Hannah sent us something this week, and it's a heavy one. She's asking about anti-Semitism, specifically the gap between reality and perception. She says Jews around the world are feeling frightened in a way they haven't in a long time, and she's trying to figure out how much of the ugliness she's seeing online is actually new versus voices that were always there but suddenly have platforms. She's been seeing horrific comments on completely unrelated posts, hecklers at comedy shows dropping Jewish slurs, and she's genuinely asking — has something fundamentally changed, or did the lid just come off? And if it has gotten worse, what do we do about it?
That question about the lid coming off versus the pot actually getting hotter — that's the core of it. And I think the honest answer is both, which is unsettling in its own way. Let me start with some numbers, because Hannah's asking about reality versus perception, and data helps anchor that. The Anti-Defamation League's most recent audit tracked over ten thousand antisemitic incidents in the United States in a single year. That's the highest number they've ever recorded since they started tracking in nineteen seventy-nine.
That's not a rounding error.
It's not. And that's incidents — assaults, vandalism, harassment. Not just mean tweets. Physical assaults on Jews more than doubled in some recent reporting periods. Synagogue attacks, visibly identifiable Jews getting attacked on the street, Jewish students facing coordinated harassment on campuses. The ADL's numbers have been climbing year over year for nearly a decade now, and the slope got steeper.
When Hannah says things feel worse, the data says her feelings are correctly calibrated. That's the reality part. The perception part is trickier, because the internet makes it hard to know whether you're seeing more anti-Semitism or just seeing anti-Semitism more.
And that distinction matters for what you do about it. If the problem is mainly amplification — the same number of bigots just suddenly given megaphones — that suggests one set of responses. If the number of bigots is actually growing, that suggests something else. The evidence points to both happening simultaneously.
Walk me through the amplification side first.
Pre-social-media, the town anti-Semite had a limited reach. He could mutter at the bar, write a letter to the editor that probably wouldn't get printed, maybe spray-paint something on a wall. His audience was whoever happened to be physically near him. Today, that same person can find a community of thousands online in about ten minutes. The barriers to entry for hate speech collapsed. You don't need a printing press, you don't need a publisher, you don't need to pass any editorial filter. You just type and hit send.
The algorithms love it.
They feast on it. Outrage drives engagement. Comments that provoke strong reactions get surfaced, get replies, get more visibility. A completely innocuous post about a stand-up comedian or a news story — the comments section becomes a sewer because the algorithm has learned that sewer content keeps people scrolling and fighting. The platform has no incentive to clean it up. In fact, it has a financial incentive not to.
A comment that would have been confined to a guy yelling at his television in nineteen ninety-five is now the first thing you see under a news article. And you see it, and you think, wow, half the country hates us.
And that's where perception can outpace reality. You're seeing a curated feed of the worst humanity has to offer, selected by an algorithm that optimizes for your horrified attention. It's not a representative sample. But — and this is the uncomfortable but — it's also not nothing. Those comments represent actual people typing actual things they actually believe. And the fact that they feel comfortable posting them publicly, with their names attached in many cases, tells you something about social permission.
The Overton window for Jew-hatred has moved.
And that's the "both" part. It's not just that the bigots have platforms. It's that using those platforms to express anti-Semitism has become less stigmatized. The social cost has dropped.
Hannah mentioned she initially saw this mostly in international contexts, comments from Pakistan and so forth, but now she's seeing it in American sources too. That maps onto something real, doesn't it?
For a long time, explicit anti-Semitism was considered beyond the pale in mainstream American discourse. You could hold anti-Semitic views, but expressing them openly carried real consequences — you'd lose your job, your social standing, your platform. That norm has eroded. And the erosion happened from multiple directions at once.
Name the directions.
I'd point to at least three. One, the far right, which has always had an anti-Semitic undercurrent and has become more emboldened in expressing it. Two, parts of the far left that have folded anti-Zionism into a broader worldview that increasingly treats Jews as symbols of whatever they oppose — capitalism, whiteness, colonialism, Western power — and the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism has proven to be less a line and more a gradient that people slide down without noticing.
