Influencing antisemitism

Braden Eric Peters, who performs as Clavicular, landed in Tel Aviv. Within hours, the people who perform the fight against antisemitism were not fighting him. They were fighting each other.

I am tired of the spineless populism dressed up in pseudo-intellectual argument about what the “idealistic Jewish position” should be on the ‘‘Clavicular affair.’’ The whole discourse is a sordid little pantomime, so devoid of truth, so inflated with performance, that arguing with any of it is a category error.

It is as shallow as the pundit they are all obsessing over.

What we saw was not analysis. It was not strategy. It certainly was not Jewish thought. It was a screaming, self-branding tantrum, the same narcissistic virtue signaling that has swallowed the “fight against antisemitism,” an ecosystem so self-obsessed it is completely oblivious to the damage it causes.

It feeds on its own drama and drains the meaning out of the real existential issues the Jewish world is facing.

A sphere addicted to spectacle, allergic to self-awareness, incapable of distinguishing between Jewish responsibility and low-end tabloid personal branding.

Then I read Tamara Tayar in the Jerusalem Post, “The Clavicular controversy exposes a culture of silence.” I felt compelled to respond. Not to join the circus, and not because Clavicular deserves another minute of our attention, but because ignoring her would feel like failing to validate something real. Her warning is legitimate.

Her fear is rooted in actual communal experience. There have been too many instances where potential damage to the community has trampled the pain of the individual. Work must be done to undo whatever can be undone, and systems must be built so that no pain, no injustice, is silenced again.

But this issue does not belong in this context. It should be miles from this self-obsessed influencer cesspit. What Tayar names is serious on every side. A victim whose pain is real. Communal figures who, however wrongly, believe they are protecting something sacred. Even at their worst, they are operating inside a moral universe that takes itself seriously. This is not that. There is no sacred thing being wrongly protected here. There is no communal instinct being tragically misapplied. There is a market. A shallow, sordid marketplace of clout-chasers monetizing the mention of six million dead, dressed in the borrowed vocabulary of Jewish seriousness, competing for the same thirty-second attention span. Every camp had a stream, a post, a family member deployed for the confrontation.

There is no omerta among influencers. They live off the noise. What Tayar heard as a demand for silence was one influencer camp telling another influencer camp to stop taking the audience share. That fight benefits them both. By introducing the moral weight of the cover-ups she survived into a Tel Aviv beach-club story, she unwittingly cheapens the ones still happening, in silence, right now.

This was not Melbourne. It was not Sydney. It was not Brooklyn. This was full exposure, useless, counterproductive, embarrassing exposure, of what is actually happening in the “fight against antisemitism” influencer sphere.

Some called the Clavicular visit “a first step,” a chance to “reach” someone who had flirted with antisemitism. Others declared him “garbage” who owed a full mea culpa before he could be considered for kosherization.

Some framed his arrival as strategy. Others as desecration. The pile-on had nothing to do with him. He was the occasion. The subject was who could be seen making the loudest self-serving use of a man who had sung Heil Hitler and refused to apologize for it.

They were not piling onto him. They were piling onto each other.

The saddest part, the part nobody wants to say out loud, is that many of them would have done exactly what Clavicular did if given the chance. A man who told CNN he was sterile, who said he would sing Heil Hitler again, and they queued up to be photographed with him. The honest ones admitted it. The rest behaved in ways that made the admission unnecessary.

This is not a fight against antisemitism. It is a fight for antisemitism, because antisemitism is the fuel that keeps their brands alive. Without it, they have nothing to say.

The way they drag the Rebbe and the Torah into their business is the clearest sign of how unserious the ecosystem is. Looking religious is not being religious. Coming from the broader Chabad community does not mean standing for what Chabad stands for. Their behavior is a far cry from what the Rebbe expected of his emissaries.

Cherry-picking an invitation the Rebbe extended to a US congressman as precedent for taking a morally compromised influencer clubbing in Tel Aviv is intellectually bankrupt.

The Rebbe is not a marketing asset. Judaism is not a costume. If the Rebbe truly mattered to them, they would be singing other tunes.

And on the very subject of the Rebbe, I heard a recorded lecture in which he explained that when it comes to Jew-haters, we know who they are and they know we know. He said there is no point in fighting them, calling them names, calling them antisemites. Speak to them diplomatically. Do not turn a cold war into a hot one. He was speaking about Jesse Helms at the time, but the principle is the principle.

Once the man had already landed in Israel, that principle applied a hundred times over. The Rebbe would never have condoned this crass public spat.

The Clavicular trip was not a communal failure. It was a mirror. It showed who has been speaking in our name. It showed what they are not fighting for. It showed who they are fighting for.

These influencers do not speak in our name. We should stop allowing this to happen in our name.

Antisemitism does not recede through public battles with antisemites. It recedes where genuine affinity is built, the affinity and respect that come to those exposed to our heritage, our faith, and to what our people have given the world.

We need to empower those worthy of representing our people and telling the depth of our story.