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The End Jew Hatred Movement is spreading across the country — and sparking controversy
(New York Jewish Week) — Last month, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Jewish Democrat, proclaimed April 29 “End Jew Hatred Day,” citing “an urgent need to act against antisemitism in Colorado and across the country.”
Similar proclamations came from New York Rep. Mike Lawler, a Republican, and dozens of other elected officials nationwide.
But in the New York City Council, an identical effort proved controversial. While the overwhelmingly Democratic council approved April 29 as End Jew Hatred Day annually, six council members either abstained from or voted against what organizers had intended to be an unanimous decision.
The initiative behind the proclamations, called the End Jew Hatred Movement, is a relatively new presence based in New York City that is increasingly making its voice known nationally — through rallies, petitions, a relentless press campaign and now in the halls of government. One measure that demonstrates the initiative’s growth is the number of April 29 proclamations. Last year, there were a handful. This year, according to End Jew Hatred, there were 30.
The movement also provided the spark for the unexpected opposition in the New York City Council. Lawmakers who did not support the proclamation said they demurred because the End Jew Hatred Movement, while run by people who say they “set aside politics and ideology,” has been associated with right-wing Jewish activists.
End Jew Hatred doesn’t publicize much about its structure or funding. It is not a registered nonprofit organization, and would not tell the New York Jewish Week its annual budget or how it receives donations.
Its backers call it an unapologetic voice that’s fighting a growing problem, antisemitism, while its critics say it is an attempt to inject hawkish rhetoric into a national effort to combat anti-Jewish persecution. Amid that debate, the movement’s growth, and its successful spearheading of resolutions nationwide, show how an initiative founded by conservative activists has wielded influence in the conversation about antisemitism, even in liberal political spaces.
Here’s what we know about End Jew Hatred, how it’s establishing itself in New York City and beyond, and why its activities are drawing backlash.
A movement founded in the politics of 2020
Founded in New York City near the beginning of the pandemic, End Jew Hatred first drew local attention in October 2020, when it organized a rally in front of the New York Public Library protesting the way its activists said New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo were unfairly targeting Orthodox New Yorkers with public health restrictions.
Haredi New Yorkers and their backers railed against the city’s regulations that year, and claimed that policies limiting group prayer and other religious ceremonies were selectively enforced against their communities.
“Never in my life did I think I would see this type of blatant Jew-hatred from our public officials,” Brooke Goldstein, who founded End Jew Hatred, said at the rally, which drew dozens of protesters. “Singling out New York Jews for blame in the coronavirus spread is unconscionable and discriminatory.”
But while the movement’s first significant action concerned the pandemic, a spokesman for End Jew Hatred said it was inspired by another seismic event that took place in 2020: the racial justice protests and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“How can we replicate this for the Jewish people?” said Gerard Filitti, senior counsel for the organization Goldstein directs, the Lawfare Project, describing End Jew Hatred’s genesis. “We saw antisemitism shoot up during the pandemic. So it was kind of the right time to launch this idea.”
Since then, in addition to spearheading the proclamations, the initiative has continued holding rallies, protesting the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which aids Palestinian refugees, for “promoting Jew hatred”; speaking out against antisemitism in Berlin, Toronto and other cities around the globe; and, earlier this year, opposing a reported plea bargain for the men who assaulted Joseph Borgen while he was en route to a pro-Israel rally in May 2021. It was also a signatory on a letter to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg protesting the plea deal, and members of the movement showed up to the alleged attackers’ court hearing.
Nearly three years after its launch, the movement remains opaque about its structure, declining to share any financial information or elaborate on its relationship to the Lawfare Project, which bills itself as an “international pro-Israel litigation fund.” In a brief statement to the New York Jewish Week, a spokesperson for End Jew Hatred said the organization accepts donations from local community members and support from like-minded nonprofit groups, though he declined to detail how those donations were processed.
“Our network of activists spans the globe, from New York City to Los Angeles, from Toronto to Berlin,” he said. “Also, the movement is supported by people from all walks of life who donate both their time and money to make the movement a success. Activists are encouraged to fundraise within their community, and some actions have been supported by organizations that have taken part in them.”
Roots in pro-Israel and right-wing activism
The Lawfare Project, Goldstein’s group, has represented Jewish students who settled a discrimination lawsuit with San Francisco State University, and the following year, represented an Israeli organization that settled a suit with the National Lawyers’ Guild, after the guild declined to place the group’s ad in its annual dinner journal.
