A few months ago, my mother called me to report that she had been the target of hate-speach.
She and her friend have a regular table at a vintage market, and along with the funky clothing, jewelry, dishes, and knick-knacks that they sell, are items of vintage judaica. Menorahs and candle-sticks, kiddush cups and seder plates.
My mom and her friend have often enjoyed the way that these items attract Jewish and Israeli browsers, and they love finding new homes for these sacred treasures.
But that week, their Judaica attracted the wrong kind of attention.
A woman picked up one of their items and asked if it was made in Palestine. When my mom’s friend responded that it was made in Israel, the woman looked her straight in the eye and said: “Free Palestine”, and then walked away, but not before calling over her shoulder to them that they were “genocidal Zionist monsters”.
As you can imagine, this was pretty upsetting for my mom and her friend. Or maybe you don’t have to imagine. Maybe you already know.
If you were here last Rosh Hashanah, then you probably remember that I am not shy about sharing my criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Hopefully, you also remember that I am not shy about stating clearly that I do not believe there was or is a genocide happening in Gaza, and that I am also not shy about sharing my love for Israel, along with my hopes for Israeli officials to lead Israel in a way that is consistent with our liberal, democratic AND Jewish values.
It is that love for Israel which has also put me in the line of fire on social media, where I too, have been branded a “genocidal Zionist” for posts that support Israel, educate about Israel, recall October 7th, or pay tribute to the hostages and survivors.
Far too many of us have been targeted in this way. Our Jewishness, when visible, is too often, now, a justification for being branded with the “Dirty Z(ed) word”, as it has come to be known. Too many of us have been accused of being complicit, of blindly supporting a war, a genocide, a colonialist plot to eradicate anyone who is not Jewish from Israel’s borders.
Even though we are living our lives here in Canada; Even though we are not Israeli politicians; Even though we don’t vote in Israel or serve in the IDF; Even if we have never been to Israel! – still – we are identified as Zionists, in our social media feeds, or in shouted remarks from passing vehicles, or maybe even in direct face-to-face conversations.
Maybe you have been accused of being a Zionist in this way? Of being part of a genocidal conspiracy? Maybe you have been called a monster, or a baby-killer?
And of course you know you are not a monster or a baby-killer. You know you are not participating in or perpetuating a genocide.
But maybe you are less certain about whether or not you are a Zionist. Maybe you’re not sure what a Zionist even is these days.
Maybe you were never sure. Is a Zionist someone who loves Israel? Someone who supports Israel? Or is being a Zionist something more than that?
I recently listened to an incredible podcast episode with Jonah Platt, the well-known actor, singer, producer and Jewish advocate, whose podcast, Being Jewish with Jonah Platt, has garnered a huge following since October 7th, propelling him to become one of the most well-known celebrity voices speaking out about and against anti-Jewish hate.
In this recent episode, titled: “The No Good Dirty Z(ed) Word”, Jonah responds to a recent experience, where one of his social-media posts got even more hate than usual.
In reviewing the thousands of comments he received, Jonah noticed that while there were, certainly, some overtly antisemetic comments, the most common type of hate speech he received was, “a variation on a single theme: Zionist scum, Zionist trash, Zionist pig, dirty Zionist,” etc.
The sheer volume of these Zionist slurs helped Jonah to understand something he hadn’t fully grasped before – something that he suspects most Jews do not yet understand. “We continue to bang our heads on the tree, Charlie Brown style,” he said. We shout back that Zionism isn’t what it’s made out to be; That it simply means “self-determination in some part of the land to which Jews are indigenous.”
This is the simplest and most distilled meaning of Zionism. “Don’t you get it?” Asks our modern-day-prophet Jonah? And then, immediately he answers his own question, “No, they don’t get it.”
“They’re not listening to us at all,” Platt explained, “either because no one they know or follow is saying (what we’re saying about Zionism), or because they(‘ve) shut out anything counter to their already chosen belief(s).
Thus, when these anti-Israel haters continue to use “Zionist” as an insult (even after we’ve explained why it isn’t), we wrongfully assume that they are doing so as a code-word for Jew, as a slur, as a way to get shots in without getting tagged for it.”
