You Heard It Here First, Folks!

The first time I ever met with a Jewish American establishment organization was sometime in 2020 (in the spirit of the times, the meeting was held virtually, over Zoom). Even today, I remember the excitement and nervous apprehension that I felt as I answered that call. I am Jewish as can be, but I didn’t grow up in the United States — I spent most of my childhood in the 2,500-strong Jewish community of Costa Rica, and I had no immediate family here — and my work came with no built-in connections, no pending favors. If the big dogs wanted to meet with me, it must have meant that my work was actually good.

It was pretty cool.

By then, I had been working in the Jewish online activism sphere for the better part of the previous three years. I use the term “working” loosely here, as everything I did was entirely unpaid, motivated only by a love of writing and a desire to communicate the Jewish story to my then mostly non-Jewish audience. I had seen, then, how quickly antisemitism was proliferating on social media, not just in the dark corners of 4chan and QAnon, as the Jewish establishment had long presupposed, but also among my completely average, if predominantly left-leaning, peers. In the beginning, the signs were relatively small: the way that Instagram activists chose to focus exclusively on gun control after the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting, bypassing conversations on antisemitism entirely, or how the most popular liberal political activist accounts had drawn comparisons between the Palestinian intifadas and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock. I was eager for the ADLs, AJCs, and other three-letter Jewish organizations of the world, with their bigger reach and even bigger donors, to learn of these things. It was time to nip this in the bud.

I came out of the meeting gravely disappointed. Antisemitism, left-wing or otherwise, I was told, was the work of a few fringe extremists, not a destructive force that was rapidly eating away at the political left-of-center. It was far-right antisemitism that we all had to worry about, they said. When I brought up the way in which Instagram infographics — many of them wildly politicized, inaccurate and borderline antisemitic — were quickly replacing traditional education and suggested that maybe these organizations should do something about that by creating their own, the organization rebuked me, arguing that “social media isn’t that relevant” and “the social media team doesn’t like to be told what to do.”

Oh, OK then.

I’ve had many such meetings since then. Most have played out similarly.

Then Oct. 7, 2023 happened.

The Jewish community — and the Jewish establishment — had been caught off guard, if not by the unspeakable atrocities perpetrated against innocents in Southern Israel, then by the world’s disgusting reaction, which ranged from apathy to whataboutism to outright celebration. On Oct. 7, as the increasingly devastating reports rolled in, an Israeli friend told a family member of mine, “Finally, the left will realize what it’s like, living with these terrorists next door.” He, along with 15 million other Jews, would quickly learn that they were wrong. By the following morning, Jews around the world — October 8 Jews, if you will — had come face to face with the ancient, toxic virus that had been quietly bidding its time.

Or maybe not so quietly.

I, for one, was not that shocked. For over half a decade, I had seen how the slow drip of antisemitism, carefully enveloped in the language of social justice and human rights, had steadily poisoned people whom I had previously considered perfectly reasonable. Over the past two-and-a-half years, the three-letter Jewish organizations have pushed educational infographic after educational infographic; unfortunately, by now, it is far too late.

Antisemitism enters the cultural zeitgeist through new technology, but new technology can never contain it. This has been so since the days of the printing press, but while the printing press remained more or less the same over the course of hundreds of years, social media changes by the minute. Every few seconds, someone, somewhere, invents a new conspiracy theory, and if they’re lucky, it’ll go viral and catch on. Indeed, everything we’ve witnessed over the past couple of years can be traced back to a random internet user. Al Jazeera’s recent (ludicrous) report on evaporating Palestinians? Pro-Palestine users were tweeting such claims as early as 2024. Blatant support for U.S.-designated terror organizations across college campuses in America? I distinctly remember a popular American Palestinian activist chastising her Lebanese followers on Instagram for not expressing open support for Hezbollah way back in 2021. The recent Islamic Revolution Day demonstrations in Iran, during which attendants set statues of a Canaanite deity plastered in Israeli and American flags aflame? It all goes back to an antisemitic conspiracy on Twitter, which alleges that Jeffrey Epstein named a bank account “Baal,” after an ancient Canaanite deity, which obviously is iron-clad proof that he was running a demonic Jewish cabal that sacrificed children at the altar of a Canaanite god.

I have to wonder: are the three-letter orgs and their big donors finally paying attention? Are they — can they — adequately keep track of this monster and just how very quickly it proliferates? Or are they too busy catching up on the infographics that could have served us well in 2016, 2017, and maybe 2018? I pray, for the sake of the future of the Jewish Diaspora, that it’s the former. ■

Debbie Lechtman is a Jewish author, activist and content creator.