On March 5, 2026, I was crossing the street in San Francisco wearing my kippah when a car drove into the crosswalk and yelled “Free Palestine” at me. That was the physical threat.

When I posted about it online, the incident opened into something else: a flood of antisemitic and antizionist responses, multiplied by the scalability of digital reach. One ugly moment became dozens of notifications, then more, then arguments and personal attacks that reached into my personal life. It was tempting to read every comment as a fresh revelation of how much Jew hatred is out there.

Jewish organizations face this problem, too. When a synagogue, school, museum, federation, or nonprofit makes an ordinary post, there is always the possibility of a dogpile. This happens so often that many of us have a clear mental picture of it: one comment invokes libels; another asks a question that is asked of no other community in the world; a few comments insist Jews are fine, but not Zionists; flags and copy-pastes spread like spam.

Jewish institutions should pair moderation tools and security protocols with historical framing. Online Jew hatred collapses into a few recurring scripts that non-Jewish parents and leaders have renewed for centuries. These scripts........

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