By Jonathan Tobin, Israel Hayom—
For one day at least, Twitter became a forum for some honesty, as opposed to the usual orgy of nastiness and pointless memes. After seeing the hashtag #Jewishprivilege used to spread anti-Semitic smears, a Jewish activist responded – and the result was a tidal wave of tweets testifying to the fact that the phrase has generally meant that Jews have been singled out for persecution.
Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer and public speaker, began the effort to reclaim the hashtag. Soon some Jewish celebrities, such as comedian Sarah Silverman, used it to recount incidents of anti-Semitism, as well as the list of relatives lost to the Holocaust and other stories of bias, insults, violence, and persecution. That provided education to the Twitterverse about the lachrymose nature of much of modern Jewish history.
But it will take more than one day of trending tweets about the hashtag to reverse the way those on both the far-Right and the Left have promoted the notion that Jews use some mythical “privilege” in order to manipulate the world or need to repent of an equally false status as beneficiaries of “white Jewish privilege.” Both are intended to intimidate and shame Jews into silence or acquiescence to radical agendas that are inimical to Jewish interests.
The notion that Jews are both the masterminds of some elite international conspiracy intended to rob, cheat, or otherwise misuse non-Jewish victims was a popular trope of Jew-hatred long before it was formalized in the anti-Semitic conspiracy text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fictional pamphlet first published in Russia by tsarist agents in 1903. The spread of that forgery helped fuel the acceptance of these lies around the globe. To this day, the Protocols still help to fan the flames of hatred in the Arab and Muslim world after having helped set the stage for the Holocaust in Europe. Continue Reading….