This Humpty Dumpty won’t fall

In the unlikely event of my forgetting to look in the mirror, I have social media to remind me that I’m bald. For good measure, a few times a week at the least, attention is drawn to the size of my nose -it’s apparently Jewish-looking – and that I’m overweight.

There are those who feel it’s important that I’m aware that I look like an egg head, and like Humpty Dumpty – before the fall. It has been noted by many on X that if you look closely at my eyes, you’ll see the evil that lurks there.

Because I am, after all, a “genocidal, apartheid-loving, Zionist, Palestinian-hating, baby killer”.

If social media is to be believed, the size of my nose and my lack of hair seem to have increased significantly since 7 October, when Hamas launched an invasion on the towns and people of southern Israel.

My “support” for apartheid, though fictional, has grown proportionately since that day, along with my “Jewishness”, which discredits me in all areas and precludes me from having a view on anything other than Israel.

I’m repeatedly asked why I “put myself out there” in this way. The most obvious reason is that the abuse is an attempt to silence me. The insults are meant to embarrass me into keeping quiet as labelling me a racist is designed to make me cower in fear.

Whereas I’m aware of the truth of my repeated bad hair day, I also know that I’m not a racist. I’m not a racist off social media, which means that it’s unlikely I’ll be one on it. Simply because someone calls me something doesn’t make it true or believable.

I also respond because I can. As Jews, we have been facing this antisemitism thing for thousands of years. We’re good at it. We understand it, and we know it when we see it. Many on X, however, are new to the prejudice, and are still trying their hand at it. In a way it’s like a game of “whack a gator”, where antisemites are awarded with a short sharp verbal smack when they raise their snapping jaws. It might not deter them, but they will think twice before attempting it again.

There’s also the issue of algorithms, but that’s neither here nor there.

Since 7 October, Jews around the world have been reduced to being defenders of Israel, defenders of our people, and defenders of our position in the world.

In some ways, it reminds me of a phenomenon we’ve seen before, when we speak of survivors or victims of the Holocaust. The event itself was so significant, it dwarfed so many things about them, reducing them to “survivors” or ‘victims” and not whole people. We know intellectually that they were. Some were smart, some less so, some kind, and some not. Some had great senses of humour, and some could have done with smiling more often. But in the tragedy of history, so much is lost because only one thing becomes relevant. And that’s the survival of their memory and that of the Jewish people. As an aside, I’m aware of the incredible projects out there to individualise and record personal testimonies of survivors and I celebrate them, but I’m talking about the more general memorialising of six million Jewish lives.

I don’t advocate that that we all treat social media like a game of whack a gator. I don’t believe that everyone needs to “put ourselves out there” in the same way. But we each have talent and skill, and we each have a responsibility, especially now, to do what we can to protect each other and our people. Because, after all, it’s infinitely better to be the Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall than the Humpty Dumpty who isn’t.