"Lie down and play dead if the shooter comes in," our Rabbi instructed.
On a sunny afternoon in my ninth-grade year, my Jewish day school went under lockdown. From an announcement over the loudspeaker, we learned that someone with a weapon had broken into the building.
The door to our classroom would not lock. Our rabbi barricaded the door with the entire weight of his body.
I can still see the terror in his face and hear the quiet cries of my classmates. I still dream of the prickly carpet tickling my skin as I melted into the ground, wondering if I would see my family again.
We cowered under our desks in silence for what felt like an eternity.
Eventually, the nightmare ended, and we learned that our assailant had not come with an intent to harm us. An ex-employee snuck into campus armed with a knife and stabbed a cafeteria worker in our school kitchen. In reality, we were never in any real danger.
The fear of death that suffocated my chest as we hid suddenly felt ridiculous. For years, I have attempted to minimize that day because I did not yet honor the power of perception.
In the age of social media and 24/7 news, narratives have become currency that are bought, sold, and edited to conform to whatever truth we choose to believe. Objective truth no longer exists as the foremost pillar in the construction of our worldviews. What we believe to be true can often outweigh the relevance of reality in public discourse.
In the weeks following the massacre of October 7, I have come to compare the false truth I perceived while cowering in my classroom to the spread of popular misinformation online.
While the war in Israel and Gaza unfolds in devastating bloodshed and terror, Instagram has become the site of a proxy battleground of its own. Comment sections are the lines of fire while Instagram stories bomb our feed like an airstrike.
Propaganda proliferates as snippets of interviews are taken out of context and bold declarations in aesthetically pleasing fonts are presented as fact. Extremes from every angle are assaulting nuance and compassion through unrelenting ignorance.
I am witnessing Holocaust denial before my own eyes, and I have no idea how to stop it from happening.
The weaponization of social media is a tool that I am all too familiar with. Just weeks after the 2021 Israel-Palestine crisis and the coinciding Instagram crusade spearheaded by my liberal collegiate peers, I moved to Jerusalem to intern at MEMRI, an international think tank focused on exposing extremist incitement located in underground social media networks.
For months, I analyzed thousands of posts shared by white supremacists throughout North America and Europe. The hatred these people carried had become truths that warped their realities into a humanitarian horror.
In these spaces, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and antisemitism serve as the inherent premises of a shared reality. The ingestion of these perspectives provided me with a unique window into the world of my enemy.
Most posts were adorned with swastikas, iron crosses, weapons, quotes from manifestos, news clips, racist musings, and cartoons—the classic iterations of neo-Nazi ideology.
Among the rubble of human hatred, I found the most terrifying artifacts of all: Digital posters of antisemitic propaganda almost identical to the anti-Zionist posts shared by my liberal college classmates back in the United States.
The antisemitic overlap between the left and right reemerges again today as I see friends posting denials of the atrocities that occurred during the October 7 massacre and images of American protestors carrying "keep the world clean" signs in Washington Square Park.
These messages spreading throughout liberal political consciousness are analogous to the dismissal of gas chambers and historic calls for a Judenrein. The glaring parallels between right-wing and left-wing antisemitism can no longer be ignored.
The conflict over truth and perception is rooted in the center of global antisemitism. How we see the world becomes our truth, and that truth is more easily malleable now than ever before in human history.
The millennium-old narrative of Jew hatred is alive and well throughout the Western political spectrum and has been flawlessly adopted into modern digital discourse.
The physical violence in Gaza and Israel is reproduced digitally in the Western world's ideological combat zone: Social media. As the Internet Intifada rages on, I have learned that the facts of a physical event do not eradicate the feelings one might possess regarding it.
What is understood to be true directly influences our future reality. There was no antisemitic militant in my school the day we believed there was one—but that does not discredit the horror we felt as we hid, unsure of what lay ahead.
The narratives we are presented with online may be rooted in lies, but it does not matter if they are believed to be true. In the age of misinformation, it is our civic duty to research and question the narratives shared online before ingesting and reposting content.
Samantha Becker an American and Israeli Jew. She is a paralegal in New York City and plans to pursue a career as an attorney.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Samantha Becker is a paralegal in New York City and plans to pursue a career as an attorney.
