I first encountered the work of Caryn Block and Yael Silverstein last summer, when I read their paper “Making the Invisible Visible: Exploring Contemporary Antisemitic Experiences on College Campuses Through Racial Microaggressions Theory.” I sent it to colleagues, funders, and friends. It was the kind of research I had been waiting for. Research that gave the field language for something we had been gesturing at without yet grasping.

I have been in conversation with their work, though not yet with them, ever since.

We were preparing at the time to launch GameChangers NY with the NYU Center for the Study of Antisemitism. Our cohort was 40% non-Jewish, by design. I wanted, very much, to understand the deeper levels at which antisemitism and hate manifest. Not only in those who target Jews directly, but in the secondary and tertiary circles where ideas travel and shape behavior. The word someone read. The meme or sticker someone saw. The event that happened to their neighbor living in a country to the east. People carry these things, often without knowing they are carrying them, and they show up in how they speak, moderate, build, and play.

And they show up, in particular, in the underworld of gaming environments and online communities, which is where much of our attention at ADIR lies. We are working to advance technologies and interventions, alongside industry and stakeholders, to mitigate toxicity in gaming and digital spaces. The research from NYU CSA helps us name what we are seeing there with greater precision, and gives the work a foundation that the field has needed.

Yesterday I had the privilege of sitting in on Caryn and Yael’s lecture, “The Social and Psychological Impact of Contemporary Antisemitism on Jews,” at NYU CSA. They have continued to build, and what they presented extends the foundation in important ways.

Three things their work names:

Language for a shape-shifting disease.

Antisemitism mutates across centuries, contexts, and mediums, and the field has often been left chasing symptoms because we lacked shared language for what we are actually dealing with. The framework Block and Silverstein are developing gives us diagnostic vocabulary, and vocabulary is the precondition for intervention, for measurement, and for dialogue across disagreement.

A way to talk about climate, not just incidents.

Their work shows that ambient antisemitism, the cumulative atmosphere Jews navigate at work, on campus, online, predicts belonging and disengagement more strongly than discrete events. If we are measuring only incidents, we are measuring the wrong thing. This shifts what institutions, platforms, and funders should be looking at, and what they should be willing to act on.

Empirical clarity that the medium matters.

Online and in-person antisemitism do different kinds of damage and require different kinds of response. The online dimension, where so much of contemporary hate now lives, and where so much of our work at ADIR is focused, is precisely where the gap between experienced harm and recognized harm is widest. The harm Jews experience in digital spaces falls heavily into the categories the research names as most prevalent and least visible to existing systems.

The questions I am sitting with:

How do we translate this research into industry practice? What does a trust and safety framework look like that recognizes the dimensions of harm the research identifies? How do we measure climate, not just count incidents? And how do we reach the secondary and tertiary circles, the people who are not the direct targets and not the deliberate perpetrators, but who carry, transmit, and amplify hate without yet recognizing what they are carrying?

Research like this needs a place to land. GameChangers is one of those places, a real-life lab where academic work, industry expertise, and emerging talent come together to translate new frameworks into new interventions.

Silverstein, Y. M., & Block, C. J. (2025). Making the invisible visible: Exploring contemporary antisemitic experiences on college campuses through racial microaggressions theory. The Journal of Jewish Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/15244113.2025.2482060

Silverstein, Y. M., & Block, C. J. (in press). Understanding antisemitism: Why perceiver and target perspectives are both essential. In A. Zawadzka & D. Hirsch (Eds.), Contemporary Antisemitism: Perspectives from the LCSCA Conference. Routledge.

Silverstein, Y. M., Block, A., & Block, C. J. (in press). On Screens and in Streets: Comparing the Impact of Online and Offline Antisemitic Experiences. In T. Pittinsky (Ed.), Online Antisemitism. Oxford University Press.

Block, C. J., & Silverstein, Y. M. (under review). Contemporary Antisemitic Experiences: Development and Validation of a Multidimensional Scale and Its Associations with Discrimination, Well-Being, and Belonging.

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