When the Right Pushes Fake Jews - NYTimes.com

News Analysis

Credit Leon Edler

Bernie Bernstein pretty much fits the mold of a Jew — at least as the alt-right sees us.

A strange Northeastern accent, somewhere between New York and Boston? Check. Tossing money, but not too much money, around to no good end (remember, we’re rich, but cheap)? Check. Pursuing the agenda of the liberal fake-news media? Check. Riling the worst instincts of the South’s conservative base? Check.

But there was something a little too on the nose, forgive me please, about those robocalls in Alabama from a mythical Washington Post reporter named Bernstein seeking women to dish dirt on Roy Moore, something too “Jewy” to be actually Jewish. And that’s where the rising anti-Semitism of the new white nationalists loses its punch.

He may be Bernie Bernstein; he may be Lenny Bernstein — it’s a little hard to tell from the tape. Regardless, as the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse wrote on Twitter, “Whoever’s behind this is a horrible anti-Semite. I mean, just really bad at being an anti-Semite.”

Last week, voters in Alabama — rocked, befuddled or riled by allegations that Mr. Moore, the Republican nominee for the Senate, sexually assaulted teenage girls — were treated to an electronic “robocall” that intoned, or really whined:

I’m a reporter for The Washington Post calling to find out if anyone at this address is a female between the ages of 54 to 57 years old, willing to make damaging remarks about candidate Roy Moore for a reward of between $5,000 and $7,000. We will not be fully investigating these claims however we will make a written report.

I could be charitable and suggest that the name is a play on the Post’s legendary Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. There really is a Lenny Bernstein at the paper, a health care reporter who most certainly does not share the caller’s voice or penchant for journalistic duplicity. But honestly, I’m more inclined to invoke Occam’s razor: The most logical explanation is usually the right one. Bernie Bernstein is the creation of an anti-Semite — or at least an opportunist appealing to Alabama voters’ willingness to believe the worst about a man named Bernie Bernstein.

Leaving aside the low esteem that many Alabamians hold the national media in, no mainstream outlet is paying women for dirt on Mr. Moore, and no one is promising to publish half-baked uncorroborated allegations. But whoever recorded the call thought voters in deep-red Alabama would swallow such aspersions on the profession of journalism, especially if they came from a Yankee Jew.

Hatred of Jews in my native South is a phenomenon that is distinct from the more pervasive racism. White Southerners who hold bigoted views tend to know — or think they know — African-American and Hispanic people, and are convinced of their own superiority to them.

They don’t know nearly as many Jews, if any at all, and because of that Jews play a key role in their bigotry. If they are superior to blacks and Hispanics, yet believe they are losing ground in the battle of the races, then some other force must be orchestrating the “white genocide” that is befalling them. Enter the Jews, puller of strings, manipulators of the masses.

The anti-Semitism of the alt-right, the newest manifestation of bigotry that combines age-old hatred with internet-era technological savvy, biting wit and a self-conscious sense of irony, shows no more logical consistency than the anti-Semitism of the past. Jews are both all-powerful puppetmasters and sniveling weaklings, rapacious capitalists and left-wing anarchists. The Holocaust never happened, but man, was it cool.

In some sense, anti-Semitism has more in common with rising Islamophobia than with endemic racism. It gains its power from the same kind of mythologizing that convinces people like Roy Moore that whole communities in the Midwest are laboring under Shariah law.

In my own experiences with the alt-right, I have been treated to all of these contradictions — in so many variations that they have long lost their power to shock, scare or disturb. In 2016, they came at me through Twitter, the occasional voice mail and a few very ugly emails after I was identified by my Jewish-sounding name and “belled” on social media as a target for the alt-right.

Beyond the realm of the internet, a whole community of Jews in and around Whitefish, Mont., was targeted for vicious harassment. Fist fights have broken out among alt-right demonstrators and counter-demonstrators in any number of locations. And of course, the deadly events in Charlottesville, Va., this summer proved that the new anti-Semitic white supremacy is very much flesh and blood, or as the perpetrators like to chant, in our blood and soil.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently released its hate-crime statistics for 2016, and the numbers were plain. Of the 6,121 actions deemed crimes of hate and bigotry last year, 307 were perpetrated against Muslims, a 19 percent increase over 2015. Half the hate crimes, 1,739, were targeted at blacks, showing the potency of the nation’s original sin. Bias crimes against white people rose 17 percent, to 720 incidents, a sign of just how violent the nation’s polarization has become.

The 684 anti-Semitic hate crimes were more than the rest of the religiously motivated crimes of bias and bigotry combined.

As hate flares and the nation fragments, no one is safe within some cloistered quarter. The statistics are stark on that front. We can pull together and rediscover some shared sense of purpose. Or we can listen to Bernie Bernstein on our answering machine and rage, rage, rage against the mysterious other.

Your choice.

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