The Antisemitic Cultural Moment

After a brief conversation with a friend last week about the Bondi Beach massacre, I realized that I am far more concerned about the all-consuming power of technology than I am about the rise in antisemitism. Almost immediately, another thought followed: what if the two are connected? What if the current resurgence of antisemitism is related to new technologies—but not in the obvious ways?

Recently, some of the more perceptive online commentators (the smart ones worth reading), have been noting that society is becoming increasingly conformist. They describe it variously as cultural blandness, the disappearance of “weirdness,” or the flattening of taste. What I’ve observed in a much more personal way—watching my own children move through adolescence into adulthood—is that they are markedly more conservative than my generation was.

Admittedly, my experience is highly skewed: I’m an Ashkenazi Jewish, upper-middle-class, university-educated person. Still, when I was growing up in the 1970s—the first broadly affluent postwar generation, living in the so-called “Me Decade”—there was a widespread spirit of testing social boundaries. In the wake of the 1960s, experimentation with drugs, sex, art, fashion, and identity was not marginal; it was mainstream. Life was meant to be lived colorfully, weirdly, even dangerously. Rock stars were idolized not just for their music but for their excess, their refusal of bourgeois norms, their visible transgression.

That cultural moment is gone. The rock-star lifestyle—defined by sexual freedom and drug experimentation—began its decline with the AIDS epidemic of the mid-1980s. Around the same time, political neoconservatism took hold under Reagan and Thatcher, and we’ve arguably never recovered from that turn. The radical energies of the 1960s and 70s were slowly neutralized—either demonized or absorbed into the mainstream and rendered harmless.

It’s difficult to point to genuinely new movements in fashion, music, art, or literature over the past 30 years. As one telling example, the popular music YouTuber Rick Beato argues that rock music effectively died in 1996. Whether or not that date is precise, the broader point stands. The most dominant American musician of our era, Taylor Swift, is less an artist in the traditional sense than a perfectly optimized creative entrepreneur—the prototype of the monetized content creator. The last truly disruptive popular music movements were punk and hip-hop, both of which emerged from specific subcultures, underground scenes, and physical spaces that no longer exist in meaningful form.

Those scenes depended on infrastructure: clubs, independent labels, local promoters, critics, and risk-taking entrepreneurs willing to back the non-conformist. That infrastructure has collapsed. In its place stand tech megacorporations that don’t cultivate cultural risk so much as absorb it, sanitize it, and feed it back through algorithms optimized for scale, predictability, and engagement.

Social media and algorithmic culture haven’t created conformity from scratch, but they have accelerated and entrenched it. Social media may be the most powerful pacifying force in history—more intimate and omnipresent than any religion. It offers the feeling of belonging without the obligations of community, the sensation of political engagement without political action. Above all, it optimizes our most conformist activity—consumption—making it frictionless and total. Where shopping once required exposure to other people, other classes, other tastes (think of going to the mall) consumption now arrives at our doors, curated precisely to reinforce who we already are.

So what does all of this have to do with antisemitism?

First, the obvious point: algorithms keep us in bubbles, endlessly reinforcing our existing preferences, biases and resentments. That has been thoroughly discussed.

But there is a deeper historical pattern worth considering. Jews have long occupied the position of the non-conformist outsider. Think of Marx, Freud, and Einstein—figures who didn’t merely contribute to their fields but fundamentally altered how we understand history, the 'self', and the universe. In both 19th-century Europe and 20th-century America, Jews have had an outsized cultural influence precisely because they lived at the margins of mainstream society. That marginality granted a certain freedom: the freedom to question received wisdom, to cross boundaries, to think otherwise.

That outsider perspective has repeatedly invigorated the societies Jews have lived in. But it has also come at a cost. Non-conformity threatens those invested in the status quo—especially people in positions of power. The recurring response has been scapegoating: portraying the non-conformist as subversive, dangerous, corrupting. Jews, over and over again, have been cast in that role.

What strikes me about our current moment—oddly, and perhaps tellingly—is the relative cultural absence of Jews. In postwar America, Jews dominated many of the industries that shaped culture: Hollywood, theater, publishing, television, popular music and even comedy. In 1979, Time magazine estimated that 80 percent of American comedians were Jewish. Until roughly the 1980s, non-conformity wasn’t just tolerated; it was celebrated.

Today, the industries that once nurtured and amplified that spirit are in steep decline. They’ve been replaced—or more accurately, consumed—by tech platforms whose business models reward standardization, safety, and scale. The risk-taking producers, editors, club owners, and impresarios who once brought weirdness into the mainstream have largely vanished.

The ideological irony is striking. The informal godmother of today’s tech elite—Gates, Musk, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Bezos—is Ayn Rand, a lapsed Jew whose philosophy fused extreme individualism with moralized selfishness and unrestrained capitalism. Her ideas have shaped a cultural model that is, in practice, profoundly conservative: hostile to deviation, allergic to disorder, and obsessed with optimization.

So perhaps we are living through an antisemitic cultural moment precisely because of hyper-conformity. And it's important to note that it's not a left-right phenomenon. History suggests that periods of intense conformity—Nazi Germany (right), Stalinist Russia (left)—are precisely when Jews are most vulnerable. When societies narrow, harden, and standardize, the outsider becomes intolerable. The non-conformist must be explained, blamed, and eventually expelled.

If that pattern holds, then the rise in antisemitism may tell us less about the actions of Jews (read: Israel) than about the culture itself—and about the price societies pay when creative disorder is traded for algorithmic control.