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American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews?

(JTA) — Among Sandra Fox’s most memorable finds during her years mining American archives for materials about Jewish summer camps was a series of letters about the hours before lights-out.

The letters were by counselors who were documenting an unusual window in the day when they stopped supervising campers, leaving the teens instead to their own devices, which sometimes included romance and sexual exploration.

“It was each division talking about how they dealt with that free time before bed in ‘age-appropriate ways,’” Fox recalled about the letters written by counselors at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, the original iteration of the Conservative movement’s network of summer camps.

“I’ve spoken to Christian people who work at Christian camps and have researched Christian camps. There is no free time before bed,” Fox told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That’s not a thing if you don’t want kids to hook up. So it was just amazing to find these documents of Camp Ramah leaders really having the conversation explicitly. Most of the romance and sexuality stuff is implicit in the archives.”

The letters are quoted extensively in Fox’s new book, “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.” Fox, who earned a PhD in history from New York University in 2018 and now teaches and directs the Archive of the American Jewish Left there, tells the story of American Judaism’s most immersive laboratory for constructing identity and contesting values.

Next week, Fox is launching the book with an event at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. (Tickets for the Feb. 23 event are available here.) Attendees will be able to tour adult versions of some of the most durable elements of Jewish summer camps, from Israeli dance to Yiddish and Hebrew instruction to Color Wars to Tisha B’Av, the mournful holiday that always falls over the summer.

“I never considered doing a normal book party,” Fox said. “It was always really obvious to me that a book about experiential Jewish education and role play should be celebrated and launched out into the world through experiential education and role play.”

Sandra Fox’s 2023 book “The Jews of Summer,” looks at the history of American Jewish summer camps. (Courtesy of Fox)

We spoke to Fox about her party plans, how Jewish summer camps have changed over time and how they’ve stayed the same, and the cultural history of that before-bed free time.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. We’ll be continuing the conversation in a virtual chat through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Feb. 27 at 1 p.m.; register here.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Given how much Jews like to talk about camp, were you surprised that this book hadn’t already been written?

Sandra Fox: There’s been a lot of fruitful research on the history of various camps, but it’s usually been focused on one camping movement or one camp type. So there are articles about Zionist camps. There are certainly articles out there about the Ramah camps. A lot of camps have produced books — either their alumni associations or a scholar who went to let’s say, Reform movement camps have created essay collections about those camps. And there are also books about Habonim and other Zionist youth movements.

I don’t really know why this is the first stab at this kind of cross-comparison. It might be that people didn’t think there would be so much to compare. I think the overwhelming feeling I get from readers so far, people who preordered and gotten their books early, is that they’re very surprised to hear how similar these camps are. So perhaps it’s that scholars weren’t thinking about Jewish summer camps that came from such diverse standpoints as having something enough in common to write about them all at once.

Also distance from the time period really helps. You can write a book about — and people do write a book about — the ’60s and ’70s and have been for decades, but there’s a certain amount of distance from the period that has allowed me to do this, I think, and maybe it also helps that I’m generationally removed. A lot of the scholars who’ve worked on camps in the postwar period went to camps in the postwar period. It makes a lot of sense that it would be harder to write this sort of sweeping thing perhaps. The fact that I’m a millennial meant that I could write about the postwar period — and also write kind of an epilogue-style chapter that catches us up to the present.

What’s clear is that there’s something amazing about studying summer camp, a completely immersive 24/7 experience that parents send children away for. There’s no better setting for thinking about how adults project their anxieties and desires about the future onto children. There’s also no place better to think about power dynamics and age and generational tension.

I was definitely struck by the “sameyness” of Jewish camps in your accounting. What do you think we can learn from that, either about camps or about us as Jews?

I do want to say that while there’s a lot of sameyness, whenever you do a comparative study, there’s a risk of kind of collapsing all these things and making them seem too similar. What I’m trying to convey is that the camp leaders from a variety of movements took the basic structure of the summer camp as we know it — its daily schedule, its environment, its activities — and it did look similar from camp to camp, at least on that surface level.