The importation of Middle Eastern anti-Semitic discourse into Western spaces. Hannah mentioned comments from Pakistan — that's not random. In much of the Muslim world, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are mainstream, taught in schools, broadcast on state media, woven into political rhetoric. When diaspora communities form online, those ideas travel. And when Western progressives form political alliances around anti-Israel activism, those ideas get laundered into respectable-sounding language but the underlying tropes remain the same.
You've got the old-school American bigot, the activist who thinks he's just criticizing Israel, and the imported conspiracy theorist — all converging in the same comment section under a video of a comedian who isn't even Jewish.
The non-Jewish comedian getting heckled with anti-Semitic slurs is its own data point worth sitting with. The heckler didn't target a Jewish comedian. He just had this loaded weapon ready and fired it at a random target because the weapon itself had become so accessible. Anti-Semitism as a kind of all-purpose social aggression — the thing you reach for when you want to be maximally transgressive, maximally edgy, maximally offensive. It's become the go-to shock tactic.
Like adopting a feral cat.
I'm not sure I follow the analogy, but yes. The dynamics are similar in that people pick it up thinking it makes them dangerous and interesting, without fully grasping what they're holding.
The comedian handled it well, apparently — worked it into the bit, called the guy out. But then Hannah checks the comments and half of them are defending the heckler. That's the part that stays with you.
Because it's not one guy. One guy you can dismiss as a lone crank. Half the comments section is a pattern. And even if the comments section is algorithmically distorted, even if half is an exaggeration driven by engagement mechanics, the fact remains that enough real people are typing these things to fill a comments section. That's not bots. Some might be, but not most.
We've established that things are worse and also the amplification makes them feel even worse than that. What's actually driving the genuine increase?
I think there are structural factors and triggering events. The triggering event is fairly obvious — October seventh, twenty twenty-three, and the war that followed. Antisemitic incidents spiked dramatically after October seventh, not just in the United States but globally. In some European countries, reported incidents increased by several hundred percent in the months following the attack.
Which is a particular kind of grim irony — the largest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, and the global response included a massive surge in Jew-hatred.
It's a pattern that historians of anti-Semitism recognize. Jews are attacked, and the attack triggers sympathy for about five minutes, and then it triggers a backlash against Jews for being the victims of an attack that complicates people's political narratives. If your worldview requires Israel to be the villain, a massacre of Israelis creates cognitive dissonance, and one way to resolve that dissonance is to decide the victims deserved it or exaggerated it or brought it on themselves.
Or to just lean harder into hating Jews generally, since the distinction between Israelis and Jews conveniently evaporates.
Which it always does. That's the canary in the coal mine. When people can't distinguish between the state of Israel and Jewish people living in Brooklyn or London or Buenos Aires, you're not dealing with foreign policy critique. You're dealing with something older and uglier.
The structural factors predate October seventh. The ADL numbers were climbing before that.
I think several things have been converging for a while. One is institutional decay — the erosion of trust in the institutions that used to enforce norms against bigotry. Universities, media, civic organizations, even corporate HR departments. When those institutions lose their moral authority or their will to enforce norms, the norms themselves weaken.
The university example is hard to argue with. Campus anti-Semitism has been a rolling disaster.
It's especially damaging because universities shape the people who go on to run institutions. When a student spends four years in an environment where anti-Semitic ideas are treated as respectable political discourse, they carry that framing into their careers in media, law, education, government. The campus problem is a pipeline problem.
What's the second structural factor?
The decline of what you might call the post-Holocaust consensus. For several decades after World War Two, there was broad agreement in the West that anti-Semitism was uniquely evil and had to be suppressed. That consensus was maintained by living memory of the Holocaust, by educational efforts, by cultural products that reinforced the message. Living memory is fading. The last survivors are dying. And the educational apparatus has in many places shifted from teaching the Holocaust as a unique historical crime to treating it as one example among many of prejudice and intolerance — which sounds inclusive but actually strips it of the specific lessons that made the post-war consensus possible.
