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Why My Generation Hates Jews Julia Steinberg
I am 21 years old and Jewish. Apparently, 48 percent of my peers want people like me dead.
As of October 23, 64 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds think what happened on October 7 was a terrorist attack. Seventy-seven percent of us think “it’s true that Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 Israeli civilians by shooting them, raping and beheading people including whole families, kids and babies.” But when asked, “in this conflict do you side more with Israel or Hamas?”
Forty-eight percent said Hamas.
I am not surprised.
In high school, my homeroom had an exercise where we made a T-chart dividing various ethnicities, religions, and other identities into the categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed.” Women: oppressed. Straight people: oppressor. Black people: oppressed. Then we reached the “Jew” category. And we paused. This being a high school in Los Angeles, many of my classmates were Jewish. I recall we skipped it altogether. But the T-chart stayed on the whiteboard.
If there were fewer Jews in that room, I’m confident that “Jews” would’ve gone squarely in the “oppressor” column.
Social justice theory became part of everything. My senior English class was not about great literature, but about readings in critical theory, mostly about race and gender. I had a non-academic weekly homeroom class in which we learned that every white person is racist, and all men are evil. It took me a long time to shake off a hatred of men. It wasn’t socially acceptable to disagree, and no one really tried.
My high school got a dean of gender studies and feminism. At the time, one of her roles was to help seniors write their college applications. In answer to the question: “What is the most significant challenge that society faces today?” I wrote it was identity politics. She gave me a note saying that meant I was rejecting the advances of the civil rights movement. I changed it.
I see the biggest part of growing up to be the acceptance of gray areas. But Gen Z worships these identity categories and the distinction of oppressor/oppressed. I know that’s true—I am submerged in it every day. The oppressor is always wrong, and the oppressed are always right. Since high school we’ve been trained to identify and slot people based on their identities alone.
That’s intersectionality for you.
The cheering of Hamas among people my age on college campuses in the U.S. might seem shocking to older people. But it doesn’t shock me. For most of my peers, social issues are unanimous. At my college campus, the tiny group of people who publicly celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade were mocked mercilessly.
And so, even a terrorist group’s mass murder of innocent Jews—babies, grandmothers, entire families—cannot defeat my generation’s Manichean belief system. Jews are the worst, and October 7 is about justifiable revenge.
I am a college junior at Stanford. For my freshman and sophomore years, I lived in a dorm with the only dining hall that serves kosher food. Last winter, a Jewish student in my dorm found that a portrait of Hitler had been drawn on his door. My friend was the RA who had to report it. They never found the perpetrator.
Soon after, swastikas were carved into bathrooms in the main quad.
In my freshman year, I took part in a Great Books program: Structured Liberal Education (SLE). Weeks were labeled by students like Shark week, Plato week, Marx week, Holocaust week. (I’m not kidding.)
In SLE’s third quarter, my classmates and I were lucky enough to dive deeply into the ideologies that have shaped where we are now, a tour of the great books of the past 200 years. That quarter, I recall a conversation where I was shot down during “Fanon week” (which celebrates “anti-colonial” hero Frantz Fanon) for suggesting that approving violence under the guise of “decolonization” could have nasty consequences. I was the only person to vehemently disagree with Marx in my discussion section. In a moment of weakness, I pretended to be a communist during my oral exam to save my grade.
In another section during spring quarter’s “Holocaust week” where we read Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, a student gave a presentation on how Zionism is the new Nazism and how Israelis were the new Nazis. He chose this specific week to present. A Chinese student argued with the presenter, but that was that. The class went on as usual.
This is only my small corner of Gen Z. Gen Z, comprised of people born in 1997 to 2013, makes up a fifth of America’s population. Not all of us—thank God—go to elite universities, where the obsession with the so-called “oppressed” is our intellectual north star. But the vast majority of us were raised on Instagram and Twitter—our ideas are tweet-length and infographic-sized. And the oppressor/oppressed framework was made for us.
After seeing a thread on X about how TikTok—the preferred search engine for just over half of Gen Z—is an echo chamber for virulently anti-Israel posts and how its algorithm promotes pro-Palestine content, I re-downloaded the app for the first time since Covid to see how bad it really was.