If you look at the daily schedules in comparison, they might have a lot of the same features but they’ll be called slightly different things depending on if the camp leans more heavily towards Hebrew, or Yiddish, or English. But the content within those schedules would be rather different. It’s more that the skeletal structure of camp life has a lot of similarities across the board and then the details within each section of the day or the month had a lot of differences.

But I think what it says is that in the postwar period, the anxieties that Jewish leaders had about the future of Judaism are really, really similar and the solution that they found within the summer camp, they were pretty unanimous about. They just then took the model and inserted within it their particular nationalistic, linguistic or religious perspectives. So I think more so than saying anything about American Jewry, it shows kind of how flexible camping is. And that’s not just the Jewish story. Lots of different Americans have embraced summer camping in different ways.

So many people who have gone to camp have a fixed memory of what camp is like, where it’s caught in time, but you argue that camps have actually undergone lots of change. What are the most striking changes you documented, perhaps ones that might have been hard for even insiders to discern as they happened?

First of all, the Israel-centeredness of American Jewish education as we know it today didn’t happen overnight in 1948, for instance. It was a slower process, beyond the Zionist movements where that was already going on, for decades before 1948. Ramah and the Reform camps for instance took their time towards getting to the heavily Zionist-imbued curricula that we know.

There was considerable confusion and ambivalence at first about what to do with Israel: whether to raise an Israeli flag, not because they were anti-Zionist, but because American Jews had been thinking about proving their loyalty to America for many generations. There were some sources that would talk about — what kind of right do American Jews have to raise the Israeli flag when they’re not Israeli? So that kind of Israel-centeredness that is really a feature of camp life today was a slower process than we might think.

It fit camp life really well because broader American camps used Native American symbols, in some ways that are problematic today, to create what we know of as an iconography of camp life. So for Jews, Israel and its iconography, or Palestine and iconography before ’48, provided an alternative set of options that were read as Jewish, but it still took some time to get to where we are now in terms of the Israel focus.

One of the reasons I place emphasis on the Yiddish summer camps is to show that in the early 20th century and the mid-20th century there was more ideological diversity in the Jewish camping sphere, including various forms of Yiddishist groups and socialist groups and communist groups that operated summer camps. Most of them have closed, and their decline is obviously a change that tells a story of how American Jewry changed over the course of the postwar period. Their legacy is important, too: I have made the argument that these camps in a lot of ways modeled the idea of Yiddish as having a future in America.

What about hookup culture? Contemporary discourse about Jewish camps have focused on sex and sexuality there. What did you observe about this in the archives?

I think people think of the hookup culture of Jewish camps today and certainly in my time in the ’90s and 2000s as a permanent feature, and in some ways I found through my research and oral history interviews that that was the case, but it was really interesting to zoom out a little bit and think about how Jewish summer camps changed in terms of sexual romantic culture, in relationship to how America changed with the sexual revolution and the youth culture.

It’s not it’s not useful to think about Jewish hookup culture in a vacuum. It’s happening within America more broadly. And so of course, it’s changed dramatically over time. And one of the things I learned that was so fascinating is that Jewish summer camps were actually their leaders were less concerned in a lot of ways about sexuality at camp in the ’40s and ’50s, than they were in the late ’60s and ’70s. Because earlier premarital sex was pretty rare, at least in the teenage years, so they were not that concerned about what happened after lights out because they kind of assumed whatever was going on was fairly innocent.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, that’s when camps have to actually think about how to balance allowance and control. They want to allow campers to have these relationships, to have their first sexual experiences, and part of that is related to rising rates of intermarriage and wanting to encourage love between Jews, but they also want to control it because there’s a broader societal moment in which the sexuality of teenagers is problematized and their and their sexual culture is more public.

There’s been a real wave of sustained criticism by former campers about the cultures that they experienced, arguing that the camps created an inappropriately sexualized and unsafe space. There’s been a lot of reaction to that and the broader #MeToo moment. I’m curious about what you can speculate about a future where that space is cleaned up, based on your historical research — what is gained and what, potentially, could be lost?

