The Right-wing Antisemite & Jew

The Right-wing antisemitism of today is not a new one.

Hi all,

What happened on October 7, 2023, unleashed antisemitism in the United States. The antisemitism from the Left surprised many of us but was not unexpected. Since the 1960s, the Left has not only racialized us but tried to impose a racial order grounded in liberation ideology upon our society. It sought to divide Americans into the oppressed “people of color” versus the “white” oppressors. The Left gaslit many American Jews into believing that their white skin was the main feature of their identity. It was only from this place of whiteness — along with renouncing all the privileges that came with said identity — that these Jews could side with the oppressed in their fight against systemic racism. In the days after October 7, many of these Jews, expecting some form of human understanding or sympathy, were stunned to see their allies siding with Hamas. These Jews then found themselves cast to the side of the oppressors along with the charges of apartheid, genocide, and occupation. The only permissible Jew was one who denounced Israel.

The antisemitism that emerged from the Right, however, was a different breed. One doesn’t have to spend much time on X (Twitter) to see how prevalent and mainstream it has become. Social media influencers often target Israel only, lower themselves to spew outlandish conspiracies, and revive age-old blood libels to online audiences of millions. When pressed, they claim innocence and that they are only asking questions.

Here are some of them:

Ian Carroll, an influencer I never heard of before, appeared on the Joe Rogan show and claimed that the Rothschild family pushed efforts to rewrite the New Testament in order to put Judaism front and center. He went on to tell Rogan that Jeffrey Epstein was the “King of Jews” and that his sex-trafficking ring was “directly run by the Mossad.”

Tucker Carlson hosted a “historian” named Darryl Cooper on his podcast. Carlson gave free rein to Cooper to make outlandish claims that millions of Jews “ended up dead” in concentration camps because the Nazis did not have the resources to care for them. Carlson called Coop “the most popular historian in the United States.”

The Tate brothers, Andrew and Tristan, who made their fame on preaching the exploitation of women and made their money from porn sites, used their powerful social media platforms to blame the “Jewish matrix” for the human trafficking charges they face in Romania. They also have pushed conspiracy theories that accused Jews pushing pornography in order to “destroy Western society.”

Candace Owens was one of the first antisemites on scene after October 7. In one of her first video interviews with a Jewish comedian she claimed that the existence of Arab Quarters in Jerusalem was evidence of Israel’s apartheid practices. She went on to develop her antisemitism rhetoric to the point where Jews are not Jews at all but “Franks,” a meshuga sect that was a “blood cult” and pedophile ring. She famously ended a public dispute over antisemitism with Ben Shapiro by saying Christ is King.

There are many more examples of these antisemitic voices that have grown to hold a powerful sway over many on the Right. It was not too long ago that these antisemitic voices would have been ridiculed. But today’s antisemites float above all criticisms and consequences, buoyed by massive followings and social media clicks that bring them financial windfalls. Strangely, they carry themselves with the veneer of respectability, one that many of us, including myself, thought was lost to history.

This story is not a new one. The Right-wing antisemitism of today is not a new one.

The America I grew up in was less ideological. I was born to a black father and a Jewish mother in San Jose, CA. Growing up the 1980s, I never suffered antisemitism. My Jewish heritage was more of a curiosity — the story of my grandfather escaping the Nazi train only the be arrested by Russians as a “German spy” fascinated my childhood friends.

It was not until I traveled back to my grandfather’s native Poland several years ago for my documentary, “How Jack Became Black,” that I experienced this hatred for the first time and in two distinct forms.

Eli Steele on the main boulevard in Radom, Poland.

After driving south from Warsaw for hours, I arrived at the sleepy village of Nowa Slupia that is now a destination for hikers. I drove past the imposing Catholic cemetery on a slight hill with rows of gleaming marble headstones adorned with bouquets of fresh flowers. We passed the fire station and I rounded the long turn into the village center which was not much to look at aside from a butcher shop and a hiking supply store. There was no visible evidence that Jews, my family included, had lived there for hundreds of years until the Nazis came.

My Polish guide and translator, who studied at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, had warned me before arriving in this town that he would not call me by my name.

“Your name is Edward now. We are not in Warsaw anymore.”

The American in me bristled.

We returned to the Catholic cemetery where I, against the advice of my guide, walked up to a worker and asked him where the Jewish cemetery was. He didn’t know English and as my question was translated, his eyes widened. He looked me up and down and when he heard me addressed as “Edward” he let out a laugh. He then pointed down the road to the fire station and mimicked the smashing of something. I looked back and him and saw him thrusting the cross hanging from his neck toward me and said Polish words with a certain passion that seemed to violate the sanctity of the cemetery.

I turned to my guide for the translation but he was already walking toward the fire station. When I caught up, he pulled me back so I would not step onto the gravel that lined the driveway to the outdated fire truck. He explained that there was no Jewish cemetery. Around the time of World War II, the locals had uprooted the Jewish headstones and crushed them into the gravel that now lined the driveway.