This year, the group is providing legal aid to a Las Vegas-area Jewish teen who had a swastika drawn onto his back. And it sued the mayor of Barcelona over her decision to sever ties with Tel Aviv.
Goldstein also has a history of right-wing activism and controversial statements. She has made appearances on conservative news networks such as Fox News, One America News and Newsmax. She once said that “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian person,” and on Election Day in 2016, tweeted, “Can I run the anti-anti-islamophobia department in the Trump administration?”
Goldstein has said she sees Ronald Lauder — the philanthropist, World Jewish Congress president and conservative donor — as an ally. In a virtual conversation between the two hosted by Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Synagogue last year, Goldstein thanked Lauder for his “support and his friendship,” and Lauder called Goldstein “so smart and wonderful.” Lauder was also involved with the movement’s effort to establish End Jew Hatred Day in New York City last year.
Ronald S Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) recorded before a bilateral a conversation with Chancellor Scholz. (Michael Kappeler/Getty Images)
End Jew Hatred has also worked with Dov Hikind, a former Brooklyn Democratic state assemblyman who now runs a group called Americans Against Antisemitism. Hikind’s group has partnered with End Jew Hatred, and he has appeared at its events. Hikind told the New York Jewish Week that his group and End Jew Hatred are “involved in terms of pushing the same agenda.”
Hikind has stirred controversy as well: In 2013, he wore blackface as part of a Purim costume, and in 2005, sponsored a bill that would have allowed police to profile Middle Eastern men on the subway. He was a follower of the late right-wing extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane.
Controversy or consensus?
Even as its right-wing connections have sparked suspicion from progressive activists, End Jew Hatred has garnered support from establishment Jewish groups. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations promoted End Jew Hatred Day on Twitter last week, posting a graphic with the logo of the movement. And the city’s Jewish Community Relations Council also backed the City Council resolution.
“All people, regardless of party affiliation, have a role to play in combating antisemitism and other forms of hatred, and we should not lose sight of that,” a JCRC spokesperson told the New York Jewish Week. “From our perspective, every day should be End Jew Hatred Day.”
Lauder has also advocated the use of the term “Jew hatred” in place of antisemitism in a video published by the World Jewish Congress that has been viewed more than 480,000 times.
“No one is embarrassed anymore when they’re called an antisemite,” he said. “Antisemitism must be called what it really is: Jew hatred.”
That view is not universally shared among antisemitism watchdogs. Holly Huffnagle, the American Jewish Committee’s U.S. director for combating antisemitism, said that the term “Jew hatred” is “jarring” and “makes people stop and think.” But she said the term does not capture the way antisemitism is often expressed via coded conspiratorial language.
“[People] might not know what [the term] antisemitism is, but Jew hatred they know,” she said. “In that sense it can be used to get attention, to help people call it out.”
“On the other hand, the antisemitism we see today, in its primary form, which is conspiratorial, is not captured by the term ‘Jew hatred,’” she added. “I hear from a variety of people that they don’t hate Jews, they’re against Jew hatred, they’re not antisemitic, but they believe that Jews have too much power [or] they control the media.”
And End Jew Hatred’s right-wing ties have also made some progressive activists in its home base of New York City wary of its motives. The lead sponsor of the City Council’s End Jew Hatred Day resolution was Queens Republican Inna Vernikov, a former aide to Hikind who has previously spotlighted antisemitism allegations at the City University of New York.
Her resolution, which passed overwhelmingly, garnered a mix of 14 co-sponsors, including some prominent Jewish Democrats and all six of the council’s Republicans — two of whom have links, respectively, to white supremacists and a person arrested for storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Council Member Inna Vernikov introduced a resolution to create an annual “End Jew Hatred” day in the New York City Council on April 27, 2023. (New York City Council Flickr)
Those right-wing connections were part of what led six progressive council members to either abstain from or vote against the resolution. One of the council members who voted no, Brooklyn’s Shahana Hanif, told the New York Jewish Week that she has participated in multiple actions against antisemitism but opposed the resolution because she didn’t want to endorse End Jew Hatred as a movement.
“Antisemitism is real,” Hanif said. “I understand the urgency. I understand the opportunity when there is a resolution or any kind of symbolic gesture that comes along, that every legislator wants to be united in supporting our Jewish colleagues. But in the same breath, it is our responsibility to know who is leading on these efforts.”