And while Jonah acknowledges that yes, there are evil folks who absolutely do “disseminate the anti-Jew, anti-Israel propaganda … the vast majority of people,” he maintains, “are not (doing so).” Rather, he suggests that what is happening is that most people who lob the word Zionism at us as an insult, “have had a very different and very specific definition of Zionism implanted in their brains. If you ask most (of these people) if they hate Jews,” Platt says, they would likely say, “Of course not! . . . I love Jews. My friend is a Jew. I’m a Jew. My doctor is a Jew.”
But, “first of all,” Platt reminds us, “you can love an individual in your day to day life and still be a total bigot towards their group as a whole. . . But that’s not what’s happening here either,” he says.
This is how Jonah explains it – and I relay his exact words to you here because he explains it so clearly and effectively. I was moved and motivated by the way he describes our current reality, and I hope you will be too.
On his podcast, Jonah described how, “a large swath of the global population has been carefully taught by social media, by elementary and middle and high school teachers, by their friends who learned it from their teachers or social media, and by tenured college professors that Zionism means (that) Israelis want to kill all Palestinians on earth simply because of who they are, their skin color, their not-Jewishness.”
“When you hear someone say Zionism is racism,” Jonah continued, “and you think, ‘But (not all) Jews (are) white
and there are two million Arab Israelis’, you likely conclude that this someone is either (ignorant) or hates Jews. But in fact, they have been taught that Zionism is an evil on par with other racially-motivated murder cults like Nazism or the KKK.
This is what they’ve been taught,” Platt maintains. And he emphasizes that this phenomenon has been verified by many journalists and Jewish leaders who have visited dozens and dozens and dozens of colleges and universities around North America and abroad, and have seen this playbook in action, time and time again.
Platt calls this, “illogical, brainwashed ignorance,” and maintains that it is not actually motivated by sincere bigotry towards Jewish people. Rather, “we are dealing with folks who have been formally educated to believe that Zionism is evil incarnate. So of course they have no qualms about calling (us) Zionist scum or Zionist trash. Would you have qualms about calling an actual Nazi, Nazi scum or Nazi trash?” He asks. “Not only would you not feel bad,” Platt suggests, “you’d feel good, and not just good, but righteous … (In doing so, you’d be) serving justice to the very worst humanity has to offer.”
And whether or not we agree with Platt that what we are seeing is a bad combination of brainwashing and ignorance rather than Jewish-hatred masked as righteous outrage, Jonah directs us to the question we need to consider and begin to answer either way:
How do we educate or re-educate millions of people?
“The deck is absolutely stacked against us,” Platt acknowledges. “We are up against billions of dollars in foreign money that have been planting this seed for decades. (AND) we are up against an algorithm that cordons us off into completely different realities.”
Okay. So the part about how the masses have been educated might make sense, but what does Platt mean about the algorithm? Jonah himself gives a powerful example in the podcast.
Last Passover, he participated in a Passover-themed dinner with a ballroom full of “black folks, Jews and black Jews united in allyship.” The event was led by Van Jones, an American political analyst and media personality, CNN host, lawyer, author, entrepreneur, civil rights advocate, NY Times bestselling author, and Emmy Award winner. All of which is to say that this event was being hosted by a man who is not ignorant – not poorly educated; A man who is generally known to be an upstanding person, “one of our greatest allies” according to Platt, and “incredibly well- informed about the world.”
Jonah relates that over dinner, Van spoke about the day that the Bebus children were returned to Israel in coffins. He told Jonah that when he asked a friend who happened to be Jewish, why she wasn’t returning his texts that day, she said it was because she was distraught over what was going on. But Van had no idea what she was talking about. Did she mean something about Trump? The economy? Van admitted to Jonah that until that moment, he had never even heard of the Bebuses. The algorithm (didn’t) show them to him.”
“Practically every Jew on earth,” Platt explained, “was in a state of grief and trauma (that day), shouting online, where is everyone?
Where are my black friends? Why is nobody speaking up for us? (But it was) because they literally had no idea it was happening.”
“For a Jew, it sounds impossible to believe,” Jonah acknowledges, “but that is how the algorithm works. If you’re not (actively) engaging with the Jewish community online, and you bought a yoga mat one time, so Metta thinks you’re a liberal, you (were likely) getting videos of dead Gazan children over and over and over (during the war in Gaza), while Jewish pain (was) erased (from your feed).
