The first thing to understand is that Sharpton’s activism was a form of flesh-and-blood ethnic politics adapted to the televisual era. His narrative in Crown Heights was built on a particular grievance, against particular people, in a particular neighborhood. It generated its power on a left-wing trope: that Jews were oppressing poor blacks, and that the government was favoring “white interloper[s]” over native minorities. Sharpton’s desired outcome was tangible: he sought the imprisonment of the driver and, more broadly, cash for his organization, which operated like a mafia protection racket.
The new anti-Semitism has taken a different turn. The leaders of this movement are not political activists but social media “influencers” who have constructed a narrative based not on a left-wing, oppressor/oppressed framework, but on a diffused, right-coded conspiracy theory. Jews, in these influencers’ telling, have taken control of American media, flooded society with pornography, and organized sex-related blackmail rings to secure support for Israel.
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