A German and Israeli flag fly, on the day Chancellor Friedrich Merz meets with Israeli President Isaac Herzog for talks, in Berlin, Germany, May 12, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Liesa Johannssen

There is a comforting narrative circulating in Western discourse. It insists that the surge of anti-Israel activism we see today is nothing more than political engagement. We are told it is about policy disagreements, about borders, about governments and human rights. We are assured it has nothing to do with Jews as Jews.

Yet over and over again, the façade cracks. Beneath the slogans and hashtags, something much older surfaces. What presents itself as principled opposition to a state too often reveals itself as hostility toward a people.

For centuries, Jews have been blamed for calamities that had nothing to do with them. During the Black Death in medieval Europe, Jewish communities were accused of poisoning wells and spreading plague. These lies triggered massacres. In times of disease and social instability, fear sought an outlet and found it in the Jewish minority.

The pattern did not end there. Blood libels claimed that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals. Jews were portrayed as shadowy financiers manipulating global markets, engineering wars, and controlling governments. These were not fringe ideas whispered in dark corners. They were preached from pulpits, embedded in political rhetoric, and woven into cultural narratives.

The consequences were catastrophic. The expulsions from European kingdoms. The pogroms that swept across Eastern Europe and parts of the Middle East all the way up until the 1900s. The 1929 massacre in Hebron, where Jews were slaughtered in their homes. And ultimately the Holocaust, orchestrated by the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler, in which six million Jews were systematically murdered. Each era insisted it was responding to some new threat. Each era recycled ancient accusations.

Many antisemites now claim they only oppose Israel — but are we really supposed to believe that 80 years after 1/3 of every Jew on Earth was murdered, that antisemitism has disappeared and this is all about Israel?

Modern terrorism continued the pattern. At the 1972 Munich Olympics, members of the Israeli team were murdered in cold blood. In 1985, during the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, a Jewish passenger was singled out and killed. In 1976, Jewish hostages were separated from others in Entebbe before a dramatic rescue operation. And on October 7, 2023, Israeli civilians were massacred in their homes, children were abducted, and elderly people were dragged into Gaza by Hamas. Once again, Jews were targeted not for what they had done as individuals, but for who they were.

Each time, the world proclaims never again. Each time, hatred finds new language.

That’s why most “anti-Zionism” is just antisemitic logic repackaged for the digital age.

The intellectual dishonesty extends further. Marginal sects such as Neturei Karta are frequently showcased as the authentic voice of Judaism because they oppose the State of Israel. This tiny, fringe group does not represent mainstream Jewish communities in Israel or the Diaspora. Yet their images are amplified to suggest that “real Jews” reject Jewish self determination. It is not an honest engagement with Jewish diversity. It is a strategy to legitimize hostility.

In online spaces, the pattern is unmistakable. Comment sections filled with recycled tropes about Jewish control of media, finance, and politics are everywhere. Every geopolitical development is reframed as evidence of a hidden Jewish hand. Emotional accusations drown out factual context. In the age of algorithms, outrage spreads faster than correction. A sensational claim travels further than a careful explanation.

None of this means that Israel is beyond criticism. But there is a difference between criticism and much of what is happening now.

The State of Israel was established after centuries in which Jews lacked sovereignty and paid for that vulnerability with blood. It emerged in the aftermath of the Holocaust, when the absence of refuge proved fatal. To reduce its existence to colonial ambition is to erase Jewish history and the lived reality of exile, persecution, and statelessness.

Antisemitism disguised as anti-Zionism is not diminishing. It is intensifying across university campuses, in activist movements, and in mainstream conversation. The vocabulary may sound modern, but the underlying message echoes the past. Jews are uniquely malevolent. Jews are collectively responsible. Jews are the problem.

The antidote is not censorship but clarity. Historical literacy matters. Facts matter. Calling out antisemitic tropes when they appear, even when wrapped in fashionable language, is not an attempt to silence dissent. It is a defense of truth and moral consistency.

The lesson of history is neither abstract nor distant. When antisemitism is trivialized or excused, it spreads. When it is confronted with moral seriousness and factual rigor, it loses legitimacy. If we are sincere in our commitment to a world where Jews are not scapegoats for every crisis, then we must recognize that anti-Zionism too often serves as the latest vessel for the oldest hatred.

The responsibility to say so belongs to all of us.

Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.

Inside the reconstructed sports complex at the Israel Defense Forces’ Re’im Base during its reopening ceremony on Feb. 24, 2026. Photo: FIDF

A sports center and gym at the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) base in Re’im, Israel, reopened on Tuesday after being infiltrated on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas-led terrorists, who used the facility to plan further attacks against Israelis before it was ultimately destroyed.

