THINK LONG TERM
Establishment Jewish institutions woke up too late to the existential threat that social media can pose to the Jewish community. I know this because I personally tried to appeal, for years, to the biggest American Jewish institutions to take the situation brewing on mainstream social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok seriously and was repeatedly rebuked by all of them.
Then October 7th happened, and these organizations were left scrambling. Unfamiliar with the landscape, they’ve confused clicks, views, and likes with successful advocacy. But antisemitism, antizionism, and Israel education is not the same thing as marketing a product. Clickbait and ragebait may produce millions of likes, but these likely come from within the echo chamber.
Real education takes time. Changing or opening people’s perspectives takes time. A single reel, Tweet, or Instagram carousel will not fundamentally change anyone’s opinion about Jews or the State of Israel. What you do is you plant seeds, and those who open themselves up to new information will keep coming back. It’s a process. I receive messages attesting to this weekly. Some people will never agree with us entirely. But challenging a deeply-held worldview is sometimes all it takes.
A NOTE ON THINKING LONG TERM
I find it absolutely maddening that, time and time again, Jewish community-led initiatives to combat antisemitism have lacked the foresight to predict how they might be perceived in ways that don’t actually combat antisemitism, but validate antisemitic tropes, conspiracies, and stereotypes instead.
Take the blue square campaign, for example. Who could’ve predicted that throwing $150 million at celebrities to say that they stand with Jewish people was going to backfire? (This is a rhetorical question. I very much predicted it). Inherent to antisemitic conspiracy is the idea that Jews silence or control influential people with our money.
Likewise, creating AI content in which the Star of David is combined with the American flag isn’t exactly doing us any favors when it comes to combatting conspiracies about so-called Jewish control of the United States government.
RECOGNIZE PATTERNS
As things now stand, the Jewish community is largely being reactive, rather than proactive. A new conspiracy pops up. We debunk it, with extensive sourcing to boot. By the time we’ve finished our sentence, 10 new conspiracies have popped up.
Lucky for us, antisemitism is boring. For years, I’ve argued that antisemitism always follows the same familiar formula. When you teach people the formula, they start to see it and exercise discernment.
problem + scapegoat ^ ascribed sinister intent = Jewish collective
Alternatively,
Jews do something ^ ascribed sinister intent = problem
Dara Horn argued at the AJC conference that we must focus on pattern recognition, and I couldn’t agree more. This means not only recognizing the antisemitism formula, but recognizing the social and political conditions which have historically allowed for antisemitism to flourish.
A NOTE ON PATTERN RECOGNITION
Our extensive 3,000 year history provides us with more than enough clues as to how this is all going to go.
From the days of the printing press, new technology has always been weaponized to propagate antisemitic propaganda. So how come Jewish institutions lacked the foresight to envision what would transpire on social media in the aftermath of the largest antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust?
How come Jewish institutions were so late to wake up to the threat that AI was going to pose to the history and memory of the Holocaust?
How come it occurred to nobody that Wikipedia would one day become a battleground for the erasure of Jewish history?
There’s more. For years, establishment Jewish institutions argued that it was far-right antisemitism that posed a real threat to the American Jewish community. As though our own history doesn’t teach us that when antisemitism rises on the right, it also rises on the left, and vice versa. Antisemites have always put their politics aside to unite for the cause of antisemitism. Where was the foresight?
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
It is painful to see how little establishment Jewish organizations seem to understand the audiences that they are trying to appeal to.
Antisemitism has always followed a simple formula: Jewish collectivity is perceived as a threat to whatever it is that any given group or society values the most. For some reason, it appears that many Jewish institutions are deeply out of touch with whatever it is that their audience values the most.
If, for example, someone is enmeshed in a worldview in which “the West” is representative of all that is evil – that is largely the progressive left of today, by the way – then you are not going to appeal to them by arguing that jihadi antisemitism is a threat to the West, or that Israel is all that stands in between ISIS-like rampages and the West.
If someone sees the phrase “Judeo-Christian values” as a dogwhistle or euphemism for Christian nationalism (look up the history of the phrase: they’re not entirely wrong), then arguing in favor of preserving so-called Judeo-Christian values is not going to make a dent in their worldview. The list goes on.
A NOTE ON KNOWING YOUR AUDIENCE
Antisemites think they know our story. They very much don’t. What they do understand is what makes us tick.