And, “it works the other way too,” Platt reminds us. “Jews don’t get those videos, and we also don’t get videos about pain in the black community or any other community either, unless we seek it out deliberately. And the result is that we blame each other for being bad allies, when in fact we are all just being played.”
As Platt told his podcast listeners, “it is critical to understand how this works.” To understand that our social-media feeds are playing into our own biases, and are not showing us a complete or balanced picture of reality.
But once we understand this, then what? How do we fight an algorithm? How do we dismantle or reform the billion dollar apparatus of social media? How do we fight back against deep-seeded academic brainwashing? “There is no easy fix,” Platt says, “and certainly not a fast one. Our opposition is going to take years.”
“If we start now,” Platt suggests, we might be able to do it over the next 10, 20, 30 years. And this is how. “Instead of Jewish donors putting their names on hospitals and theaters and sports facilities, we need to be investing in professorships and Middle East history chairs and Jewish study departments to counter the anti-Israel poison inside academia. We need to make Jewish day schools financially accessible to every Jewish family to ensure that the next generation of young Jews are fully informed, confident in their strong Jewish identity and cloaked in the dignity they need to face this fight on the front lines. We need to be showing up to school board meetings and (local parliament) and town halls and playing a role in the shaping of our kids’ curriculums. We need to be bringing educators like Project Shema or Mosaic Persuasion or Holocaust survivors to speak in our businesses and in our classrooms. We need to be sounding the alarm and getting to work. And we need to do it now.”
This is important to hear. It is tough to hear. It is hard and painful to realize that there isn’t an easy fix. That this is going to take hard work, collective work, expensive work, ongoing work. When we think about how long and how much it will take, it can be easy to feel discouraged. We’re behind the ball. We’re down for the count. But we are NOT out.
Jonah Platt, like every good Rabbi, knows that his listeners need to hear words of hope – a nechemta – at the end of his podcasted-sermon. “Remember the stonecutter’s credo,” he reminds us, “coined by 19th century social reformer Jacob Reiss: When nothing seems to help, (he wrote) I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow, it will split in two. And I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
We’ve got to just chip, chip, chip away (at it),” our modern-day Jonah encourages us. “And who knows when it will happen, but one day that stone will crack. And when it does,” he says, “make sure you’re able to look at it and say, I helped to do that.”
In its simplest terms, being a Zionist is being someone who thinks that Jews have a right to a homeland of our own, in Israel, the land to which our people trace our history back thousands of years. It means believing we have a right to self-governance in that land, and a right to defend ourselves in that land.
Being a Zionist doesn’t mean agreeing with everything Israel does, or everything Israeli officials say. It doesn’t mean supporting everything that happens in a war, even if we believe the war to be necessary. It doesn’t mean hating people who are not Jewish or not Israeli. It doesn’t mean believing that only Jews should live in Israel or have citizenship or rights there. There are many things that Zionism does not mean.
And maybe you’re still uncertain. Maybe you aren’t sure if you are a Zionist or if you want to be a Zionist, or if you want others to think you are a Zionist. But what I hope you are clear about, is that none of us are going to be safe – from the accusations, from the assumptions or from the verbal and physical attacks that can stem from such accusations and assumptions, unless we stand together and participate in the work.
We can’t let Jewish advocates and influencers and leaders stand alone. We must stand with them. We must learn from them. We must speak out with them. We must follow their lead. Every single one of us must work together – Zionist or not.
Lo Alecha Hamlach Ligmor. No one person is obligated to complete the work. V’lo atah ben chorin l’hibatel mimena. But neither is any of us exempt from it.
This is what it means to be a Jew today. It means accepting our reality. It means motivating one another to fight back.
We fight back by understanding how we got here, and by understanding what we need to do next. If you haven’t been part of that work yet, then your work begins now.
Kol Aravim Zeh B’Zeh – Each Jew is responsible for the other. None of us are exempt until all of us are safe.
Kein Yehi Ratzon. May it be God’s Will.
Being Jewish with Jonah Platt: The No Good Dirty Z Word, Aug 6, 2026