The sports center at the IDF base in Re’im, which serves as the military’s Gaza Division headquarters, was reconstructed and reopened as part of a NIS 23 million ($7.44 million) project to restore facilities destroyed during the deadly massacre across southern Israel. The facility was rebuilt from the ground up and now includes a state-of-the-art fitness gym and indoor basketball arena. A mezuzah was placed on the doorpost of the center during its reopening ceremony on Tuesday and a commemorative plaque was unveiled.

A project to make the base fully operational again was led by Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) and the Association for Israel’s Soldiers (AFIS). The sports center’s original construction was funded by donors from FIDF’s New York Tristate Area Real Estate Affinity Group, who united after the Oct. 7 attack to launch its rebuilding. Marty Berger, co-chair of the group, spoke at the center’s reopening on Tuesday.

“I remember when we first built this gym and facility and coming back over the years to see how much they meant to you,” he told IDF solders and FIDF supporters in attendance. “When we returned in December 2023, just two months after Oct. 7, we saw the damage and the bullet holes throughout the gym and fitness center. It was heartbreaking, but we also saw how the Gaza Division re-emerged ready to defend Israel with strength and determination and we vowed to rebuild it. To see this place rebuilt and to have played a small part in restoring it is deeply humbling.”

Hamas-led terrorists infiltrated the IDF base on Oct. 7, 2023, and used the sports center as their own center for operations, where they planned further attacks on IDF soldiers and their families on base. When IDF special forces closed in and tried to regain control of the base, the terrorists used the gym as the site for their final stand-off. The IDF ultimately ordered an airstrike against the terrorists, which completely destroyed the building. Many of the military base’s structures were also damaged in the Oct. 7 attack and considered unusable.

“Rehabilitating [the] Re’im base is a true mission, stemming from the inseparable bond between the Jewish community in the United States and IDF soldiers,” said FIDF CEO Maj. Gen. (Res.) Nadav Padan. “The reconstruction of the sports center and other welfare facilities symbolizes the determination to restore routine, stability, and a place that enables soldiers to continue their mission with a sense of security and pride. We stand alongside the soldiers of the Gaza Division today and in the future, with full and ongoing commitment.”

“The completion of this rehabilitation project is not only the rebuilding of structures but also symbolizes the end of a complex period and the beginning of a new path for the soldiers and commanders at Re’im base,” added AFIS CEO Col. (Res.) Shari Nechmias-Carmel. “It is an expression of life, spirit, and hope returning to the base, and of our commitment to providing those who serve there with a dignified environment that is strengthening and secure.”

The NIS 23 million reconstruction project also includes the restoration of the military base’s synagogue, library, health clinic, and other structures damaged during the Oct. 7 attack.

Overt antisemitism among online influencers — the folks who often make a very comfortable living from podcasting, live streaming and clip farming — has started to break into the real world.

A notable recent example comes via Tyler Oliveira, a YouTuber who rose to fame with stunts like trying to absorb a swimming pool’s worth of water with paper towels before pivoting to “documentaries” that often purport to expose conservative bugaboos — and who has filmed two recent videos focused on Jews.

Or, as Oliveira put it to his nearly 9 million Youtube subscribers, “the New York town invaded by welfare-addicted Jews” and “New Jersey’s Jewish invasion.”

The two videos — about Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic enclave in New York, and Lakewood, a heavily Orthodox town in New Jersey — fit a mold gaining increasing traction in the second Trump era.

Harmeet Dhillon, civil rights director for the Department of Justice, has said she finds cases to prosecute by scrolling social media. The massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in Minneapolis was prompted in part by a 23-year-old vlogger who made a video claiming to expose social services funding fraud by Somali residents of the city, and an immigrant arrest operation in Manhattan followed an influencer’s demand for a crackdown.

Oliveira tried to get in on the Minnesota action, posting “Inside Minneapolis’ Somali invasion” in December. But he has struck more novel territory with his recent content about the Orthodox Jewish enclaves in the greater New York City region.

The videos themselves total around two hours of footage and are a strange mix of man-on-the-street interviews with Jews and others who he insists on calling “goyim” in the towns he visits, along with more formal interviews with local activists and Oliveira’s own narration.

Oliveira repeatedly seeks to connect what are fundamentally local disputes over land use and the changing face of these suburban towns into something far more sinister, editing in ominous music behind basically stories about a concrete yard turned into a kosher grocery.

“How do you combat a group of people chosen by God, practicing rampant ethno-nationalism,” he asked Mike Caldarise, an independent journalist from a town near Lakewood. Caldarise primarily seemed concerned with the more obscure goal of reforming the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act to prevent synagogues without parking from being built in residential neighborhoods.

“You think moving capital and charging interest is something more valuable than what I do or what?” Oliveira asks a random Jewish man in Lakewood who had questioned his profession as a Youtuber.

