Tweeting while Jewish
At 7:06 AM on February 15, I sent out a tweet that would change my world. Relaying both the humor of my dinner conversation the night before, and my frustration with the way U.S. history is often taught in my child’s school, I transcribed a brief family interaction. At the time, I followed about 380 people and was followed by about that many in return. My most popular tweet prior to this time received about 130 likes and 20 retweets, and most of my tweets had just a handful of likes. I was far from a significant presence on this social media platform, and I wasn’t striving to be one. In fact, I was mostly on Twitter to help amplify other voices, especially those of Black women. Of all the tweets I’d made since joining, I would never have predicted that this one would be the match that lit a firestorm.
By mid-morning, the tweet was taking off. By the time I ate lunch, it had almost 10,000 likes. This increase came from a few people tagging noted historians on Twitter, who retweeted me or commented, leading well-known personalities and journalists to take notice. I was seeing hundreds of people like and comment and retweet, enough that I turned off notifications on my phone. Almost all the comments were from people who had similar experiences and wanted to see change in how students were taught about this issue. People expressed anger that the “states’ rights” rhetoric, which had been a deliberate part of the “Lost Cause” campaign, remained present in our educational system. They posted resources and potential responses, such as suggesting that I contact the teacher, the school board, demand a resignation from the teacher, and send my child with copies of primary documents. I mostly refrained from replying.
I had begun to worry that the schoolteacher responsible for the statement would hear about the tweet before they heard from me. My child asked me not to write immediately, because the teacher was out anyway. She said he wasn’t on social media, and asked me to please wait until the next day to write. I agreed.
That same evening, the new superintendent of our public schools was holding a town hall. I had agreed to go, in order to support diversity and inclusion in the schools, something many people felt had come under attack recently. As the meeting began, the superintendent called a local minister to the stage to open with a prayer — a prayer that concluded with the words, “In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.”
And so, almost 12 hours later, I made a short thread of two tweets objecting to having a government official promoting a particular religion as part of a school meeting. As the superintendent opened the meeting, he talked about his commitment to diversity. As a Jewish person, with a lifetime of involvement in public schools in the South, I could see that inclusion would not extend to people like me or others who are not Christian. From the very beginning of the town hall, that position was made plain. And to be completely clear here, I believe in the separation of church and state.
Even before I made that second set of tweets, I had started to be noticed as a Jewish woman on the internet. One man in my DMs asked me for my position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, hours before I posted about the town hall. When I didn’t reply, he wrote, “Pls respond!” In fact, my DMs were getting numerous requests, all from men, none of whom I knew. None of their handles revealed their names. Many sent several messages, demanding I reply. One from “Mr. X” began: “Hey saw your post about states rights and the civil war. I helped right [sic] the curriculum, even I the PAP setting […]” and asked to “sit down sometime.” I didn’t reply to this message, a decision which had repercussions for me later.
A few things happened after my “prayer in school” tweets. The ones I could see immediately were comments and quote tweets. Sometimes the quote tweet just wrote, “Goldberg, LOL.” Sometimes they had nose emojis. Sometimes they used antisemitic memes and coded speech that white supremacists use about Jewish people. I’ve gotten quite an education on that language, unfortunately. Some people objected to my opinion, believing that Christian prayer belongs in schools, but others attacked me for my Jewish last name. So many I have lost count. In so many ways, in such hateful speech, they attacked.
I learned of another event later. A local aspiring politician made a graphic with my face and the two tweets, writing:
If I ever run for Governor, a key point on my platform will be mass deportation of ghouls like this from my State. This goblin currently locates its lair in Conway. Few things are worse than rootless Carpetbaggers coming down South and treating natives like vermin.
He posted it on Gab and others posted it to Twitter, where he is banned, sometimes tagging me and other times not. I also saw it on Instagram. I only found out about it the next day, when a former student wrote me an email of support, saying he noticed I was getting negative attention on Reddit.
By the next morning, the first tweet was nearing 100,000 likes. I knew I needed to write to the teacher involved. I sent an email, copying my husband, explaining my concern about the lesson and about the unexpected response to my tweet. I concluded with an offer to talk, supplying my number. I let him know that I was being targeted by antisemitic white supremacists online. I also wrote that because my child and I don’t share a last name I hoped that this would both shield her and the teacher from repercussions. I had no link to the school district or my employer in my profile.