Hamas, for example, understood that taking Israeli hostages was the one war crime that would tear Israel apart from the inside out. Proponents of Holocaust inversion understand that nothing could hurt the Jewish psyche more than the accusation that Israel is a mirror image of Nazi Germany, even when the facts don’t align.
Antisemites also understand their non-Jewish audiences. They always have. They know just the right buttons to click to play up to their personal, familial, communal, and national fears. And they do it masterfully.
It’s not our job, as Jews, to fix antisemites, but it’s in our best interest to have partners in the fight. And you will not persuade anyone to join you — or even to broaden their mind to absorb a different perspective — with talking points that don’t land because they are completely antithetical to the person’s current worldview.
WORK TOGETHER, NOT APART
At the AJC conference, Dr. Maya Ackerman argued that, when you have a war, you don’t just have different units go off and do their own thing with zero coordinated strategy. And yet we currently find ourselves in the midst of a propaganda and information war, and it feels that every Jewish institution – and the State of Israel itself – is off doing its own thing, particularly as far as messaging goes.
That’s not to say that every Jewish organization must become a mirror image of the other. Different institutions have different audiences, political leanings, and populations that they serve. The cultural and political diversity of the Jewish experience is one of our greatest strengths.
But we must, at the very least, try to find some common ground on the core of our mission. Why is fighting antisemitism important? Why is the preservation of the Jewish community and the survival of the State of Israel important to us? Why are the disinformation campaigns targeting the Jewish community so harmful?
INVEST IN COMMUNITY EDUCATION
Let me make something clear: when I argue in favor of investing in Jewish education, I am not merely talking about making Jewish day school more affordable for parents, though of course, that’s important too.
Because, in the United States, there is no nationalized Jewish day school and/or Hebrew school curriculum, I don’t want to paint the situation with too broad a brush. Some schools are more comprehensive than others.
That said, I have made some general observations, and truth be told, the situation is really disappointing. If all we’re teaching our kids is Torah (important!), the Holocaust (important!), and the miracle of Israel (important!), we are fundamentally failing them. What happened between the stories in the Torah and the Shoah? Why are we not emphasizing the cultural continuity that can be traced from King David to the gas chambers in Auschwitz? Why, for example, are we not teaching our children about the antizionist campaigns of the Soviet Union, the influence of Arab-Nazi collaboration on the 1948 war and the ensuing conflict, and the Muslim world’s backlash to the Ottoman Empire’s revocation of second-class citizenship laws for Jews and Christians in 1856? This information should be as readily available for Jewish students as Holocaust education.
SAY THE HARD THINGS
As hate crimes against the Jewish community skyrocket and antisemitic rhetoric grows normalized across the political spectrum and on a global scale, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend coming from many Jewish institutions and prominent Jews.
Instead of challenging bigots on their bigotry, we try to combat antisemitism by trying to get people to like us. We try to flatter Jew-haters, as though you can flatter someone’s way out of a prejudice. That’s not how you adequately confront someone’s hateful views.
This can look like several things. It can look like conceding that “criticism of Israel is not necessarily antisemitic” when confronting antizionist bigotry (as though those aren’t two separate things entirely!). It can look like the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt going on a podcast to concede that “some” Black Hebrew Israelites are legitimately Jewish, which is not only a lie, but inadvertently conflated Black Jews with a new religious movement that fundamentally denies Jews our history.
But you don’t challenge Jew-haters by telling them they have a point.
LEAVE A HISTORICAL RECORD
Perhaps this is a cynical take, but I have to say it: at this moment in time, we’ve lost the information battle. Wikipedia is ideologically captured. Antisemitic and anti-Israel content exponentially outnumbers positive Jewish and pro-Israel content on social media. AI algorithms, including Google searches, pick up from whatever is produced on the web, and most of what is produced is entirely unfavorable to us and oftentimes hateful, conspiratorial, or outright false. It doesn’t matter how loud we shout. At this point, we’re not going to win this.
We may have lost the information battle, but we don’t have to lose the information war. We are the authors of our own story. And we have the agency to keep telling it, if only to leave a historical record, as generations of Jews have done before us in the most unimaginable of circumstances. If we don’t, others will swoop in and tell our story for us. Our story will, quite literally, be lost to history. At that point, there’ll be no going back.
"You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it."
Pirkei Avot 2:21