And Then There Were None: The Toxic Culture of Antisemitism Driving the Jewish Exodus from “Binders”
By: Amanda Kreklau
Tags: Anti Semitism, Jewish, Journalism, Racism, Binders

It wouldn’t be my first personal experience with antisemitism online, but it was the worst.

To orient the reader unfamiliar with the groups I will be discussing: An incident occurred in the Binder Full of Writing Jobs that resulted in a number of people wishing to create a new group with a similar focus that had slightly different rules. Feeling that I had the emotional bandwidth and the time to do the work of starting a new group, I chose to create that new group. I dubbed it Binder Full of Writing Jobs v2.0, and immediately brought on two fellow admins and several moderators for a solid team with Latinx, Black, Jewish, queer, and disabled representation.

Aside from the usual start-up bumps, things ran fairly smoothly for several weeks. And then a comment was posted — not coincidentally, just before Shabbat was to start. I say not coincidentally because I was very open with the group at large that as a Jew in the process of reconnecting culturally and spiritually, I was trying to make it a habit to be offline from Friday evenings through Saturday evenings.

So it was no mistake that the comment questioning my political beliefs and ability to fairly moderate an anti-racist group came on a Friday afternoon. What followed was a brief exchange in which I attempted, fruitlessly, to clarify and defend myself — to a white, non-Jewish woman who decided to speak on behalf of unnamed others in the group.

Worth noting here is that initially, my fellow admins — Liv Monahan and “Krystal Rene’ Nurse” — expressed irritation with Amy. Liv is a pale-skinned WOC, who Amy erroneously assumed was white despite Liv having introduced herself in the group very clearly as a WOC. Krystal is a Black woman; Amy private messaged her specifically due to her skin color, to “alert her.” Krystal said she was pissed at being singled out because of her race.

I chose to allow this to be a group discussion among the mod team instead of taking action unilaterally. This decision resulted in several sustained hours of antisemitic bullying by a member of my own mod team — Jennifer Stavros. ”I’m still waiting to be called an antisemite,” she taunted, after telling me that she would “check with other Jews” about what Zionism meant and what antisemitism was instead of listening to my lived experience.

This was followed by a suggestion from another admin that the entire team should “privately vote” on which one of us should be removed from the mod team: Me, a Jew expressing that I was enduring, at that moment, antisemitic harassment, or Jennifer, who subsequently suggested she might reconsider her decision to move in with someone because he, too, was Jewish.

Initially I had promised to abide by my fellow mods’ decision about what I should do. But after a few lukewarm comments in the group chat — and some private messages to me saying I had their support, but. . . — I admittedly grew angry that they were allowing my repeated statements that I was experiencing antisemitism to go unremarked upon. They allowed Jennifer to harangue me — including bringing up murdered Palestinian children multiple times, as if I were personally responsible — for literally hours at the holiest time of the Jewish week, despite my having said, repeatedly, that I had wanted to be offline.

Meanwhile, Amy’s comments in the group and my subsequent comments had spurred another hours-long “debate,” if it can be called that, during which two “anti-Zionist Jews” and one individual who isn’t Jewish (or, it should be added, Palestinian) were allowed to engage in intellectually dishonest debate: strawmanning, gaslighting, questioning the Jewish status of those few who felt safe enough to defend my perspective, and claiming that we — including a Middle Eastern Jew and a Black Jew — were racist for merely trying to point out that many Jews who identify as Zionists are pro Palestinian liberation.

[Note: You’ll notice there are no screenshots for the rest of this in-group incident. Primarily, this is because I feel it’s important to protect my fellow Jews, and my Muslim cousins — no matter how much we disagree, and no matter how much pain they contributed. We are at high risk of being targeted for harassment, and I won’t add to that potentiality for them.]

It was a bloodbath, and I felt both raw and slightly traumatized afterward — as did the dozen or so Jews who privately messaged me to commiserate and say that they felt afraid to speak out.

One of the most frustrating exchanges came as yet another of my Facebook friends — Sarah Ratliff (aka Sarah Sarita, Sarita Ratliff, and SE Farmer, as she has most recently changed her display name to show), herself an admin of a different Facebook group — expressed that so-typical complaint that “any defense of Palestine gets one labeled antisemitic.” One of the Jews in the group commented that she, too, chose to stay out of these conversations because it’s so common for gentiles to use antisemitic language and tropes when they critique Israel. Sarah immediately shot back that she couldn’t believe someone would dare to call her antisemitic. She couldn’t be antisemitic, she said, because she “grew up in an area where she was the only non-Jew.”

I chose to leave the group. Several other Jews I know of did the same.

This is how the mod team chose to respond after I stepped down.

I chose to leave the group rather than read dozens of comments by the same small group of individuals who had harassed both myself and several other Jews. Instead, I vented about it on my own Facebook wall, feeling stressed and upset after literally hours of what felt like willful misunderstanding of my words — over and over and over by bad actors.

Sarah private messaged me to tell me that calling her a gentile was “racist as fuck” before blocking me. The following morning I woke up to more private messages from her alternate (sock) account letting me know that even though I had already left the group she co-adminned, they had “made the decision to ban [me] anyway.”

In the week that followed my exit from that group, I heard from many Jewish members that the remaining admins had essentially disappeared. The small cohort of anti-Zionists were being allowed to go on a comment rampage, brutally harassing any Jews who dared to express even the mildest disagreement or factual correction. Several Jews who reached out to the admin team privately to express feeling unsafe in the group were booted from the group.