I scooped up a handful of pebbles but time had smoothed away any trace of the Jews.

I noticed the worker still watching us. He pantomimed the smashing of what I now understood to be the smashing of headstones and laughed again. It took me a moment to adjunct to the realities of this Polish land: he was an antisemite. I asked my guide for confirmation and he made a face as if what I said had been glaringly obvious all along.

“But there are no Jews here anymore,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s part of our culture, my family, too. That’s why I study in Israel.”

“What did he say back there?”

“The killers of Christ don’t deserve a resting place.”

In the beginning of Christianity, godly men saw the Jewish refusal to embrace Christ as a threat to the rising Christian civilization and they lifted the charge of Jews as Christ-killers to the level of doctrine. Then came the blood libels: Jews drank the blood of Christian children and used their blood in the baking of matzah. When Peter the Great was asked about admitting Jews into the Russian empire, he responded, “I prefer to see in our midst nations professing Mohammedanism and paganism rather than the Jews…It is my endeavor to eradicate evil.”

The longest hatred became more brutal when the Jews were blamed for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. A wave of pogroms was unleashed and all of Russia’s institutions from the police to the small businesses became violently antisemitic, leading to a mass exodus of Jews westward.

My ancestors ended up in Nowa Slupia. They sought a living in the crafts, trades, and farmlands. They prayed that this isolated town would protect them from the medieval hatred that, with he passage of time, reduced the last markings of their existence to gravel.

I did not look in the rearview mirror as I left the ancestral village for a one hour drive through the farmland to the small city of Radom. I remember the strange feeling that I had about that worker. Even though it had been so long since the last Jew lived there, he saw himself as the victim. They had killed his king.

After October 7, I saw similar behaviors online. There have always been religious postings which I have appreciated. However, many of the antisemitic influencers began to take on a grievance quality. They posted videos of several Jews spitting on Christians in Israel as if that represented all Jews. Some of the postings engaged in historical revisionism, arguing that the slaughter of Christians, not Jews, in World War II was the real Holocaust. They claimed that Hitler never made antisemitic speeches and that Winston Churchill was the true villain. They called Israel’s war against Hamas another Holocaust. Like the cemetery worker, these influencers refused to see the Jews as a persecuted people. Rather, it was them, the politicized Christian influencers who belonged to the persecuted tribe.

In today’s American culture of victimization, victimhood is power.

The remains of the towering Soviet Union-era pastel colored apartment buildings came into view and I drove past them into the city center of Radom where I encountered my second form of antisemitism.

My grandfather was the first and only one in his family to be born here in 1918 — a year before pogroms in Poland and Ukraine killed over 100,000 Jews. His eight beloved sisters, who would all perish in the Holocaust, had moved here in the hopes that their seamstress talents would bring a better life.

My guide led me to a residential courtyard at the bottom of the elegant, cobblestone boulevard that ran through the heart of Radom. The courtyard stood mere feet away from the archway that marked the entrance to what had been the larger of the two ghettos which the Nazis had forced the Jews into. As we entered, I saw a poor, elderly man with bad teeth tending to the doves cooing in the cages. He had on an artist smock stained with paint. My guide had brought me here to show me an old Yiddish sign on a nearby wall, the only thing remaining from a pre-Holocaust Jewish bakery. As I studied the faded blue brushstrokes of the sign, the painter gestured toward me and said, “Zyd?”

My guide mouthed “Jew” to me.

Then the painter smiled, his face creasing, and said in guttural English, “We miss the Jews.”

“Then why did you try to kill them all?” That was the first thought in my head.

I looked at his paintings on the nearby easels. They were lifeless and uninspired. There was mud, trash, and empty vodka bottles strewn around. I looked through an open door and saw that there were no walls. Everything, including the stairs, had been stripped to dead, structural wood and wires. The only beauty were the doves.

I asked the painter why he missed the Jews.

“They knew how to do things, how the world runs. They took all that with them. My father, he would say, he missed the Zyds.”

The painter then went off on a spiel in his native tongue that my guide later told me was unfiltered antisemitism, conspiracies of world domination and all.

Then the painter looked me in the eye: “I knew you were Jewish by your face. I can tell.”

Did he? Or was it my interest in the Yiddish sign that gave him the hint?

Unlike the cemetery worker with his cross, the painter was a different breed of antisemite. His hatred was not grounded in Christianity but in the Age of Enlightenment. That era saw the emancipation of Jews from ghettos in western-central Europe as well as the rise of new nation-states along with the fervor of nationalism. Many Europeans moved beyond seeing religious differences as a threat and embraced the secular influences upon their societies as an advancement in civilization.

