A plea for Rosh Hashanah 2023/5873: Spare me your Shana Tovas. All of your embossed greeting playing cards and earnest textual content messages? Narishkeit. (Google it!)
I’ve spent the final two years on the frontlines of the battle towards antisemitism and am stupefied by the niceties surrounding the present Excessive Vacation season.
I’m drained and annoyed. However largely I’m indignant.
Take into account me your golem of Rosh Hashanah to return: I carry tidings from the long run and they’re something however candy.
There isn’t a Jew on this nation who isn’t at the very least casually conscious of the disturbing rise in antisemitism.
Final yr the ADL logged a report 3,697 reported antisemitic incidents within the US, a 36% rise over 2021.
However even these figures paint an incomplete image of what we’re up towards.
Significantly on social media.
On each social platform, Jews discover themselves awash in antisemitism.
Conspiracy theories, slurs, harassment, threats.
All people is aware of the socials could be poisonous, however for Jews, it’s a Three Mile Island of blood libels.
The Holocaust is a fantasy.
Jews orchestrated 9/11.
We management the media, Hollywood, The White Home, and the climate.
We masterminded Covid, Brexit, January 6, and Epstein’s suicide.
Too blithely we dismiss antisemites as trolls after they’re truly a part of devastatingly efficient campaigns.
Armies of Hate, I name them, and nothing energizes them greater than Israel.
A lot of this is because of that faddish notion generally known as Intersectionality — which has aligned the Palestinian trigger with different marginalized communities (irrespective of how traditionally inaccurate).
The outcome: Unprecedented numbers of individuals receptive to their soundbyte-ready lies: The Jews stole Palestinian land! The Jews are oppressors! Israel is an apartheid state!
It’s true, that we’re no strangers to those aspersions, however social media is a nuclear-level catalyst with out precedent.
It coalesces fringe concepts into communities the place lunacy is validated and amplified.
Right here, insanity spawns actions with staggering effectivity.
Final yr, Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib mentioned the quiet half out loud, declaring you could’t be progressive “but again Israel’s apartheid authorities.”
Her feedback went viral and uncovered a warped syllogism standard on socials: If Judaism is synonymous with Zionism, and Zionism is racist, Jews should be racist. Regardless of that antisemitism is humanity’s oldest type of racism.
Nicely earlier than Kanye West immolated himself on Twitter, a spate of celebrities used their platforms to push antisemitism.
The response? Barely a whimper. “
Latest incidents of antisemitic tweets and posts from sports activities and leisure celebrities are a really troubling omen…however so too is the surprising lack of large indignation,” basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote in The Hollywood Reporter in 2020. “We anticipated extra passionate public outrage. What we received was a shrug of meh-rage.”
A part of the issue: calling out antisemitism on social media is dangerous enterprise.
Take the cautionary story of Eve Barlow, a prolific music critic when in 2021 she took to Twitter to advertise a narrative she’d written for Pill decrying the “social media pogrom,” solely to have actor Seth Rogen cruelly mock her for it.
Their Twitter alternate made her an business pariah, successfully ending her profitable writing profession as she knew it.
A staggering 85% of Jews between 18 and 29 say they’ve skilled antisemitism on social media, in response to the American Jewish Congress. (Are you aware how arduous it’s to get 85% of Jews to agree on something?)
We reassure ourselves that social media isn’t the actual world, however there we’re, self-censoring images of a household trip to Tel Aviv.
And giving a grateful nod to the safety guards standing watch over our synagogues for Excessive Vacation companies.
After which there are the whisper networks of Jewish mother and father sharing intel about schools the place their children received’t be harassed for being proudly Jewish.
Inform me once more how social media doesn’t matter.
Seven years in the past I co-founded JewBelong as a web based useful resource for folks looking for a non-judgmental connection to Judaism.
We put up billboards saying issues like, “So that you eat bacon, God has different issues to fret about.” or “We don’t care which half of you is Jewish.”
However JewBelong’s mission developed with the explosion of antisemitism–and, extra particularly, our impotent response to it.
The sample is all the time the identical: a horrific occasion rattles us. We grit our tooth, await the inevitable press launch or apology, and transfer on.
However social media has rendered that response loop totally insufficient.
It’s a dusty outdated playbook for a completely fashionable recreation.
And we’re taking part in as if our lives rely on it.
As a result of historical past reveals they do.
That’s the reason I ask that you simply skip the Shana Tovahs however take note of the shofar.
The traditional Jews didn’t simply blow it on Rosh Hashanah, but additionally earlier than battle.
It’s a rallying cry.
And when it blows this yr, let or not it’s our name to motion: We’re performed cowering.
Archie Gottesman is co-founder of JewBelong.org.