City Comptroller Brad Lander, a prominent Jewish progressive politician, vouched for Hanif’s record of standing up to antisemitism and echoed her concerns. He told the New York Jewish Week that End Jew Hatred’s activists are “right-wingers who have a track record of working very closely with people who foment hatred.”
Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a progressive group, also opposed the resolution. Rafael Shimunov, a member of the group, said the resolution was “clearly associated with the right,” and noted that at a hearing ahead of the vote, an activist decried bail reform, something right-wing advocates have pushed for years to repeal.
Shimunov also took issue with remarks Vernikov has made about George Soros, the billionaire Jewish liberal megadonor who has become an avatar of right-wing antisemitism, and whom Vernikov called ”an evil man, who happens to be Jewish.” JFREJ activists also noted that also noted that some Republican cosponsors of the bill, such as Vernikov, Vickie Paladino and Joann Ariola, have called for transgender women to be barred from women’s sports at schools and universities. In addition, Paladino has a history of anti-LGBTQ comments. The activists say these views undercut the council members’ calls to oppose hatred directed at Jews.
End Jew Hatred’s supporters dismissed accusations that their cause is right-wing. In a text message, Vernikov told the New York Jewish Week that “this resolution has nothing to do with politics or right-wing extremists.” Hikind also echoed that message.
“Everyone in the Jewish community supported this idea,” Hikind said. “To say it’s just right-wing organizations is dishonest and hypocritical.”
Filliti, the Lawfare counsel, said the aim of the resolution — and End Jew Hatred as a whole — was to send “a unifying message.”
“We’re not looking to make this political,” he said. “We have had so much success with this and we are so happy to see this going forward.”
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The post The End Jew Hatred Movement is spreading across the country — and sparking controversy appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Looking for the right Yiddish word? This 1950 reference book finds it for you
As more people explore Yiddish, a thick 1950 book I discovered on a beloved friend’s shelf can help anyone find the exact right word for any situation.
Der Oytser fun der Yidisher Shprakh (The Treasure of the Yiddish language) published by the YIVO Institute in New York and available digitally through the Yiddish Book Center, is a 1,000-page Yiddish thesaurus, modeled on Roget’s Thesaurus of the English Language.
Like Roget’s, a standard source for writers and students of English, Der Oytser is not arranged alphabetically, but according to concepts. If you’re looking for a word related to evil, you look up the concept “evil,” and there you find many words related to it, for example, “untoward, black, sinister, wicked, wrong, vicious, sinful and criminal.”
The book was born of a project by author Nahum Stutchkoff to create a new kind of lexicon for the Yiddish language. He launched the project under the editorial oversight of Max Weinreich, the great Yiddish philologist and then director of YIVO. Yiddish had had many dictionaries over the course of its existence, but never a thesaurus of this kind. The result is a magnificent work of lexicography, 15 years in the making, a storehouse of over 175,000 Yiddish words, phrases, folk sayings, and idioms.
The book is out of print but Yiddish students and enthusiasts can download it from the Yiddish Book Center’s digital library. There’s also a free digitized version of the book printed in the English alphabet for people who don’t read Yiddish. Instead of an index, readers use the search box.
In 1950, a mere five years after the Holocaust, the Oytser was finally published. It included a preface by Weinreich, with the following words:
The very fact that, despite the years of the huge catastrophe that befell our people, a great man with vision has appeared to gather the scattered treasures of our language, can surely serve as a symbol of our unbroken collective will to survive. In Nahum Stutchkoff we see a love of mame-loshn, a keen understanding of both broad concepts and the smallest of details, tireless perseverance and pragmatism in carrying out the designated plan for Der Oytser fun der Yidisher Shprakh.
It is without a doubt, the greatest complete achievement of Yiddish lexicography since Jehoshua Mordechai Lifschitz‘s dictionary, compiled during the last third of the nineteenth century.
For the first time we see the full inventory of the Yiddish language, in accordance with the knowledge that the field of Yiddish research has accumulated under the authority of the YIVO Institute.
Weinreich goes on to speak about the problems of standardizing Yiddish, Yiddish dialectology, the Germanisms, Americanisms, Slavicisms in Yiddish and how Stutchkoff addresses these issues.
In his own introduction, Stutchkoff states he had two purposes in mind: (1) to gather as many Yiddish words, phrases and proverbs as he could, and (2) to provide a helpful tool for the Yiddish speaker and writer.