Without being involved in camping today — and I want to really make that disclaimer because I know a lot of change is happening and lot of organizations are involved to talk about this issue better, to train camps and camp leaders and their counselors to not create a pressured environment for camper — I think what the history shows is that this hookup culture did not come about out of nowhere. It was partly related to the broader changes in America and the sexual revolution.

But it was also partly created because camps really needed to have campers’ buy-in, in order to be “successful.” A huge argument of my book is that we think about the power of camps as if camp directors have campers as, like, puppets on strings, and that what they do is what happens in camp life. But actually, campers have changed the everyday texture of life at camp over the course of the decades in so many different ways by resisting various ideas or just not being interested.

So hookup culture is also part of making campers feel like they have freedom at camp and that’s essential. That’s not a side project — that is essential to their ability to get campers to come back. It’s a financial need, and it’s an ideological need. If you make campers feel like they have freedom, then they will feel like they freely took on the ideologies your camp is promoting in a really natural way.

The last part of it is rising rates of intermarriage. As rates of intermarriage rose in the second half of the 20th century, there’s no doubt in my mind from doing the research that the preexisting culture around sexuality at camp and romance at camp got turbo-boosted [to facilitate relationships that could potentially lead to marriage between two Jews]. At that point, the allowance and control that camp leaders were trying to create for many decades leans maybe more heavily towards allowance.

There are positives to camp environments being a place where campers can explore their sexualities. There’s definitely a lot of conversation about the negative effects and those are all very, very real. I know people who went through horrible things at a camp and I also know people who experienced it as a very sex-positive atmosphere. I know people in my age range who were able to discover that they were gay or lesbian at camp in safety in comparison to home, so it’s not black and white at all. I hope that my chapter on romance and sexuality can maybe add some historical nuance to the conversation and give people a sense of how this actually happened. Because it happened for a whole bunch of reasons.

I think there’s a consensus view that camp is one of the most “successful” things the Jews do. But it’s hard to see where lessons from camp or camp culture are being imported to the rest of Jewish life. I’m curious what you see as kind of the lessons that Jewish institutions or Jewish communities have taken from camp — or have they not done that?

Every single public engagement I do about my work has boiled down to the question of, well, does it work? Does camp work? Is it successful? And that’s been a question that a lot of social scientists have been interested in. I don’t want to oversimplify that research, but a lot of the ways that they’ve measured success have been things that are not necessarily a given to all Jews as obviously the right way to be a Jew. So, for instance, in the ’90s and early 2000s, at the very least, a lot of research was about how, you know, “XYZ” camp and youth movement were successfully curbing intermarriage. A lot of them also asked campers and former campers how they feel about Israel, and it’s always if they are supportive of Israel in very normative ways, right, giving money visiting, supporting Israel or lobbying for its behalf — then camps have been successful.

I’m not interested in whether camps were successful by those metrics. I’m interested in how we got to the idea that camp should be successful in those ways in the first place. How did we get to those kinds of normative assumptions of like, this is a good Jew; a good Jew marries a Jew; a good Jew supports Israel, no matter what. So what I wanted to do is zoom out from that question of success and show how camp actually functions.

And then the question of “does it work” is really up to the reader. To people who believe that curbing intermarriage is the most important thing, then camps have been somewhat successful in the sense that people who go to these heavily educational camps are less likely to marry out of the faith.

But I am more interested in what actually happened at camp. And in terms of their legacies, I wanted to show how they changed various aspects of American Jewish life, and religion and politics. So I was really able to find how camping was essential in making kind of an Israel-centered Jewish education the norm. I was also able to draw a line between these Yiddish camps over the ’60s and ’70s that closed in the ’80s and contemporary Yiddish. The question of success is a real tricky and political one in a way that a lot of people have not talked about.

And is camp also fun? Because you’re creating a camp experience for your book launch next week.