I also sent a message to the chief communications officer (CCO) of my college to let him know about the tweet and the white supremacist response to it. He and I spoke soon after, when he told me he was already aware of my tweet because the college had a monitoring system in place. He offered support and empathy, and suggested that I also let the VP for HR know, along with the provost, my chair, and my dean. I received brief replies in return, with the head of HR expressing sympathy. The dean is a close friend, and I have received the strongest support from her from the very beginning. I also got a few messages from people outside the college sharing their concern about the negative responses I was receiving. I did not hear back from the teacher.
That day, February 16, the response to both tweets began to grow. I became aware of the graphic described above circulating. I got increasing hate speech on all platforms. I also had a white supremacist search my account for the word “white.” When he found the older third tweet posted above, he screenshotted it and posted it on Twitter, saying that I hated white people. I began getting comments that I should move out of the state, that I was paranoid and mentally ill, and that I was a racist because I hated white people.
The third tweet had been written on August 4, 2019, about 2.5 years ago. On August 3, 2019, a far-right extremist — a white man — opened fire in a Walmart in El Paso, killing 23 people and injuring 23 more. He targeted Latinos. That same night, early in the morning of August 4, 2019, another white man shot people with a semi-automatic AM-15 outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio, killing nine people and wounding 17 more. My tweet asking for gun law reforms came that evening. I tagged my representatives to Congress asking for them to change the laws that allow such events to become commonplace, that can happen anywhere.
Now, the firestorm of hatred truly exploded. Not only did I want Civil War history to center the institution of slavery, not only did I want the separation of church and state, but I also wanted sensible reforms of gun laws. And I had a Jewish last name. And I was a woman with “Dr.” in front of her name. I was a perfect target for white supremacist, misogynist hatred.
I began getting so many hateful responses and messages that I asked friends to help me report those making them on social media platforms. Many people did, and I spent hours blocking and reporting comments. As an example, I got a private message on Facebook that started, “Hey, Ugly Jewess!” He continued, “your race is a race of miserable, parasitic nation-wreckers . . . the filthy, rotten, disgusting jews have destroyed everything that was once lovely and beautiful about America . . . You know what, filthy jew? I am PROUDLY anti-Semitic, and I want you to know that I hate everything that comes from your terrible people . . . The Holocaust was a lie. Hitler was right. The Nazis were the heroes, then as now . . . YOUR FACE IS A BIOHAZARD! . . .” and on and on. Another unknown man sent me a DM with a string of nose emojis.
While people could see the Twitter ugliness, the ugliness elsewhere only I could see. I hesitated to share it with anyone because it was so traumatizing — for me and probably for others. Yes, I told people I was getting hatred, but they couldn’t witness it. I was alone with it, blocking, deleting, worrying that it would somehow reach my daughter. The people who made antisemitic comments hid their identities most of the time. It was chilling, though, to see the direct messages from people on Facebook. Yes, one man holding a pistol in his profile picture fit my expectations, but another posed with his family in front of a Christmas tree. The people sending these messages were real people, and I had no idea who they were or how to identify them. Seeing the hateful comments spread from one platform to another, I knew they could also spill out off of social media and into my workplace and my home.
The next day, February 17, I shared the graphic from the politician with my CCO. I asked if they were monitoring Parler and Gab, or other right-wing social media sites. They said they were not. When I told fellow faculty members what I was experiencing on that day, some showed true concern and outrage. Others didn’t comment or looked away. As an outspoken member of our college community, I couldn’t help but imagine that the silent ones thought I deserved it.
I decided to try to look on Gab on my own to see what was being said there, and I what I found was horrible. “What do we expect from the hook-nosed rat-faced, parasitic tribes?” said one. “Kike bitch,” wrote another. “((They’re)) always SO… hideous. Satan’s bloodline.” I won’t share more. I admit that I cried in my office. That I cried at home. I knew this was out there, but it had never been directed this blatantly at me. There were hundreds of such comments.