When you use a dictionary, says Stutchkoff, you have a word in mind and want to find or clarify its meaning. The words in a dictionary, therefore, are arranged alphabetically. His thesaurus, on the other hand, like Roget’s, is for a user who has an idea but can’t recall the right word. It is therefore arranged according to ideas. He created 620 categories, such as onheyb, or beginning (category No. 41); glaykhayt, equality (153), and libe, love (500).
Let’s say you’re looking for a Yiddish word related to thieves. You may know the word ganef, thief, but need a different word. So you turn to the index at the back of the Oytser where there are thousands of words arranged alphabetically and find the word ganef, which has the number 483 next to it That means all the words related to ganef are listed under number 483 of the 620 idea categories. You would then turn to the section for number 483 and find no less than seven pages of terms and expressions related to ganef, including, for example, the word marvikher — a dealer in stolen items, as well as the proverb dos ken nor a ganef (Only a thief would think of that). Those seven pages demonstrate the incredible richness of the Yiddish language.
The Oytser also contains the colorful slang of various occupations and groups such as klezmers, thieves, cobblers, actors, tailors and butchers.
Nahum Stutchkoff wasn’t an academic. He was an actor, a playwright, and a popular radio personality before he became a masterful lexicographer.
Stutchkoff was born in 1893 in a town called Brok in Czarist Poland. When he was 7, his family moved to Warsaw, where he was sent to cheder and yeshiva. At the age of 16, he was drawn to the theatre. He began translating and reworking plays for a Yiddish theatrical company from the standard European repertoire, such as, for example, Moliere’s The Miser. Eventually he became an actor too, touring with the company throughout Poland and Russia.
In 1912 he served a stint in the Czarist army. Upon his release in 1917, he again joined a theatrical troupe, eventually becoming director of the Yiddish State Theatre in Vitebsk. In 1923, he emigrated to the United States.
In New York, where he settled, he performed in various Yiddish theatres and authored plays, musical comedies and operettas for the Yiddish theatre. In 1926, he became secretary of The Yiddish Playwrights League of America.
He then took up a radio career. Every Sunday, starting in 1932, on the Forward radio station WEVD (the call letters are the initials of Eugene Victor Debs, the leader of the American Socialist Party), he performed a children’s radio show called The Uncle Nahum Hour, as well as other radio programs.
In 1931, he turned to lexicography, publishing another creative work: a 330-page Yiddish rhyming dictionary.
Stutchkoff died in 1965, but he left us a great legacy: a wealthy storehouse of the Yiddish language that continues to inform and entertain Yiddish enthusiasts everywhere.
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The harrowing German concept that Donald Trump has not yet managed to achieve
Since the start of his second term, Donald Trump has been following a despot’s playbook. Trump himself has all but acknowledged this, by gleefully sharing with New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for their new book a “historian’s” assessment that Trump has more power than Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao and Hitler.
Never mind that it wasn’t a historian at all who came to this conclusion, but a longtime friend and caddy of golfer Gary Player. The anecdote shows what’s going on in Trump’s head: the fantasies of an 80-year-old would-be despot who’s more fixated on his place in history than on the concerns of even the MAGA faithful.
What Trump has been up to amounts to nothing less than trying to capture and radicalize the American soul — persecuting immigrants of color, gays, lesbians and other minorities; coarsening Americans into Trump’s own brand of vulgarity; lobbing figurative Molotov cocktails at the rule of law; perverting America’s history; and sowing divisions that echo the raw spite that once split North from South. It’s an attempted American variant of what Germans call Gleichschaltung, the Nazis’ 1933 rapid re-engineering of every facet of German life — business, culture, sports, education, and all else — to conform to the doctrines of Adolf Hitler.
With America’s 250th birthday now behind us, it’s worth asking how far Trump has already taken the country down the path of an American Gleichschaltung.
As Hitler was rising to power, Germany was in a perpetual state of political, economic and social upheaval. During the 15 years between Germany’s World War I defeat and Hitler’s rise to power, roughly a dozen serious attempts were made to overthrow the government — from communist revolutions to right-wing putsches. The best known is Hitler’s own failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923.
On the evening of Nov. 8, 1923, Hitler and a contingent of Brown Shirts stormed Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller during a gathering of Bavarian government and community leaders. Climbing onto a chair, Hitler bellowed “The German revolution has begun!” The next day the Nazi leader led 2,000 followers on a march through the city, hoping to incite a nationwide uprising. Bavarian state police were waiting. About a dozen of Hitler’s followers were killed in a fusillade of gunfire. Hitler escaped but was tracked down and arrested. He was given a five-year prison sentence but a Nazi-friendly court granted him parole after only 10 months.