Universalize the lesson until it means nothing in particular.
If the Holocaust is just one data point in a general category of bad things humans do, then anti-Semitism is just one data point in a general category of prejudices, and it doesn't require special vigilance. Which means when it reappears, it doesn't register as the emergency it actually is.
The third factor?
This one's uncomfortable but I think it's real. The way the Jewish community is perceived has shifted. For much of the post-war period, American Jews were seen as a minority group that had faced discrimination and overcome it — a success story that fit comfortably into American narratives about opportunity and pluralism. In the current political landscape, Jews are increasingly coded as white, privileged, and powerful — which in the progressive moral framework means they're oppressors, not oppressed. And if Jews are oppressors, then anti-Semitism isn't bigotry, it's resistance.
That's the logic that lets people convince themselves they're not being anti-Semitic, they're being anti-racist.
It's an incredibly durable piece of self-deception because it flatters the person who holds it. You get to feel morally righteous while spreading ideas that would have made Henry Ford nod along. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion updated with intersectional jargon.
What do we do? That's the second part of Hannah's question. She says it's really scary and she doesn't know what lies in the future. What's the answer?
I want to be careful not to offer false comfort. This is frightening, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But I also think despair is both inaccurate and counterproductive. Historically, Jews have faced far worse than a nasty comments section, and we're still here.
That's the optimistic framing — we've survived pogroms, expulsions, and genocide, so we can probably survive Twitter.
Twitter may actually be harder on the psyche than some historical persecutions, in a strange way. Physical danger focuses the mind and mobilizes the community. A constant low-grade ambient hostility that you can't escape because it lives in your pocket — that wears people down differently.
What's the actual prescription?
I think there are responses at multiple levels. At the policy level, there's actually movement. Just today, June eleventh, there's news about a bipartisan House antisemitism bill that major Jewish organizations are throwing their weight behind. It's designed to codify a working definition of anti-Semitism for use in federal civil rights investigations, which would give the Department of Education and other agencies clearer tools to act.
A bipartisan bill in twenty twenty-six. That's almost exotic.
And the fact that it's bipartisan suggests that anti-Semitism still occupies an unusual space in American politics — it's one of the few issues where you can still get Republicans and Democrats to sign onto the same piece of legislation. That's not nothing. It means the political class, at least at the federal level, still recognizes this as a problem that transcends partisan divisions.
Though a bill is only as good as its enforcement, and enforcement requires political will that has been inconsistent at best.
The bill creates tools, not outcomes. But tools matter. Another thing at the policy level — the Trump administration has been fairly aggressive on campus anti-Semitism, including Title VI investigations and threats to pull federal funding from universities that don't address it. Whatever you think of the administration generally, that specific lever has been effective in getting some universities to take the problem more seriously.
Policy is slow and unreliable. What about at the individual level? Hannah's a mother. She's thinking about her family's future. What do you tell someone who's scared?
A few things. One, community is the oldest Jewish security technology, and it still works. The more embedded you are in a real, physical Jewish community — not just an online network — the more resilient you are against both the reality and the perception of threat. Actual neighbors who share your life are a better defense than any amount of doomscrolling is an offense.
The flip side of that is that isolation amplifies fear. If your primary window into how the world sees Jews is through comment sections, you're going to think the world is ninety percent Cossacks.
Two, there's a distinction between vigilance and hypervigilance that's worth maintaining. Vigilance is knowing where the exits are, paying attention to your surroundings, taking reasonable precautions. Hypervigilance is seeing every stranger as a potential attacker, every comment as a threat, every news cycle as the prelude to catastrophe. The first is adaptive. The second is debilitating.
The internet is a hypervigilance machine.
It absolutely is. It takes real threats and presents them to you in a format designed to make you feel that the threat is everywhere, always, and about to get worse. One of the most practical things any Jewish person can do for their mental health is radically curate their information diet. You don't need to read the comments. You don't need to follow accounts that surface anti-Semitism for you to be outraged by. You can stay informed without marinating in it.
