Ben Lorber

Meet the ‘Bronze Age Zionists’: Far-Right Jews Embracing Fascism in the Wake of 10/7

“The US online hard-right isn’t exactly known as the friendliest place for Jews. It’s the place where antisemitic conspiracies thrive and cries of ‘Jews will not replace us’ resound. It’s where the Pittsburgh and Poway synagogue shooters (and many more besides) not only got their start and inspiration, but also found their base of support and cheering audience. It’s the source, according to most Jews, of the most threatening antisemitic movement today.

And yet, since October 7, a micro-community of what I’m calling “Bronze Age Zionists” has emerged with greater visibility on sites like Twitter and Telegram, Discord and TikTok, determined to put a Jewish, and militant Zionist spin on the ‘dissident Right’ (formerly known as the alt-right). A typical avatar features a Groyper frog decked out in an Israeli flag hoodie, and holding a rifle, accompanied by a quote attributed to Zionist fascist leader Meir Kahane:

Love has its place, as does hate.

Peace has its place, as does war.

Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge.

They go by usernames like ‘Kahane Disciple’ and ‘Kahanist Reactionary’; ‘HyperboreanJewDominance’ and ‘Full Jewish Resistance’; ‘goyim_hunter’ and ‘YehudiReaction.’ Their bios describe themselves as ‘Paleocon Zionist,’ ‘suburban Jewish neoreactionary,’ ‘Israel for Jews, Europe for indigenous Europeans,’ ‘unironically muscular Jew,’ and ‘American Revanchism and Jewish Power.’”

Read more at Religion Dispatches.

How Colleges Became Recruitment Hubs for the Gen-Z Right

“An anonymous post appeared in late September on Reddit’s “QAnonCasualties” forum, an online space designed to support those desperate to extricate loved ones from the all-consuming grip of conspiracy theories. “I think my brother is a white supremacist and I don’t know what to do,” a 17-year-old posted. She went on that she became concerned after her 13-year old brother started saying things like “gay people are disgusting.”

She’d done some digging and discovered her younger brother’s anonymous account on the alternative social media platform Telegram — complete with a username boasting support for white Christian nationalist Nick Fuentes and an avatar featuring the alt-right icon Pepe the Frog framed by an America First flag. Her brother, she soon discovered, had become a devoted follower of Fuentes.

Fuentes — who recently referred to Hitler as “really fucking cool” and announced “we need to eradicate the Jewish stranglehold over The United States of America” — leads the America First/“Groyper” movement, a network of disaffected, terminally online Gen Z men animated by a toxic brew of misogyny, antisemitism and white rage. (Groyper is a variation of the Pepe meme in far-right online spaces.) “This [is] really hard,” the sister acknowledged to those offering support. “I love my family so much and [it] hurts to see him turn into this.”

While Fuentes’ unabashed Hitlerism has rendered him untouchable for most conservative leaders, he can hardly be called fringe. Within the past two years, Fuentes has featured leading MAGA politicians Reps. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) at his Groyper conferences and intimately dined with former President Donald Trump as a surprise guest at Mar-a-Lago. Most of the once-fringe positions Fuentes championed for years — such as the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, Christian nationalism and hardline homophobia — are now standard conservative fare. And all that’s by design.

On high school and college campuses across the country, many young right-wingers are outflanking their MAGA elders in enthusiastic embrace of radically anti-democratic, exclusionary and bigoted politics. To be sure, most of Gen Z leans liberal. But those who buck the trend cling proudly to their “dissident” status, doubling down in uncompromising reassertion of the race, gender and other hierarchies their peers are set on dismantling.”

Toward a Sober Assessment of Campus Antisemitism

“A post on an anonymous message board calls to “eliminate jewish living from cornell campus” [sic]. A viral video shows protesters outside the Cooper Union library, pressing Palestine solidarity signs against a transparent glass wall while students wearing kippot study on the other side. The president of Harvard denounces the “hurtful” climate for Jewish students produced in part by chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” In recent weeks, as Israel’s horrific assault on Gaza has unfolded at a dizzying pace—killing at least 15,000 Palestinians in seven weeks—controversies concerning alleged antisemitic incidents on American college campuses have circulated faster than anyone can process them, stoking an overwhelming sense of fear.

