DISCLAIMER: Baruch Hashem, we are living in phenomenal times, when all of the anti-Semites around us are finally outing themselves so we don’t have to wonder who they are. But with more and more of them coming out of the woodwork these days, it has come to my attention that my columns have not been very inclusive. Mostly, I talk to a large audience of Yidden about things that Yidden can relate to – sometimes I even talk about things that secular people can relate to – but I never really talk to the antisemites.
Apparently, there is an even larger audience of anti-Semites out there that I’m not reaching. Where’s their column?
My bad.
So this one is written for them. If you’re not an anti-Semite, feel free to skip this one.
Here goes:
So you just came out as an anti-Semites. Congratulations! It is definitely the fashionable thing to do these days -- to hate a people who have been laughing in the face of anti-Semitism for thousands of years.
But perhaps you’re wondering: How do I go about it? What do I do with this information? Do I have to hold any core beliefs? How do I defend my values against those who would seek to defeat me with logic? This column might help you.
-Just as Jews have a long, rich, and storied and history, so do anti-Semites. Just as long, in fact. As long as there have been Jews, there have been anti-Semites. It’s the only tradition that has lasted as long as Judaism. Our forefather Yaakov’s own twin brother Eisav was an anti-Semite. So it in fact turns out that anti-Semitism may be a minute or two older.
-Everyone likes having someone to blame for their problems, and the Jews, historically, don’t punch back. Well, until Israel developed weapons systems. Historically, though, what are the Jews going to do? Debate you to death? I mean we can try, but it turns out, unfortunately, that in real life, if you win an argument – completely demolish the other side – the other side just gets upset. Try it with your wife.
-It also helps that the Jews have always and will always be around. If you want a scapegoat for your problems, you do your research -- you want to blame a people who won’t suddenly disappear, and then you’ll be like, “We still have that problem that we used to blame on them. I guess it wasn’t their fault.” Well, now what? You can’t now blame the same problem on a new group. People need someone to blame who won’t suddenly disappear on them. Hence the Jews.
-You can hate Jews for any reason you like, no matter your political leanings. For example, one side hates us because they say we’re in places of power and control world events, and the other side hates us because they say we’re uneducated and poor and bleed society dry. Everyone hates us for their own reasons, and those reasons are often contradictory, plus they hate each other, but they all end up in the same place eventually. Anti-Semitism: It brings people together.
-And you can incorporate the contradictions into yourself as well. For example, you can believe that Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel and never lived there before 1948, while at the same time believing that the Jews killed Yoshke, who was Jewish and lived in Israel. WHERE DID THOSE JEWS LIVE?! Did they commute?!
-You don’t actually need a reason to hate Jews. No one’s going to call you on it.
-You don’t either have to know anything about the region or its history. Most don’t.
-To be fair, how is anybody supposed to know the history all the way from 1948 to now? The way history class works is that the teacher spends half a year talking about the Native Americans and the colonies, half the year talking about the Civil War, and then does the last like 150 years of history in 3 days in June. And there’s more and more history every single year.
-What all anti-Semites are familiar with is the International Rules of War. They’ve all read it, internalized it… I think this is one of those things they teach in public schools that they don’t teach in yeshivas. They definitely know it better than an entire country’s military.
-Every Jew, no matter where he or she lives, is an official ambassador of Israel. So any time Israel does anything, feel free to run over to the nearest Jew for an explanation. To see if Israel shared it with all of us in our nightly Zoom meeting.
-History has shown us numerous times that the more powerful army is perforce the bad guy. That’s why the United States right now is the biggest bad guy. Israel keeps saying they have G-d on their side, and what’s more powerful than that? So obviously, they’re the bad guy.
-You can be indisputably right if you call the other side colonizers, because colonizers are evil. For example, once upon a time, England colonized America. That makes them evil. So it’s a good thing that in the Revolutionary War, the colonists beat them (the colonizers).
-If 465 million Arabs want 16 million Jews dead and 16 million Jews don’t want themselves dead, doesn’t democracy dictate that we go by majority vote? You thought Israel claims to be democratic.
-It frustrates you to no end that every time the anti-Semites make their presence obvious, all the Jews come together. “Again? I thought this was my moment! I chose it so carefully!”
-The biggest part of being an anti-Semites is pulling people over to your cause while at the same time also denying that you’re an anti-Semite. “Listen when I said, “Kill all the Jews,” I didn’t mean in an anti-Semitic way. I meant in a humanitarian way. Like I believe Israel has a right to defend themselves. I’m just saying that if all of them died, they won’t have to.”
-You can also say things like, “Listen, I don’t hate the Jews; I just hate Israel. And all the Children of Israel.”
-If you have a choice between attending two opposing rallies, you want to go to the one that defaces monuments that have nothing to do with the Jews. Nothing says, “I hate Israel,” like looting a Walgreens. And nothing says, “I am definitely right about who should live on specific pieces of land halfway around the world” like the destruction of public property.
-At Jewish rallies, nothing gets vandalized or looted. So how are they sending a message, exactly? You want to attend a rally that destroys property, loots stores, and gets into fistfights with the cops (before thanking them at the end for doing their job, of course), in order to prove that the people on whose behalf you’re protesting are a peace-loving people.
-Don’t actually call for peace. Just a ceasefire. It’s totally the same thing.
