Twitter Antisemitism and Jewish Identity

Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Rick Rosner about antisemitism on Twitter, political persuasion, and Jewish identity. Rosner discusses online conspiracy rhetoric, personal experiences of prejudice, Reform synagogue services, and historical restrictions shaping Jewish occupations. Their conversation considers differences between online hostility and everyday encounters, alongside religious practice and cultural achievement traditions.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How is Twitter? What has Twitter become?

Rick Rosner: Racism, anti-Semitism, propaganda, dunking on your opponents, destroying your opponents, with "destroying" in quotation marks. If you say something vicious about somebody you do not like, you have not actually destroyed them. They do not care. It is a bunch of bullshit.

You try to change people's minds, but you do not really. On the other hand, any other political shit I could do probably would not change people's minds either. A couple of times, I have spent an afternoon or evening filling out get-out-the-vote postcards.

That seems like a ridiculous waste of time. I do not know. Maybe it is not, but it is certainly not worth the effort.

I can reach many more people in a much shorter amount of time by putting up stats about Trump and his many failures. Does it change anybody's mind? I do not know, but I can probably reach thousands of people instead of spending two hours filling out 20 postcards and reaching 20 people.

Jacobsen: What is the style of anti-Semitism on Twitter?

Rosner: There are "gnoticers," spelled G-N-O-T-I-C-E-R. A gnoticer is somebody who claims to be "noticing" that Jews control the world.

It is a gross, creepy, modern version of standard anti-Semitic shit, the idea that Jews are an evil cabal.

Jacobsen: Do you see any difference between the type of anti-Semitism Jews encounter in regular life versus online? Moreover, is there any difference depending on whether someone is a secular or atheist Jew, a Reform Jew, an Orthodox Jew, old, or young?

Rosner: I think everybody knows, using the example of the Holocaust, that it did not matter what kind of Jew you were. Many of the Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators across Europe were highly assimilated into their surrounding cultures. It did not matter whether they went to synagogue.

They were persecuted and murdered based on Nazi racial definitions of Jewish ancestry. As far as anti-Semitism in real life goes, people do not usually scream anti-Semitic shit at you on the street. A couple of times, people have given me shit to my face about wearing a mask.

I will wear a mask during periods of high COVID transmission. I have never had somebody call me a "Jew boy" to my face.

Jacobsen: Do you feel put upon in any way by people who are not saying explicitly anti-Semitic things, but who treat you in ways that could be characterized as prejudiced because you are seen as Jewish?

Rosner: I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, which remains a very white town. I felt it was harder to get girlfriends, but there were a lot of reasons I had a hard time getting a girlfriend as a teenager. Looking pretty heebie was only part of the problem. However, is that anti-Semitism? Not exactly.

It is partly about not being a six-foot-two blond ski instructor with a good personality, like my friend Lon.

Jacobsen: What about Carole? Does she say anything?

Rosner: Carole grew up in L.A., and she had a lot of Jewish friends. Los Angeles has a large Jewish community.

Some of her friends are Jewish. She has plenty of friends. I have almost no friends. She did not encounter a whole lot of anti-Semitism, though I am sure she had some of the same issues where she does not have long blond hair. However, there was no overt anti-Semitism.

Jacobsen: As a Reform Jew, how often do you actually go to temple or synagogue?

Rosner: I have not been in years now.

Jacobsen: What about when you go to a Reform synagogue?

Rosner: The last time I went to temple was for the wedding of my nephew, Ryan. So it has not actually been years. That was a little over a year ago.

Jacobsen: How would you characterize the feel of a Reform service versus others? Is it shorter?

Rosner: That is mostly it. You still say the prayers. There is still a lot of singing from the cantor.

A cantor is a clergy member or trained liturgical singer who leads much of the musical prayer in many Jewish congregations. You can sing along if you want. The cantor does a lot of solos, and the service is done in about an hour. Some Conservative or Orthodox services can run two or three hours, depending on the congregation and occasion.

Jacobsen: True. I have been to two Shabbat services and a Shavuot service here. Why is there an emphasis on intellectual achievement or business achievement in Jewish culture?

Rosner: Some historians have argued that part of it developed from the restrictions Jews faced in different European societies. At various times and places, Jews were excluded from landholding, guilds, public offices, and certain occupations, while being permitted or pushed toward particular forms of commerce, finance, scholarship, and other portable professions. That helped create cultural traditions built around study and book learning. However, we should move on to something else.

Jacobsen: Yeah.

Richard “Rick” Rosner (born May 2, 1960) is an American television writer, producer, game-show writer, media personality, and high-range intelligence-test participant. His credits include Remote Control, The World’s Funniest!, Twenty-One, The Weakest Link, The Man Show, Crank Yankers, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the Grammy Awards, and the Primetime Emmy Awards. He wrote more than 1,000 credited episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, won a 2012 Writers Guild Award as part of the After the Academy Awards writing team, received multiple Writers Guild nominations, and earned a 2013 Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series. Rosner achieved the only known perfect score on Ronald K. Hoeflin’s Titan Test, ranked among the leading scorers on the Omni Mega Test, and served six years as editor of Noesis, the Mega Society journal. He earned approximately twelve years of college credit within one year and completing requirements equivalent to eight academic majors. In 2013, the World Genius Directory named him “Genius of the Year - America.” Rosner appeared on Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, was profiled by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris in First Person: One in a Million Trillion, and has spent decades developing ideas in cosmology, intelligence, science, technology, television, and culture.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a blogger on Vocal with more than 200 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978–1–0692343; 978–1–0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369–6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018–7399; Online: ISSN, 2163–3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719–6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The Good Men Project, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing, comprising more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications across more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic fellowships, and currently serves on several boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20–0708028), and others.