Hitler focused on rebuilding the party. When the Great Depression struck Germany, putting millions out of work, Hitler’s radical and antisemitic pronouncements found resonance among the populace, resulting in increased political power for the Nazi party. As successive coalition governments fell in the face of political and economic turmoil and street violence, the Nazi leader was made chancellor in January 1933 through backroom political dealings.
After fire destroyed the Reichstag on Feb. 27, 1933, there was little stopping the German chancellor on his march to one-man rule. The very next day key civil liberties — including freedom of expression, of the press, and of assembly, as well as protections against house searches and property confiscation — were abruptly suspended by a decree whose title claimed it was “For The Protection of People and State.” Amid mass arrests and terror by Hitler’s Storm Troopers, and with much of the populace already backing the Nazi leader, Gleichschaltung was carried out within two months.
Which brings us to Donald Trump.
The Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol echoes the Beer Hall Putsch in one essential respect: a leader inciting followers to march in an attempted coup d’état.
“After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol,” Trump told the MAGA mob at a rally. “Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” Trump lied; he didn’t accompany them on the march. Back at the White House, he let the violence happen as America watched in horror.
Neither Trump nor Hitler had to stay long in the wilderness. During Hitler’s brief incarceration at Landsberg Prison, Nazi comrades like Rudolf Hess made pilgrimages to visit the boss. For Trump, after retreating to Mar-a-Lago, it became a parade of sycophants — among them the late Lindsey Graham, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene — each making the journey to pay homage.
Trump’s intent to rule like an authoritarian began manifesting itself on the very first day of his return to the White House.
There was the flurry of Executive Orders on inauguration day, signed with Trump’s Sharpie in carefully choreographed photo-ops. It was all spectacle, as Trump basked in the role of a ruler issuing edicts that were intended to recast the land in his image. “Could you imagine Biden doing this,?” Trump boasted while holding up a freshly signed order. The most outrageous edict was Trump’s pardon of about 1,500 Jan. 6 insurrectionists, akin to Third Reich pardons for Nazis who had been convicted of crimes before Hitler ascended to power.
Trump’s unleashing of ICE and other federal agents to terrorize immigrants showed how far he was willing to go — masked agents making arrests at Home Depot parking lots and inside immigration courts, brutally yanking people out of their vehicles, and in Chicago, a raid that included agents rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter and using flashbang grenades, automatic weapons, and breaching tools as they burst into apartments.
Trump insists that he is above the law. His most radical acolyte — Stephen Miller — argued that Trump’s absolutist power extends to relations with other countries, an argument for taking Greenland.
And so here we are, a year-and-a-half after Trump’s second inauguration. The republic is battered, bruised and wobbly, but it still stands. To a significant degree this is because of federal courts that have blocked dozens of Trump’s assaults against democracy — often with excoriating words, like these from U.S. District Judge William Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee: “The President’s palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech.”
Hitler never faced this kind of judicial opposition. And he was never confronted with the magnitude and fearlessness of citizen resistance that has swept across the US — like the Minneapolis protests triggered by the killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
Trump’s approval ratings have plummeted because of his war in Iran and soaring consumer prices, some Republicans are finally daring to resist him, the MAGA movement is fraying, Jeffrey Epstein still dogs him, and a snowballing number of Americans are infuriated over Trump’s abuse of his presidential powers to enrich himself and his family — raking in at least $2.2 billion in 2025.
With the midterm elections four months away, our democracy may be facing greater peril than at any time since the Civil War. Like a mortally wounded beast, Trump may resort to desperate measures for survival. He’s already working to poison the midterms — dismantling federal election oversight, suing states to imply their elections are insecure, and stoking daily mistrust about any contest where Democrats might topple Republicans. Each move lays the groundwork for claiming fraud, contesting results, or deploying more extreme measures under the guise of “protecting” the vote.
We needn’t look too far back in history for despots who chose a scorched-earth exit as they faced the loss of power.
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The real reason Clavicular is in Israel
Clavicular is partying in Tel Aviv this week.
If you don’t know who that is, first of all, I’m happy for you. Clavicular is a looksmaxxer, part of an online male subculture that subscribes to the idea that becoming as hot as possible is the main, perhaps the only, meaningful thing to do with one’s life, and the only road to success. To achieve peak hotness — “ascend,” in looksmaxxing lingo — followers of the doctrine engage in such activities as hitting themselves in the face with a hammer to supposedly sharpen their jaw line (“bone-smashing”), or taking steroids and meth to improve their physique.