Hannah's going to push back on that, I suspect. She'd say that not looking doesn't make it go away, and there's something almost irresponsible about looking away from a real threat.
She'd have a point. There's a balance. You don't want to be the person who ignores a fire alarm because the noise is unpleasant. But you also don't want to be the person who listens to the fire alarm at full volume twenty-four hours a day. The alarm is there to prompt action, not to become the soundtrack of your life. If you've taken reasonable precautions — you're involved in your community, you support organizations that fight anti-Semitism, you vote, you speak up when you can — then you've responded to the alarm. Continuing to stare at it doesn't make you safer.
That's a useful frame. The alarm is for action, not for permanent residence.
Three, and this is something I think about a lot as a former physician — intergenerational trauma is real, and it's being activated right now in ways that many Jews don't fully recognize. When your grandparents or great-grandparents survived a genocide, your nervous system may be calibrated to detect threats that your rational mind knows are not equivalent. A comment section is not a pogrom. But it can feel like one if your threat-detection system was tuned by ancestors who faced actual annihilation.
Part of the answer is recognizing that some of the fear is coming from a place deeper and older than the current moment, and that the current moment, bad as it is, is not nineteen thirty-eight.
It's not. And that's not to minimize what's happening — the ADL numbers are real, the violence is real, the eleven people murdered at the Tree of Life synagogue in twenty eighteen were really murdered. But the structural position of American Jewry in twenty twenty-six is fundamentally different from the structural position of European Jewry in the nineteen thirties. American Jews have political power, institutional allies, legal protections, and a broader culture that, while more permissive of anti-Semitism than it was twenty years ago, still broadly condemns it.
Is that last part still true? The "broadly condemns" part? Because Hannah's experience in that comments section suggests otherwise.
I think comments sections are a terrible measure of what the broader culture condemns. They're self-selecting. The people who feel strongly enough to comment are not a random sample of the population. And the people who feel strongly enough to comment anti-Semitic things are an even more specific subset. Polling data consistently shows that anti-Semitic attitudes are held by a minority, and that most Americans have favorable views of Jews. The problem is that the minority has gotten louder and more aggressive, not that it's become a majority.
A loud and aggressive minority can do a lot of damage even if it's small. A tiny percentage of a population of three hundred thirty million is still a lot of people.
And that's why you can't just dismiss it as a fringe. The fringe can kill. We've seen that. But the distinction matters for how you think about the future. If you believe the entire society has turned against Jews, the only rational response is to leave or to despair. If you believe a toxic minority has been empowered by technology and institutional failure, the response is to fight the institutional failure and contain the toxicity.
Containment is a more useful metaphor than eradication. You're not going to eliminate anti-Semitism — it's a several-thousand-year-old hatred that has proven remarkably adaptable. But you can contain it, stigmatize it, make it costly to express, and prevent it from capturing institutions.
Containment has worked before. The post-war period in America wasn't free of anti-Semitism — far from it — but it was contained. Quotas at universities, restrictive covenants in housing, exclusion from professions — those were real, and they were fought and largely dismantled. Social anti-Semitism became unfashionable. That didn't happen by accident. It happened because Jewish organizations, allied with other groups, systematically worked to make it unacceptable.
The playbook exists.
The challenge is that some of the tools that worked then — shame, social ostracism, career consequences for bigots — depend on a shared moral framework that has fractured. When you can retreat into a subculture that validates your bigotry and provides you with alternative media, alternative institutions, alternative social networks, shame loses its power. The bigot doesn't care if you ostracize him because he's already part of a community that celebrates him for saying the thing you're ostracizing him for.
That's the internet's real innovation. Not giving bigots a platform — giving them a home.
A home is harder to dismantle than a platform. A platform you can deplatform. A home is where people live, socially and psychologically.
If the old containment playbook is partially broken, what's the new one?