In my foray back into TikTok, I was reminded of how my friends and I would doomscroll on the app. By osmosis, we mindlessly bleated the same talking points served up to us in thirty-second videos. The same critical theory books we read championing “decolonization” and “resistance” had been distilled into the perfect format: the explainer video.
Dipping my toes back in was a wake-up call as to how sinister this information flow has become. (It’s worth noting that TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance.)
Within the first minute of scrolling under a search for “Zionism” on TikTok, I saw a “Zionism Explained” video with over 125,000 views. It said that Jews are forbidden by God to have their own state, completely ignoring the fact that the State of Israel is secular. “How did this start? Let’s go back to 1897,” the video instructs. But Jewish history in Israel started thousands of years ago, not in 1897.
When I searched “history” on TikTok, a woman with the “cute freckles and lashes” filter told me and over 80,000 viewers that, in “the biggest plot twist of the century,” Jews are using their ancestors’ “tragedy to justify and inflict another Holocaust.”
That explainer video is why, when I went to a pro-Palestine rally at Stanford on Wednesday and asked a fellow student what she meant when she chanted “from the river to the sea,” she said that, after admitting she wasn’t knowledgeable about the issue, Palestine must be free from the Tigris River (in Iraq) to the Black Sea (north of Turkey). This student, though she has no sense of geography, is actually chanting for the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea to no longer contain the state of Israel. It is an eliminationist slogan.
I saw a similar message at an off-campus café recently when I walked by a girl whose laptop bore a newly applied sticker with the words “By Any Means Necessary” stamped over an outline of Israel. It’s been less than three weeks since October 7 and already these glib stickers plugging genocide, aimed at my generation, are proliferating.
A new axis of evil—Big Tech, social media companies, and China—has taken the once-fringe position that Jews are undeserving of a homeland, and is now pushing the idea of their mass slaughter via shoddy animation and beautiful women hosting “explainer” videos. And it’s trickling down onto T-shirts and “cute” laptop stickers.
It’s cool to promote hate.
My Jewish parents, whose hearts break to hear about what I go through at college, did everything they could so that my brother and I would reject this simplistic, horrible way of thinking. But they can’t change that my little brother’s high school also teaches ideology with T-charts. I doubt his teachers or classmates care to understand that no T-chart can account for why he and his Jewish friends feel sick when they see slogans calling for their deaths.
Julia Steinberg is an intern at The Free Press. Her last piece was about California’s War on Math. Follow her on X (formerly known as Twitter) @juliaonatroika.
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Yesterday, U.S. officials arrested Ismael Zambada García, or “El Mayo,” cofounder of the violent and powerful drug trafficking organization the Sinaloa Cartel, and Joaquín Guzmán López, a son of its other cofounder. That other cofounder, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, or “El Chapo,” is already incarcerated in the U.S., as are another of El Chapo’s sons, alleged cartel leader Ovidio Guzmán López, and the cartel’s alleged lead hitman, Néstor Isidro Pérez Salas, or “El Nini.”
In a statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland said: “Fentanyl is the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced, and the Justice Department will not rest until every single cartel leader, member, and associate responsible for poisoning our communities is held accountable.” El Mayo has been charged with drug trafficking and money laundering.
U.S. officials exploited rifts in the cartel to get Guzmán López to bring El Mayo in. The successful and peaceful capture of the two Sinaloa Cartel leaders contrasts with Trump’s insistence that the U.S. must bomb or invade Mexico to damage the cartels, a position echoed by Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance and increasingly popular in the Republican Party. Mexico, which is America’s biggest trade partner, staunchly opposes such an intervention. Opponents note that such military action would do nothing to decrease demand for illegal drugs in the U.S. and would increase the numbers of asylum-seekers at the border as their land became a battleground.
Trump seems to think that governance is about dominance, but that approach often runs afoul of the law. Today the Justice Department reached a $2 million settlement with former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who became the butt of Trump’s attacks after their work on the FBI investigation into the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Trump’s Department of Justice released text messages between the two journalists. Today’s settlement appears to reflect that the release likely violated the Privacy Act, which bars the government from disclosing personal information.
