13 Fall 2024 n Los Angeles, a mob waving Palestinian flags laid siege to a synagogue and beat Jewish worshipers in the street, days after a different mob screamed “Go back to Germany” at Jewish children outside a synagogue’s preschool. At Stanford, a university task force found that antisemitism on campus is “widespread and pernicious,” with Jewish and Israeli students feeling “ostracized, canceled, and intimidated.” In Brooklyn, a Jewish family was assaulted at their twin sons’ fifth grade graduation by another family shouting “Free Palestine” and “Death to Israel.” At Columbia, three deans were placed on leave after they were revealed to have mocked Jewish students and Hillel staff during a panel on antisemitism on campus. In Westchester, a progressive congressman who lost his primary race to a moderate challenger invoked antisemitic tropes in his concession speech, insinuating that a dark Jewish conspiracy had brought about his defeat. In Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron decried the “scourge of antisemitism” after a twelve-year-old Jewish girl was raped and threatened with murder by three underage boys, including an ex-boyfriend enraged that she had concealed her Jewishness from him. In Amsterdam, the words “No Zionists Allowed” were spray-painted on the sidewalk outside a home that had belonged to a Jewish family deported during the Holocaust. In southern Russia, assailants opened fire at synagogues in two separate cities simultaneously and then burned one of them to the ground. And all of this happened in the past week alone. The surge in antisemitism around the world in the eight months since October 7 has been nothing short of breathtaking. That the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust should have precipitated not an unparalleled outpouring of sympathy and support but rather an unprecedented wave of Jew-hatred has left us all reeling. In fact, it has come so fast and so furious that it has often been difficult to know where to look. Each day, it seems, another synagogue is defaced, another Israeli restaurant vandalized, another Jewish student made to feel unwelcome, another Jewish voter rendered politically homeless. And nowhere is antisemitism more prevalent than it is online. To be openly Jewish on social media platforms today is to expose oneself to unrelenting hate and abuse. Hashtags like #HitlerWasRight and #DeathToJews have proliferated. Horrific antisemitic imagery is seemingly everywhere, and even the most innocuous posts by Jewish users are often followed by cascades of blood libel, conspiracy theories, and death threats. It may be tempting to dismiss online antisemitism as unpleasant but ultimately harmless, a form of hate restricted to the virtual realm. But we know that isn’t true. Hate groups use social media platforms to organize, recruit, fundraise, and incite, to poison the discourse, spread disinformation, and put Jews on the defensive. And online hate has direct, real-world consequences. As one study found last year, increases in antisemitic speech – and particularly anti-Zionist speech – online can help predict real-world antisemitic activity, including both far-right threats and violence, and far-left antisemitic incidents, both on and off college campuses. Time and again, the perpetrators of antisemitic violence – from the Tree of Life synagogue shooter to the organizers of pro-Hamas mobs to the terrorists themselves – have been found to have engaged in virulent antisemitic activity online. Hate that starts online rarely stays there. The maelstrom of the past eight months has left many Jews feeling intimidated and alone. It has often felt as though the entire world is against us, the hate coming from so many directions at once – including from those we had thought were our friends and our allies. It would be all too easy to lose hope. And yet, out of the chaos has emerged a moment of crystal clarity. To borrow Douglas Murray’s striking imagery, it is as though a flare has gone up, briefly illuminating all and showing us exactly where everyone stands. Lines that were previously blurred have become sharp and bold: lines between good and evil, between right and wrong, between those who are with us and The State of Online Antisemitism* Avi Mayer * This is an edited address delivered at Tel Aviv University Cyber Week, panel on “Tech vs. Hate: Combating Online Antisemitism,” June 26, 2024. I
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