-Chants are fun, as long as they rhyme. You don’t actually have to know what river or what sea. It could be the Nile River to the Red Sea. All you have to know is that “sea” rhymes with “free” and “Intifada” rhymes with “Intifada.”
-You don’t actually have to know what any of the chants mean. It’s all about numbers. (“Wait, did they just say they want 48 states? How does that work? Are they coming for the entire US besides Alaska and Hawaii?... Why not Hawaii?”)
-If you see a poster, rip it down. It’s just propaganda for whichever side wants people to live.
-If you don’t want to come right out and admit your hatred for a group of people, linguists recommend that you put the word “the” before the name of their group. (EXAMPLE: “Boy! Shoprite was full of the Jews today!”)
-A lot of anti-Semites enjoy calling the Jews Nazis. Which is confusing, because Nazi is a compliment to those people.
-What you’re doing is not antisemitism if you say it’s not antisemitism. Even if the Jews say it’s antisemitism what do they know? They’re just Jews. Their opinion doesn’t matter. Suddenly they’re big experts on hating Jews? Also if you step on someone’s toe, you get to decide whether it hurts.
-You are probably more sick of hearing the Jews complaining about anti-Semitism than the Jews are of experiencing anti-Semitism.
-You want bias? How come when you hate Jews, it’s anti-Semitism, but when you hate Arabs, it’s Islamophobia? Why is there no Jew phobia? How come only the side that spreads terror gets a phobia?
-For all that the Jews talk about G-d being on their side and miracles happening to them every day, miracles are happening on both sides. How many videos have we seen of deceased Palestinians that suddenly start moving or get up and walk away? Miracles! We have video proof.
-Jews think they’re so smart, but which side do you think is smarter? Israel takes weeks to figure out their tragedy numbers, whereas the Gaza Health Ministry can tell you within minutes of a rocket hitting a parking lot exactly how many hundreds of people happened to randomly be standing in that parking lot, along with lists of names and contact information. Sometimes they can tell you before even.
-Look! It’s a coin from before 1948, and it says Palestine in Hebrew, right next to the alef-yud! That proves that it was Palestine back then! The Jews, who were not living there, came in and added their Hebrew letters to the coin to help prove this.
-The Israeli army presents itself as all tough, but from what we’ve seen, a decent percentage of being in the Israeli army is about having kumzitzin and eating barbecue in the dessert. They also make a lot of weddings. And also they all come home and hug their kids with the same music playing in the background.
-The Gazans on the other hand are a very tough people. They can live for weeks on end without electricity or food or water or internet, whereas with your own kids, you turn off the Wi-Fi for a minute and they’re at each other’s throats.
-Also, the Gazans are way more environmentally friendly. They recycle photos of carnage from previous events in other countries, reuse their crisis actors for multiple scenes, and all of their missiles are made out of repurposed water pipes. Whereas a Jewish family goes through more foil in one year than a typical non-Jewish family does in a lifetime.
-Israel says that Gazan civilians are all under Hamas’s thumb and that no one can stand up to them or say anything against them or even as much as step out of the way when the bombs are falling or else something bad will happen to them or their families, but I mean no one in Gaza has said anything to confirm that this is true.
-The Jews claim that a lot of the media is biased against them in that the media for example writes headlines that aren’t true. And that’s not true, because if you read carefully, they’re not lying at all. For example, they’ve figured out that they can write whatever they want in the headline as long as they end the headline with “Gazans say.” No one will read that far anyway, and it’s true – the Gazans actually did say that. Is what they said true? Who knows? But the paper isn’t claiming it is. So the headline isn’t that 500 people died in a parking lot; the headline is that they said that 500 people died in a parking lot. The only thing that the paper itself is claiming actually happened that day is that they said something. If you think they’re lying, you’re reading it wrong. Or the end of your headline got cut off.
-Also, sometimes the headline is 100% true, such as this one, which the media has locked and loaded for when they need it: “Blast hits Gaza cemetery, thousands of bodies found.”
-Israel says they don’t release many pictures of victims because of respect and privacy, but at the end of the day, you’ve seen way more moving pictures of deceased Palestinians. Way more pictures of moving deceased Palestinians? Something. As the Jews say, “Reshaim afilu b’chayeihem kruim meisim.”
-But look at all the rockets that Israel dropped. If a rocket lands in Israel, everyone’s down in bomb shelters, so it’s totally okay to shoot at them. Whereas if you look around Gaza, there are zero bomb shelters amongst all the government tunnels. Whose fault is that?
-All the Jews do is complain. They complain that they can tell the world, “The sky is blue,” and everyone will, instead of looking up, say, “No, it isn’t,” and demand photo proof and then claim the photos are fake. But meanwhile, Hamas can say a hospital was bombed, and show you pictures of a different hospital that was once bombed as evidence that they know what bombed is, and every media outlet can rerun that picture, and they can say that 500 people were killed, and they can have these 500 people get up in front of cameras and say, “Yes, I was killed,” and Israel still won’t believe them.
-The Jews say, “Don’t believe everything Hamas says. Hamas lies.” Then Hamas gets up and says, “We want to wipe all the Jews off the face of the planet.” And you say, “I don’t believe that.” And then the Jews say, “No, that you’re supposed to believe.” What do these Jews want?
-If you side with Hamas, they will add your name to a list of people they will kill last.
-You want an actual tip? Here’s one: Whichever side G-d wants to win will win. So maybe get on his good side. If you don’t know how, we can give you some pointers.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.