Bari Weiss on Jewish Identity in Online Spaces - Article

The Bad Optics of Fighting for your Life, an article by Bari Weiss succinctly summarizes the struggle many Jews are going through to defend their identity while remaining in intersectional spaces, especially online.

This article is a testament to the main objective of this entire website and accurately explains, in a simple and concise way, why this subject is extremely crucial to address. If you read anything on this website, let it be this article.

The top of Weiss's article that shows her intriguing byline and a photograph of missiles flying in the air

"[...] plenty of Western activists, including many who identify as journalists, have spent the past decade or so rebranding this conflict to suit the ideological fantasy world in which they operate. " - Matti Friedman, from Weiss's article

Over the course of her article, Weiss describes the anxiety-inducing scene of Jewish identity boiled down to the Israeli conflict on social media platforms. In an effort to defend and define their own identities (regardless of if Israel is even significant to a Jew's life, which it not always is), Jews across platforms are fighting to simply be heard across a cacophony of misinformation that further silences Jewish communities. Weiss addresses a concept she dubs "The Narrative," which is essentially the Israeli- Palestinian conflict (or I/P conflict) as painted through the lens of simply good and evil, which is not only a massive injustice to the true complexities of what is currently facing the Palestinian and Israeli people, but is simply not true, as "the narrative" then serves to erase not only historical context but also amplify tensions. Weiss discusses the challenge many Jews are facing on the internet in not only facing this barrage of misinformation, but the antisemitic fallout this misinformation produces. This misinformation is carried through content like tweets, Tiktok videos, and more recently infamous, Instagram infographics. Weiss provides examples of these posts that are shared most frequently by large activist accounts with followings higher than the entire Jewish world population. By posting misinformation on social media that casts Israel as an "evil" force in a century old conflict and conflating Israel with all Jews, Jews then in the real world face violence and threats by groups of people who believe Jews are the root problem of a complex conflict. And hopefully this doesn't need saying, but blaming a complex problem on the entirety of the Jewish people, by individuals without much context of the middle east or the I/P conflict to boot, is antisemitic.

See below for the full article.

Weiss, Bari. “The Bad Optics of Fighting for Your Life.” Common Sense, Substack, 13 May 2021, https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-bad-optics-of-fighting-for-your.