Why the manosphere has an antisemitism problem
Toward the end of Netflix’s “Into the Manosphere,” documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux chats in Marbella, Spain, with British influencer Ed Matthews.
“The people who run the world, they don’t have our best intentions,” says Matthews, speaking in the language of the manosphere – where some influencers and viewers believe they have tapped into a deeper truth about reality and power. When Theroux asked who controlled all of that, Matthews shrugged and answered this complex question very simply: “The Jews.”
It’s part of a three-minute digression from the film’s focus on masculinity, with multiple influencers making antisemitic claims about global conspiracies.
The manosphere is a catchall term for websites, forums, blogs and influencers promoting a particular kind of hypermasculinity, from the belief that women and feminism are the cause of men’s problems to calls to legalize rape. Groups within it – including pickup artists, men’s rights groups and “involuntary celibate” or “incel” communities – portray themselves as victims of modernity. In their eyes, the global economy is to blame for their unsatisfactory job prospects, feminism is to blame for their failures with women, minority rights are forcing them to relinquish their privilege as straight men, and so on.
And those digital spaces are rife with antisemitism. Some prominent influencers openly deny the Holocaust, call for violence against Jews and spread global conspiracy theories.
As a historian of Jewish gender and antisemitism, I know the connections between misogyny and antisemitism have deep roots. For centuries, a frequent tactic of antisemitism has been to attack Jewish men, deriding their........
