Jews can't control their own narrative, let alone the world

Last month on X, the website he owns, Musk appeared to endorse “The Great Replacement Theory” — that is, the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews fund mass immigration to western nations in a ploy to “replace” the white majorities therein.

“You have said the actual truth,” Musk wrote on X in response to a post pushing the odious theory — one that numerous mass shooters invoked before committing their hate crimes. And though Musk proceeded to embark on an apparent apology tour of Israel, the billionaire quickly doubled down on his antisemitism in a recent interview when he suggested that “prominent people in the Jewish community” fund “massive demonstrations for Hamas in every major city in the West.”

In sum, while those on the far left believe Jews exaggerate or invent antisemitism at “Free Palestine” rallies, those on the far right believe we organize the rallies. It is truly remarkable that we can be in so many places at once, achieving so many remarkable things at cross purposes. Again, I just don’t know how we do it.

Of course, we don’t do it. These are unhinged lies. But at no point in recent memory have lies about outsized Jewish power and influence been so abundant. Therefore, in the spirit of countering these lies, I’ve decided to devote the rest of this column to the truth: that most of us are in fact, unremarkable. And furthermore, many of us aren’t doing so hot.

It isn’t just the global antisemitism that is wearing us down: it is the economy that we allegedly control, yet can’t seem to manipulate in our favour.

According to a Pew Research survey from 2020, “26 per cent of all U.S. Jews including 55 per cent of those who earn less than $50,000 per year” — say that, in the year prior to taking the survey, they had difficulty paying for medical care, their rent or mortgage, food, or other bills or debts.

The same survey found that during the COVID-19 pandemic (which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently claimed was bioengineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews), nearly 4-in-10 American Jews “said they or someone in their home had lost a job or had pay cut.”

Despite rumours of our overwhelming richness, a report from 2020 puts the Jewish poverty level in Canada at 14.6 per cent, what amounts to roughly 48,000 people.

In a 2019 piece entitled “Dispelling the Myth about Jews and Poverty,” Jeremy J. Fingerman writes: “More than one-third of the 100,000 [Holocaust] survivors in North America (as well as 60,000 in Israel and 62,000 in the former Soviet Union) are living at or near poverty.”

Despite rumours of our supernatural intelligence, according to a recent news story in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “the reading and writing skills of Israeli fourth graders dropped more sharply than their peers in much of the world from their pre-COVID pandemic levels.”

Despite rumours of our divine wisdom, earlier this year Shlomo Amar, the Sephardic chief rabbi of Jerusalem, blamed a spate of earthquakes in the region on the rise of gay marriage.

I could go on, but I won’t because this is a useless and frankly pathetic exercise. There is no statistic or anecdote that will disprove an antisemitic conspiracy theory in the mind of an antisemite. For even when we tell the world who we are and who we aren’t — and what we witnessed — many don’t believe us. They don’t believe, despite video evidence, that we were massacred on Oct. 7. (In fact, according to the latest conspiracy theory, we massacred ourselves). They don’t believe that we were raped. It is as if the fact of our existence is evidence of conspiracy.

We are alleged to control the entire world. In reality, we don’t even control our own narrative.