The Money-Making Business of Attacking Jews
Incentives in media and politics are turning outrage about Jews into a profitable system that rewards antisemitism, turning it into a vicious cycle at scale.
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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
There is a comforting way to think about antisemitism: as a relic of the past, driven by ignorance, ideology, or fringe hatred.
That framing is neat, moral, and wrong. It misses what is actually happening in plain sight.
Today, hostility toward Jews is not just expressed; it is incentivized — not everywhere, not by everyone, but enough to matter, enough to shape behavior, enough to create a system in which attacking Jews — often under different names — can be profitable.
That should change how we understand the problem entirely.
Most people who participate in anti-Jewish discourse do not wake up thinking, “How can I be antisemitic today?” That’s not how systems work.
They respond to incentives.
In the modern “Attention Economy,” people and platforms make money by capturing and keeping your focus — often by showing you the most emotional, shocking, or engaging content. In this context, outrage is the most reliable currency. Platforms reward content that provokes emotion such as anger, moral certainty, indignation. The more intense the reaction, the more the algorithm amplifies it. And the more it spreads, the more it pays.
This is not unique to Jews. But Jews, and especially Israel, occupy a peculiar position within this system. They can be framed, simultaneously, as powerful yet illegitimate, privileged yet oppressive, Western yet foreign, and successful yet immoral. That combination is combustible. It allows for a narrative that is simple, emotionally charged, and endlessly recyclable. In other words, it performs extremely well. And performance is what gets rewarded.
Scroll through enough content and a pattern emerges. Content creators and influencers who package their commentary around moral outrage (particularly around Israel or “Zionism”) tend to grow faster. Their content travels further. Their audiences are more engaged. Their platforms expand. Plenty of data has been published since October 7th showing that anti-Israel content far outweighs “pro-Israel” content on these platforms. Translation: Propaganda, half-truths, and information devoid of context far outweigh more factual, nuanced content.
With that expansion comes monetization ad revenue, sponsorships, paid subscriptions, speaking opportunities, and brand partnerships.
The mechanism is straightforward: Content that frames Jews or Israel as uniquely malevolent is more likely to trigger strong emotional responses. Those responses drive engagement. Engagement drives visibility. Visibility drives income. This does not require coordination or conspiracy. It requires only one thing: that the system rewards certain outputs. And it does.
Over time, creators and influencers learn what works. They refine their messaging accordingly. The line between genuine belief and optimized performance begins to blur. What matters is not just what is true, but what travels. The result is more profitable outrage.
Journalists and media organizations operate under different constraints, but they are not immune to the same pressures. Attention still matters. Narratives still compete. Simplicity still beats complexity.
Stories that position Jews or Israel within familiar moral frameworks (whether explicit or implicit) — like oppressor versus oppressed, powerful versus powerless — are easier to tell and easier to consume. They fit pre-existing expectations. They require less explanation. They generate more clicks and stronger reactions.
That doesn’t mean every piece of coverage is biased or malicious. It means the ecosystem favors certain framings over others. And when those framings consistently generate more engagement, they are more likely to be repeated, reinforced, and normalized. Over time, patterns emerge due to aligned incentives.
If the content creator and influencer economy runs on money, the political economy runs on votes. And votes are driven by emotion.
For politicians, the calculus is brutally simple: Adopt positions that energize supporters, build coalitions, and distinguish you from your opponents. Moral clarity (especially when simplified) can be a powerful tool. In that context, Jews have become a convenient target — not always directly, but through proxies.
Think: “Zionism,” “Israel,” “Netanyahu,” “global power.”
These terms can function as rhetorical stand-ins, allowing politicians to tap into existing narratives without explicitly naming Jews. It creates plausible deniability while still capturing the emotional and political energy those narratives generate.
Opposition becomes a form of signaling to activist bases, to ideological coalitions, and to voters seeking moral alignment. And like any effective signal, it gets repeated. Again, no conspiracy is required, just incentives.
If attacking or isolating Jews (or the Jewish state) mobilizes support, raises profiles, or wins elections, then it will be used — because the system rewards it.
Take, for example, Don J. Grundmann, an independent candidate for California governor, who just wrote an unhinged anti-Israel rant which claims, among other things, that conservative activist Charlie Kirk was “murdered by [a] shape-charged bomb Israel used”; that the World Trade Center was destroyed by Israeli art students, and that “Israel rules our conquered Republic.”