Though on the eastern edge of central Europe, Radom felt those influences. When I walked the grand boulevard earlier that morning, my guide pointed to the spacious apartments above the shops and said that the wealthy Jews had lived there along with Catholics and a handful of Protestants.

As Europe tried to move on from the longest hatred, a serious, disaffected minority resisted. They saw the diminishing role of Christianity and the idea of Jews assimilating deeper into their societies as an existential threat.

If they lost the Jew, what other scapegoat would excuse their shortcomings as men?

They recognized that the medieval anti-Judaism held little sway with the newly enlightened. Their hatred needed reinvention. An abundance of anti-Jewish literature, art, and so-called intellectual thought emerged around the “Jewish question,” laying the foundation for the anti-Jewish tropes that Kayne West would spew nearly 150 years later. Even Jesus of Nazareth was reinvented as a Nordic Aryan during this period to erase the physical stigma of the Jewish identity.

A pseudoscience of racializing an entire group of people as a certain phenotype — influenced by America’s racial classification system — began to grow around the Jew. When the word “antisemitism” first came into being in Germany in the late 1870s, it was embraced widely and positively by its adherents and several burgeoning political movements as a secular political ideology that viewed Jews as a distinct biological group.

Many Jews had assimilated to the point of putting nationality before religion (when the Nazis came for the German Jews, the common refrain was, “But I am German!”) The reframing of Jews as a biological group nullified the official view held by the Christian Church that religious conversion transformed a Jew into a Christian. The Jews became a race distinct from the Aryan race and, instead of fading away, the longest hatred was given new life.

Out of this, the antisemite emerged. Anti-Judaism became antisemitism.

The antisemite embraced this label for it expressed — in his view — the irrefutable biological reality of the Jews as well as their disproportionate amount of influence within society. The dissidents of the antisemite turn the label on him to mean all things anti-Jewish. But the antisemite could care less about this shaming. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, the antisemite’s cause is a passion. Emotions of hate, not truth, feeds his passion.

That is why the painter irritated me when he said he missed the Jews. When the Nazis crossed the train tracks to the impoverished side of Radom where my grandfather grew up, he said the Poles helped the Nazis. His last memories of his hometown were the Poles slitting their fingers across their throats as the Nazi trains took him away. It was not until the Jews were gone that antisemites like the painter and his father realized that they had lost a significant part of their identity.

Who would they define themselves against for false esteem? For some meaning in life?

When I turned to go and reached the street, I turned back and took a picture in my head of the painter in the dirty courtyard. I felt sorry for the doves.

To this day, I have thought often about the two antisemites. They fascinate me because the disconnect between their lives and mine is absolute. The multiracial group of friends that I grew up with in the Bay Area were not blind to our immutable characteristics. They were just not as important as the common values and interests that we built our friendships upon. To live as the antisemitic did, to live in a world of conspiratorial traps, to live in a world where identity was not earned but defined against the Jew — against the “other” — was anathema to us.

I am fascinated by the antisemites on the Right and I suspect that others share this same fascination. The antisemite is the mediocre man and how can such mediocrity rise to such heights and why is the market for it so strong?

One can blame social media. It rewards sensationalism, hatred, and controversy. The more clicks (from you, guilty one) the more money and notoriety.

However, social media is only the latest vehicle for this age-old hatred which today’s Right-wing antisemites carry forward and without much originality. The seduction of this antisemitism, in the words of Sartre, is that it is a form of Manichaeism that “explains the course of the world by the struggle of the principle of Good with the principle of Evil.” In such a world, the Evil Jew controls the levers in all aspects of society.

It is this evil that allows the “Good” antisemite to be “impervious to reason,” in the words of Sartre. How can the antisemite expect be responsible to reality when faced with such evil? These windmills must be slayed.

More devastatingly, Sartre, in his timeless definition of the antisemite, wrote that the “antisemite is not too anxious to possess individual merit. Merit has to be sought, just like truth.” It is far easier for that painter, for a Candace Owens, to seek esteem in mediocrity and the irresponsibility that it permits.

Sartre strips the anti-Semite further: “He chooses the irremediable out of fear of being free; he chooses mediocrity out of the fear of being alone, and out of pride he makes of this irremediable mediocrity a rigid aristocracy. To this end, he finds the existence of the Jew absolutely necessary. Otherwise, to whom would he be superior?”

That right there is the fear of the weak-minded who spread their poison through our great nation built on the notions of freedom and merit. Most of all, the antisemite is a tribal being who defines his self and esteem by the “other.” And for too long, we have permitted ourselves to indulge in tribal politics and we should not be surprised when the antisemite joins in.

There is no other antidote to this free fall other than the merciless annihilation of the antisemite’s “Good.” We must raise the consciousness of the America individual among our youth as well as what it means to live as an American. Nothing less than truth and endless battles that our ancestors fought to preserve it is at stake.

My best,

Eli