Camp is fun — for a lot of people. Camp was not fun for everyone. And so I do want to play with that ambivalence at the party, and acknowledge that and also acknowledge that some people loved camp when they were younger and have mixed feelings about it now.

The party is not really a celebration of Jewish summer camp. People will be drinking and having fun and dancing — but I want them to be thinking while also about what is going on and why. How is Tisha B’Av [the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem that falls at the height of summer] commemorated at camp, for example?

Or what songs are we singing and what do they mean? I think a lot of people when they’re little kids, they learn songs in these Jewish summer camps that they can’t understand and later they maybe learn Hebrew and go, whoa, we were singing what?! My example from Zionist summer camp is singing “Ein Li Eretz Acheret,” or “I Have No Other Country.” We were in America and we obviously have another country! I don’t think anyone in my youth movement actually believes the words “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” because we live in America and people tend to kind of like living in America and most of them do not move to Israel.

So at the party we’ll be working through the fun of it, and at the same time the confusion of it and the ambivalence of it. I want it to be fun, and I also want it to be something that causes people to think.

—
The post American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Campus Frontlines: Professors and Students Continue to Fuel Antisemitism

A pro-Hamas group splattered red paint, symbolizing spilled blood, on an administrative building at Princeton University. Photo: Screenshot

There may be a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, but on university campuses globally, antisemitism has yet to end. The encampments that took up space both on the lawns of universities and on the front pages of newspapers may be gone, but the new form of antisemitism, one that student leaders and professors are driving, is not.

The top global universities are expected to train students to become the next leaders in society. That requires complex courses to be taught with accuracy and objectivity.

This is not the case at Princeton, however. One course, entitled Gender, Reproduction, and Genocide, is scheduled for the spring 2025-2026 semester.

Taught by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, the course is said to explore “genocide through the analytic of gender” and specifically will focus on the “ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

In the course, students will “engage reproductive justice frameworks,” suggesting that Israel is committing genocide by deliberately targeting institutions that would prevent women from becoming pregnant. However, this claim, spread by the UN, has no factual basis.

The UN report relies on a 2024 ABC News story that claimed an IDF shell was deliberately fired at an IVF clinic in December 2023, allegedly destroying more than 4,000 embryos with the intention to “prevent births.”

But even ABC News and its sole source, who was not present at the time, could not verify that an IDF shell caused the damage. In fact, a wide-angle photo of the scene shows a nearby high-rise building visibly damaged, while the IVF clinic itself appears fully intact.

If the course’s entire framework being held up by falsified information wasn’t enough, it also seeks to compare the history of the “genocide” in Gaza to other genocides, including the Holocaust. There is no lack of moral clarity more evident than flattening the Holocaust into a political talking point. No comparison can be made between a war of defense and the industrialization of murder that the Nazis waged against the Jewish people.

Yet, this vile comparison does not come as much of a surprise, considering the professor herself has, in the past, denied the murder and assault of Jews.

Antisemitism from faculty is not limited to academic courses. A Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at University College London hosted Samar Maqusi as part of a series titled “Palestine: From Existence to Resistance.” Although the lecture was advertised as a discussion on the origins of Zionism, Maqusi instead promoted classic antisemitic tropes, including that Jews require the blood of gentiles for making their “special pancakes,” referring to a medieval blood libel in which Jews use the blood of gentiles for making matzah.

Unfortunately, many discussions of Zionism on university campuses come from those with hostile and thus inaccurate beliefs on what it truly means to be a Zionist.

Even in an interfaith discussion at the City College of New York, a Hillel director was told he was “responsible for the murder” of Gazans and caused “disgust” in other participants because he was a Zionist. Activist and student groups further condemned the interfaith discussion. Not in favor of defending the Hillel director whose sole wrongdoing was being a Jew, but because interfaith efforts were causing the “normalization of Zionism.”

In warping the definitions to fit the narrative of the speaker or lecturer, lectures and campus spaces have become breeding grounds for bias and thinly veiled antisemitism.

Antisemitic Student Voices

Student leaders and activists have also frequently isolated their Jewish peers.

