Antisemitism in the modern world is not a residual prejudice carried over from history. It is not a ghost of the twentieth century, nor a marginal pathology confined to extremists shouting at the edges of society. It is a live, evolving force — digitally networked, socially tolerated, and increasingly lethal. Its most dangerous feature today is not volume, but velocity: the speed with which hate narratives circulate online, harden into conviction, and cross the threshold into physical violence.
What distinguishes contemporary antisemitism is not that it is louder than before, but that it is embedded — woven into the infrastructure of public discourse. It moves through platforms that describe themselves as neutral. It hides behind the language of “questions”, “investigation”, and “public interest”. It rarely needs to say “Jew” outright — until it does.
Australia learned this the hard way.
Australia’s shock — and the illusion of distance
In December, Australia was shaken by a violent attack in Sydney that forced the country to confront an assumption long taken for granted: that ideological terrorism, and particularly antisemitic violence, was something that happened elsewhere. Writing in Le Monde, commentators noted that Australia’s relative distance from large-scale terrorist attacks may have fostered a dangerous complacency — a belief that the forces tearing through Europe and the United States would not reach its shores.
That assumption collapsed overnight.
What made the shock deeper was not only the violence itself, but the recognition that the warning signs had been present for years. Analysts pointed to online radicalisation, to digital environments saturated with conspiracy theories, dehumanising rhetoric, and ideological grievance. As in previous attacks across the West, hatred had not appeared suddenly. It had been rehearsed — typed, shared, refined — long before it was enacted.
For Jewish communities worldwide, the lesson was grimly familiar.
A record written in blood
Modern antisemitism leaves an evidentiary trail.
In January 2015, four Jews were murdered at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris. They were killed during an ordinary shopping trip, targeted solely because they were Jewish. In the days that followed, relatives spoke of a rupture: the moment when daily Jewish life itself became dangerous, when buying food was no longer a neutral act.
Later that year, Paris was again struck by mass terror at the Bataclan concert hall. While the victims came from many backgrounds, Jewish venues and Jewish audiences had already been explicitly identified in extremist propaganda as legitimate targets. French intelligence services later confirmed that antisemitic ideology was not incidental but structural to the worldview driving the attackers — part of a broader narrative in which Jews were framed as enemies of civilisation itself.
In October 2018, eleven worshippers were murdered at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the deadliest antisemitic attack in US history. The gunman’s digital footprint revealed obsessive engagement with antisemitic conspiracy theories portraying Jews as hidden manipulators, corrupt elites orchestrating social decay. Survivors would later say that the hatred did not begin with bullets. It began with words that were tolerated, repeated, and normalised.
In October 2019, a gunman attempted to storm a synagogue in Halle, Germany, on Yom Kippur. Failing to enter, he murdered two people outside. German prosecutors confirmed that the attack was driven by antisemitic ideology nurtured in online spaces — forums, livestreams, and comment sections where hatred was cultivated as identity.
Across countries and years, survivors and relatives have repeated the same refrain: violence does not begin with weapons. It begins with permission.
The online manufacture of suspicion
Modern antisemitism rarely presents itself as explicit hatred. It operates through insinuation. “Look into it.” “Follow the money.” “Strange coincidences.” The audience is invited to connect the dots. Jewish identity becomes the unspoken explanation.
This pattern is visible with disturbing clarity in the sustained online harassment of Uri Poliavich, a Jewish entrepreneur whose name has circulated for years across social media platforms, blogs, and collaborative knowledge sites. The accusations follow a recognisable template: vague allegations of financial crime, no judicial findings regarding Uri Poliavich, and no regulatory sanctions — only repetition of the same old arguments targeted towards Poliavich.
The content often presents itself as investigation. In reality, it relies on innuendo rather than evidence.
In December, a public post on X (formerly Twitter) accused a company associated with Poliavich of “money laundering” — a serious criminal offence — without citing any court decision, regulatory action, or credible inquiry. The language was abusive and categorical. Standing alone, it constituted defamation.
What followed removed any remaining ambiguity.
In the same discussion thread, commenters wrote, in Greek, potentially targeting Uri Poliavich :
“Soft2Bet — Jews, coincidentally they’re all in there 🤣.”
“Even if you don’t know his name, it’s obvious he’s a Jew.”
These statements are not critique. They are not analysis. They are explicit invocations of Jewish identity as stigma — deployed to legitimise a criminal accusation by tying it to ethnicity and religion. They echo one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in European history: the association of Jews with hidden money, corruption, and conspiracy.
This is antisemitism in its contemporary form: modular, shareable, and platform-enabled.
Harassment towards Uri Poliavich as infrastructure
What distinguishes Poliavich’s case is not a single post, but accumulation. Content migrates from social media to blogs, from blogs into Wikipedia edits, from edits back into social media. Each iteration strips context, each repetition creates the illusion of consensus. Over time, suspicion hardens into “reputation”.
This is how reputational harm becomes infrastructural.
For Jewish individuals such as Uri Poliavich, the consequences are tangible. Business relationships are strained. Security concerns escalate. Visibility becomes risk. Success becomes suspect. The message is implicit but constant: legitimacy is conditional.
Researchers who track antisemitism have long warned that this environment produces more than emotional harm. It creates a social climate in which Jews are perceived as acceptable targets — symbolically first, physically later.
Platforms without brakes
Social media companies insist they are neutral intermediaries. In practice, they are accelerators. Their algorithms reward outrage, their moderation lags behind harm, and their governance structures remain detached from real-world consequences.
Antisemitism today does not spread because people whisper it to one another in shops. It spreads because defamatory insinuation, hate speech, and coordinated harassment remain online — visible, searchable, replicable. Wikipedia articles, timelines, comment threads become reservoirs of suspicion.
Security experts have warned for years that online normalisation precedes offline violence. The attackers in Pittsburgh, Halle and elsewhere did not radicalise in isolation. They were shaped by environments where antisemitic narratives were never meaningfully challenged.
Australia’s shock, as Le Monde observed, lies not only in the violence itself, but in the failure to recognise these warning signs. Distance offered no protection. Neither will denial.
A narrowing gap between screen and street
The harassment of individuals like Uri Poliavich may appear, to some, as separate from mass violence. It is not. It exists on the same continuum.
Reputational destruction, ethnic stigmatisation, and conspiracy thinking create a climate in which Jews are framed as legitimate targets — first rhetorically, then physically. Each tolerated post lowers the threshold for the next. Each unchallenged insinuation widens the circle of acceptable hatred.
As long as social media platforms operate without meaningful accountability — moral, legal, or structural — antisemitism will continue to scale. And as it scales, the distance between a post and a body will continue to shrink.
History has already shown where this road leads. The only difference today is speed.
The question facing platforms, regulators, and media institutions is no longer whether antisemitism online is dangerous. The record — from Paris to Pittsburgh to Sydney — is already written.
The question is how many more people must pay the price before it is taken seriously.
