The case against cancel culture that decent people have made in the past decade has become a refuge for one of the oldest and most insidious prejudices.
Six months ago, I wrote a speculative column that the pandemic had a lot to do with killing the power of taboos in our society, including the taboo against antisemitism. The pandemic drove conversation online, and it saw one authority after another discredit itself. It was a period of time when people were “canceled” or subjected to social media shaming just for handling the pandemic with a different level of caution than others.
I believe that the withdrawal from social life drained the authority and force not just out of institutions like health boards, schools, and churches (none of which have fully recovered), but also out of long-developed taboos and social expectations. The definitions of what’s crazy, what’s malicious, what’s polite, normal, and respectable all lost some of their force. Again, this built on an existing trend to shift socialization online. But considered this way, the rise of antisemitism would be connected to other trends the pandemic supercharged, like our low fertility, the sex recession, and the general surge of loneliness.
In the six months since, antisemitism continues to spread like a brain disease in the people who give in to it. You start a conversation about anything at all, the price of a carton of eggs, and they respond with a criticism of Bibi Netanyahu. It’s nuts. The algorithm on X (and, I’m told, TikTok) seems to favor clips of Nick Fuentes, who has been subjected to bans everywhere else. He denies the extent of the Holocaust. He is, along with Candace Owens, literally trying to mainstream in the 2020s the “Jewish question” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the one that led to pogroms against Jews in Odessa, Warsaw, Kiev, Białystok, and Limerick. Fuentes thinks Hitler is “cool.” New York City is electing a mayor who, through the power of antisemitic association, connects American police brutality to the Israel Defense Forces.
One of the problems of putting the genie back in the bottle is that the taboo against antisemitism was enforced through shaming and ostracism. Now, we live in a time that rewards shamelessness, and with algorithms that boomerang precisely those lines of thought that you try to expel and anathematize. The case against cancel culture that decent people have made in the past decade has become a refuge for one of the oldest and most insidious prejudices.
I’m not sure about the way forward. Reflexively, Jews and philosemites will want to rebuild the taboo: Antisemitism is disgusting, it is undignified, its exponents should be embarrassed to even be seen in the light of day. They fashion themselves intellectuals, while their conclusions are enacted by street thugs who punch people out in Brooklyn or desecrate graveyards or shoot up synagogues. To argue against antisemitism with antisemites feels like losing one’s dignity; it feels like giving up ground. And besides, they seem to like the attention and profit from it.
But if we’ve already lost ground, so much the worse for us, and so much more needful to point out, for anyone listening, the immense contributions Jews have made to the American common good — and, to put a finer point on it, to American foreign policy. Jews play a disproportionate role in almost every school of foreign policy. This is not because they are acting out some kind of ethnic strategy but because of their education and their formation, which makes them worldly and wise. This is a case that men of goodwill are going to have to take up exhaustively and in earnest against this glib, viral new variant of an ancient madness.