It’s fair for American Jews to be concerned for our safety, with reports of vandalism, harassment, death threats, and physical attacks making headlines across the US. The global picture is even more alarming, as we have seen attacks on synagogue buildings in Berlin and Tunisia; a Jewish woman stabbed in Paris, a swastika painted on her door; an angry mob in Dagestan storming the airport with signs saying, “We are against Jewish refugees”; and many other heinous incidents. This wartime spike in antisemitic acts is not without precedent: Studies show that Israeli military offensives tend to correlate with upticks in antisemitism in the diaspora, perhaps because antisemitic attitudes and actors are emboldened when the State of Israel commits great violence in the name of world Jewry. But as experts seek clarity about the scale of the rise in antisemitic activity, political leaders and Israel-advocacy organizations are funneling this communal anxiety into a national moral panic. The campus has become a primary site of this dangerous and counterproductive panic—not only as a long-standing target for the right’s culture war, but also as a vehicle for the generational anxieties of the American Jewish establishment. The end result is immense repression of speech, with crackdowns primarily targeting Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim student activists, as well as other students of color. “There is an exponential increase in the need for legal support,” Dima Khalidi, director of Palestine Legal, told The Intercept last month, citing the “McCarthyist-style purge” sweeping universities, as well as industries like media and tech.

Though the intensity of the fear and the repression it’s feeding are new, these dynamics are familiar. From 2015 to 2018—before I became a senior researcher at the progressive think tank Political Research Associates, where I focus on white nationalism and antisemitism—I worked as the national campus organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), an American Jewish group that organizes for Palestinian rights. In that role, I supported student Palestine solidarity activists in countering the groundless and damaging charge that their legitimate political actions, like asking their student government to divest from Boeing’s war planes or building a mock Israeli apartheid wall on the quad to educate their peers, were creating what Israel-advocacy organizations misleadingly call a “hostile and unsafe” environment for Jewish students. As I worked with students and administrators at schools across the country—helping them to parse vital distinctions between criticism of Israel and antisemitism, disagreement and bigotry, discomfort and danger—I came to appreciate the necessity of considering each campus conflict in all its particularity. Some incidents were simple, others complex. But in each case, I found that the way to understand the situation was to carefully examine it, rather than rush to judge it. In a moment when many American Jews are feeling afraid, in a media environment that is stoking that fear with headlines that conflate many different kinds of events, it is more important than ever to proceed with level-headed calm. To undertake this sorting and disaggregation of a vertiginous pile of anecdotes will help us not only to more accurately assess the threat to Jews on campuses, but also to guard against Jewish fear being used to erode civil liberties.”

The ADL Is Making It Less Safe to Be a Progressive Jew

“Every morning, when I open my laptop to start the workday, I look at Nazis.

Sometimes I’m tracking young “suit-and-tie” white nationalists working to infiltrate conservative campus organizations and spread their worldview. Other times I’m monitoring street-fighting white power groups rallying to terrorize Jewish, Muslim, LGBTQ+, Black and other marginalized folks. Sometimes the work leaves me feeling energized, enraged and defiant. Much of the time, it leaves me feeling numb.

I work as a senior researcher at Political Research Associates, a think tank that monitors right-wing movements and helps people of conscience fight back. My focus is on white nationalism and antisemitism — the groups and ideologies that want me and my Jewish family turned into second-class citizens, expelled from the United States, or worse. I like to think I’m decent at it, too. Last year, HuffPost named me “one of the foremost chroniclers of the groypers,” the movement of Gen Z white Christian nationalists whose rabidly antisemitic leader, Nick Fuentes, dined with Trump last Thanksgiving at Mar-A-Lago.

I do this work because I want to do my part to help keep my people, and all people safe, and to stop the rise of fascism in the United States and worldwide. That’s also why I’m a member of IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace. These are two Jewish-led groups fighting for justice for Palestinians, an end to Israeli apartheid and freedom and dignity for all. These groups have long been active around these issues, but since Oct. 7, they have called for all hands on deck and moved into overdrive, demanding an immediate cease-fire. Right now, even Israel’s staunchest supporters recognize that the state’s current government is the most far-right it has ever been. Combining that with the rise of the far-right in the United States, the two sides of my activism have never felt more conjoined. (I used to work on staff at JVP and some In These Times staffers are active with JVP and IfNotNow.)

That’s why I, like so many, was outraged — though not entirely surprised — when Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, slammed JVP and IfNotNow as “hate groups, the photo inverse of white supremacists” on Oct. 18, shortly after they staged a powerful sit-in on Capitol Hill to demand our elected officials call for a cease-fire.”

Advisory: ‘No Nazis on Our Streets!’

“With Palestine solidarity protests ramping up in the U.S. and around the world in response to Israel’s large-scale, indiscriminate assault on Gaza following Hamas’s horrific massacre and kidnapping of Israeli civilians on October 7, troubling reports are emerging of anti-Muslim and antisemitic White nationalists attempting to hijack these protests to their own ends.

Ground reports from activists indicate that White supremacists and neonazis have joined demonstrations to spread their propaganda by positioning themselves as part of the solidarity movement. While only a few incidents have so far been reported, these racist propagandists stand to pose a significant threat to progressive organizing for Palestinian liberation—particularly as protestors demand a ceasefire, the return of vital services to Gaza, humanitarian relief, and an end to U.S. military aid to Israel.

