Alvin Rosenfeld's recent Commentary essay, "The Pornography of Anti-Semitism," identifies something real. Today's Jew-hatred has a performative, exhibitionistic quality - loud, profane, addictive, and publicly enacted for an audience. The pornography analogy captures the texture of it well. But his analogy isn't explanation, and Rosenfeld stops just short of the mechanism that would make his insight actionable.
Antisemitism isn't like regular pornography, because pornography has become trite. There is no thrill in it anymore. If there is an analogy, it is more like incest porn, a genre whose entire appeal is the violation of a specific and powerful social taboo. The content itself is almost irrelevant. What matters is the frisson of crossing a line that society has marked as especially forbidden. Many of the "anti-Zionists" nowadays embrace the label "antisemite" as a kind of badge of honor, proving their supposed bravery at crossing lines and "truth telling."
And crucially, for both the producer and consumer, there is no real risk. No one is getting arrested for writing incest stories and no one is getting jailed for calling Jews "Nazis." You can indulge the transgression from complete safety.
It's not hate - it's "edgy."
That combination - maximum taboo violation, minimum personal cost - is precisely what makes antisemitism so attractive to a particular type of performer. Amplifying content that contextualizes synagogue attacks as understandable grief responses carries enormous symbolic weight as a transgression. And yet Jews are a small, geographically dispersed, non-violent minority with no credible capacity for retaliation. They write letters to the editor. The transgression feels enormous. The actual risk is negligible. It's the perfect trade.
Rosenfeld focuses, understandably, on the most extreme manifestations: the campus mobs, the Park East synagogue harassment, the murderers who traveled across state lines to kill Jews for Palestine. These are real and frightening. But they represent the far end of a continuum that begins somewhere much more banal - with podcasters and former cable news anchors who have discovered that a little performative hostility toward Israel is excellent for business.
And her fans are flocking to this performance. While she whines that Ben Shapiro is trying to "censor" her, her audience has increased dramatically in concert with her deciding that mainstreaming antisemitism is good business. Her YouTube channel subscribers increased from by 1.7 million between 2023 and 2025. and 176 percent year-over-year, accumulating over four million YouTube subscribers and vaulting to the third-largest conservative podcast in America. She is, by any measure, one of the great success stories of independent media.
If that is censorship, most influencers would love to have that problem. And indeed, many are following in the same pattern - attacking the Jewish people, claiming bravery, and simultaneously claiming victimhood while their transgressive content makes them money.
This is the business model for both the left-wing and right-wing "anti-Zionists." The victimhood claim and the massive audience are not in tension; they are mutually reinforcing. The persecution narrative is itself a transgression amplifier, allowing them to simultaneously claim to be brave truth-tellers and the scrappy underdogs, persecuted by a supposedly powerful Jewish lobby that in reality cannot touch them. Every Jewish voice that pushes back confirms the narrative. Progressives say facts are weapons of white supremacy; far-right influencers are saying facts are the weapons of Jewish supremacy.
This is why the standard response toolkit fails so completely. Pointing out the truth doesn't dissuade people whose primary motivation is the performance of transgression. Moral counter-argument doesn't touch them. Factual correction actively helps them. Being called antisemitic, which once carried genuine social cost, is now a trophy in many circles - proof that the taboo was successfully violated, that the performance landed.
Which means the honest conclusion of this analysis is uncomfortable: there is no rhetorical counter-strategy that solves what is fundamentally an economic and legal problem. As long as antisemitic transgression is profitable and cost-free, the market will supply it in increasing quantities. The response that actually matters is not a better argument - it is making the transgression costly again. That means advertiser pressure, platform consequences, and where applicable, prosecution. Not because those tools are pleasant or easy, but because they are the only ones that operate on the reward structure rather than the content.
Rosenfeld is right that unless it is effectively curtailed, we will see an ongoing stream of moral horror. He is right about the urgency. What he doesn't quite say is that curtailment requires targeting the business model, not the argument - because for most of these performers, there is no argument. There is only a performance, and performances stop when the audience stops paying.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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