It is a losing battle to send a fashion influencer into a historical debate.
Social media – that vast psychological experiment into which half of humanity has willingly enrolled itself. A digital Babel built upon the illusion of connection, where algorithms whisper into every ear what it most desires to hear. Within this cacophony, some of the vilest and, yes, viral forms of anti-Zionism have found their stage – draped in the language of moral outrage and consumed as truth. It has become one of the most potent tools wielded against Israel and the Jewish people in recent years. Jewish legacy organizations awoke to this belatedly during a flare-up in fighting between Israel and Hamas in May 2021.
Since then, vast resources have been poured into digital strategies, marketing campaigns, public relations efforts, and influencer programs. Yet what continues to escape far too many is that social media is the tool, not the source, of the problem. We have confused the megaphone for the mechanism.
A misdiagnosis
If one begins with the comforting assumption, as so many Jewish institutions do, that what we are witnessing online and on campus is simply confusion – the product of students who “don’t know any better” – then the solution appears obvious: Launch another marketing campaign. Hire more strategists. Produce better graphics and earnest pleas for understanding.
In this view, these young activists are not standing at the edge of fanaticism but are merely lost in ignorance. But this is a delusion. The young people who chant for intifada and denounce Zionism with quasi-religious conviction do not believe themselves ignorant. They think themselves enlightened.
The slogans that saturate social platforms – settler colonialism, decolonization, and the genocide libel – did not originate in the fevered minds of the naïve but in the quiet, tenured rooms of the university. They have become the moral grammar of our time and are now wielded to sanctify the murder of Israeli Jews on October 7.
Ideas have consequences
These theories have real, bloody consequences. In studying anti-Zionism, we see that it carries a continuous record of harm – concrete, personal, and enduring. Wherever it takes hold, persecution follows: families displaced, communities erased, and individuals silenced, imprisoned, or killed. There are libraries of books on Zionism and on Israel’s history, identity, dilemmas, wars, and aspirations.
Yet on anti-Zionism – the most widespread, organized, and lethal ideological assault on Jewish existence since the fall of the Third Reich – we find shockingly little. Some scholars and think-tank researchers do this work, but as a mainstream communal project, anti-Zionism has been granted near-immunity from serious scrutiny. Its origins – ideological genealogy, internal factions, Nazi history and Islamist adoption, Soviet industrialization, and migration into universities and activist movements – remain scandalously understudied.
The failure of the establishment
Nowhere is Jewish institutional abandonment more glaring than here. There is bitter irony in a people who pride themselves on intellectual tradition choosing to invest not in scholarship, research, publishing, or academic defense, but in crisis communications.
Public relations is not a philosophy, and marketing is not an intellectual defense against an ideological threat. Young Jewish thinkers and scholars stand largely alone – underfunded and unsupported – trying to build walls of reason against a fashionable hate movement. But a community cannot defend itself against a force it refuses to anatomize.
We have outsourced the study of our enemies to our enemies – and then act surprised when Jewish students return from university alienated, ashamed, or even radicalized.
Beyond influencers
What is needed now is not another marketing campaign but collective intellectual mobilization. Influencers have their place, and many do meaningful work. But honesty is required. It is a losing battle to send a fashion influencer into a historical debate. Unless that influencer is teaching social media strategy and platform-building, he/she should not be paid five times more to speak on history than a historian simply because he/she draws a crowd.
Today, our intellectual infrastructure is thin, fragmented, and reactive. Anti-Zionism must become a field of study equivalent in importance and scope to courses on Nazism, the Holocaust, and classical antisemitism. It belongs in Israel studies departments, Jewish educational institutions, and academic centers dedicated to the study of hostility toward Jews.
Intellectual renaissance
Countless Jewish and Israeli writers struggle to find publishers, even as those same publishing houses enthusiastically promote voices committed to our erasure.
Who is funding Jewish publishing houses? Who is supporting the writing of books? Who is ensuring that Jewish scholars are not left standing alone at the edge of the academy, abandoned by the very institutions meant to sustain them? Not the Jewish legacy organizations. Certainly not enough. The Jewish world cannot answer a doctrinal war with crisis communications.
It is time for Jewish legacy organizations to invest in young scholars, think tanks, research institutes, translation projects, academic programs, and Jewish publishing dedicated to anti-Zionism so that a serious body of knowledge can emerge to meet this threat.