One peculiar trend of our post-October 7 world is witnessing the tribe of people once lauded as “humanitarians,” “progressives,” and “anti-racists” becoming the exact opposite: regressives, racists, bigots, and xenophobes.
The waves of hate directed at Israelis and Jews in the past 10 months have revealed a widely accepted, peculiar inversion of traditional racism, which once condemned a people for their alleged inferiority, now instead condemning a people for their alleged superiority. Hamas crimes are excused and all Israelis are treated like war criminals.
“But not all Jews, only Zionist Jews!” they gleefully insist, as though conditional racism is something worth patting themselves on the back for. Withholding bigotry against a community, but only on the condition that they adhere to narratives prescribed by outsiders, is still racism.
Despite being historically oppressed, exterminated, drummed out of everywhere they called home, and one of the main victims of the same white supremacy they are now charged with, “progressives” and “anti-racists” have spun a new narrative that married every unconscionable attribute, stereotype, and malignment into a cocktail of antisemitic hatred, accusing Jews of being “oppressors” and therefore unworthy of sympathy.
Since 1200 Israelis were killed on October 7, we’ve watched as Jews and Israelis have been targeted by the “humanitarians,” the “bastions of justice,” and the “anti-racists,” all for the good cause of “liberating the Gazan people.”
Of course, any clear-eyed, common-sensed individual can see there is no traceable thread between targeting Jews and liberating Gazans, but that is the genius of this insidious bigotry – finding the loophole to express its hate under guise of caring for humanity.
In the latest chapter, actress Gal Gadot, who plays the Evil Queen in the upcoming rendition of Snow White, has been subject to these same targeted attacks. As images of Gadot in the new role surfaced, the “humanitarians” and “anti-racists” emerged from their “safe spaces for intersectional liberation” to launch a witch hunt against Gadot for her Israeli Nationality, explaining “how fitting” it was for Gadot to play a “character that tries to kill a child and steal her kingdom.” Content creators with huge platforms immediately demanded that their audience boycott Snow White in protest of Gadot’s participation, with others parroted the old antisemitic trope that she was only cast because “Jews run the world”
To be clear: this was not a boycott against the war in Gaza, against Netanyahu, against the Likkud, against settlements, or against Ben-Gvir. No. This was a Jewish boycott.
This is not the first we’ve seen of the Jewish boycott. Earlier this year, Marvel erased the Israeli heritage of Sabra, a Jewish superhero, seemingly to appease the anti-racists who were offended by her race.
This Jewish boycott is often found in art-dominated spaces, where radical liberals most susceptible to this mind virus tend to congregate.
We’ve seen Jewish and Israeli artists ostracized from the arts and entertainment industries purely for their ethnicity or nationality alone. In July, a British art museum canceled a show by Israeli artist Pomidor (which was about Russian dissidents resisting Putin’s oppression and had nothing to do with the Israel-Hamas conflict) purely because she was Israeli, and released a statement reflecting the same. To be sure, Pomidor had not posted anything about the war except on Oct. 7 to stand with the victims of those massacred. My good friend Zoe Buckman, a British Jewish artist from Hackney now living in New York, has been frequently made the target of such attacks and boycotts against her works as a Jewish artist (again, her works having nothing to do with the conflict and despite constantly expressing her solidarity with both Jews and Palestinians but calling for an end to antisemitic hate crimes), even having a prominent voice in the art world change her Instagram handle to “Zoe Buckman’s number one hater” and encouraging peers to disassociate with her.
One would like to imagine that as our world advances, we progressively mature from the animus of bigotry, race-based hate, and xenophobia in all forms. While fronting as reasonable, antisemites and anti-Zionists trade acceptance only for purity, requiring Jews loudly shed themselves of all ties to Israel in exchange for entry into the “progressives” club - something that thousands of years of stateless persecution dictates the vast majority of Jews cannot do.
Animus toward a people because of their race, ethnicity, or nationality is certainly nothing new, however, what we have come to understand more than ever in our post-October 7 world, is that a shockingly effective loophole for expressing bigotry is to hide it behind “caring for humanity.”
