Old-New Anti-Semitism

In impressive detail, Eliana Aiken’s essay on anti-Semitism as information warfare brings together the ways in which America’s great adversaries, Russia, China, and Iran, have managed to weaponize anti-Jewish sentiments in the digital age with content farmed and engineered to divide Americans against one another at home and erode their will to project power abroad. Yang Meng’s response complicates the story of China and argues that the emergence of anti-Semitism on Chinese platforms owes more to the digital ecosystem's incentive structure than to any centrally directed campaign. Accordingly, the explanatory power of the Russian and Iranian cases cannot account for the spontaneous generation of anti-Semitic content in a country with no indigenous tradition of Jew-hatred and no significant Jewish population.

Matthew Knee’s response pushes the idea further still, arguing that the real threat is much worse and much larger: the emergence of a global public square in which American political discourse is conducted among billions of non-American participants whose baseline attitudes toward Jews, free speech, and social trust diverge sharply from historical American norms. The result of that latter development is that anti-Semitism became a profitable and popular instrument in the information market by sheer demographic weight alone, regardless of the efforts of any particular government.

Each of these accounts captures an important dimension of the monster awakening from its long slumber. Taken together, I believe they show that information warfare is probably too narrow a category for what we are seeing today, and that we need a new conceptual model to understand it.