You know that old joke. A Jew is reading a Nazi newspaper. His friend asks him why and he says something like, “When I read the normal newspaper, it’s all doom and gloom and antisemitism. But when I read the Nazi paper, we Jews are doing really well! We own Hollywood, we control the media and we are all rich doctors, lawyers and bankers.”

Of course, these are antisemitic conspiracies — that’s the joke. But there’s a seed of truth there: Jewish stereotypes can sound oddly complimentary.

Even Kanye West  — who legally changed his name to Ye — can sound philosemitic at times. On Tucker Carlson’s show, the rapper said he wished his kids learned about Hanukkah instead of Kwanzaa at school — so that they could learn “financial engineering.” And in 2015, after talking about conspiracies regarding Jewish information sharing, Jewish control and Jewish wealth, he denied any antisemitism. “That’s a compliment,” West said. “I love Jews.”

He’s not the only one. Some people online have attempted to defend West by saying that his antisemitic comments about Jews are really compliments. And other politicians, including Trump and Michele Reynolds, have made comments about Jewish business or financial prowess, which they also retroactively excused as well-intentioned appreciation.

Other groups’ stereotypes are obviously defamatory. So how did Jewish stereotypes become so different? And are they as harmful as open insults?

‘Poisonous power’

There are plenty of negative stereotypes about Jews: That Jews are untrustworthy, weak, greedy, ugly. There are the weird ones, like blood libel, about Jews drinking Christian children’s blood.

But a tractate called Protocols of the Elders of Zion published first in Russia in 1903, marked a change in prevailing ideas about Jews. Purportedly written by a council of Jewish leaders, it outlined a plan for Jewish global domination.

“The Protocols are, in my view, the essence of antisemitism, which is the idea of Jewish poisonous power,” Kenneth Jacobson, the deputy director for the Anti-Defamation League, told me. “For the antisemite, the Jew is not what he or she appears to be. The reality of the Jew is something hidden, something more powerful.”

The Protocols in Russian. Courtesy of New York Public Library

This allows antisemitic conspiracies to sidestep the need for any evidence — the lack of it is simply proof of the insidious nature of Jewish skill subterfuge.

“The idea that Jews, particularly Jews in Russia, who had no power whatsoever, were coming together to take over the world, is the most preposterous thing, and yet it resonated so tremendously,” said Jacobson.

The Protocols were not the first instance of a conspiracy about Jewish domination and power. Still, the Protocols had a lasting effect, one which Jacobson attributes to the era in which it was published. In the early 20th century, urbanization was creating a massive shift in people’s lives, identity and economic status, provoking an atmosphere of anxiety.

“When people are living in a state of anxiety for a variety of political, social, economic reasons, it’s been said a million times in the past, they’re looking for a scapegoat. More than a scapegoat, they’re looking for an explanation to themselves,” said Jacobson. “Jewish power is the number one conspiracy about that.”

Even after the London Times debunked the Protocols in 1921, showing it to be a forgery, it was translated into numerous languages and spread around the world. And whether or not antisemites cite it — or have even heard of it — it indirectly influences their ideas.

A threat to white society

Most racist stereotypes focus on putting down another group, positioning them as lesser, undesirable or worthless. And while some Jewish stereotypes do this — think about caricatures of Jews as nebbishy, nerdy or weak, hook-nosed and beady-eyed — stereotypes of Jewish power function differently.

Contrasting Jewish stereotypes with those of other groups makes them seem less harmful. But stereotypes about Jewish wealth or control position Jews as a worthy adversary for white supremacists or antisemites, a group to be feared and defeated, not simply ignored or excluded.

On Instagram, Jamyle K. Cannon, the founder of Chicago nonprofit The Bloc, said he had been talking to a Black man in his 20s who had said talking about Jewish wealth and power was a compliment — how could it be antisemitic?

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Cannon, who is Black, said stereotypes about Black people, “paint the picture of a group of people who are a drain on society unless they are broken, controlled, imprisoned, or enslaved.”

But stereotypes about Jews conjure “a picture of a group of people who can compete with, outperform and even subjugate white people in the open market,” he said.

“Goebbels in Germany was all about this,” Jacobson told me. “He basically convinced the German people not to merely dislike Jews, but that you have to fear Jews — and you have to defend yourself against these Jews.”

And these ideas about Jewish control mesh well with stereotypes and conspiracies about other minorities. The “great replacement theory,” a longtime white supremacist conspiracy promoted by conservative ideologues including Tucker Carlson and the Tree of Life shooter in Pittsburgh, posits that minorities are attempting to take over the world and exterminate white society and culture. 

But given that stereotypes about most ethnic minorities portray them as stupid or weak, some other group must be masterminding it, puppeteering the people of color — the Jews, of course.