The last time Clav — as people call him, though his real name is Braden Peters — went viral, it was for getting turned down repeatedly by French women during Paris fashion week. The time before that was for dancing with a bunch of far-right influencers, including noted antisemite Nick Fuentes and manosphere titan Andrew Tate, to Kanye West’s Führer-sampling song “Heil Hitler” and singing along to the offensive lyrics.
Which is why Clavicular’s sudden appearance in Israel was such a surprise — and a controversial one. In one video, the bouncer at a Tel Aviv club kicks him out, saying no one who hates Israel is welcome inside. Several Israeli feminist influencers have also decried his visit, pointing to his bad behavior with women. And, of course, countless users online have accused him of normalizing genocide, including mega-popular streamer Hasan Piker. But others are excited by his presence; a female IDF soldier is also appearing in his videos (she’s now facing disciplinary action for the collab), as is Chabad influencer, Yossi Farro and he’s drawn excited crowds in Tel Aviv.
Farro was perhaps the first Jewish influencer to court Clavicular after the “Heil Hitler” incident; his usual schtick is wrapping tefillin with celebrities. But he made a video last month feeding the looksmaxxer the traditional Ashkenazi Shabbat stew cholent — Clav said it was good — and it went viral in the Jewish world, where people decried the effort at rehabilitation. But the clip also went viral with antisemites: Fuentes said he wanted to hang a mezuzah and get in with Jews, too.
The first announcement that Clavicular was in Tel Aviv also came with a post from Farro, crossposted by several large Jewish social media accounts. In the video, Farro gifts Clav a memento that could not be more of our times: a necklace featuring an OpenAI logo with a Star of David in the middle. Later, he posted a video of a conversation with Clavicular calling the biblical Joseph the first looksmaxxer. It felt surreal.
That’s the whole point. Clavicular is just as obsessive about his fame as he is about his looks. Clicks boost accounts no matter whether they’re from haters or followers; monetized social media pays the same amount for adoring comments as it does for ones calling Clavicular evil and praying to spit on his grave. Engagement is engagement. (Farro, who didn’t reply to a request for comment, seems to be operating by the same philosophy.)
The simple answer as to why he was in Israel was because it would be controversial — which it was — and controversy earns him money and eyes. Clavicular said that he noticed everyone was talking about the nation, but almost no influencers were going. He figured he would go viral if he bucked the trend. It’s not by accident that Clav’s one-time publicist, Mitchell Jackson, specializes in cancelled figures of all political persuasions, including Candace Owens, Caroline Calloway and an OnlyFans model named Adam22. The point is attention, not adulation.
In an interview with The Free Press, Clavicular said he did not see his visit as political; he came to party. And he criticized the idea that a young influencer should have any political take, or that the outlet should even ask about his views. He doesn’t know about anything but looksmaxxing, he wrote in a post, and believes it’s irresponsible for him to talk about anything else. While one could say advising teens to take steroids and meth is also irresponsible, he’s not wrong about his ignorance of geopolitics.
But many Israelis and Jews are happy to have him, despite his “Heil Hitler” singalong. Israel has been short on positive PR, and Clav has called the country beautiful and fun. Never mind that Clavicular is followed by at least as many haters, watching out of Schadenfreude, as he is fans, and hardly brings uncomplicated good vibes to Israel with him. At least someone popular among the youth, who are increasingly critical of Israel, said something good about the nation. Many Israelis seem desperate enough for global goodwill that they’re willing to overlook Clav’s antisemitism. People are even claiming he’s Jewish now. (And maybe he is; he hasn’t confirmed or denied, but he’s certainly never mentioned it before.)
And, of course, Clavicular does have adherents who believe anything he does is cool, that he’s always “mogging” (dominating via his powerful aura, more or less). So even if he proclaims he has no political opinion, everything is politics and his presence serves to cast Israel in a more positive light, even if it’s the nihilistic glow of an amoral influencer who cares about looking good above all else. He may be cringe, but he’s popular. Maybe that’s enough for some, but it highlights how low the bar is for Israel’s public image in this moment.
For Clavicular, though, it’s all a game. He doesn’t care about Israel’s image or the war in Gaza or settlers or Palestinians. His only side is his own, and even then he doesn’t need to be popular; he only needs to be seen. He said he plans to stream in Russia next.
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