When left-wing streamer Hasan Piker addressed the national convention of the College Democrats of America this past weekend, he wasn’t just denouncing “Trumpism,” he had won a new platform for spreading his great project of gaslighting American Jews.

I am a historian of antisemitism. My gaslighting alarm goes off loud and clear whenever someone tells me what is and is not antisemitic. Other minorities get to name the bigotry, prejudice and hate they face. But some voices, Piker among them, deny my right to call out antisemitism. That is classic gaslighting.  

Gaslighting works by making victims doubt their own perceptions. Piker asks Jews to believe that attacks on the overwhelming majority of their community are not really attacks on Jews at all.

Piker, gaslighter-in-chief of the left, says that “Zionism is a racist ideology.” He proclaims “Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel.” Earlier this year in an interview with JTA, he boasted of his opposition to the “real antisemitism,” the one manifest in attacks on synagogues and swastikas graffitied on Hillel buildings. 

He condemned the “heinous” antisemitic attack in March on Temple Israel in West  Bloomfield, Michigan. That the perpetrator, who loaded his truck with explosives and rammed it into the synagogue, intended to murder as many Michigan Jews as he could because “Israel is pure evil” should, if Piker were consistent, count as justifiable anti-Zionism. After all, that was his view of Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.  

Just last month, the British journalist Lewis Goodall pressed Piker on why he keeps........

© The Jewish Week