I think it has to include a few elements. One, legal tools like that House bill — making anti-Semitism legally costly when it crosses into discrimination, harassment, or violence. Two, institutional pressure that still works on institutions that still care about their reputations — universities, corporations, cultural organizations. Three, building and strengthening Jewish institutions that don't depend on the goodwill of outsiders — Jewish schools, Jewish community centers, Jewish security organizations.
Four is the hardest one. Political alliances that cross ideological lines. Anti-Semitism is growing on the far right and on the far left, and the center has been weirdly passive about it. Jews need allies who will call out anti-Semitism wherever it appears, not just when it comes from the political team they already oppose. That means working with people you might disagree with on other issues. The bipartisan House bill is a small example of what that looks like.
That's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of Jews who are politically committed to one side or the other.
And I'm not saying anyone has to abandon their political principles. But if your response to anti-Semitism depends on who's expressing it, you're not actually against anti-Semitism — you're against your political opponents. And that instrumental approach to Jew-hatred is part of why we're in this mess.
Say more about that.
For years, many Jewish organizations and Jewish individuals have been aligned with political movements that have tolerated or even nurtured anti-Semitism within their coalitions, because those movements were seen as aligned with Jewish interests on other issues. On the left, that meant looking past anti-Zionist rhetoric that crossed into anti-Semitism because the same coalition supported abortion rights or climate action or whatever the priority was. On the right, it meant looking past white nationalist elements because the coalition supported Israel or religious liberty.
Both sides traded Jewish safety for other priorities and hoped it wouldn't blow up.
It's blowing up. The far right marches through Charlottesville chanting "Jews will not replace us." The far left harasses Jewish students on campuses and tells them to go back to Poland. These are not equivalent in every respect, but they're equivalent in the respect that matters most — they both make Jews less safe. And a Jewish community that's only willing to fight one of them is a community that's fighting with one hand tied behind its back.
Hannah's going to read this and say, okay, but what do I actually do tomorrow? Not policy, not political realignment — tomorrow morning.
Here's what I'd say. Tomorrow morning, you can do a few concrete things. One, do an audit of your information diet. Which accounts, which platforms, which habits are exposing you to anti-Semitic content without giving you anything useful in return? Cut one of them. See how it feels. Two, find one thing in your actual physical community that makes you feel connected — a Shabbat dinner, a Jewish book club, a volunteer opportunity — and put it on your calendar. Not as a political act, but as a psychological one. Three, if you have kids, think about what you want them to know and how you want them to know it. Not a lecture about anti-Semitism — a positive transmission of Jewish life that makes their identity a source of joy, not just vigilance.
That last one is big. Raising kids who are proudly Jewish rather than defensively Jewish.
Defensive Judaism is exhausting and unsustainable. If being Jewish is primarily about monitoring threats and tracking incidents and bracing for the next attack, your kids will eventually ask why they should bother. Joyful Judaism — the actual content of the tradition, the community, the holidays, the food, the music, the intellectual life — that's what makes the fight worth fighting. The fight is in service of the life, not the other way around.
The life is actually good. That gets lost in these conversations. Jewish life in America, for all the threats, is still vibrant and prosperous and creative. The story isn't only a story of danger.
It's really not. And I think it's important to say that explicitly because the internet flattens Jewish experience into a single dimension of victimhood. The reality is that American Jews are thriving by almost any measure — economically, culturally, institutionally. That doesn't make the anti-Semitism less real, but it does provide context for thinking about the future. We're not a powerless minority facing an existential threat with no resources. We're a well-organized, well-resourced community facing a serious but manageable challenge.
Manageable is doing a lot of work there. What makes you confident it's manageable?
American Jewry has faced periods of intense anti-Semitism before — the early twentieth century, the nineteen thirties and forties — and came through them. The institutional and legal infrastructure that exists now is far stronger than anything that existed then. The challenge is real, but the resources to meet it are real too.
The international picture? Hannah's in Jerusalem, we're in Jerusalem — the Israeli dimension of this is inescapable.