Oliveira couldn’t seem to decide if the point of his videos was to make a point about welfare — he vacillates between claiming Orthodox Jews are engaged in fraud and acknowledging they legitimately qualify for programs like Medicaid and food stamps that he doesn’t think taxes should pay for, at least when it comes to large Jewish families — or to hold up the Jewish communities in Kiryas Joel and Lakewood as models for white Americans.

“When you live the same, you look the same, you pray the same, you can do cool shit like that,” he says after visiting volunteer emergency service teams in Kiryas Joel. “We got to do this for ourselves.”

At several points he complains of a double standard that allows Jews to live together but supposedly prevents white people from doing the same, posting screenshots of the Forward’s coverage of a white supremacist settlement in Arkansas that forbids Jews. “Why is it OK for Jewish people to live together in a homogenous Jew-only community but it’s illegal when white people try to build their own?” Oliveira asked.

But coherence doesn’t really matter here. Oliveira isn’t doing investigative journalism. And, although his politics clearly match the manosphere’s politics of white grievance, he’s not much of a pundit. His videos on various minority “invasions” and interspersed with ones about Scientology and scammers targeting European tourists. (The title of one promises a “fart spray gun 🔫 + 2 bodyguards.”)

What matters is that these videos help Oliveira confirm whatever stereotypes his viewers already have about Jews. When a man in Lakewood leaned on his horn, Oliveira commented “that honk was promised to him 3,000 years ago,” referencing a popular antisemitic meme that suggests Jewish attachment to Israel is the result of a broader sense of entitlement.

The notion that Jews are a people apart — and should be treated as such — has exploded since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel and resulting political turmoil in the U.S. Some of it has a clear connection to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but much of it is nothing more than the regurgitation of longstanding antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control.

“The Great Noticing continues,” reads one of the top comments on Oliveira’s Lakewood video and similar “noticing” references are studded throughout the replies. It’s a coded antisemitic term, labeling the act of identifying the supposedly nefarious Jewish influence over society. The Blue Square Alliance found use of the meme increased more than 2,000% last year.

Orthodox towns like those Oliveira highlighted an easy target for this kind of “noticing” because, if one doesn’t think too hard about it, they appear to confirm various antisemitic stereotypes: they can be insular communities whose leaders often leverage political influence to advance what they perceive to be Jewish interests.

That’s very close to the classic claim that Jews are pulling the strings in society.

But the connection between the reality of towns like Kiryas Joel and broader antisemitic conspiracy theories fall apart upon even cursory inspection. Oliveira seems to suggest that the Jews of Kiryas Joel are somehow gaming the welfare system to fund their lifestyles, while simultaneously acknowledging the high poverty rates in the town that qualify residents for programs like Medicaid. Repeatedly, he implies that Jews should not have children if they need help affording them, as though the birth rates themselves are part of a fraudulent scheme.

And the disputes he covers in Lakewood revolve around where Jews should be allowed to build synagogues and the allocation of school district resources. Those are serious issues for local residents and have received lots of normal media coverage. But convincing the local municipality to install a new traffic light outside an informal synagogue, which Oliveira points to as an example of outsize Jewish influence, would be a pretty bush league priority for any kind of all-powerful cabal.

A flimsy premise also undergirded a much shorter video released this week by Essa Ejelat and Erik Warsaw, two online influencers who use concern for Palestinian rights as a thin veneer for antisemitism. The six-minute short shows the pair walking and driving through an affluent part of Riverdale in the Bronx while Essa talks about how feminine “Zionists” are and Warsaw does a dance meant to represent a scheming Jew. The point of the video is that somehow Rep. Ritchie Torres, a strong supporter of Israel, is responsible for the wealth disparity between Riverdale and poorer parts of the borough.

The claim is so thoroughly absurd — and frankly rather unclear — that it’s hard to fact check, though it’s worth noting that despite Ejelat repeatedly calling it a “Zionist neighborhood” Riverdale is only 20% Jewish.

These kinds of details rarely matter to antisemites, who alternate between accusing Jews of orchestrating capitalism and communism and of simultaneously belonging in Israel (“Why don’t you move back to Israel?” Oliveira asks a man in Lakewood) and needing to vacate the region.

The danger, though, is real.

Racist online content is making its way into the real world. Federal agencies are sharing white supremacist memes on social media at the same time that immigration agents have been documented arresting American citizens based on foreign accents.

Oliveira seems to be pushing to extend the same kind of racist dragnet that spurred the federal crackdown in Minneapolis to capture Jewish communities, even if he recognizes this approach may not catch on for the time being.

“If Americans are upset about Somalis in Minneapolis not assimilating and living according to ‘Sharia law’ while sucking the teat of welfare programs,” he wrote on X while promoting the Kiryas Joel video, “then what’s the excuse for this religious ethno-state feeding their massive families with your secular tax-dollars?”

The post After Minneapolis, a Youtuber comes for Jewish ‘welfare queens’ appeared first on The Forward.