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My husband and I were sitting on a tarmac at Newark Airport, just having landed from a vacation in France, relieved to come home, where we could be openly Jewish again. Visits to that country are always laced with stress for us, Orthodox Jews whose appearance broadcasts our identity. Being home meant that my husband, a rabbi, didn’t have to hide his kipa or tuck in his tzitzis. It meant we no longer had to check emergency exit signs in kosher restaurants, or change the subject when cabdrivers asked us where we’re from.
Then I turned on my phone.
I saw immediately that several people — friends, acquaintances, fellow synagogue members — had texted me the same disturbing image: It was a Twitter profile with the name “David Goldberg.” The bio read: “Orthodox Jew against the apartheid state of Israel.” But the photograph was of my Jerusalem-born husband, Benjamin.
Staring at the image on my phone, an image of a large “Boycott Israel” sign behind my husband’s photo, I wondered about the country I had just returned to. As I scrolled through the troll’s account, reading the tweets denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland next to a photograph of my husband’s face, the sense of violation was no less than if someone in France had shouted “Juif!” at us on the street.
Benjamin’s photo was not the only one stolen. The identity theft was part of a larger scheme that had been organized on 4chan, the notorious online forum where white supremacists reign. Dozens of Jews from diverse backgrounds were affected. Among them: a Chabad-affiliated rabbi, Mendel Kaplan; Josh Goldberg, a Reform cantor in Los Angeles; and Hen Mazzig, a Mizrahi Israeli gay activist. (All of these have since been removed. Who knows if others still lurk?)
“We must create a massive movement of fake Jewish profiles on Facebook, Twitter, etc.,” an anonymous user posted. “Since Jews shapeshift into whites anytime they want, we can do the same to them.” A slew of profiles began to appear on social media, most posing as Orthodox Jews promoting anti-Semitic and anti-Israel content.
In other words, these avatars with fringe views were created with the express purpose of stoking ferocious fighting within the Jewish community by highlighting its most sensitive topics: Israel, Donald Trump and anti-Zionist Jews.
The 4chan user behind the movement made this entirely clear: The intention, he wrote, was to “subvert Jews themselves.” His goal was to “create infighting as righty Jews will accuse lefty Jews of being fake profiles. This creates more division.” The post advised readers how best to stir the pot: “You also have the benefit of labeling anyone an anti-Semite who disagrees with you. Use this to your advantage.”
I read all of this on an iPhone sitting on a Boeing 757. But in the year 70, the Roman emperor Vespasian alighted on this exact idea. The Roman court historian Josephus Flavius reported that Vespasian chose to hold off his attack on rebels in Jerusalem because he knew that Jewish infighting over whether to appease Rome or to take up arms against it would do most of the work for him. “The Jews are vexed to pieces every day by their civil wars and dissensions,” Vespasian reasoned, according to Josephus. Therefore, “we ought by no means to meddle with these men now they are afflicted with a distemper at home.”
The Romans’ military strategy was to encourage division within their enemy and then swoop in for the kill. It was the Jews’ internal warfare, especially the starvation imposed by one group on another, that weakened their resolve in the face of Vespasian’s army. On Aug. 30, the Romans entered a besieged Jerusalem, burning and destroying the Second Temple, and sending the Jewish people into an exile from the Holy Land that would end only with the establishment of the modern state of Israel.
Now, consciously or not, this political weapon of letting the Jews “fight it out” is being taken up by a president who sees himself as a great friend of Israel and the Jews — yet who attacks those Jewish citizens who vote for Democrats as having either a “total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”
Those who seek to exploit this tension seek to turn the American Jewish community against itself. They threaten to permanently damage the communal consensus that fostered the emerging state of Israel in 1948, as Jews worldwide rallied for the right to a homeland in the wake of the Holocaust. And they shake the core of the very community that banded together, across all political and religious differences, to demand freedom for Soviet Jewry, an effort which allowed my own parents to escape from behind the Iron Curtain to freedom in 1979.
Some anti-Semites want us to be afraid of our physical safety. They are the ones who compel us to put baseball caps over our kipas in cities like Paris. But others are more insidious. They don’t beat us or shout at us on the street. Instead they pit our already anxious community against itself.
It is on us not to give them the pleasure.
Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt (@avitalrachel) is an editor at The Forward.
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