The Other Way to End Antisemitism and Extremism

The story of my own journey to extremism and how it taught me that there is more to ending bigotry and extremism than fighting it.

Our society tends to have a band-aid approach to problems. Our worst problems, from climate change to inequality are largely addressed through outward manifestations of “change” as opposed to addressing the core issues.

Extremism and antisemitism are no different.

It took me a while to realize this. The very language we use to address bigotry and extremism affects how we look at the solutions to them.

We “fight” antisemitism. We “combat” extremism. The literal war on terror.

It makes sense on the face of it. How else to fight violent people than to fight back? These are people who literally want to kill all Jews (and/or Black people, immigrants, gay & trans people, etc).  The danger is real.

But again: this language is an adaptation to the most extreme forms of extremism, and specifically to only one element of it: hate.

In other words, just as we are waiting for climate change to become so unbearable that we can no longer ignore it to finally address things, we wait for extremism to become its worst form possible before we care about it.

We are now seeing the results all over the world: extremism is growing. Authoritarians are winning much of the world over, and just about all of them are relying at least partly on antisemitic tropes to do it. 

From Orban of Hungary to Vladimir Putin of Russia to Ali Khamenei of Iran to even Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel have used varying versions of antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories to achieve their ends.

In other words, the “fight” against antisemitism and extremism at large are failing. The leaders in charge of this fight haven’t succeeded. Political and spiritual leaders who represent an alternative are failing. 

We are seeing an extreme example of this play out in the war in Gaza, which was sparked by an act of hateful extremism and antisemitism: for decades, the Israeli government has treated terrorism as a problem that can be solved with just the right amount of violence and oppression. As October 7th showed us so painfully, that strategy only made things worse.

In other words, if this is a war, then we are losing. At the very least, we have not succeed in any measurable sense in making it disappear. And as social media proliferates, extremism and antisemitism are able to spread lightning fast and with far fewer gatekeepers than in the past.

So what now?

What is Extremism?

When I think of extremism, I no longer tend to think only of genocide. Ironically enough, I think of my experience as a Hasid. This is not to say that I think it is any sense as on the level of the worst extremism. Quite the opposite.

In fact, it’s not so much even the Hasidic life itself but what drew me to it in the first place. It was this very question that led me to studying extremism as a whole. When I first decided to not just leave the Hasidic lifestyle, but Orthodox Judaism, I was finally able to come to grips with the fact that this journey started with a cult-like recruitment style, indoctrination process, and finally a full embrace of views that completely misaligned with the values I once cherished. Suddenly, I found ways to explain why gay people shouldn’t be able to marry, why my chosen group had all of the answers to life’s questions, and why my wife and women generally shouldn’t be on equal footing in prayer, ritual, and beyond. These were once so core to my morality that the change is wild to look back on in retrospect. Almost as if a different person had inhabited my body for years.

This realization was deeply disturbing when I first started coming back to myself. It disturbed me to realize how misaligned I still was, even in that time. The truer part of myself was still against those things, I just found ways to justify and explain what I now look on as inhuman, cruel, and sometimes evil beliefs. How was that possible? How could anyone have convinced me to do this?

To me, this is extremism. It is a false reality people impose on themselves, one that eschews our inherent morality and allows us to see others as inhuman, justify imposing unnatural rules on innocent people, and to give up our inner autonomy. It imposes another personality onto us, one which we must wear as a costume to cover up what is underneath. This, I believe, is why it is so effective in many cults to encourage similar dress: it is a reflection of the deeper change they are attempting to impose on their members.

But again: the question is how. How can someone get to this place, especially if they weren’t born into it? What would convince a person in a liberal democracy, for example, to accept a society that wouldn’t just oppress others but oppress them? This should be the more pressing question, but one that is hard for people in the mindset of a fight to accept. Ultimately, the first person who is oppressed by extremism is the member themselves. It is only once they have accepted the yoke of their own oppression are they willing to impose a far harsher oppression on others. 

So. How. How can someone become so indoctrinated that they are willing to give up a past morality and buy into a new one? One that is on its face a loss of freedom, a loss of autonomy, and a collectivist, unthinking mindset?

How It Happened to Me

(Before I start this section, I want to clarify that my personal story is just that. I don’t mean to universalize it, but to instead point out some similarities between my story and others and draw some lessons from it) 

My entire childhood to college life was marked by a deep desire for meaning. One that largely went unfulfilled. On top of that, I was lonely. As the son of immigrants with brown skin with a weird personality and undiagnosed bipolar, it was hard for me to make friends in a world that was largely “normal” in that it was white, conformist, and boring. As time passed, I found refuge in things like creativity, Taoism, and out of the box friends. But still, there was a hole in my heart that was unfulfilled. A sort of lonely existential despair often pervaded my life.