Conspiracy goes mainstream

Conspiracies about Jewish wealth, power or control have roots in medieval Jewish money lenders, in the Christian Bible, in the Protocols, in Nazi propaganda. And people in the corners of the internet where hate speech and conspiracies brew, on sites like Gab or 4chan, continue to propagate them too.

But with public figures such as West making unambiguously antisemitic comments, or Trump meeting with virulent antisemite Nick Fuentes, the ideas are being mainstreamed.

Jacobson said the ADL has not seen evidence that public figures such as West, Trump or Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene openly promoting antisemitic ideas has swayed greater numbers of people against Jews. In the ADL’s recent surveys, Americans’ attitudes toward antisemitism have stayed relatively stable, with between 11% and 14% of Americans holding antisemitic ideas.

The issue, he said, is not numerical increase, but mainstreaming antisemitic ideas. If even under 15% of Americans hold antisemitic ideas, that means around 30 million people are walking around hating or feeling threatened by Jews. They just never felt emboldened to act on those ideas.

“I don’t think the American people are more antisemitic, but those people who are, are getting too much support,” said Jacobson. “There’s plenty to worry about.”

The post Is saying that Jews are wealthy and powerful really a compliment? appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Rhonda Moore was alarmed when she saw the ad for a student-loan refinancing company that featured what she believed was a stereotypical dishonest Jewish banker. 

In the ad, for the company SoFi, a young couple is harassed by a schlubby, balding middle-aged man who dumps out the contents of the woman’s purse searching for change, then kisses and pockets a stack of dollar bills. Later, the man — who is wearing glasses, a gold watch and a tweed jacket — is shown hoarding their dinner at a restaurant, stealing their blankets in bed and using their sink to brush his teeth.

“I know what it says to [a] non-Jew like me,” Moore, a real-estate appraiser in Ottawa, Canada, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It says to me, ‘Refinance with us and don’t let Jews steal your money.’”

That wasn’t what the ad’s creators intended: They said the meant the character to fit the archetype of a professor. But following a JTA inquiry inspired by Moore’s questions, the company said Wednesday that it would pull the commercial.

“Out of an abundance of caution, given the current rise in antisemitism, we are working to take down this advertisement as quickly as possible,” SoFi told JTA in a statement.

The ad was produced by the company’s in-house creative team and had been running since late October, including on CNN, where Moore saw it. SoFi said it had received “a handful of complaints” from people upset that the ad featured an interracial couple. The company vets its ads for “cultural concerns” before they air, but said this one did not raise any concerns.

“SoFi is committed to fighting discrimination and racism in any form and will take no part in perpetuating any hateful stereotypes, even if completely unintentional,” the statement continued.

Founded in 2011, the online lender has become a leader in the student-loan refinancing space. The company has a reported 4.7 million “members” and recently reported a quarterly revenue of $424 million, a gain of more than 50% over the previous year.

In response to the news of SoFi removing the ad, Moore said, “I’m just happy that maybe one person could make a difference. There is no reason for an ad like that to ever be allowed to air anywhere.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Loan company SoFi pulls ad after criticism that it features an antisemitic stereotype appeared first on The Forward.

There was once a time when it was gauche to court the Nazi vote or take the antisemite’s dollar, but the head of Amazon just indicated that he takes more of a “customer is always right” approach to his business.

On Wednesday, CEO Andy Jassy, who is Jewish, told The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin that, when it comes to the fate of certain inflammatory titles, like the Kyrie Irving-promoted Hebrews to Negroes, the retailer has “to allow access to those viewpoints, even if they are objectionable,” Variety reported.

The reason being that Amazon sells to “hundreds of millions of customers with a lot of different viewpoints,” Jassy said at the Times’ DealBook Summit.

Deja vu.

Maggie Haberman’s Donald Trump book, Confidence Man, said the former president was reluctant to disavow David Duke because “a lot of these people vote.”

Is Jassy’s stance simply economically cynical or virtuous to a fault a la the ACLU’s defense of the KKK? Well, Jassy, who joined Amazon in 1997 and took over for Jeff Bezos last year, said that it’s really all just very complicated. Bumping Hebrews to Negroes would be less “straightforward” than 86-ing work that promotes violence or pedophilia. But that doesn’t seem straightforward either in a world where, to certain conservatives, anything involving drag queens is considered grooming and Quentin Tarantino’s work makes extreme violence look insanely cool. 

Hebrews to Negroes, which became a bestseller on Amazon after Irving’s tweet, is not objectionable because it promotes violence or pedophilia, but because it says that it’s a “lie” that “6 million Jews died in a holocaust [sic] during WWII,” that white Jews are impostors and that Jews orchestrated the transatlantic slave trade. There aren’t any instructions about how to kill Jews in it — most of the film is devoted to pseudo-history and composed of slides — but Mein Kampf didn’t exactly break that down either.

