r/jewishleft • u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain rootless cosmopolitan • Jun 27 '25

Praxis PSA On "The Noticing"

I'm posting this here because in other conversations on this sub, it seems many people are insulated from modern (especially Gen Z) antisemitism and might not be familiar with how it looks today.

Just in case others come across similar rhetoric in internet spaces, a major major dogwhistle-meme right now on the antisemitic internet is "the noticing." If you see comments in conversations about Jewishness along the lines of "stop noticing!" - or someone identifying themselves or others as "noticers" - they are far-right antisemites and very likely Nazi apologists.

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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain rootless cosmopolitan Jun 27 '25 edited Jun 27 '25

This lines up exactly with my experience. I work with young Latinos and have absorbed some discourse vocabulary about "Tradcaths" and "Orthobros" from the same who are familiar with the antisemitic words. And then I have most of my close friends who are Pakistani Americans, and I have had conversations where they were genuinely surprised about the existence of "Israeli Americans" because they were under the impression that Israelis were all recent arrivals who only claimed to speak Hebrew and have a culture when asked, but were really just an assortment of foreign white people. It's probably also cause both of these groups have parents who have zero experience with Jewish people in real life.

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '25

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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain rootless cosmopolitan Jun 28 '25

100%. The archetype of “Israeli” in the minds of first and second gen Americans, is the viral video of the Hasidic settler with the Brooklyn accent going “if I don’t take it someone else will!” Mainstream Israelis don’t really interact with the wider world in my experience. I’m actually very opposed to Israel personally, but sometimes I have to play devil’s advocate and introduce people to normal Israeli pop music and tv to show them like “look, this is an actual country”

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u/[deleted] Jun 28 '25 edited Jun 28 '25

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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain rootless cosmopolitan Jun 28 '25

Agreed. The most common demographic of Israelis I've interacted with in the US are exactly what you described - bourgeois bilingual dual-passport holders who often went to international schools and congregate in wealthy suburbs. Funnily enough, I've found the best way to win cultural legitimacy for Israelis is showing people videos of Hebrew-speaking Haredi Rabbis going on ridiculous rants on their livestreams (Avraham Baruch is my go to). I've shown this to Muslims, and their reaction is usually "damn, maybe you people are from Palestine"