Dan Bilzerian, the mega-influencer who has spread conspiracy theories about Jews and said he wants to “kill Israelis,” is running for U.S. Congress, which already includes a slew of proud antisemites who manipulate language to make it seem like they are critical of Israel when, in reality, they are Jew-haters hiding behind more acceptable diction.
Just weeks ago, Governor Gavin Newsom, who could very well be the Democratic Party’s candidate for president in 2028, described Israel as “sort of an apartheid state.” New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, conspicuously made “anti-Zionism” a central tenet of his political campaign.
These stances seem critical of Israel, but they are merely disguises. Since the Holocaust, hostility toward Jews has rarely presented itself as such. It is reframed, repackaged, and relabeled as “human rights” advocacy, as “anti-colonialism,” as “social justice,” as “political critique.”
Sometimes those frameworks are legitimate, but more often than not they provide cover. They allow ideas that would otherwise be rejected to circulate with moral credibility. They blur distinctions. They make it harder to separate critique from hostility, analysis from accusation.
And crucially, they make the content more shareable. Because it no longer feels like prejudice; it feels like virtue.
Once these dynamics take hold, they reinforce themselves. Content that attacks Jews (directly or indirectly) performs well. High-performing content attracts more creators. More creators produce more of the same content. Audiences become conditioned to expect and reward it. Politicians and media respond to the shift in public sentiment.
The loop tightens.
At no point does it require central coordination. It runs on decentralized decisions, each individually rational, collectively corrosive. And like any system driven by incentives, it scales.
To state the obvious, antisemitism is not new. What is new is the structure surrounding it. In previous eras, antisemitism spread through institutions like churches, governments, and political movements. Today, it spreads through markets: attention markets, media markets, political markets.
That shift matters because markets don’t ask whether something is true or just. They ask whether it works. And right now, in too many cases, attacking Jews works.
When a system rewards a behavior, it produces more of it. If outrage targeting Jews generates clicks, it will be produced. If narratives about Jewish power generate engagement, they will spread. If political attacks mobilize voters, they will be deployed.
Over time, the volume increases, the tone escalates, and the boundaries shift. What once felt extreme begins to feel normal, which makes it among the most dangerous forms of antisemitism — because it becomes increasingly rewarded. What is rewarded is what gets repeated, and what gets repeated is what shapes reality.
That is what makes this moment different. We are no longer operating within a cultural or moral system; we are operating within an economic and political one, where hostility toward Jews is rewarded, amplified and, in some cases, dependent on it.
And systems like that do not correct themselves. They scale.
 | A guest post by
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Vanessa, excellent point. That’s exactly what so many people miss — for many of these influencers and media personalities, outrage toward Jews or Israel has become a business model. It drives clicks, followers, subscriptions, donations, and attention.
People like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and others understand that controversy sells, and anti-Israel content has become incredibly profitable. They laugh all the way to the bank while helping normalize some very ugly ideas.
That’s what makes this so dangerous. We’re not just dealing with ideology anymore — we’re dealing with an incentive structure where outrage against Jews has become financially rewarding.
Our local paper has an Associated Press article talking about some terrorist group associated with the Taliban which has its base in Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan. The terrorists have been doing some incursions into Pakistan and killing people and doing what terrorist groups do.
The Pakistani government has responded the way governments respond to such things. Missile strikes, targeted response into Afghanistan, etc. Yesterday a missile from Pakistan reportedly hit a university, killing 7 and wounding 85. Pakistan denies this. There was a strike by Pakistan into Kabul on March 17 hitting a drug treatment facility, killing 400 civilians. The Afghan government calls the Pakistani strikes “war crimes” and violations of international law.
Now…………… have you seen any protests in the US or Europe at college campuses or elsewhere, accusing the Pakistanis of “genocide” or of any thing else at all? Even 1 protester with a single sign? Nada. Has the mayor of New York of any of the left wing or right wing politicians in the US spoken about this?
Isn’t that rather analogous to Hezbollah or Hamas doing cross border attacks into Israel, and Israel responding to try to target the terrorists, and unfortunately killing some civilians in the process?
I suppose the absence of protests has to do with the fact that the Pakistanis are not Jews.