At The Harvard Crimson, one column suggests that there are some “visions of Zionism more morally objectionable” and therefore one might “feel wary of staying friends with Zionists.” It should then be no wonder to the author why Jewish students feel isolated on campuses.

This becomes all the more problematic when the students elected to represent the entire student union are not neutral nor representative on complex issues, particularly regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at large.

At the University of Oxford, the Oxford Student Union elected Arwa Elrayess as the incoming president. She has been part of a no-budget documentary on the pro-Palestine protests that erupted after October 7. In one post promoting the film, Elrayess makes the moral equivalence between the Holocaust and the war against Hamas in Gaza by comparing the deaths of Anne Frank and Hind Rajab, a Gazan civilian.

Elrayess is meant to represent all students equally. Still, her posts suggest otherwise and are part of a worrying trend of using Jewish trauma to uncritically discuss Israel’s war.

As the current academic year continues, it remains clear that the issue of antisemitism on campus has not gone away, nor can it be afforded to be swept aside and ignored. When courses are built on debunked claims and student leaders use Holocaust inversion to further their anti-Israel narratives, it becomes evident that this issue is not isolated but rather is systemic, requiring urgent and sustained action.

Jewish students on campuses worldwide deserve the same safety and respect as any other student, and all students deserve an education grounded in truth and accuracy. The moral and intellectual integrity of higher education depends on confronting antisemitism directly, rather than allowing it to fester under the guise of activism or academic freedom.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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Social Media Algorithms and Design Spread Antisemitism — Not Foreign Actors

A 3D-printed miniature model of Elon Musk and the X logo are seen in this illustration taken Jan. 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Recently, as Jewish Insider reported, bipartisan lawmakers in Congress hailed what they saw as a major advance in fighting online antisemitism — X’s new location feature.

The new tool, showing which country an account operates from — had started revealing that some accounts spreading antisemitic content in US political discussions were based overseas. For legislators on both sides, this represented a digital unmasking.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) remarked that the feature exposed “foreign interests trying to spread antisemitic poison” while “masquerading as Americans.”

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) insisted Americans “deserve to know which accounts are run from abroad, so we know the true source of these narratives.” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) took a geopolitical view: “Beijing, Moscow and Tehran know they cannot defeat us economically or militarily, so they exploit controversial issues, like Israel and antisemitism, and try to divide.” Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley declared the feature “a huge win for transparency and American security.”

The story is appealing: foreign enemies weaponize antisemitism to fracture American unity, and transparency about account origins helps us counter these external threats. There’s truth here — bad actors do exploit divisive topics.

But this celebration reveals a dangerous misdiagnosis.

As the lead of the Decoding Antisemitism project — which has examined over 300,000 items of digital content across multiple crises — I’ve identified three distinct but connected drivers of online antisemitic radicalization: coordinated malicious actors (foreign and domestic), algorithmic amplification through platform design, and homegrown participatory dynamics enabled by online communication itself — anonymity, mutual reinforcement, and the normalization of extremism through constant exposure.

The issue isn’t that foreign influence exists — it does. The problem is treating it as the primary driver while overlooking the structural and domestic conditions that allow antisemitic narratives to take root and spread.

How we diagnose problems determines how we design solutions — and misdiagnosis doesn’t just limit our response, it actively redirects resources, attention, and political will away from factors we can actually control.

Comprehending online antisemitism demands a virological approach: examining not just where accounts originate, but how hate narratives evolve, which platform features enable transmission, and what conditions allow them to thrive. Yet social media platforms remain essentially black boxes — we lack systematic tools to understand dynamics unfolding within these digital spaces.

Lawmakers celebrate a feature revealing account geography while leaving the actual black box — algorithmic recommendations, engagement optimization, and content amplification — completely unexamined.

The Conflation Problem

The Jewish Insider article and quoted lawmakers collapse “foreign,” “adversarial,” and “antisemitic” into one category. This conflation obscures more than it reveals.

