How viral clips of antisemitism splinter our shared reality
Reporting on a “hateful message does not demand a lexicographer’s precision,” one watchdog group told a judge
Welcome to Antisemitism Decoded’s launch on Substack! This is an experiment to reach newsletter readers through a new platform, and hopefully experiment with some of Substack’s features like chat and video in the future.
I was at the arraignment of the alleged Capital Jewish Museum shooter Elias Rodriguez last week, where prosecutors said they had more than 1.5 million pages of evidence against him.
ProPublica has a must-read investigation into Leo Terrell, chair of the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force, and his checkered history of unpaid debt and ban on “lawyer talk” at the Department of Justice.
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UP FIRST
As clips of antisemitism go viral, consider the source
Last week, a video began circulating that purported to show a man wearing a “Hot Girls for Zohran” T-shirt harassing two Jewish women in a New York City subway station. The 18-second clip shows him calling one a “b‑‑‑‑” and yelling that they’re “monsters.”
It went viral in a particular corner of the internet popular with those who are concerned that Jews are under siege, especially by progressives, and that one of the best ways to fight this threat is by aggressively naming and shaming the perpetrators of antisemitism.
This brand of activism traces its roots back at least a decade to Canary Mission’s database of alleged antisemites, but it now includes the “Antisemites of the Week” award by StopAntisemitism, the “knowledge base” being created by Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus and the Shirion Collective, which relies on facial recognition technology to identify individuals captured in viral clips, among others.
But if there’s a journalistic veneer to cataloguing and amplifying instances of antisemitism, this particular ecosystem often seems to play by a different set of rules than traditional media.
Take the subway video. The subject of the video was quickly identified as Greg Schlotthauer, but the clearly spliced-together set of clips failed to show what sparked the interaction, or what the women behind the camera may have said to Schlotthauer.
Melissa Chapman, a Jewish influencer, was the first to share the footage, with a quote from the anonymous camerawoman. "My mom and I were going to Union Square, and then he starts screaming at us when he sees my Jewish star,” the account read in part.
As the footage spread, the description intensified.
“Maniac Hunts Jewish Mother and Daughter in Subway,” the Shirion Collective posted to its account, which also shares videos like one of a car forcing its way through a pro-Palestinian demonstration, captioned, “This is glorious. 🥹”
StopAntisemitism followed with its own observation: “Greg likes to harass and scream at Jewish mothers with their children in subways.”
Schlotthauer said he’s embarrassed by his behavior but insists the clip and accompanying narrative is deeply distorted. He told me he was riding the elevator with the two women when one noticed his Mamdani shirt — Schlotthauer had canvassed for the Democratic mayoral nominee — and started playing “Am Yisrael Chai” on her phone and gleefully shouted “Israel, b----!”
He asked if the woman had ever spoken to a Palestinian, and an argument over the war ensued, with Schlotthauer saying he snapped after one of the women responded to his concern over Palestinian deaths in Gaza with a mocking “aww!”
The 58-year-old musician acknowledged that it was wrong to scream at two strangers in the subway, and said that engaging with them at all “was probably the stupidest thing I've ever done.” But his description is essentially that of a political disagreement gone off the rails as opposed to the unprovoked harassment of two Jewish women on the basis of their identity.
I tried to track down more information about the incident to see which version best matched the reality, but the online network that spread the footage of Schlotthauer is not set up to share detailed evidence.
Chapman, who first received the subway footage, declined to send the full video to me or even to let the woman who had filmed the clip know that I was interested in her perspective. “I would never ever do anything with your self-hating Jew rag,” she said in an email.
In a recent court case, lawyers for StopAntisemitism argued that the group is not liable for getting specific facts wrong — it had accused a man of spraypainting swastikas outside a Jewish campus hub when he had in fact drawn a penis — so long as its descriptions are "substantially true” because reporting on a “hateful message does not demand a lexicographer’s precision.”
This view holds that what really counted in the subway exchange was that a Mamdani supporter accosted two Jewish women, cursed at them and made them feel afraid. “If this were your mother or daughter, how would you feel?” Daniel Linder, whose Shirion Collective first identified Schlotthauer, wrote to me in an email. “What context makes that OK?”
Linder might be right. One of my guiding principles in covering antisemitism is that I’m not here to tell you what is and isn’t antisemitic. Reasonable people often land in different places on that question. But I firmly believe that everyone deserves as much accurate information as possible when making that judgement.
Even if Schlotthauer’s description of what took place was completely accurate, one could still consider what he did to be antisemitic. My hunch, though, is that if his version of events was included alongside the viral clip, many of the people who sent him violent threats — “we gonna break you in two motherf---er,” a man who appeared to be an Israeli soldier said in one screenshot he shared with me — might have reacted differently.
On the flipside, if Chapman had agreed to connect me with the woman who took the video of Schlotthauer, it’s possible that she would have more footage or details to confirm her account of an unprovoked attack and the claims against him might prove more durable than those attached to a brief video clip.
Instead, many of these viral attempts to expose antisemitism sit in a liminal space between confirmed offenses against Jews and spurious allegations that can’t hold up to scrutiny. They are viewed as “substantially true” among those predisposed to believe antisemitism is an especially menacing threat — and serve to strengthen this conviction — but the scant details mean they generally fail to spread much beyond that bubble.
