Jews Do Count - and that's the problem

This is the first post on Everyday Hate and a general introduction to the ideas and themes I’ll be writing about. If you haven’t already subscribed and you’d like to, just click here!

It is rare that a week passes without some important person, somewhere, talking nonsense about Jews. Sometimes they are being antisemitic, sometimes it’s just weird, and it’s usually a sign that they think the role and status of Jews in the world carries some special meaning.

Earlier this month Russian President Vladimir Putin tried explaining that it isn’t a coincidence, or a contradiction, that Ukraine - a state he claims is riddled with Nazism - has a Jewish President. He told a Russian TV interviewer:

“Western curators have put a person at the head of modern Ukraine - an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins. And thus, in my opinion, they seem to be covering up an anti-human essence that is the foundation ... of the modern Ukrainian state. And this makes the whole situation extremely disgusting, in that an ethnic Jew is covering up the glorification of Nazism and covering up those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine at one time - and this is the extermination of one and a half million people."

We can only speculate about who these “Western curators” are meant to be, but the thrust of Putin’s remarks are clear: that President Zelensky was nominated and installed by other, more powerful, forces to play a specific role in the geopolitics of Ukraine and Russia, because he is an “ethnic Jew”. Putin’s thinking seems to be that there is nobody better placed to cover up Nazism or antisemitism than a Jew (anybody who followed the contortions of some anti-Zionist Jews in trying to explain away the antisemitism that flourished in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party might have a wry smile at that one). There’s a hint of other antisemitic tropes in there, such as the idea that Jews are anti-human and that, when it comes to Jews, what you see on the surface is never really what is going on.

But the central point is a simple one: in Putin’s imagination, Jews matter in a unique way, both to him and to others. These “Western curators” had to choose an “ethnic Jew” for this role, because Jews have a significance and a symbolism in the way that some people think about our world, and it’s a role that can’t be filled by anyone else.

From Putin to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, owner of X - the platform formerly known as Twitter - who is struggling to attract and keep advertisers and is not lacking for online fans telling him who to blame for this. The problem is that these Musk acolytes were not necessarily the kind of people you’d want him to be listening to: a bierkeller’s worth of far right, racist and antisemitic accounts spent days feeding Musk the idea that the Anti-Defamation League, a prominent and well-respected Jewish organisation founded in 1913 to oppose antisemitism and other forms of hate in the United States, was to blame for his company’s financial woes.

It was alarming enough to watch Musk engage in friendly terms with accounts that would have been - and in some cases actually were - banned under the previous ownership. Worse, he even implied that the ADL might be manufacturing the antisemitism on X itself, and amplified to his vast following posts that were nothing to do with the ADL and were just generalised attacks on Jews.

With Musk’s help the hashtag #BantheADL trended for a while. Perhaps the fact it was being pushed at him most vigorously by an Irish white supremacist who has endorsed antisemitic blood libel fables should have been a warning sign, but there’s nobody so credulous as a self-declared internet sceptic. Naturally, the ADL’s enemies from the crank left jumped on the bandwagon, and they didn’t seem to care who was driving it either.

Musk likes to think of X as the world’s town square, where a free exchange of ideas holds sway and democracy will flourish. Except if my local town square had as many neo-Nazis, racists and conspiracy cranks in it as Musk’s personal online echo chamber does, I don’t think I’d go there to do my shopping.

Musk’s grievance is that the ADL called for advertisers to pause their spend on Twitter when he bought it because they feared he would weaken Twitter’s policies and systems for removing hate content. It is true that the ADL is part of a coalition called Stop Hate For Profit that made just such a call back in November 2022, and Musk says this call cost the company 60% of its advertising revenue. But there are eight other partners in Stop Hate For Profit, none of which are Jewish organisations. Thousands of other organisations and businesses have backed their previous campaigns - and again, the vast majority were not Jewish. The same goes for other, similar campaigns that the ADL has joined. So why, out of all those campaign groups, did Musk and his fans single out the biggest, best-known Jewish organisation in America to target?

To ask the question is to answer it. For some people, the opinions of Jews and the actions of Jewish organisations are the key to understanding something as globally significant as the future survival of X. It’s as if, when Jews lobby businesses, social media companies or politicians, it is different from when others do: more threatening, more insidious, less legitimate, even if others are doing exactly the same. These motifs attach themselves to Jewish activism because they connect with some very old and familiar stereotypes about the supposed influence of Jewish power and wealth in shaping our world; especially if a story can be told that implies behind-the-scenes manipulation and underhand influence. These are things that people instinctively ‘know’ about how Jews operate, whether consciously or not, so when a bunch of seemingly-friendly accounts on X pander to Musk’s bruised ego by suggesting he blame the ADL for his problems, it just fits.

If you like the Everyday Hate substack and want to know more about how antisemitism is built into our world - and what we can do about it - I’ve written a book of the same name https://www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/everyday-hate

This doesn’t mean that Musk is an antisemite, and he insists that nothing could be further from the truth. It just means that, like so many people, he has absorbed some of the assumptions that circulate in society about Jews, and when confronted with a Jewish organisation doing something he doesn’t like, something that affects him personally, it is easy to interpret this through the framing that antisemitism has provided for centuries. In fact, sometimes it’s easier to fall into that way of thinking than it is to avoid it.

The final example (so far) this month of a world figure saying strange things about Jews is Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, who gave a rambling speech full of anti-Jewish claims, a virtual bingo card of antisemitic myths familiar to anyone who studies this stuff for a living. I’m going to dig deeper into exactly what he said in a future post (Hitler “fought the Jews because they were dealing with usury and money” was the gist of it), but I was struck by the horrified response of Martin Indyk, the veteran U.S. diplomat and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel:

I feel genuine sympathy for Indyk who seemed stung by a sense of personal betrayal, but I’m also flabbergasted by his naiveté. If antisemitism were ‘just’ a visceral prejudice, then he’d have a point. It would indeed be strange for someone who can build a lifelong friendship with a real-life Jew to simultaneously believe such heinous thoughts about “the Jews”. But that gets antisemitism entirely wrong, because antisemitism is not - or not only - about hating actual living, breathing, Jewish people. It’s a set of abstract ideas and beliefs about Jews that is not anchored in reality. Fundamentally, it’s the idea that Jews are always up to something and can never be trusted. And at its most developed, antisemitism is a way of understanding and interpreting world events that places Jews at the centre of everything. It’s not about actual Jewish people and how they behave.

So of course Abbas can be personal friends with Indyk, while also believing a whole raft of antisemitic things about “the Jews”. Just as Musk can be assured he does not hate Jews, while being seduced by the allure of an antisemitic explanation for his problems. And Putin can claim to be ridding the Ukraine of Nazism, while insisting that an “ethnic Jew” is a front for an “anti-human essence” at the heart of Ukraine.

Three leaders of different nationalities, religions and regions of the world, all sharing the same strange notion that - to paraphrase David Baddiel, but not to contradict him at all - Jews Do Count, and usually more than we’d like.

This is what the Everyday Hate substack will be about. It’s about the strange ideas about Jews that have been woven into the cultural fabric and mental architecture of our world over centuries, and that pop up in the strangest of places today. It’s about why antisemitism keeps happening, even though everyone knows it shouldn’t. And, because I’m an optimist at heart, it will have some ideas about what we should be doing about it.