By Donald H. Harrison
LAFAYETTE, California — Two major factors in the growth of antisemitism are the weaponization of technology and the emboldening of extremists, Seth Brysk, the ADL Central Pacific Regional Director serving Northern California, Utah, and Hawai’i, told a Temple Isaiah audience on Wednesday evening, Dec.7.
“The weaponization of technology has allowed people not only to spread the word, but they use it to reach, recruit and sometimes radicalize people,” Brysk said. “In some cases, they can even use technology to commit acts of hatred and extremism. We have seen livestreaming of terrorist attacks. We have seen mass robo calls to try to dissuade people from voting or to spread various forms of bigotry.”
Brysk said there has been backsliding on some previous gains against hate. “We once upon a time went to Twitter and said ‘you need community standards’ because they didn’t have them. They said okay. We said you need a council to evaluate this and so they launched a Trust and Safety Council that they invited ADL to sit on to advise them what does hate look like, what should you do about it, what types of punishments should you mete out?”
Although he did not mention Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter recently, he said that type of cooperation is “not happening anymore.”
One hopeful development, he said, was the passage by the California Legislature of AB 587 which mandates large social media companies like Twitter “to once a year report to the attorney general what are your community standards, what kinds of reports are you getting about violations of your community standards, and how are you responding to them?”
Emboldening of extremists is the second factor in the growth of antisemitism specifically and hate generally, Brysk said. “We’ve seen them mainstreamed under the banner of a new term, “Alt-Right,” which is a way of saying ‘We are not extremists, we are just an alternative. We’re a right-wing form, but we are Alt-Right.’ We’ve seen extremes happen also on the Left too, where people under the guise of human rights or progressive values express various forms of antisemitism.”
Brysk’s discourse was one of several developments on Wednesday, Dec. 7. as concerns about growing antisemitism were expressed coast to coast starting with a White House-sponsored meeting convened by Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff.
Asked his assessment of the importance of that meeting, Brysk replied, “Half of Americans don’t know what antisemitism is. So let’s convene a summit; let’s get it on the news.” By this means, he added, uninformed people will ask “what is antisemitism?”
“Let’s get people to talk about it and learn about it and understand it so they can become the allies to fight back against it,” Brysk said. “Once you can start the conversation, you can introduce the facts, but you have to start the conversation somewhere.”
In New York, Todd Gutnick, a spokesman for the national Anti-Defamation League, reported that a growing number of online video games have been subjected to hateful messaging from white supremacists. Particularly targeted, he said, are Call of Duty, Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto, PUBG, Battlegrounds, Valorant and World of Warcraft. He said ADL found that 15 percent of young persons, ages 10-17, reported being exposed to discussion of white supremacist ideologies.
Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s National CEO, commented: “White supremacists and extremists are pushing their ideas into the mainstream across society, including online games. We know that what starts online doesn’t always end online – It can have deadly consequences in our communities. Online gaming companies have the ability to better moderate their content, but most have fully abdicated any responsibility to protect users and their communities.”
In California developments, Mayor Todd Gloria of San Diego will lead a Town Hall discussion about antisemitism at 6 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 8, at Temple Emanu-El in the Del Cerro neighborhood of San Diego. He will be joined by San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan, Hillel of San Diego Executive Director Karen Parry, Jewish community activist Sheri Sachs, and San Diego Pride Executive Director Fernando Lopez.
In Los Angeles, Laura Fennell, the Anti-Defamation League’s Western Regional Communications Director, issued a report from the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations that in 2021 there were 786 hate crimes recorded in the county, up 23 percent from the 641 reported the previous year.
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Anti-Jewish crimes accounted for 10 percent of the 2021 hate crimes tally. ADL’s Los Angeles Regional Director Jeffrey I. Abrams commented that “While this report covers 2021, we have seen a terrifying increase in recent years in hateful vitriol from celebrities and elected leaders–most recently with Ye’s repeated tirades against the Jewish people. We know that words matter. And words can and do incite real-life violence.”
At the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, on Tuesday, Dec. 6, actress and Jeopardy co-host Mayim Bialik, noting that “there are people who simply don’t like Jews,” stated that she tries to “ensure that the antisemitic voices on social media aren’t louder than the conversations I have with my family around the Shabbat table.”
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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com