I couldn’t help but feel as if the issue was me: I never belonged. I could never find true meaning. What was wrong with me? And what was wrong with a world that couldn’t find space for someone like me?

It turned out that so much of what I was feeling was more a reflection of our society than anything cosmic. So much of America is deeply boring, loneliness is an epidemic, and the lack of meaning in so many lives is a reflection of our focus on material instead of spiritual fulfillment. 

I didn’t know that, and even if I did I’m not sure it would have mattered. The issue was not a greater knowledge of society as a whole, but the simple fact that all the things that I needed to feel whole simply didn’t seem to exist.

Then one day, years after I had a manic episode that led to my bipolar diagnosis, near death experience, and a long road of recovery, I finally gave into the Hasidic rabbi at my college who had been spending years trying to get me to come to his Shabbat meals. He was, I would eventually learn, a form of missionary. But instead of outreach to non-Jews, the Chabad movement was focused on bringing non-Orthodox Jews into Hasidic life.

Almost instantly, I loved the experience. I heard ideas that sounded strangely resonant with the Taoist ideas I found so much meaning in. But on top of that, I also found other journeyers. People who were dying to find some sort of spiritual truths to the universe. And, maybe most importantly, they felt like family. 

All of a sudden, that hole in my heart was starting to heal.

A year later, I was in Israel. I had joined a yeshiva (school for Jewish religious learning) for people like me: people who had grown up non-Orthodox but now learning as Hasidic Jews. The feeling of belonging was heightened: the rabbis helped me feel like I was part of an incredibly special movement. The other students were even big journeyers than the ones in the past: like myself, they had given up careers and big moments in their lives to be there. And we learned every day about deep spiritual concepts. It was as if all my wishes had come true.

This led to me joining the Hasidic community itself, eventually getting married and moving to a community in Brooklyn. 

Ten years later, I left it. Traumatized, in pain, and not even able to pick up a prayer book without having an anxiety attack.

Why It Worked

So. What happened? Why was Hasidic life so promising to me? I was alone and I couldn’t find any sense of meaning in the world around me. 

I also had no narrative for my life. What was the story of why I was in the world? Unlike perhaps people who were born into a certain worldview, I was relatively unmoored as the son of immigrants. And in a country without much spirituality outside of the religiosity of church, my spiritual side couldn’t be fulfilled.

This experience, I have come to learn, is not rare. In fact, it’s becoming more and more common as social media overwhelms us, the world gets darker, and despair sets in for so many.

It is now common knowledge that loneliness is a crisis in America. A majority of Americans report being lonely. 12% don’t have any friends at all.

Ironically, the better off people are, the less social they become. As someone who has gone from living in a cramped but communal New York apartment to a home in Los Angeles, I’ve seen exactly how this plays out: the American Dream at its core is about individual, not communal, success. In other words, our very dreams are rather empty.

Americans are less and less happy, a trend that has been going on for decades.

We are depressed. We are anxious. We have a dim view of the future.

Wouldn’t it make sense, then, that if there was anything that could address these issues quickly, most would jump at the opportunity? In a lonely society that provides very little sense of inner fulfillment and has no strong narrative about the purpose of our lives, anyone offering to address all these concerns is a savior. And when there are so few options available, it makes sense that we give it a sort of cosmic significance: this is the only sense of meaning and true community that exists.

I know that’s exactly what happened in my story. And so many others I know who are recovering from extremist communities.

What Extremism Offers

Which brings me back to antisemitism and extremism.

I used to run a social media account that tracked and called out antisemitism online. I would often spend hours combing through some of the worst hate speech imaginable.

A few things struck me about this experience. In particular, I realized how many didn’t just spew hate speech: they found meaning and connection through doing it among each other. Meaning, it wasn’t just about directing it outwards. It was about incubating their hate. Anyone spending a day on 4chan (don’t do this), will see that this sort of behavior defines these communities much more than their outward expressions.

Second, I was struck, as I mentioned above, by how much their hate explained everything. Jews were the problem. Easy. Minorities were lower than their supreme race. Easy. 

Third, I was struck by how this community was just that: a community. They discussed, they connected. Not only that, their views being taboo made them even more motivated to connect with others.

Fourth, I was struck by how their hate also gave them a sense of heroism. Antisemitism created a villain. But in the narrative where there is a villain, there is also a hero. They are those heroes. 