Speaking of Mein Kampf, that’s a title that Amazon continues to sell on Kindle, but, as Variety notes, its proceeds go to Jewish charities. (Apologies to the Hitler estate, who ran out the clock on the copyright anyway.)

But while one could defend selling Hitler’s manifesto because of its historical importance, it’s the rare Nazi exception on the internet marketplace, which still manages to host plenty of Nazi bands and merch and be overwhelmed by the moderation thereof. 

That said, Amazon was happy to remove almost two dozen Nazi propaganda films identified by Americans Against Antisemitism in January, and a few of those seemed to have merit for teaching about Nazi propaganda. A few of the ones the Wiesenthal Center identified contained historical context from academics and others, like Jew Suss and Triumph of the Will, have historical and cinematic significance.

The same just can’t be said for Hebrews to Negroes, which, according to our own Louis Keene, is a meandering mess of a lecture filled with falsehoods from a director-narrator who claims the movie was divinely inspired. 

It’s of interest now because Kyrie Irving tweeted about it (and later, after much waffling, apologized for tweeting it). Protecting diverse viewpoints is Amazon’s prerogative, but can the world’s biggest retailer really not earn a buck without accommodating conspiracy theorists — or worse? (I mean, is firing 100,000 people not enough to protect your bottom line?) 

If there’s a person who boycotts you for removing a movie with a fake Hitler quote, is that really someone whose business you want?

I guess that person’s money’s just as green as the next guy’s, his vote as valid, his curiosity as worthy of indulging. But Amazon could afford to be more curious about what happens when it sells things like this. Those “objectionable viewpoints” don’t appear out of nowhere, even if same-day delivery can make it seem that way.

The post Amazon CEO says he’ll still sell that antisemitic movie Kyrie Irving tweeted about appeared first on The Forward.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on Wednesday Washington must do more to counter China while insisting the world’s two largest economies should not isolate from each other.

Raimondo cited U.S. strengths like American universities, billions of dollars in government funding for semiconductors and research, and strong allies around the world as assets when competing with China.

“Despite all of these advantages — and they are many — competing effectively with China isn’t going to be easy. It’s going to take hard work and it’s going to take the work of everyone, not just the government,” Raimondo said at a speech at MIT.

She said the United States is “not seeking the decoupling in any way of our economy from that of China’s.”

She added that “cutting edge technology, that China wants to get its hands on to put into military capacity… We’re not going to allow that.”

The United States and China have sharply clashed in recent years. Raimondo laid out a detailed strategy to counter China in her speech.

“We are aiming to bolster our system of export controls, enhance our investment screening regimes, strengthen our supply chain resiliency, and develop innovative solutions to counter China’s economic coercion and human rights abuses,” Raimondo said.

The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately comment.

In October, the Commerce Department published a sweeping set of export controls, including measures tightly restricting Chinese access to U.S. chipmaking technology, vastly expanding its reach in its bid to slow Beijing’s technological and military advances.

She said for too long America’s export control strategy “was quite reactive” and had “focused on preventing China from expanding its technological capabilities after it accessed American intellectual property.”

China firmly opposes U.S. export controls on semiconductor chips, arguing they hurt Chinese companies and commercial interests of U.S. exporters.

Raimondo told reporters on Tuesday the United States is working with allies on semiconductor tooling restrictions and hopes they “will take steps similar to ours.”

Concerns about China helped convince the U.S. Congress to approve hefty funding for semiconductor research and manufacturing and advanced science.

Raimondo in September 2021 said China was preventing its domestic airlines from buying “tens of billions of dollars” of U.S.-manufactured Boeing (BA.N) airplanes. In September, Boeing said it would begin to remarket some 737 MAX jets earmarked for Chinese customers citing ongoing geopolitical tensions.

Raimondo said on Tuesday “we need to continue to do business with China and trade with China supports American jobs.”

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday said it was time to slow the pace of coming interest rate hikes while also signaling a protracted economic adjustment to a world where borrowing costs will remain high, inflation comes down slowly and the United States remains chronically short of workers.

In an hour-long session of prepared remarks and questions at the Brookings Institution think tank – his last scheduled appearance before the central bank’s next meeting in two weeks – Powell gave a short-term message that sent markets soaring: The Fed was “slowing down” from the breakneck pace of three-quarter percentage point rate hikes that have prevailed since June, and would feel the way towards the peak interest rate needed to slow inflation to the Fed’s 2% target.

But he also outlined longer-term shifts that may be underway – in the supply of labor in particular – that could presage a long period of elevated interest rates and inflation that responds only slowly to the Fed’s restrictive policy. At the same time, he rejected the idea that the central bank was so intent on calming the highest inflation in 40 years that policymakers would “crash” the economy in that effort, insisting that a “soft or softish” landing remained possible, with inflation easing without a dramatic rise in unemployment.

