Why antisemites always have a blast—and how Jews enhance the experience
Today’s digital culture has monetized these pleasures. Online platforms are engineered to maximize engagement by maximizing emotional reward. Antisemitism is extraordinarily well suited to such systems. Platforms amplify the thrill of forbidden knowledge, insider language, memes, and collective outrage while making them instantly accessible and endlessly repeatable. The digital dogpile—coordinated mass attack on a single Jewish target—is the mob made digital. Like the analogue mobs that preceded them, these too are often gleeful and public. But unlike earlier forms, participation no longer requires gathering in the street or much physical effort at all. The mob no longer needs to gather, it simply needs to log on.
Flooding Jewish journalists’ social media feeds with Holocaust jokes and “oven” memes; defacing synagogues, menorahs, or Jewish community centers with swastikas—often timed to holidays; filming antisemitic taunts of visibly Jewish people and posting them online for laughs; turning classic antisemitic tropes into viral “ironic” content or remix videos—none of these are coherent responses to a supposedly sophisticated international cabal controlling the world’s economy, politics, media, migration, and satellites. They are rituals of humiliation. The point is not resistance. The point is pleasure.
"The third pleasure is moral. Antisemitism allows its adherents to experience hate as virtue. The antisemite does not feel like a bully. His experience is one of courage. He is exposing hidden power. Defending society. Cruelty becomes public service. This framing—hating Jews as just and right—has proved infinitely adaptable. Medieval violence against Jews was 'defense of Christendom.' In the medieval Islamic world, Jewish subjugation under dhimmi law was framed as righteous social order and mercy. Soviet purges were coded as 'anti-cosmopolitan virtue.' Nazi propaganda framed persecution as national hygiene. In much of the world today, antisemitism travels under the banner of anti-Zionism and resistance, repackaging eliminationist sentiment as liberation theology. The vocabulary shifts—anti-colonialism, anti-globalism, anti-elitism—but the emotional architecture remains. The antisemite gets to feel good. He is a whistleblower. A truth teller. A patriot. A freedom fighter. It is remarkable how stable the narrative structure remains. The blood libel accusations that convulsed medieval Europe—murdered innocents, monstrous perpetrators, the righteous community that exposes them—have proven durable and portable. Dress the accusation in the language of human rights reporting rather than theology and the structure barely changes."