It treats geographic origin as definitive of intent and impact. An account in South Asia or Eastern Europe engaging with US politics isn’t necessarily a state-directed operation. It may simply be someone with opinions about American affairs. Account location reveals nothing about whether content is coordinated, conspiratorial, state-driven, or simply individual opinion.

More crucially, emphasizing foreign accounts distracts from what we know empirically about domestic antisemitic content production.

Following the October 7 attacks, antisemitic discourse surged to 36-38% of comments on major UK news outlet YouTube channels — nearly double the pre-crisis baseline. After the Washington museum shooting in May 2025, antisemitic content averaged 43% across major English-language news channels, with some reaching 66%.

These aren’t fringe platforms infiltrated by foreign bots — they’re mainstream digital spaces where domestic audiences actively produce and amplify antisemitic narratives.

Research on antisemitic discourse spread reveals a three-phase domestic process: elite figures make strategically ambiguous statements, digital intermediaries (podcasters, YouTubers, influencers) reframe and sharpen this messaging, and comment sections collapse ambiguity into explicit hate speech.

This “cascading radicalization” is primarily homegrown, driven by domestic actors and platform dynamics — not solely foreign infiltration.

Our analysis cannot definitively establish every anonymous commenter’s geographic origin. What we observe are linguistic and cultural markers — idiom, references, political framings — indicating domestic participation, combined with the absence of coordination patterns typical of bot networks. The antisemitic discourse we documented emerges through “dialogical warfare”: organic exchanges between users presenting as ordinary Americans who deploy antisemitism as an explanatory framework for complex issues.

When a US Congressmember amplifies antisemitic tropes, when popular podcasts platform guests trafficking in conspiracy theories about Jewish power, when partisan media deploy dual loyalty accusations — these aren’t foreign operations. They’re homegrown productions embedded in American political discourse and amplified through domestic networks.

The Missing Architecture

Most striking about celebrating X’s location feature is what remains unexamined: the platform itself.

There’s virtually no discussion about platform design, algorithmic amplification, recommendation systems, the attention economy, or structural dynamics allowing hateful content to scale. The feature is treated as inherently truth-revealing, exposing hidden foreign manipulation.

But this framing evades more important questions: why do certain narratives spread, how do platform architectures enable amplification, and how do online communication conditions — anonymity, mutual reinforcement, constant exposure to extremity — create environments where antisemitic ideas mutate and take hold?

The answer has little to do with account location and everything to do with how platforms are built. Engagement-based algorithms reward emotionally provocative content — outrage, fear, tribal solidarity. Recommendation systems create filter bubbles and radicalization pathways. Virality architecture privileges simplification, moral clarity, and villain identification. The attention economy systematically rewards polarizing, enraging content. These are design choices, not inevitable features.

Meanwhile, online communication conditions themselves — anonymity removing social accountability, mutual confirmation among like-minded voices, omnipresent hate speech normalizing extremity — create participatory environments where ordinary users become active radicalization contributors.

Contemporary antisemitism increasingly operates through coded expressions, memes, and multimodal signals evading simple keyword detection. The watermelon emoji, the paraglider symbol — these function as in-group markers regardless of geographic location. Strategic ambiguity, not foreign origin, enables antisemitic narratives to spread while maintaining plausible deniability.

The Political Convenience

The “foreign adversaries spreading antisemitism” narrative aligns with a bipartisan preference: attributing social breakdown to hostile external actors. This framing is politically convenient across the spectrum.

For Republicans, it allows condemning antisemitism without confronting how right-wing media has mainstreamed antisemitic conspiracy theories — “great replacement” narratives, George Soros accusations, “globalist” rhetoric. For Democrats, it enables criticizing online hate without reckoning with how segments of progressive activism have normalized anti-Zionist rhetoric often sliding into antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and loyalty.

The foreign influence frame permits symbolic accountability –the appearance of action without institutional change. Lawmakers can call for location transparency, celebrate platform implementations, and position themselves as defenders against external threats. What they needn’t do is examine how American political rhetoric contributes to normalizing antisemitism, push for regulatory interventions altering platform incentives, or confront how online communication creates radicalization pathways.

