F—k the Jews: The Recipe of Antisemitism, from Roald Dahl to the Manosphere

Intellectual scaffolding, affective appeal

A quick note before the post: Like many other Substack creators, I have a large number of subscribers, and I’m grateful for that, but less than 5% of you are paying for a subscription. This is making Both/And difficult to sustain financially. I greatly prefer to make posts publicly available, but I’m wondering if that’s the right approach or if I need to follow other writers on my ‘tier’ and paywall more of my posts. Before doing that, I wanted to try this method first: asking for your financial support because you appreciate this newsletter and want it to continue. I don’t love fundraising, but it is an honest exchange: if you think I’m producing something of value, you decide to pay for it. So, that is my ‘ask.’ If you’re a free subscriber, please consider upgrading now for five bucks a month. And if you’re paying already, thank you! Cheers — Jay.

Now on to our regularly scheduled program.

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This past week I saw the excellent play Giant, starring Olivier-winner John Lithgow as Roald Dahl, and Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary, Inside the Manosphere, which I had put off watching out of dread. Coincidentally, both of these dealt with antisemitism, just as I published the latest in what is now a series of articles on the same subject.

So I have thoughts. (Also, this essay contains a spoiler for Giant, though you already know it if you know the true story on which it is based.)

The fundamental question in Giant is how such a wonderful writer with such fine attention and ethical sensitivity could also be a bigot. What I loved about the play is how it offers not one clear answer but a recipe with multiple intellectual, cultural, emotional, even spiritual ingredients. Which, oddly enough, seemed also to be present in the case of the Manosphere. Here are four of them:

1. Bullies like Bigotry. The primary answer, in the play, is that Dahl was an asshole. Lithgow’s Dahl is a bully — he baits and goads and criticizes everyone, even his housekeeper who is trying to steer clear of him. One character calls him a “human booby trap.” It’s easy to imagine him hating other groups besides Jews — the man seems to hate everyone, as, honestly, do some of his books, positing entire worlds of hypocrites and liars. As the Times review of Giant put it, “it’s hard to escape the discomforting conclusion that Dahl was so good at writing about hatefulness and cruelty precisely because he was, in some respects, a hateful and cruel man.”

2. A Culture of Distaste and Racism. But Dahl’s not only an asshole. Dahl also grew up in an England that had (and some would say still has) a specifically British antisemitism woven into its fabric. This is the kind of antisemitism that finds Jews unpleasant: loud, gruff, crass, money-grubbing, untrustworthy. That distate extends beyond Jews; think of how the al-Fayed family was sometimes depicted, for example. And it is wrapped up with race. In another coincidence, during intermission I shared a story with my friends about how, in my first week of my junior year abroad at Cambridge, my dorm neighbor asked me about my ‘background,’ since ‘obviously you don’t look very English.’ At first I had no idea what he meant. I’d experienced low-level antisemitism before, growing up in 1980s Florida, but it was never racialized — it was a set of stereotypes about being cheap, or religiously-derived resentment, not about my Ashkenazic nose or hair. I started to answer that my background was Russian and German, but then realized what he meant. He meant Jewish. As soon as the lights went up, a Jewish character in the play told an almost identical story.

3. A Slippery Slope from Legitimate Concern. Dahl also has a sincere (if we take him at his word) concern for the underdog and the victim. Dahl’s initial comments were in a review of a photo book about the Lebanon War, which included – another eerie coincidence – Israel’s bombing of hospitals and killing of civilians. (The play was written in 2022, before Gaza.) After viewing the horrifying photographs, Dahl condemned Israel and wrote that “never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers.” Whoops, I thought to myself. As someone who spends an inordinate amount of professional time distinguishing anti-Zionism and antisemitism, it was like a dial in my brain just flipped to eleven. Criticizing Israel, fine. Criticizing the bombing without putting it in the context of a defensive war — misleading. But extrapolating from Israel to a “race of people”? Not a close one. And quite familiar, the move from legitimate criticism to an antisemitic self-own. Dahl’s interlocutors beg him to just apologize for the wording here; criticize Israel all you want, just take back the part about the ‘race of people.’ But he won’t, because of the fourth element:

4. The Validation of the Gut. The final element of Dahl’s antisemitism in Giant, and what links it to the Manosphere documentary, comes late in the play, when Dahl has a short, private conversation with his groundskeeper, Wally, the only other character of his background and generation. First, Dahl asks him if any Jews served with him in the war — a bit puzzled, the groundskeeper replies that he can’t think of any, as if this one data point confirms Dahl’s prejudices that Jews are cowards, even as they are also simultaneously ‘barbarous murderers.’ Then Dahl tells Wally, “Apparently I have to apologize.” To whom? “The world.” Now there is no puzzlement; Wally is offended. “Wha’? You’re not, are you tho’?... You never bent to no one afore.”