“We wouldn’t…try to crash the economy and then clean up afterward,” Powell said, with policymakers hoping not to “overtighten…because we think that cutting rates is not something we want to do soon. That’s why we’re slowing down and going to try to find our way to what that right level is” that lowers inflation over time.

Combined the remarks showed the Fed grappling with some of the longer-term trends that were amplified by the pandemic, particularly the demographic drag that an aging population, COVID-era retirements, and weak immigration are having on the labor force.

Those won’t reverse soon, Powell said, acknowledging that a tight labor market will have to be brought into balance mostly by Fed actions that lower the demand for workers – either through a drop in job vacancies or, as some fear, a rise in unemployment.

“I think for now we have to assume,” that labor supply won’t rebound, Powell said. “We have to do what it takes to restore balance in the labor market to get back to 2% inflation…really just by slowing job growth rather than putting people out of work.”

Those sorts of structural concerns have been in the background of Fed debate since the early days of the pandemic, but are moving to the fore.

Concerns about global supply chains, for example, were considered fleeting at first, likely to pass and help fix high inflation as they did.

But progress has been slower than expected, with China in particular now undergoing successive lockdowns that have made it a less secure source of goods, and U.S. labor force participation still depressed.

Powell’s remarks about a coming downshift in the pace of rate increases ignited a robust rally in equity and bond markets, which have taken a pounding this year on the back of the Fed’s aggressive rate hikes.

The benchmark S&P 500 index (.SPX) shot into positive territory and closed 3.09% higher, and bond yields, which move in the opposite direction to their prices, all tumbled. The yield on the 2-year Treasury note , the maturity most sensitive to Fed rate expectations, dropped to about 4.37% from 4.52%. The dollar (.DXY) weakened against a basket of major trading partners’ currencies.

In rate futures markets, traders added to the prevailing bets that the Fed would slow its pace of rate hikes at its meeting in two weeks.

“You can’t keep raising rates as quickly as they were doing it,” said Rick Meckler at Cherry Lane Investments in New Vernon, New Jersey. “That said, investors always like the comfort of hearing it directly from the (Fed) chair.” read more

Still, and despite the coming slowdown in the pace of rate increases, Powell said it remained an open question “how much further we will need to raise rates to control inflation, and the length of time it will be necessary to hold policy at a restrictive level.”

While the Fed chief did not indicate his estimated “terminal rate,” Powell said it is likely to be “somewhat higher” than the 4.6% indicated by policymakers in their September projections. He said curing inflation “will require holding policy at a restrictive level for some time,” a comment that leaned against market expectations the U.S. central bank could begin cutting rates next year as the economy slows.

The central bank meets again on Dec. 13-14. Along with approving an expected half-point rate increase policymakers will issue new projections for rates, economic growth, inflation and unemployment in coming years.

With the coming half-percentage-point increase the central bank will have lifted its overnight policy rate from near zero as of March to the 4.25%-4.50% range, the swiftest change in rates since former Fed Chair Paul Volcker was battling an even worse rise in prices.

That has not, however, had a convincing impact yet on inflation. Powell said Fed estimates of inflation in October showed its preferred measure still rising at about triple the central bank’s 2% target.

He noted that while goods inflation has been easing, the cost of housing is likely to continue to rise into next year, while key price measures for services remain high and the labor market tight. Data released earlier on Wednesday showed there were still about 1.7 job openings for each unemployed person.

“Despite some promising developments, we have a long way to go in restoring price stability,” Powell said. “We will stay the course until the job is done.”

Merrick Garland spoke publicly today about the Oath Keepers seditious conspiracy conviction. He’s clearly feeling vindicated, but he’s being classy about it. If I were him I’d be moonwalking past the podium, giving the doomsday pundits the finger, and yelling “How do you like me now?”

Garland also used his press conference to list off all the other crucial accomplishments the DOJ has made of late, none of which the media ever seems to cover. The problem is, once the media decided that “the DOJ is doing nothing” was its most ratings-friendly narrative, it had to ignore everything the DOJ ended up accomplishing. Now that the media can’t ignore the Oath Keepers convictions, Garland is using it as an opportunity to do the media’s job for it.

You also have to love how Garland is using the media attention on the seditious conspiracy conviction to draw attention to the Jackson, Mississippi water crisis. Not just how the DOJ is trying to fix it, but the fact that the water crisis exists.

Garland was asked about his Special Counsel appointment. He responded by pointing out that Jack Smith promised there would be no delays, and “that is exactly what’s going on.”

Garland also declined to comment on whether those who weren’t on the ground will also end up charged with seditious conspiracy, saying that it wouldn’t be appropriate right now because another seditious conspiracy trial with different defendants begins next week. In other words, the court system moves at the speed that it moves, but this is all just getting started.

The post Merrick Garland speaks out after Oath Keepers seditious conspiracy conviction appeared first on Palmer Report.