Finally, I was even more struck by how deeply spiritual they all sounded. Not necessarily religious, but they found meaning in everything. This, I think, is one of the other elements of conspiracy theories that people don’t realize matter so much. Yes, they give life’s difficulties a simple answer. But it is not just that: they provide a sense of cosmic significance in a country that tells us constantly that we don’t matter.

I think this is why Kabbalah is often popular in these circles. Kabbalah is largely based off the idea that the physical world is just a reflection of a much deeper reality. And that, if we want, we can learn the code to tap into that deeper reality. This is basically the idea of the “red pill”, a popularized term for extremism that is based off the Matrix: the hero takes the “red pill” to see the world as it really is while the rest of the world is an illusion.

Notably, the red pill in the movie doesn’t reveal a better world: it reveals a dark disaster. Everything good was an illusion. And it required a hero to fix it.

In sum, what struck me about antisemitism, antisemites, and extremism as a whole was how familiar it all felt to me. I too found community in my group. I too felt like I was in a group of a few people who understood truths no one else could tap into. I too found deep significance in the world around me (Kabbalah is a huge part of Hasidus, and it was this element that most fascinated me). I too felt like a hero in the cosmic story of the world: Chabad teaches that their job is to bring about the Messiah and usher in the ultimate era of goodness and truth. That’s about as heroic as you can be. And that, in many ways, is actually what antisemites and extremists imagine they are doing as well, but with a different narrative, enemies, and approaches to achieving their goals.

My story is quite similar to the story of an antisemite’s, in other words. In fact, that was the biggest lesson I took from learning about extremism, even outside of my own work monitoring antisemitism: different extremists and cult members have far more in common with other extremists than they realize. In fact, they are relatively similar in their recruiting, societal makeup, and narratives.

And there is one other element that binds them all together: the society they are part of. And all that it’s missing.

The Other Way

In a society that lacks meaning, fulfillment, and community, extremists thrive. They provide a quick fix to things that should be part of all of our daily lives. Something that, if we don’t have it and our society doesn’t have options for us to address it, would require years to fully address in a healthy way.

This means that any stamping out of hate is ultimately unsustainable if these core issues aren’t addressed. As long as our society lacks in these essential ways, there will always be another extremist group to take the place of the one before it. There will always be more living the story I lived because there will always be people whose basic human needs are going unfulfilled.

This is really what extremist groups do: they exploit the things that make us human. And if those parts of our humanity are lacking, we are that much more vulnerable to exploitation. If I wasn’t recruited by a Hasidic community, I likely would have just ended up with some other group. Perhaps a worse or more dangerous one.

Antisemitism is not just hate. It is a narrative. It is a worldview. And it is a community. 

There are stories, myths, ideas, a language, shorthand, and a vision for how the world will look after their hero story is fulfilled.

Imagine thinking that can be solved just through watchdogs. Just through hate crime laws. Just through law enforcement. Just through exposing them as dangerous. Just through op-eds and PR and fancy panels and fear mongering and anger and ostracization.

Of course, those things do help minimize the danger in the immediate sense. But they do nothing in the big picture. Antisemitism is increasing. Bigotry is increasing. Extremism is increasing. This means our methods have failed. No one gets to blame others for the failure of this work: if you take it on, that means when it increases you are partly responsible.

The way to fight antisemitism, then, is not just to fight it. In fact, the language of fighting and combat can be counterproductive. We are dealing with the symptoms of a deeper illness. 

The job, then, is not only to fight, but to heal. To build. 

We need, in other words, to find ways to address the needs that are going unfulfilled in America and around the world and to start fulfilling them in healthy, sustainable, positive ways.

Our society will never be rid of extremism until the society itself is repaired. Not in terms of getting rid of bigotry but in creating alternatives to it. In helping people feel like heroes. Giving them, giving all of us, a new narrative. Creating communities of meaning. 

Inner fulfillment and communal connection are the solutions to the hate that results from a lack of meaning and a sense of deep loneliness.

This is not just a simple fix. This is really about a societal transformation: one where towns and cities are invested in deeply by the government to make them more walkable and create other infrastructure that makes them more socially cohesive. One where we create a spiritual narrative that gives a deep sense of meaning while also including people of all backgrounds. One where new communities are built and old ones are built up. One where the language of materialism is replaced with a language of love.

This may all sound very fanciful. Maybe even unrealistic. But these are only the beginnings to an actual solution. Imagine if the hundreds of millions of dollars spent as band-aids to fix problems after they exist went towards our deeper needs.

Because the truth is, the problems are so incredibly big and so incredibly dangerous that these changes are not only realistic, they are urgently needed.

Let’s get started.