After 90 minutes of rational argumentation, these emotional appeals are the only words that get through to the old man. Yes, you can see him thinking, this is a matter of courage, of principle. Dahl is blind to his own prejudices and his leaps of illogic. He hasn’t transcended his upbringing; he really doesn’t like Jews. But now he has the affective sense of his own rightness: the rebelliousness, stubbornness, resentment. Indeed, fuck the Jews!

Dahl as puzzle.

“Fuck the Jews” is a chant gleefully shouted by several of the subjects of Louis Theroux’s documentary, second-tier ‘manosphere’ influencers who are enormously popular with teenage boys online, and who helped put Donald Trump in the oval office. This moment, too, comes toward the end; interestingly, Theroux leaves the antisemitism for last, after exposing the misogyny, deception, grift, greed, hypocrisy, and, believe it or not, even the unhealed childhood traumas of these manosphere bros. It’s a shocking revelation, especially as it seems unconnected to all that has come so far. It’s as if the masks suddenly come off.

But, having just watched Giant, it was also quite familiar; their adolescent glee at shouting what they really feel instantly reminded of the smile on Dahl’s face when he did his disastrous interview with The New Statesman. And then I noticed that the same patterns I observed in this 20th century literary giant were also present in these 21st century online morons.

The manosphere bros, of course, are bullies; hyper-masculine oafs who equate physical strength and beauty with personal value, and who taunt anyone who doesn’t measure up. They beat up people on the street, ridicule Theroux for being a wimp, and are completely oblivious to their own stupidity. They’re a very different type of brute from Dahl, but brutes nonetheless.

Like Dahl, they also exist in a cultural context. The manosphere is a galaxy of the Trumpist conspiratorial universe; they often call themselves the Red Pill community, since they’re the ones who have awakened from the Matrix of conformity and brainwashing. In reality, they’ve merely joined a different cult of uniform belief, one in which hatred of ‘elites’ leads naturally, as always, to hatred of Jews. As one of the bros says at the end, the people who keep promoting women’s and LGBTQ equality, and telling men not to be real men, are the Jews.

They make a claim to care about people, as Dahl does — at one point, Gaza is mentioned, but more often, it’s their own followers, who have been screwed by the mainstream and told they’re not worth anything. This concern may or may not be real; unlike Dahl, it’s hard to ascribe any real beliefs to these dudes, who seem only interested in acquiring money and clout. But it does exist, imbued with an oppositional attitude of righteous rebellion.

And there’s the affective thrill. These guys love to transgress taboos, as I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. You can see it in their eyes when they chant — it’s just like the relief in Lithgow-Dahl’s face when he can finally say what he really thinks. It’s the frisson of fascism; the release of the taboo. I am saying what we are not supposed to say. And that makes me the better man. Fuck those people telling you to behave, apologize, and self-censor. Fuck the Jews!

This affective core is the essence of emotive populisms, including fascism. “In your heart, you know he’s right,” said Barry Goldwater’s ads in 1964. Not in your rational mind — in your heart, your gut. Of course, your heart is also the home of old prejudices that resist contradiction by facts: racism, sexism, antisemitism, all the old views and ideas of the dominant group. This ‘heart’ is precisely what we should not trust but should instead subject to reflection, discernment, and revision. But in the logic of the bigot, it is the source of wisdom. I admit it, the demagogue says; I speak the truth that you know but are afraid to say out loud.

Obviously, these are just two cultural artefacts — there’s no one universal recipe for antisemitism. Yet for me, the juxtaposition pointed to why it’s often so difficult to talk about. It’s hard to even describe what antisemitism is: it is partly hate, but also ideology, bias, conspiracy theorizing, resentment. It’s directed at a group that appears as a religion, a nation, even, for some, a race — a complex web that I referred to a couple of years ago as the “imbrication of multiple threads of identity.” It is partly an animus and partly a theory about how things are that resolves cognitive dissonance and explains in simple terms why the world is not as it should be: the bad guys control everything, and want to keep you down. However preposterous the antisemitic conspiracy may seem, it is still more comprehensible than the multiple, complex reasons why anything is the way it is. It can even seem rational, but inevitably it depends on the non-rational for its vitality; often the rationality can seem like a mere disguise, which can make it especially hard to discern when the ‘disguise’ is sincere, rather than masking animus underneath.

