Starring in the Conspiracies of People Who Hate You

Members of the majority culture don’t need to devote mental real estate to understanding the addled ideas of those who despise them. But many people like me do.

On Saturday night, I turned on my phone after the Jewish Sabbath and discovered that a white supremacist had massacred 10 innocents in my state. Most of the victims were Black, and the gunman reportedly targeted Buffalo, New York, because of the city’s racial makeup. According to law enforcement, the killer left a 180-page manifesto laying out his deranged grievances. The document makes clear that its author was animated by the “Great Replacement” theory, which posits that a sinister Jewish conspiracy is scheming to import Black and brown people into Western countries to displace the white race.

“White nationalism has no clear center,” wrote the Black civil-rights activist Eric Ward. “Yet it does have a deadly commitment to revolutionary violence against racial others… It rests upon a tortuous racial cosmology in which Jews form a monstrous, all-powerful cabal that uses subhuman others, including Blacks and immigrants, as pawns to destroy White nationhood.” Though these words sound like they were written in response to recent events, Ward published them in 2017.

The Great Replacement theory is doubly depraved: It infantilizes Black people as incapable of being the authors of their own stories, while demonizing Jews as mendacious manipulators. But it’s also just absurd.

Scrolling through the shooter’s fulminations about people like me, I felt a certain ironic detachment. It was impossible to square his dark delusions with my actual existence. By day, I’d been trying to amuse my 16-month-old, because her mother has COVID and is staying isolated in our bedroom. By night, I am sleeping on the couch. Like most Jews, I have not exactly had time to plot and perpetrate white genocide.

This is an experience that many members of minority communities have: We are constantly cast in a cosmic role that bears no resemblance to our lived reality. Imaginary Jews have been living rent-free in the heads of anti-Semites for centuries, which perhaps partly explains the stereotype that Jews are cheap.

It’s easy, as I just did, to mock these pretensions. In fact, I’ve made something of a sport of this on social media:

But while mockery can help turn the tables on anti-Semitic trolls online, it doesn’t solve the real-world problems posed by their dark fantasies.

In 2017, far-right activists marched in Charlottesville, chanting “Jews will not replace us.” In 2018, a white supremacist acted on these words and shot up Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, killing 11 Jews. In 2019, another white nationalist attacked a synagogue in Poway, California, leaving one dead and several others injured. In a manifesto, the killer wrote, “Every Jew is responsible for the meticulously planned genocide of the European race.” From Black people in Buffalo to Muslims in Christchurch, the body count of this idea continues to rise. (The killer in the latter massacre literally titled his manifesto “The Great Replacement.”) And as regular readers of this newsletter know, this is far from the only anti-Semitic fantasy fueling violence today.

I have no desire to invest myself in the minutiae of the Great Replacement theory or any other unhinged hallucinations of the hateful. But being Jewish means being compelled to follow these psychodramas, because people with power and deadly weapons who believe them will target us. Put another way, I’d much rather the Jewish content in this newsletter be things like the translation of Harry Potter into Yiddish, or the meaning of Passover, or Jews in science fiction. But I am repeatedly forced by events and outside actors to report on and explain anti-Semitism. This is something that members of the majority culture do not experience. They are not required to devote mental real estate to understanding the addled ideas of those who despise them.

I don’t have a happy or pat ending to this edition, just as I don’t have easy solutions to the problems of racism or anti-Jewish prejudice. But speaking from my own experience, I will say this: Anti-Semitism derives its power from ignorance of the lived realities of actual Jewish people. That’s because it’s much easier to demonize and caricature a community that your audience does not know or understand. And this is true when it comes to many targets of bigotry, not just Jews. So if you’re sitting at home watching yet another news item about yet another bigoted attack on a minority community and wondering what you could possibly do to makes things a little better, this would be my suggestion: Get to know us in the context of how we live—not just how we die.