White nationalists’ incendiary slogans and rhetoric aim to inject antisemitism into solidarity protests to further their own agenda to fuel conflict, threatening the physical safety and political demands of demonstrators. They do this intentionally, acting in an inflamed political environment in which allegations of antisemitism are used to mischaracterize and neutralize critiques of the Israeli state’s war crimes and human rights violations.”

The Right is Deeply Divided Over Support for Israel-Though it’s Not About Justice for Palestinians

“On October 7, the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, which included the horrific murder of hundreds of Israeli civilians. In response, Israel launched an unprecedented wave of deadly bombardment across the Gaza Strip, murdering thousands of Palestinian civilians, denying food, water and electricity to residents of the besieged enclave in an act of brutal collective punishment, and causing a mass displacement of hundreds of thousands that many are calling a second Nakba.

As Israel prepares for a likely ground invasion, the sudden descent into bloodshed has sent shockwaves around the world, with many worrying events could precipitously spiral into a regional war with catastrophic global implications. The U.S. Right has, in response, leapt into frenzied overdrive, ramping up Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism and war-on-terror saber-rattling while calling for repression of Palestine solidarity protests in the US. At the same time, a debate is unfolding on the Right regarding the nature and scope of U.S. support for Israel—a debate exposing deep fault lines in the MAGA coalition, and bringing ascendant varieties of far-right antisemitism closer to the mainstream.”

Read more at Religion Dispatches.

‘Sit Down and Be Quiet’- MAGA Attack on Jewish Republican Exposes Christian Nationalism’s Shaky Commitment to Pluralism

“Max Miller isn’t the person you would expect to condemn Christian ‘bigotry’ on Twitter. A GOP House member from Ohio and an advisor to former President Trump, Miller has essentially marched in lockstep with the MAGA movement.

But last week Miller fired off a tweet that created an uproar in the MAGAverse—in particular among its Christian nationalist contingent. After Lizzie Marbach, Communications Director at Ohio Right to Life, tweeted “There’s no hope for any of us outside of having faith in Jesus Christ alone,” Miller forcefully replied “this is one of the most bigoted tweets I have ever seen. Delete it, Lizzie. Religious freedom in the United States applies to every religion. You have gone too far.”

Critics rightfully point out the troubling free speech implications of a sitting Congressperson commanding a private citizen to delete a tweet. To others, Miller’s tweet is further proof of the lack of principles among GOP leadership, which is insufficiently committed to an authentic America First agenda.

But simmering beneath the uproar, and bursting at times into the open, is another charge. Miller is Jewish, and many seemed enraged, above all, that a Jew—even worse, a Republican Jew—would so brazenly challenge a core tenet of classical Christian faith that struck him as inherently oppressive. As the Christian nationalist movement builds unprecedented power in the U.S., their aggressive reaction to Miller’s cry of protest abruptly exposed the limits of their oft-professed love for Jews, at the hard edge of their dystopian vision.”

Read more at Religion Dispatches.

Conspiracy at the Core: Five Years After Tree of Life, Antisemitism Continues to Animate the MAGA Movement

“On February 20, 2023, at a re-election campaign event in West Palm Beach, Florida, former President Trump was asked by a supporter how he planned to combat the “alarming rise of antisemitism all across America.”

“We’ll get it stopped,” Trump responded, before immediately adding, “As you know, they’re after the radical Right now, and it’s very unfair.” Repeating familiar tirades against “Antifa” and “BLM,” Trump insisted of the “radical Right” that, “in many cases, these are people that love our country like nobody loves our country,” before touting his former administration’s far-right pro-Israel agenda. Trump’s defense of “radical Right” antisemites as “people that love our country” like no one else helped underscore the substantive alignment between the highest echelons of the MAGA movement and its radicalizing edge…

Antisemitism today has become a core driver of the illiberal, anti-democratic Right. Its flexible meta-narrative helps unify different sectors of the Right—from White and Christian nationalists, to self-interested billionaires, anti-trans advocates, nativists, and more—under the aegis of a common, all-powerful enemy said to be responsible for societal degeneracy and perceived victimization.”

White House Antisemitism Report Includes Encouraging Diagnoses — But Leans on Destructive Strategies

with Habiba Fahr.

“Recently, the Biden administration released the U.S. National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism, an unprecedented report advancing a broad policy agenda to combat, as its name suggests, antisemitism.

As researchers who study antisemitism and Islamophobia on the Right, we were encouraged that the report framed these oppressions within the broader upsurge in White supremacist violence that has targeted so many communities in recent years, and spoke compellingly of the connections between forms of oppression. We were discouraged, however, that some of the White House’s policy proposals cut against the intersectional approach we need, leaving the door open to flawed strategies—such as suppressing Israel-critical speech and expanding the police and security state—that harm Muslim and other communities, and ultimately do little to keep Jews safe.”

Read more at Religion Dispatches.