This isn’t analytical sloppiness. It’s moral abdication.

What Accountability Would Actually Require

Genuine accountability for online antisemitism requires confronting all three drivers — not just one.

First, acknowledging that while malicious actors (foreign and domestic) exploit divisive issues, they operate within a larger ecosystem. We must recognize the United States as an active site where antisemitic ideas are produced, circulated, and normalized through domestic political culture, media ecosystems, and participatory online dynamics — not merely as an innocent target.

Second, confronting how platform architecture shapes what spreads, and demanding transparency not just about account locations but about algorithmic recommendations, content moderation, the attention economy’s incentives, and metrics driving platform design.

Third, recognizing that high-profile domestic actors — politicians, media figures, influencers with millions of followers — bear far more responsibility for mainstreaming antisemitic narratives than anonymous accounts. We must understand the three-phase process through which elite ambiguity cascades into radicalized discourse.

Fourth, examining how partisan political discourse traffics in antisemitic tropes through strategic ambiguity — and being willing to call this out when politically inconvenient.

Fifth, acknowledging online communication conditions themselves — anonymity, mutual reinforcement, constant exposure to extremity — are creating environments where ordinary users become radicalization participants.

X’s location feature may provide useful information about one factor among many. But treating this as revelatory, exposing the “true source” of antisemitic narratives, is a dangerous misdiagnosis.

If democracies want to confront antisemitism seriously, they must address all three drivers: monitor and counter malicious actors where they exist, examine platform architectures amplifying hate, and confront participatory dynamics and communication conditions enabling antisemitic narratives to flourish in mainstream spaces.

How we diagnose problems shapes how we conceptualize solutions. Focusing exclusively on foreign actors may be politically convenient. It will not protect the public sphere.

Dr. Matthias J. Becker is the AddressHate Research Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Cambridge, and Lead of the “Decoding Antisemitism” project, which analyzes how antisemitic ideas spread and mutate in digital communication.

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‘Controversy’ Over Antisemitism List Misses the Point

Fox personality Tucker Carlson speaks at the 2017 Business Insider Ignition: Future of Media conference in New York, U.S., November 30, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

If you would have told me 20 years ago there would be a list of prominent antisemites of the year, with 10 people on it, and that one of the world’s most famous rappers would have a video called “Heil Hitler,” I would not have believed you.

If you told me that instead of focusing on antisemitism, people instead would complain about who is or isn’t on the list, that I would have believed.

I have heard some people ask what a list really achieves. That’s certainly one question. Here’s another question: what are other groups doing to fight antisemitism when it is the worst it’s been in many years?

As a writer, I have had more antisemitic comments to some of my articles than ever before, including asking if I was paid $7,000 a post. I am not an influencer, and judging by my outfits, one could surmise I was not paid $7,000 for anything — but that’s besides the point. It goes back to the idea that we’re focusing on the controversy surrounding antisemitism, rather than the antisemitism itself.

Tucker Carlson may win this year’s award — which is hosted by the site StopAntisemitism.org — but at least the contest is bringing awareness to the issue of antisemitism. Candace Owens was the winner last year.

While doing something is not always better than doing nothing — this list is an example of how it is better to do something. There are a lot of big talkers who claim to know the best way to fight antisemitism, but when I’ve asked them how to do it, I’ve gotten mostly crickets. Many are asleep at the wheel. They don’t counter blatant antisemitism, they let their friends and others get away with anti-Israel or anti-Jewish rhetoric, and when it comes to the media, many don’t push back at all on the biased claims of their guests.

So I think it’s important to have a list to call people out. While I might have chosen a different top 10 than those listed, that’s not the point. As the old joke goes, with two Jews, there are three opinions. So it is unsurprising that Jews will blame this organization with little ideas of their own to fight antisemitism. It is both sad and predictable. I, for one, am glad that people are finding creative ways to bring attention to this issue.

The author is a writer based in New York.

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