'Jewish Twitter' IS a community and it's not just about fighting antisemitism - The Jewish Chronicle

My relationship with Twitter is a bit like my relationship with my religion. It is complicated being a Jew who can’t really read Hebrew and isn’t sure she believes in God. It’s also complicated being on a site where I get abuse on a daily basis but have found like-minded friends who I can tell my deepest darkest secrets to.

While I certainly at least partially agree with David Baddiel’s musings that we Twitter Jews aren’t as powerful as we’d like to be I couldn’t disagree more with his thesis that we aren’t a community.

We are JTwitter. We may be the most boisterously argumentative of all Twitter groupings but, as I once explained to one of my bemused non-Jewish editors who’d seen me in the middle of a spat and asked if I was ok, debate is part of our culture.

God, we argue. But when push comes to shove, we come together. I’d like to think that British JTwitter has led the way on this forced, as we were, to put aside our myriad differences to fight Labour's antisemitism. Apart from the tokenistic Jews so loved by the BBC who would parrot ‘Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t have a racist bone in his body’ the Labour leader managed the unthinkable and united us all.

For that brief time left wing Jews, right wing Jews, Remainers, Brexiteers came together to fight antisemitism and for many of us Twitter was where we did it. And where we are still doing it.

There are stars of British JTwitter such as blogger David Collier (@mishtal) who has 86,000 followers for his regular blogs uncovering antisemitism, Gnasher Jew (@GnasherJew) an anonymous collective finding antisemitism from the left and the right, and granny Gillian Lazarus (@GillianLazarus) who goes on the Corbynista Facebook accounts and exposes the horrific antisemitism that can still be found. All of them have stronger stomachs for this sort of stuff than me.

There is also the CST’s Dave Rich (@daverich1) and academic David Hirsh (@DavidHirsh) who summarise the antisemitism of a situation, Jo Bell (@jobellerina) who can brilliantly skewer an antisemite in one fell swoop, Fiona Sharpe (@SharpeFiona), the always sensible spokeswoman for Labour Against Antisemitism, and Jewish film makers Joosy Joo (@JoosyJew) and Milk Media (@milkmedianewyor).

And then there are the Jewish celebrities who are part of JTwitter – Tracey Anne Oberman (@TracyAnneO), Rachel Riley (@RachelRileyRR) and Oscar-nominated comic Lee Kern (@leekern13).

You’ll see us in JTwitter out in the open, backing each other up during spats, giving each other likes and retweets. And arguing, of course.

Less openly are the private messenger groups. Checking in on each other’s mental health, thrashing out ways to respond to new challenges, discussing ideas, laughing. And arguing, of course. Sometimes it can also be hard to keep up with who hates who.

British JTwitter has had some sizeable wins – the most recent being getting the Royal Court Theatre to step back from yet another anti-Jewish play. The theatre’s producers had, in their wisdom, ignored at least two people working on the production Rare Mettle Earth telling them using the name Hershel Fink for its non-Jewish megalomaniac grasping billionaire baddie was antisemitism.

That was until, just a few days before opening night, theatre producer Adam Lenson (@AdamLenson) pointed it out and all of JTwitter joined in. The end result was the play Jews. In Their Own Words which opened last week and skewered at least some of the Royal Court’s previous misdemeanours.

It was also British JTwitter which forced a 48-hour walkout from the site by thousands of high-profile users after the British rapper Wiley went on an antisemitic tirade in July 2020. Let by @NudderingNudnik and Tracy Ann, it forced the social media company to at least consider its problem with antisemitism and racism even if that problem remains as endemic as ever.

Just as importantly, I know our work helped show the problems endemic in Corbyn’s Labour.

It is no wonder American JTwitter admires our plucky fighting spirit which they are emulating as US universities, in particular, become places of hatred - two of my favourite JTwitter Americans are the fearless journalist Bari Weiss @bariweiss and Blake Flayton (@blakeflayton) who started tweeting about this stuff when he was a student. And of course, Israeli JTwitter with activists Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) and Emily Schrader (@emilykshcrader) and fearless feminist Ethiopian Jew Ashager Araro (@AshagerAraro) all being people I admire and have connected with.

Thanks to JTwitter I now have Jewish friends all over the world and who are every type of Judaism. On Friday evenings the JTwitter cry of #ShabbatShalom goes up and it is rather beautiful - the diaspora coming together.

Because this is not just about fighting antisemitism. Thanks to the JTwitter community I’ve learned about amazing Jews of the past and the present, I’ve learned about our history and our art, our languages and our food. While we row over whether Ashkenazi or Sephardi food is better, and whether its bagel or beigel, we are doing this as a community which is more connected than ever before because of the friendships we’ve made.

Judaism has never been just about reading Hebrew or believing in God. We are a people. And while we may be few (there are antisemites with more Twitter followers than there are Jews in the world) everyone is free to join our messy noisy gang.

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