And, lastly, the hatred thrives on its own criticism. In an interview given shortly before his death, Dahl told an interviewer, “I’m certainly anti-Israeli and I’ve become antisemitic.” That probably isn’t quite true, but no doubt the vitriol with which the author was attacked (justifiably) made him hate his attackers anew, seeing them (as described in the play) as tribalistic, conspiratorial and also, it seems, irritating. Likewise for the manosphere bros, for whom QAnon-like conspiracy theories are validated when people try to censor or shut them down. The calling-out of antisemitism is proof, to the antisemite, of its truthfulness.

While I don’t have a prescription that follows from this diagnosis, I do think it points to what doesn’t work. There’s a theme going around (and subsidized by Robert Kraft’s quixotic campaign) that antisemitism is “just hate” and could thus be combated if were just nice to one another and realized that we’re all the same.

But that’s not true; antisemitism is hate plus ideology plus intuitive reasoning plus culture plus a certain kind of spiritual meanness. It affects people both great (Dahl) and small (HSTikkyTokky). It is usually woven into ethno-nationalism, which Kraft’s favored political party promotes, since in Western society, Jews are the paradigmatic ‘other’ within. We don’t look quite English, do we — and we never will, as long as Englishness is tied to a certain appearance, background, or religion. And it is often subconscious, like implicit racial bias, until some crystallizing moment draws it out and the bigot at last says what he really feels.

For two thousand years, whatever state of autonomy or subordination Jews have found ourselves in, antisemitism has resisted efforts to eradicate it; one Jewish friend told me that his son was teased in school the day after the Super Bowl by bullies mocking Kraft’s tone-deaf ‘blue square’ ad. It even resists direct human encounter: just as racists are proud of their one black friend, both Dahl and several manosphere influencers point out that they have Jewish friends, who appear right there on the stage or television screen. The problem isn’t all Jewish people, says the antisemite — it’s “the Jews,” the direct article, as Dave Chappelle pointed out, being the sign that one has gone astray.

That said, I am not a Judeo-Pessimist. With effort, we can turn down the dial on antisemitism, and at times it can seem to almost disappear, eclipsed by other modes of scapegoating and animus. The real problem is domination itself, the seemingly primal human (or at least male) tendency to subordinate others, especially those perceived to be part of an out-group. This, I think, is what gay Republicans and Jewish Republicans and Black Republicans seem unable to comprehend: that as long as there is a dominant group, those who are not a part of it will always remain a lesser caste — even if, in the Jewish case, they are accused of being the ones secretly in charge.

I’m not sure the drive to dominate will ever disappear, except in some imaginary messianic age. It also, obviously, exists within subordinated or formerly subordinated groups themselves — Dahl was right that yesterday’s victim can become tomorrow’s oppressor; he was just wrong that this fact is somehow particular to Jews. So it seems to me the work has to be both outward- and inward- facing. Of course, we need norms and laws against discrimination, and cultural products like Giant and Inside the Manosphere that expose its evil. But we also need the inner architecture — psychological, religious, spiritual — that nourishes compassion and questions the gut reactions that reflect emotional traumas and cultural baggage. That thugs like HSTickyTokky lack such interiority (though there are moments when it seems to appear) is perhaps unsurprising; that geniuses like Dahl do as well should be sobering. None of us is immune from these tendencies: neither antisemites nor Jews, nationalists nor immigrants, men nor women. The work to be better will never be complete, but we should not desist from it. It is the project of humanity.

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Thanks for reading and subscribing. Here’s some of what I’ve enjoyed reading this week:

• New data from PRRI says there may not be a religious revival underway after all.

• Of the many requiems for Viktor Orban, I liked this one in The UnPopulist .

• You’re not imagining it: social media has become a ‘freak show’ per Nate Silver .

• Best meditation guide-title ever? Jeff Warren’s “Junior Cult Leader’s Guide to Beginner Meditation.”

• Finally, here’s the piece I mentioned above about the antisemitic ‘mega-crisis’ of the Epstein Files and Iran war.

See you next time.