Jew-hate is being rebranded as 'cool'.

Antisemitism, the oldest hatred, is thriving by speaking the language of modern culture.

illustration by Future of Jewish

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This is a guest essay by Ben Schulman, the creator of TEL, a multimedia editorial exploring Jewish histories embedded in cityscapes.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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The Spanish sociologist and urban planner Manuel Castells argued that the defining feature of modern life is the “space of flows” that defines the “informational, networked city.”

Identities, formerly organized around place, are increasingly organized around the currents we move through, or as he termed them, “-scapes.” Thus, a networked world of information and mobility becomes made through diasporic flows of ethnoscapes, foodscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and more.

Scapes disperse across geographies and attempt, with varying success, to create coherence among fragmented communities. In this world of flows, culture becomes a primary binding agent. And within culture, “cool” becomes the organizing signal, the sender and receiver of meaning in a landscape without a center.

As Thomas Frank detailed in 1997 book, “The Conquest of Cool,” we have been centering “cool” for some time. And, as Frank showed, the counterculture and its signals of transgression are reliably absorbed by the very power structures they claim to oppose.

“Cool” defines things. It gives shape to the formless. It turns noise into narrative.

Which brings us to Julian Casablancas, frontman of the American rock band “The Strokes,” Übermensch of the early aughts New York City gilded sleaze set, who was recently interviewed on Kareem Rahma’s viral video series, “Subway Takes.” There, in a breezy mood waxing about things he doesn’t like, such as too-long audio text messages and ugly modern cars, he singled out “American Zionists [who] get the benefits of White privileged people, but talk like they are Black people during slavery.”

The Strokes have “cool” in their blood. Writer Eve Barlow, in a brilliant essay that contextualizes Casablancas’ still-(ir)relevant “cool,” suggests that it kinda sucks that Casablancas’ elite background (the son of Elite Model Management founder John Casablancas) makes for such an easy readymade to counter his current worldview.

For as much as his own privileged background may make it seem easy to disparage his remarks as out-of-touch, his presence still carries a paragon of “cool,” and that has cachet. “Cool cats” like Casablancas are critical as brand ambassadors when antisemitism has a big future.

Until the morning of October 7, 2023, many believed that antisemitism is a residual pathology, an atavism that modern democratic culture is in the long process of outgrowing, and that its periodic eruptions, however alarming, represent the convulsions of a dying prejudice rather than the birth pangs of something new.

As events have shown since then, the assumption has proven to be wrong.

Antisemitism became big and is likely to become even bigger in Western life, and the forces that will carry it forward are not the forces of ignorance and backwardness, but also the rational, self-interested calculations of political actors operating at every level of competition, from domestic electoral politics to great-power rivalry to the reshuffling of regional order in the Middle East.

A more telling and revealing feature of how Casablancas — and the larger culture’s — worldview was shaped, though — and how it is changing now — is what The Strokes represented when they hit in 2001: a generational update of a prior “cool,” and the milieu that produced it.

That milieu was a specific world. Woody Allen had been making films about it for 30 years. “Deconstructing Harry,” released in 1997, just four years before The Strokes’ debut, is that world at its nadir — libertine, hedonistic, brilliant, connected, wealthy, neurotic, self-destructive and, if not distinctly actually Jewish, then Jewish-adjacent. — the Upper West Side intellectuals, the therapists and the writers, the cultural cognoscenti, the people who knew people.

Allen’s characters came of age and operated in the solidity and prosperity of the post-war structure that created a space, however slim, for assimilated ascent. The Strokes came up in that same milieu, one generation younger, but its inherited “cool” would soon grow up with the post-war foundation and structure faltering.

What followed is well-documented in its broad strokes and insufficiently reckoned with in its cumulative weight: 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq — a catastrophe whose consequences are still being realized, for example the 2008 financial crisis, which did not punish many of the people who caused it and did, in effect, punish many other people. It was the audacity of hope, which turned out to be hopelessly, audaciously cynical.

The Strokes came to early adulthood riding the waves of loose moral order that could only be actualized with the strong shared post-war cultural and economic underpinnings. They matured, as we all did, watching that structure dissolve over nearly 30 years of institutional chaleria.

In response to this shift, “cool” became deconstructionist. If the avatar of “cool” was downtown New York, so the avatar of disillusionment still lived there. The flow chart runs easy from here. Down to the denizens of Dimes Square, to the embrace of “anti-Zionism” as a local issue in mayoral politics, to now Casablancas on a subway car performing transgression.

As Eve Barlow put it:

“This is a masterpiece in deflection. He’s lecturing on privilege? How rich. Casablancas’ comical hypocrisy, however, isn’t really the main issue. When he says “American Zionists” he is not addressing Christian Zionists, by the way. He’s addressing Jews. By calling Jews “American Zionists”, he is engaging in a very deliberate dog whistle. He is confirming his anti-Jewish hate by telling the world that he believes that Jews are the leading oppressors. He’s just couching it in the language that allows him to be celebrated for it.”

“‘You know what? I don’t think it’s bad to say that’, offers the interviewer, Kareem Rhama. Exactly: Casablancas used the right words to spread the applause-producing libels. And what is this privilege he speaks of?”

Isn’t this the process that Thomas Frank outlined in how “cool” conquests everything? The transgression is ratified. The “cool” is confirmed. The gesture that seems countercultural is absorbed and celebrated by the very structures it claims to challenge.

In a disordered world without clear moral or economic footing, Jews become the organizing principle of blame. We are sexy to blame. We are “hot” to blame. We are the barometer that a certain kind of nihilist “cool” reaches for when it needs to feel like it is saying something true.

This ain’t new. When societies fracture and coherence dissolves, Jews become the currency in which failure is trafficked. The specific ideology may change; the mechanism does not.

History also tells us what comes next: The energy spent demonizing Jewish life eventually exhausts itself. It searches, it destroys, and it burns out, and then, in the reckoning, there is a recontextualization. A flourishing.

The postwar period in America is the clearest example: The same culture that had excluded Jews from universities and country clubs and boardrooms, that had looked the other way while Jews and others deemed oven-worthy were mass murdered, spent the next 50 years making Jewish intellectual and artistic life central to its own self-understanding.

Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Lou Reed and Eve Babitz and Woody Allen and Bob Dylan, and … you could make a list. The therapy culture and the comedy culture and the New York intellectual culture. It came, as it always comes, after the destruction.

My hope — held carefully, given the present moment — is that the corrective arrives before the catastrophe this time; that “cool,” which is a signal and not a fixed point, turns; that the aesthetic backlash precedes the historical one.

There is a larger irony sitting underneath all of this: In a world of scapes where essentially everyone is living in some form of diaspora — physical, cultural, mental, technological — the Jewish condition has become the universal condition.

Fragmentation. Dispersal. Identity untethered from geography. Community sought in the signals of culture rather than the facts of place. The search for coherence in flows that do not stay still. The inability to codify around a single idea of self.

This is the Jewish question, generalized. The people who were never permitted to fully belong anywhere, who built their identity out of the tension between particular and universal, between rootedness and exile, between the community they carried and the country they inhabited. This is how we all live.

Julian Casablancas, the son of a global modeling empire, educated in New York and Switzerland, fronting a band that became a sort of scape unto itself, is living a Jewish condition.

Everyone is Jewish now. The ones who haven’t figured that out yet are still looking for someone to blame.

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