Old-New Anti-Semitism

In impressive detail, Eliana Aiken’s essay on anti-Semitism as information warfare brings together the ways in which America’s great adversaries, Russia, China, and Iran, have managed to weaponize anti-Jewish sentiments in the digital age with content farmed and engineered to divide Americans against one another at home and erode their will to project power abroad. Yang Meng’s response complicates the story of China and argues that the emergence of anti-Semitism on Chinese platforms owes more to the digital ecosystem's incentive structure than to any centrally directed campaign. Accordingly, the explanatory power of the Russian and Iranian cases cannot account for the spontaneous generation of anti-Semitic content in a country with no indigenous tradition of Jew-hatred and no significant Jewish population. Read Full Article »