Analysis
The online dangers shown in Adolescence are all too familiar to Jews
Antisemitic conspiracies are already widespread, blaming Jews for everything bad in the world
April 2, 2025 14:25
3 min read
Antisemitic conspiracies are already widespread, blaming Jews for everything bad in the world
April 2, 2025 14:25The Netflix show Adolescence is rightly garnering mass attention, shining a light on the dangers of toxic misogyny in the online manosphere and the real-world harms that accompany it. But it was an interview of co-writer Jack Thorne that rang additional alarm bells for me.
Thorne was speaking on the BBC’s Newsnight programme about the online attacks he has been suffering following the show’s broadcast. Questions have been raised about his masculinity, his oestrogen levels, and “weird things like people saying that I’m Jewish when I’m not”.
For anyone working on anti-Jewish racism this isn’t weird at all, but depressingly familiar. In the trolls’ eyes Thorne would be Jewish because, in the world of the online hatemonger, Jews are behind everything "bad” in the world. In this case, members of the manosphere view Adolescence as bad for showing them in a negative light, so maybe the creator is a Jew.
Over several years the Antisemitism Policy Trust, which I lead, has studied small, high-harm sites like 4Chan and slightly larger ones like Telegram in our bid to understand and combat online antisemitism. What we have found, increasingly, is an overlap with other forms of hatred including misogyny.
Young people start in online communities that are antisemitic or misogynistic and are drawn from one to the other. They develop so-called fluid ideologies that gather elements from a smorgasbord of online extremism.
The government is failing to get to grips with this, and unless the technology secretary and Ofcom up their game on regulating small, high-harm platforms, and on making AI safe by design, we will be seeing a lot more of it.
It wasn’t just the intersectional ideological hate that concerned me in watching the Newsnight interview. No less shocking was the speed, reach and casual nature of the antisemitic conspiracism, which seems to be spreading at an ever faster pace.
The comedian Paul Chowdhry is touring the country with his Englandia show. In a skit about his interactions with some individuals online, he reveals that a young woman charged him with being "a Zionist”. The allegation was that because Chowdhry had done something she found upsetting, he must be on the side of evil, and therefore Zionist, which we might presume to be a substitute for the word “Jew”.
Last year Louis Theroux, a British cultural icon who produced David Baddiel’s Channel 4 documentary Jews Don’t Count, supportively shared an essay from the London Review of Books titled The Shoah after Gaza, which suggests that the modern human rights order, established in the wake of the Holocaust and in the face of Jewish suffering, is being undermined by the Jewish state.
Theroux’s decision to share the essay was all the more disappointing given that he has famously, in the past, faced down and exposed antisemites in his documentaries.
Important and powerful piece about the west’s complicity with atrocities in Gaza and our “moral collapse” in the face of unimaginable horror. “We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. Never before have so many witnessed an industrial-scale slaughter in real time.”…
— Louis Theroux (@louistheroux) March 7, 2024
It isn’t only in cultural spaces such as drama or comedy that we see the warning signs, but in politics too. On The Rest is Politics podcast, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart hosted Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories, for a softball interview in which they failed adequately to challenge her previous antisemitic comments. In uncritically amplifying her voice, the podcast left me feeling there had been an erosion of the boundaries of what’s acceptable.
In a recent meeting with MPs and government advisers, I talked about my fear that we are simply holding up the barricades, seeking to stem the flow of a toxic, racist, conspiratorial narrative that is eating away at the bounds of public discourse.
The space for Jews is getting smaller all the time, or as former minister Robert Halfon put it, the shirt collar is tightening.
The only way this will get better is for people to meet antisemitic and conspiratorial discourses head-on, not excuse or shy away from challenging them. That is why the focus of Adolescence is so admirable. I hope the writers will now turn their attention to a show about antisemitism, as it is very sorely needed.
Danny Stone MBE is chief executive officer of the Antisemitism Policy Trust.