Yeah, shit on Reddit is bad. The prevalence of antisemitism on there goes in waves from what I have seen, always ebbing and flowing but becoming significantly worse during the existence of prominent hate subs. Probably the absolute worst time was around the both before and during the era of the Charlottesville fascist riots and their terrorizing of the Jewish community there and when The_Donald was at its peak. Those were when I really had to fully disengage for my own mental health because it was just so intensely unsafe being on that site.
And absolutely, I value much of the activists and the work they do so much. In the past year alone and as I’ve gotten more involved in the fediverse (and for the first time ever online feel comfortable to actually assume good faith in people and in discussions, which is crazy to me) I have been to able to realize I am a lot less alone than I have previously thought which I am exceptionally grateful for. But, being in the moment of dealing with the barrage of hatred weighs on you heavily. It goes without saying, the stress of being pretty much any kind of minority quite literally eats away at you, both mentally and physically. It’s just hard to describe the feeling of how incredibly isolating it is when stereotypes and hateful statements are given legitimacy on social platforms positioned for “civil” discussion. My right to exist as a human being a topic of debate for people and actively bearing witness to the Overton window shift is incredibly distressing and tiring. And then having the fact you feel distressed by it be completely invalidated by others saying you’re an alarmist or overreacting just adds salt to that wound. There comes a point where you genuinely just can’t deal with it anymore, you just don’t have the energy to be hyper-vigilant in digital social spaces and for your own personal safety you have no choice but to assume the absolute worst of everyone you are interacting with if you decide to stay as a spectator.
I know people who were directly impacted by the Charlottesville riot as well as people who were actually there who had to bear witness to watching Heather Heyer getting murdered. It was a trauma that had a direct ripple affect across the entire American Jewish community, especially since that area is such a big hub of Jews in that area of Virginia. It was so impactful to a lot of American Jews not only because many Jews actually had some degree of connection to someone who experienced what happened there, but it was also an inflection point for many gen z Jews who hadn’t really bore witness to such an intense public celebration of our peoples hatred before. Like yeah, we knew that people hate us but when Charlottesville happened and then hearing the president afterwards say “good people on both sides” was just an indescribable feeling. It was a moment of realization of “They don’t just hate us. They want us dead, and our own president just defended them in spite of that being made clear. What the fuck? Am I actually safe here?” And after when Pittsburgh happened, it just echoed that feeling even more.
It was so impactful that for a lot of right wing leaning young (Ashkenazi, primarily) American Jews it was made crystal clear for the first time to them that the American rights support of Jews is not just conditional, but their perceived whiteness is conditional as well. Their acceptance as “white Americans” can be revoked extremely easily. That fact made a pretty high amount of Jewish gen z-ers fully reflect on that and swing dramatically to the left politically.
Knowing all that and having talked with the people who were ran out of their synagogues back door with their torah scroll clutched in hand for their own safety and having to go into someones house to literally hide from nazis threatening them and then later witnessing the shit people were saying online about it was just too much to deal with. What has rattled me the most even after all these years that is almost never discussed online or really highlighted at all is that we are extraordinarily lucky more people didn’t die. All it would have taken was one slightly different decision on someones behalf for that entire situation to have turned into a genuine massacre. It’s really hard to emphasize just how close that incident was to turning into a mass causality event, and the quick thinking and actions taken to diffuse and protect their community by community leaders in that synagogue likely saved so many lives both in that synagogues community and outside of it as well.
Knowing that fact and having to witness the conversation unfold online was honestly sheer hell to deal with mentally tbh, I quite frankly felt like I was losing my mind at times watching people talk about it. Which granted is probably the point, make you question and second guess yourself to invoke that sense of terror