That afternoon, I got a reply from the teacher. Although he made it plain that he was disturbed by the tweet — something I find entirely reasonable given its spread — he responded in a calm way. He argued that my daughter had misunderstood him about a complex issue. I let it be and did not respond.
That evening, at about 6:00 pm, I got a message from my provost. She forwarded a message that had been sent the night before (February 16) to the president of the college, herself, and the CCO. In her message to me, the provost said the president would “respond [to the sender] and thank him for reaching out to share his concerns and perspective.” She continued, “I understand this conversation is not related to your role as a faculty member, but it shows the difficulty of social media and the interconnectedness of campus and the community.”
The letter they received was from “Mr. X,” an alumnus of the college and a teacher at my child’s school. Reading the letter, it was clear that her teacher had forwarded my email to him. He used many of the points I raised there and nowhere else. Her teacher, fully aware that I was worried about my child receiving harassment, forwarded my letter with her name in it to another teacher. Mr. X wrote to my employer before my child’s teacher wrote back to me. Mr. X name-drops his connections to influential alumni and writes about his disappointment in me and in the college (for supporting me?). He claims my child simply misunderstood the lesson and that I was lying based on false information. He hoped that the college would “address [his] concerns . . . and take this situation seriously.” He wrote that he had tried contacting me, but that I would not respond. I have not seen the reply from the president.
On February 18, I sent a link to one of the threads from Gab to the CCO, VP for HR, and the provost. They responded with horror and sympathy, and offered to remove any information about how to find me on campus from the website, though this information had already been posted in the thread on Gab.
The following day was the start of a long weekend, and I tried to rest and stay away from the internet. The stress had taken a real toll on me. I went hiking, hung out with friends and my kid, and tried to relax. The first tweet reached 115,000 likes and stayed there. Despite this incredible affirmation that what I wrote resonated with other people’s experiences, the vile hatred of a relatively small number of loud, angry voices overshadowed the approval of large numbers of people. And they know this, which is why they do it. It is terrorism, making a large impact even though you are actually small.
On Tuesday, February 22, in my course called Social Inequality and Identity, a student brought up how members of the KKK are only considered racists and not criminals despite committing criminal acts. I began responding, intending to talk a little about how, despite reporting blatantly Nazi symbolism and hate speech, I had received notice after notice that the tweets did not violate terms of service for Twitter. They could remain on social media as valid contributors. As I spoke, my voice cracked and I couldn’t keep my tears at bay, even in my classroom in front of my students. After class, I decided to report the incidents to the Anti-Defamation League. On Wednesday, my daughter texted me from school. Guess what I found in my notes! “Cause of civil war not abt ending slavery.” I wrote back, “I never doubted you, honey.”
All of this makes me consider what it means to participate in political discourse today. Must Jewish women like me abandon social media as a platform for engagement? Is the strain of antisemitic and misogynistic harassment too great a burden to endure? Of all the tweets, posts, and comments I reported, many of which used blatantly Nazi symbolism, Twitter found only four to be violating their standards (with no luck at all with Facebook and Instagram). Can we comment on what is being taught in schools — and also what is being banned, as with CRT and 1619 and any mention of the LGBTQ community — without being accused of harming schools? How can we be truly engaged citizens in this environment? And if we choose to be engaged, will we be supported by our employers, even when they are universities? For my vantage point, I don’t have a clear answer. I’m not sure what support would look like. Perhaps a statement from my college that affirms our right to engage in political speech and condemns antisemitic attacks would mean something. As an institution that has a stated goal of preparing students to become engaged citizens, we should take a stand when faculty and staff do exactly that.
As a society, much of our political and public conversation takes place on social media. Allowing anonymous attacks on the people who choose to identify themselves silences discourse in those spaces. Asking people to develop a “thick skin” is unreasonable when the responses are threats of rape and death, even when veiled as suggestions of what should happen to “people like you.” These questions have been asked by many before my little essay. I have chosen to write about my experiences and make them publicly available because when I have revealed even a small part of the content of the attacks on me, my friends have been shocked that such hatred still exists. And, truthfully, I was shocked too. My tweets were hardly extreme, but they were enough for vicious targeted harassment to begin. We should all ask ourselves if our online world should be controlled by hidden trolls, and what it would take to reclaim that sphere to be a place for healthy discourse.