The result is yet another set of alternate realities depicting what is happening to Jews in this country. Did a Jewish woman and her child get accosted in the subway for wearing a Jewish star? Did a Florida State University student get punched by an antisemite while trying to drink his smoothie? To pose a question that my colleague Louis Keene tried to answer last year by examining a similar Jewish media bubble, were protesters “hunting and bludgeoning Jews” outside a Los Angeles synagogue?
That more and more people are seeking answers on social media — where a belief in a kind of spiritual truth rather than a detailed set of facts often reigns — is no doubt part of why the Jewish community is increasingly divided over not only the scale of the danger posed by antisemitism but also over what remedies are necessary to address the problem.
YOU MISSED THIS
Congressional Republicans zero in on teachers unions
🌐 WHAT HAPPENED
Republicans in Congress held two hearings this week focused on antisemitism in labor unions and K-12 schools with a special eye on teachers unions, featuring testimony from Jewish union members who say their peers and senior leaders have started discriminating against them.
“We’ve essentially been pushed into our own little Jewish ghetto,” Kyle Koeppel Mann, a staff attorney at the New York Legal Assistance Group, told the Education and Workforce Committee.
Chairman Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican, also claimed that Randi Weingarten, the American Federation of Teachers president and a prominent Jewish labor leader, had never spoken out against antisemitism. She replied with a lengthy thread featuring various examples of her condemning and discussing antisemitism.
🔎 WHY IT MATTERS
To the extent that Republicans have a playbook for how to address antisemitism — whether that’s Project Esther or a looser set of ideas and policy proposals — a big part involves cracking down on institutions that they believe foster antisemitism and promote various progressive values.
Unions check both boxes, and these back-to-back hearings and the recent controversy over the National Education Association’s attempted boycott of the Anti-Defamation League suggests that the labor movement may be moving into the Trump administration’s crosshairs, not only as a perennial target of conservatives but also on the basis that they’re threatening Jews.
📚 GO DEEPER
Teachers union head Randi Weingarten rejects congressman’s claim that she’s been silent on antisemitism (JTA)
DATA DECODER
A new poll of British adults found what the Campaign Against Antisemitism, an Israel-friendly group that commissioned the survey, described as an alarming rise in the share of the population that agreed with a series of “antisemitic statements”: 21% affirmed four or more of the statements, compared to 16% last year and 11% in 2021.
That near-doubling is slightly clouded by how the Campaign Against Antisemitism calculates this rate: They tallied the responses to a set of questions focused on explicitly anti-Jewish attitudes (shown above) and a series of responses about views toward Israel (below).
But the near-doubling in the share of Brits who agree with what CAA calls antisemitic statements appears to be the result of hostile attitudes toward Israel skyrocketing even as the clearly anti-Jewish positions remain unpopular.
For example, in 2021 only 24% of respondents agreed that Israel treated Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews — but 45% now believe that is the case. In contrast, the share of people who say they are less inclined to be friends with Jews than with people from other groups remained at 3%, roughly the same figure as in other recent surveys and down from the 10% who said they avoided friendships with Jews in 2015, indicating consistent improvement over time.
FORWARD GRID
Park defaced: Police are investigating after vandals spraypainted swastikas and messages including “Israel did 9/11 and 10/7” around a park in Encino, near Los Angeles. (ABC 7)
‘Hate Jews’ vandalism: The local community rallied around Congregation Or Shalom outside Chicago after “Hate Jews” was spraypainted outside the synagogue. (ABC Chicago)
Los Angeles swastika: Neighbors helped clean up the Mitzvahland Judaica shop after a man was caught on video painting a yellow swastika on the door of the Los Angeles business. (CBS)
Trump vs. Soros: President Donald Trump demanded an investigation into George Soros, writing, “we’re not going to allow these lunatics to rip apart America any more, never giving it so much as a chance to ‘BREATHE,’ and be FREE. Soros, and his group of psychopaths, have caused great damage to our Country!” (Forward)
DOJ lawyer loved Mein Kampf: The federal government’s lead attorney in its case accusing Harvard University of antisemitism once gave a rave review to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and wrote an essay from the perspective of the Nazi leader. (Forward)
Union lawsuit: The Zionist Organization of America has filed a lawsuit against the Massachusetts Teachers Association over what it describes as antisemitic content promoted by the union ranging from materials critical of Israel to a dollar bill folded into the shape of a Jewish star. (Boston.com)
Hasan Piker: The Anti-Defamation League is up in arms over The New Yorker’s decision to invite Hasan Piker, a leftist online streamer, to speak at its annual festival. Piker, who is one of the most popular left-wing voices among young adults online, has generated controversy for referring to Israelis as “inbred” and referring to Israel’s war in Gaza as a genocide. (New York Post)
Wikipedia probed: Republicans in Congress are investigating Wikipedia over claims of anti-Israel bias and antisemitism, building on a report from the Anti-Defamation League that accused the online encyclopedia of hostility toward Jews. (MSNBC)
Plano investigation: Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued Texas attorney general, announced an investigation into antisemitism in the Plano School District, implying that there may be widespread hostility toward Jewish students in the district but providing virtually no evidence. (Eastern Progress)