. The police can assault me, just as they have killed and maimed Jewish protesters in the past. This risk exists, in part, because Zionists have delegitimized antisemitism to the extent that non-Jews may not care anymore. I fear that, like the boy who cried wolf, the misuse of the term antisemitism will numb our allies and potentially our own community to the next outbreak of antisemitic violence. How can we Jews name and fight the very real dangers we face, when Zionist reactivity profanes our understanding of antisemitism?
I will give credit where it is due; the articles above refer to data in their claims that anti-Zionism provokes antisemitism. They allude to a rise in antisemitic incidents ever since Israel began forcing Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah in May. However, their source, the Anti-Defamation League report, is fundamentally flawed. Prominent scholars and Jewish organizations have criticized the ADL for misappropriating Jewish experiences in order to “immunize Israel against criticism,” at the expense of efforts to fight antisemitism. Jewish Currents’ Mari Cohen cautions against accepting the ADL’s recent data at face value, pointing to numerous flaws in their report, which – if anything – is a better measure of media attention rather than antisemitic incidents. The ADL antisemitism tracker includes many questionable incidents from the past month. Here are a just a few examples:
“At an anti-Israel protest, in Birmingham, a demonstrator held a sign that read: ‘Zionism = Racism,’” “At an anti-Israel protest in Norfolk, a demonstrator held a sign that read: ‘Zionism is racism,’” “At an anti-Israel protest, a demonstrator held a sign demonizing Zionists that read, in part, ‘being pro-Zionist makes you pro-genocide & pro-apartheid.’”
Equating Zionism (an ideology which – in its contemporary form – displaces Arabs) to racism is not inherently antisemitic, nor is it antisemitic to compare Israeli policy with apartheid. Elsewhere, the ADL records very real incidents of antisemitism, such as threats of terrorist action against synagogues or accusations of blood libel. Unfortunately, the prevalence of these incidents fits a trend of rising antisemitism, beginning in 2015 and coinciding with the growth of white nationalist movements. It does not accurately represent a correlation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
By inflating these statistics with commonplace anti-Zionist slogans, the ADL and those who cite their statistics disarm the fight against antisemitism. Suddenly, the enemy is not the white nationalists who shoot up synagogues or march with tiki torches in defense of the white race, nor is it the January 6th capital rioters wearing sweatshirts mocking the Holocaust. Rather, Zionists would have us believe that the enemy are broke, leftist college students, tweeting fart emojis or bearing protest signs critical of Israel.
The ADL’s misappropriation of data, and the media’s misuse of the term antisemitism, is an attempt to control the narrative and shift it away from those in power. Apparently, we do not need to worry about congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump or Michael Flynn endorsing antisemitic cults calling for the death of Jews and inspiring hate crimes. Rather, we should be looking over our back every time we enter the synagogue, for fear that a Muslim teenager will block us on Twitter. Forgive me if I do not cower.
I will not discredit the very real antisemitic violence the ADL has recorded, in which Jews are attacked for their association with Israel. The blame, of course, lies with the perpetrators, and my sympathies go out to the victims. However, it would be foolish to ignore the underlying causes behind such violence. The classic antisemitic trope of dual loyalty maintains that Jews are a fifth column in whatever country they reside in, loyal to some sort of outside power, conspiracy or globalist cabal. In America, white nationalists have kept this trope alive, whether by perpetuating conspiracies about “globalist” George Soros on national television, or by publishing novels in which white revolutionaries exterminate the Jewish “race” controlling the world. Since 1948, white nationalists have begun linking Jewish loyalty to Israel. This idea is not limited to the radical fringe, and has been embedded in popular conceptions of Jewishness.
Antisemites regularly propagate the dual loyalty trope. After all, according to President Trump, Netanyahu was my prime minister. However, Zionists have played a role in perpetuating and even strengthening the dual loyalty myth. Didn’t Barlow and Green just accuse anti-Zionist Jews of betraying their community? Doesn’t Israel claim to represent and protect world Jewry? Don’t hasbarists argue that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic, therefore linking Jewish identity with the state of Israel?
In order to free ourselves from the specter of antisemitic violence, we must reconcile with the role Zionism plays in undermining the fight against anti-Jewish hate. We American Jews will continue fighting against antisemitism, in the hopes that our children will never have to watch a mob of white nationalists take to the streets chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
We will never eradicate antisemitism as long as Zionists equivocate an emoji with the slaughter of our ancestors. We will never eradicate antisemitism as long as Zionists invalidate the term until it is meaningless. To achieve liberation, we must ask if Zionism is truly in the interest of all Jews.
Combating antisemitism means addressing it where we see it, calling out perpetrators, and holding those in power accountable for allowing anti-Jewish hatred to propagate. It means confronting friends and allies, and it means resisting white supremacy. But combating antisemitism also requires us Jews to investigate how the Zionist rhetoricization of Jewish suffering impacts us all.
As Jews, we must work to control the narrative on antisemitism and the fight against anti-Jewish hatred. Much as April Rosenblum argues that we must not let right-wing Christians tell us what is and what isn’t antisemitism, so too must we take control from those who profane the suffering of our ancestors in defense of a nation-state. Antisemitism is real, it is omnipresent, and it is inextricable with white supremacist and nationalist ideologies. To attempt to obscure this reality, and to conflate anti-Jewish hatred with the most mundane of internet disputes, endangers Jews everywhere.