Israel complicates everything, as it always does. On one hand, Israel's existence is the single greatest guarantor of Jewish safety in history — a state with an army that can protect Jews when no one else will. On the other hand, Israel's actions provide a constant stream of content for people who want to express anti-Semitism while claiming they're just criticizing a country. And the line between the two is hard to draw in some cases, which is part of what makes the whole conversation so fraught.
The heckler at the comedy show wasn't making a nuanced critique of Israeli settlement policy.
No, he was not. And that's the tell. When the anti-Israel critique consistently bleeds into anti-Semitic tropes — Jews control the media, Jews control the banks, Jews are disloyal, Jews are inherently evil — you're not dealing with foreign policy disagreement. You're dealing with anti-Semitism using Israel as a convenient excuse. And the frequency with which that happens has increased dramatically.
Hannah mentioned that she initially saw this in international contexts and now it's showing up in American ones. That's a specific anxiety — the sense that something foreign is becoming domestic.
That anxiety is grounded. The globalization of anti-Semitic discourse means that tropes and narratives that were once contained to specific regions now circulate everywhere. A conspiracy theory that originates in Cairo or Karachi shows up in a Brooklyn comments section within hours. The internet has created a single global marketplace for Jew-hatred, and American Jews are shopping in it whether they want to or not.
That's a grim image.
But the flip side is that the same globalization also enables solidarity and mobilization. Jewish communities around the world can support each other in ways that weren't possible before. The same networks that spread the hate can spread the response. It's not symmetrical — the haters have an easier job, because destruction is always easier than construction — but the tools exist.
I want to circle back to something you said earlier about the erosion of the post-Holocaust consensus. That feels to me like the deepest structural problem, and also the hardest to fix. You can pass a bill, you can pressure a university, but how do you rebuild a society-wide norm that anti-Semitism is uniquely unacceptable?
That's the long-term question, and I don't have a satisfying answer. Norms are built through culture — through education, through media, through the stories a society tells about itself. Rebuilding the norm against anti-Semitism would require a cultural project that frankly no one is undertaking at scale right now. Holocaust education is shrinking, not expanding. Media coverage of anti-Semitism is inconsistent and often politically instrumentalized. The institutions that could lead a cultural shift are either captured by ideologies that minimize anti-Semitism or too afraid of controversy to take a stand.
We're left with patchwork. Bills, community security, information hygiene, political pressure. All necessary, none sufficient.
That's the human condition, isn't it? You do what you can with what you have. The Jewish approach to this has always been practical rather than utopian. You build the sukkah even though you know it's temporary. You light the candles even though you know they'll burn out. You fight the fight even though you know you won't win it permanently.
That's almost a closing thought. But I want to push you on one more thing before we get there. You've been fairly measured this whole conversation — data, history, policy. But Hannah's prompt was emotional. She's scared. Do you feel that fear?
I'd be lying if I said I didn't. I've walked past synagogues with armed guards outside and felt something twist in my chest. I've seen things online that I can't unsee. I've had conversations with friends who are seriously discussing where they'd go if things got worse. That's not theoretical. That's the emotional reality of being Jewish right now.
How do you sit with that without letting it consume you?
The same way Jews have always sat with it. You acknowledge the fear, you don't let it make your decisions for you, and you invest in the things that make life meaningful regardless of the threat level. You love your family, you observe your traditions, you do your work, you tell your jokes. The fear is real, but it doesn't get to be the main character.
The fear is a guest, not the host.
An unwanted guest who shows up uninvited and stays too long. But yes, a guest. You don't redecorate the house for him.
I think we've covered the ground Hannah was asking about — the reality, the perception, the structural drivers, and what you can actually do. Let's land the plane.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the Namib Desert, ochre pigments used in rock art dating to roughly 400 BCE contain hematite crystals so finely ground that archaeologists believe the artists deliberately heat-treated the mineral to deepen its red hue — a sophisticated chemical process not documented in written records for another thousand years.
Heat-treated hematite. Of course there are.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop, and thanks to Hannah for the question — it was a hard one and an important one. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts.com, and if you got something out of this one, leave us a review wherever you listen. We'll be back next week.
Take care of yourselves.
