Can American Jews step back from the brink of conspiratorial paranoia?
We need to stop falling for exaggerations and lies
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Yale. Photo by Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Jay Michaelson May 1, 2024
“Did you hear about the stabbing at Yale?” the woman asked me. We were at a book event in New Jersey; I had just given a reading.
“No!” I said, surprised. “Did it just happen?”
She said no; actually, it had been a few days ago. I said that I was shocked, because I’m following the Israel/Palestine crisis closely, having written several articles about it in recent weeks, but hadn’t heard anything about it. She told me to look it up.
Which I did.
It never happened.
Here’s what did happen, as captured on video so you can “do the research” for yourself. A politically active, conservative student journalist, Sahar Tartak, “covered” an anti-Israel rally at Yale. As you can see in the video, she was standing quite close to a group of student protesters who were marching in Beinecke Plaza, when one of them grazed Tartak with a flag he was waving.
Having watched the video many times, it looks to me as if this was accidental. He was waving a flag, and she was standing practically on top of them.
That’s not how Tartak reports it. “Ow! Ow! You stabbed me in the eye!” she can be heard shouting in the video. And in her account of the incident, published on Bari Weiss’ The Free Press platform, she wrote: “I was stabbed in the eye last night on Yale University’s campus because I am a Jew.”
None of that is accurate. First, she wasn’t “stabbed.” At most, she might have been poked – her initial Twitter post used the word “jabbed.” (According to one report, Tartak went to a hospital but was discharged for not having any injuries.) But can you even “stab” someone with a flag? Is it a “stabbing” if there is no puncturing of the skin? Should The Free Press have fact-checked any of these allegations?
Moreover, even if it was an intentional poke — not, as it looks to me, an accident — obviously Tartak was poked not for her religion but for being a hostile interlocutor getting close to the protesters, videotaping the protest and making comments about it.
Of course, her Jewishness is part of it; Tartak is, in her words, “a visibly observant Jew who wears a large Star of David around my neck and dresses modestly.” But Tartak antagonized them, too, yelling “I have freedom of movement!” as if clearing the plaza were her job. What would have happened, I wonder, had a “visibly Muslim” student gotten this close to a pro-Israel rally and insisted on walking through its marching lines?
Whatever happened at Yale that night — Yale says it is investigating the incident — it wasn’t a stabbing and it wasn’t an antisemitic incident. Yet that’s exactly how it was reported, multiple times, on Fox News and in right-wing newspapers. Like a game of telephone, the incident kept getting worse each time it was retold, eventually becoming the account of a “stabbing” that the kind woman told me about.
This is happening again and again and again. American Jews, including political liberals and moderates, are falling for exaggerations, lies, and conspiracy theories on par with QAnon and Plandemic. We are concerned and scared, and so we are easy marks for people who seek to gin up outrage and sow discord for one reason or another.
The Forward has already reported, for example, on the widespread myth that the Columbia protests are being orchestrated by some sinister puppet-master — a myth repeated by New York Mayor Eric Adams. Never mind that the photographic “evidence” in question is apparently an AI-generated fake. Or that all protest movements, from the March on Washington to the March for Life, from Occupy to the Israel Day Parade, receive logistical support from activist organizers. No, it must be a shadowy conspiracy.
Or take another example: A well-respected rabbinic friend of mine showered me with evidence of antisemitism on college campuses. One was a perhaps-infamous protest in which a single person is holding an offensive, handwritten sign next to some pro-Israel protesters waving Israeli flags on the Columbia sundial: “Next target for Al-Qasem Rocket.”
I’m not defending that sign, just like I’m not defending the protesters at Beinecke. But this wasn’t antisemitism, for heaven’s sake. This was a group of political activists cheering and waving the flag of a country that has killed 30,000 civilians in recent months, and a single counter-protester with a tasteless, offensive piece of paper. Is it “Anti-Chinese” to protest the genocide in Tibet? Is it “Anti-Buddhist” to protest the genocide in Myanmar? No, obviously. What’s being protested is the genociding, not the identities of the people doing it.
Now, as I’ve written before, the term “genocide” clearly does not apply to what is happening in Gaza. But these protesters think that it does, and in any case, what is happening is horrible, and people are protesting it.
There has been, to be sure, an increase in antisemitic incidents. Any time Jews or Jewish events or venues are targeted, that is antisemitic. Any time antisemitic motifs are used, that is antisemitic. But a lot of this is vitriolic protest.
We American Jews need to get a hold of ourselves — for our own sake.
First, we need to recognize the obvious: Many of us are angry, scared, and feeling threatened, both by Oct. 7 and by its aftermath. Understandably, our judgment is clouded. We are liable to respond out of fear, and to be receptive to fear-based messages that confirm our anxieties. Just as you wouldn’t lash out at your spouse when you know you’re feeling angry, lonely, or exhausted, we should second-guess ourselves now. The deepest-held feelings are not always correct. On the contrary, they’re often the most misleading.
Second, not everything that seems scary is antisemitic. Because of my conditioning, I still shudder when I see a group of masked protesters wearing keffiyehs. They remind me of the terrorists who murdered friends of mine, and the Palestinians who once threw rocks at me when I lived in Israel. But that does not make the incident antisemitic.
Nor are our gut-reflex interpretations of events really that reliable. For that matter, are protesters really focusing on Israel because it is the Jewish state? Or because it is the leading recipient of U.S. foreign aid and has killed 30,000 people in six months?
Our judgment is also clouded because many of us care deeply about Israel. It is hard to hold the tension of caring about Israel on the one hand, and deploring its extremist government’s conduct of the war on the other. I have fond memories of Israel, both from my childhood education and my lived experience there. But that doesn’t excuse a war that, by many objective measures, seems designed not only to root out Hamas but to teach a darker, wider lesson that Israel is not to be trifled with – at the cost of massive civilian death.
Finally, conspiracy theories exist to explain reality to people who cannot accept it as it is. And the reality American Jews struggle to accept is that good people disagree strongly about this war. Some oppose this war but support Israel. Some oppose the state of Israel itself, believing it to be a state built upon the subjugation of another nation. Still others support the war and believe Israel has done its best to minimize civilian deaths. All of these are political views held by millions of people.
To hold an anti-Israel view may be incorrect in some way, but it is not evidence of bigotry or conspiracy. Right or wrong, there are, on college campuses and elsewhere, thousands of young activists who are horrified at the carnage in Gaza and who are raising their voices to oppose it. Some of them are deeply misguided. Some do indeed lapse into antisemitism. But many — I would wager most — are sincere in their convictions, and are motivated by moral intentions. That’s certainly true of the ones I know personally.
I am dismayed at what I see happening to the American Jewish community right now. Of course, nothing in America compares with the plight of innocent Gazans or innocent Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas. But we should be better than this. We are, by and large, an educated population, and we have survived worse days than this. We know what it is like to be on the wrong end of a conspiracy theory. Yet now we’re falling for them.
And to top it off, this irrationality is alienating the next generation of American Jews, who see through the hyperbole of their parents. We need to support Jewish students wherever they feel threatened, but not by maligning every student activist as a would-be terrorist or antisemite. Hysteria is not the path to security.
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