Why "Zionist" Became a Racial Slur — And How Jews Can Fight Back

Watch and Listen

A couple of weeks ago, something happened to me.

Maybe you read about it, maybe you didn't.

I'm not gonna get into it.

But what I will get into is how that experience granted me the

opportunity to analyze literally thousands of hateful messages and try

to draw some conclusions from them.

With this mountain of data, I was able to distinguish certain unique patterns

in behavioral norms online, the sociology of a certain kind of social media user.

And most interestingly, to me, the root of some of the most common anti-Jewish

racism being spewed on our screens.

Now some of the hate I got was your tired run of the mill racism, the

K word, what size oven fits your head, which was a weird way to phrase

that you people are an effing cancer on Earth, et cetera, et cetera.

Not so interesting.

Also, got a lot of nepo baby, which I only mentioned because

it's really fun to say never baby.

If I had a band, I'd call it NPO Baby.

Anyway.

Also not interesting, but what was interesting was the most common

type of HA speech I received, which was a variation on a single theme.

Zionist scum, Zionist trash, Zionist pig, dirty, Zionist, Zionist, NIPPO, baby.

Okay, I'm done.

I swear.

The sheer volume of these Zionist as insult dms plus something my friend Sarah

Herwitz said on an earlier episode of this show, helped me understand something

I hadn't fully grasped until now.

Something that I know most Jews do not yet understand.

We continue to bang our heads on the tree.

Charlie Brown style shouting Zionism means self-determination in some part of

the land to which Jews are indigenous.

Don't you get it?

First of all, no, they don't get it.

They're not listening to us at all either because no one they know or

follow is saying that, or because they shut out anything counter

to their already chosen belief.

Thus, when these anti-Israel haters continue to use Zionist as an insult

anyway, we wrongfully assume that they are doing so as a code word for

Jew, as a slur, as a way to get shots in without getting tagged for it.

While the evil leaders who disseminate the anti Jew, anti-Israel

propaganda absolutely are doing this, the vast majority of people

that is the useful idiots are not.

Remember, they're idiots.

More kindly.

These are not folks admired for their superior critical thinking skills.

There's no subterfuge going on here.

What's happening is that they have had a very different and

very specific definition of Zionism implanted in their brains.

If you ask most Zionist scum dms, if they hate Jews, I guarantee you you'd get what?

Of course not.

I love Jews.

My friend is a Jew.

I'm a Jew.

My doctor's a Jew.

I'm very nice to him.

First of all, you can love an individual in your day-to-day

life and still be a total bigot towards their group as a whole.

But that's another monologue.

But that's not what's happening here either.

A large swath of the global population has been carefully taught.

By social media, by elementary and middle and high school teachers, by

their friends who learned it from their teachers or social media and by tenured

college professors that Zionism means Israelis want to kill all Palestinians

on Earth simply because of who they are.

They skin color, they're not Jewishness.

When you hear someone say, Zionism is racism, and you think, but Jews

aren't white, and there are 2 million Arab Israelis, you likely conclude

that this someone is either stupid or hates Jews, but in fact, they have

been taught that Zionism is an evil on par with other racially motivated

murder cults like Nazim or the KKK.

This is what they've been taught as verified by Sarah Hurwitz, who

visited dozens and dozens of colleges.

It is utter, illogical, brainwashed ignorance, but it's not actually motivated

by sincere bigotry towards Jewish people, which doesn't mean that it's okay,

but it's not the worst case scenario.

And it's vitally important to understand precisely what we're dealing with

so we can appropriately confront it.

And we are dealing with folks who have been formally educated to believe

that Zionism is evil incarnate.

So of course, they have no qualms about calling me Zionist scum or Zionist trash.

I. Would you have qualms about calling an actual Nazi, Nazi scum or Nazi trash?

Not only would you not feel bad, you feel good, and not just good, but righteous.

You're serving justice to the very worst.

Humanity has to offer you, my friend, are on the right side of history.

So how the hell do we fix this?

How do we reeducate millions of people?

To be honest, I don't think we can.

I think in a lot of ways our present is fucked.

The deck is absolutely stacked against us.

We are up against billions of dollars in foreign money that have been

planting this seed for decades.

We are up against an algorithm that cords us off into

completely different realities.

Lemme give you an example.

A few weeks ago, I participated in an amazing Passover theme dinner

with a ballroom full of black folks, Jews and black Jews, United and

allyship led by my friend Van Jones and over dinner Van recounted a

story of the day the Bibas children were returned to Israel in coffins.

As I'm sure most of you know, van is one of our greatest allies and

incredibly well informed about the world.

And he told me that when he asked a friend that day who happened to be

Jewish, why she wasn't returning his texts, and she said because she was

distraught over what was going on.

He had no idea what she was talking about.

Did she mean something about Trump had happened?

Was it the economy guys?

He had never even heard of the Bibi.

The algorithm doesn't show them to him.

Practically every Jew on earth was in a state of grief and trauma shouting online.

Where is everyone?

Where are my black friends?

Why is nobody speaking up for us?

It's because they literally had no idea it was happening.

For a Jew, it sounds impossible to believe, but that is

how the algorithm works.

If you're not actually engaging, not just following, but engaging regularly with

Jewish voices and you bought a yoga mat one time, so meta thinks you're a liberal.

You're just getting videos of dead God and children over and over and

over while Jewish pain is erased.

And it works the other way too, right?

Jews don't get those videos and we also don't get videos about pain in the black

community or any other community either, unless we seek it out deliberately.

The result is that we blame each other for being bad allies, when in

fact we are all just being played.

It is critical to understand how this works.

So how do you fight an algorithm?

How do you dismantle or reform the billion dollar apparatus of social media?

How do you fight back against deep-seated academic brainwashing?

There is no easy fix and certainly not a fast one.

Our opposition is going to take years.

I'm not sure how we win the battle today, but I think we can win

it in the next 10, 20, 30 years.

If we start now, instead of Jewish donors putting their names on hospitals

and theaters and sports facilities, we need to be investing in professorships

and Middle East history chairs and Jewish study departments to counter

the anti-Israel poison inside academia.

We need to make Jewish Day School financially accessible to every Jewish

family to ensure that the next generation of young Jews are fully informed,

confident in their strong Jewish identity, and cloaked in the dignity they need

to face this fight on the front lines.

We need to be showing up to school board meetings and state houses and

town halls, and playing a role in the shaping of our kids' curriculums.

We need to be bringing educators like Project Shama or Mosaic Persuasion

or Holocaust survivors to speak in our businesses and on our classrooms.

We need to be sounding the alarm and getting to work, and we need to do

it now unless you be discouraged.

Remember the stone cutters credo coined by 19th century social reformer, Jacob Reese.

Nothing seems to help.

I go and look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times

without as much as a crack showing in it.

Yet at the hundred first blow, it will split in two.

And I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

We gotta just chip, chip, chip away and who knows when it'll happen.

But one day that stone will crack.

And when it does, make sure you're able to look at it and say.

I helped do that.