Tonight, speaking to Christians at the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump made his plans to become a strongman clear: “Get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians…. Get out, you’ve got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
This chilling statement comes after Trump praised autocratic Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán in his speech at the Republican National Convention last week and then publicly praised China’s president Xi Jinping for being “brilliant” because he “controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” It should also be read against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States that a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his “official duties.”
The Harris campaign reacted to Trump’s dark statements by ridiculing them, and him: “Tonight, Donald Trump couldn’t pronounce words [he mispronounced “landslide” as “land slade], insulted the faith of Jewish and Catholic Americans, lied about the election (again), lied about other stuff, bragged about repealing Roe, proposed cutting billions in education funding, announced he would appoint more extremist judges, revealed he planned to fill a second Trump term with more criminals like himself, attacked lawful voting, went on and on and on, and generally sounded like someone you wouldn’t want to sit near at a restaurant—let alone be President of the United States.
“America can do better than the bitter, bizarre, and backward looking delusions of criminal Donald Trump. Vice President Kamala Harris offers a vision for America’s future focused on freedom, opportunity, and security.”
Harris continually refers to Trump as a criminal in her speeches, but her campaign has taken the approach of referring to him and J.D. Vance as weirdos. On Tuesday, Minnesota governor Tim Walz said, “These guys are just weird.” Senators Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Brian Schatz of Hawaii recorded a video together about Vance’s “super weird,” “bananas,” and “offensive” idea that people with children should be assigned additional votes for each child, making their wishes count more than people without children.
As J.D. Vance continues to step on rakes, the “weird” label seems correctly to label the MAGAs as outside the mainstream of American thought. Today, Vance doubled down on his denigration of women who have not given birth as “childless cat ladies” but assured voters he has nothing against cats. In addition, a video surfaced of Vance calling for the federal government to stop women in Republican-dominated states from crossing state lines to obtain abortions.
Mychael Schnell of The Hill reported today that while MAGA Republican lawmakers like Vance, a number of House Republicans are bashing his selection as the vice presidential candidate. “He was the worst choice of all the options,” one said. “It was so bad I didn’t even think it was possible.”
“The prevailing sentiment is if Trump loses, [it’s] because of this pick,” another said, a sentiment that suggests Vance will be a scapegoat if Trump loses. Considering what happened to Trump’s last vice president after Trump blamed him for an election loss, Vance might have reason to be concerned.
Last night’s “Answer the Call” Zoom has now raised more than $8.5 million for Harris; the organizers thanked Win With Black Women “for showing us how it’s done.” Today the Future Forward PAC, which had threatened to hold back $90 million in spending if Biden stayed at the head of the ticket, began large advertising purchases in swing states for Harris.
Carl Quintanilla of CNBC reported that a week ago, those on a phone call of more than 400 people from Bank of America’s Federal Government Relations Team believed that a Trump victory was a “foregone conclusion.” Now that conviction is gone. “[T]here’s been a palpable sentiment reversal.”
The Harris campaign announced that it will launch 2,600 more volunteers into its ground game in Florida, a state where abortion rights will be on the ballot this fall, likely turning out voters for the Democratic ticket. The volunteers will write postcards, make phone calls, and knock on doors.
Today, Vice President Kamala Harris filled out the paperwork officially declaring her candidacy for president of the United States.
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/us/sinaloa-cartel-ismael-zambada-custody-report/index.html
https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/mexico-surpasses-china-us-biggest-trading-partner-exports/
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/10/gop-bomb-mexico-fentanyl-00091132
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/26/peter-strzok-lawsuit-settlement-00171498
https://www.vox.com/culture/363230/jd-vance-couch-sex-hillbilly-elegy-rumor-false
https://thehill.com/homenews/4793818-vance-vp-trump-house-republicans/
https://ballotpedia.org/Florida_Amendment_4,_Right_to_Abortion_Initiative_(2024)
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Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.
→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”
→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.
That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.
And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.
Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”
→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.
Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.
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