This talk investigates how antisemitism has festered and flourished in global digital media. The public sphere of social media has globalized and changed “traditional” antisemitism, offering a new digital antisemitism. This talk center the phenomenon of the “Jew Goal”, an ignominious but broadly employed e-sports neologism that antisemitically labels an easy goal as “Jewish.” Jewish involvement in sports in the twentieth century has been trumpeted as a successful story of Jewish emancipation and gradual inclusion. How is it that in the 21st century the Jewish subject came to be constructed in opposition to sportsmanship and consequently to inclusion and equality more broadly? Historicizing and contextualizing the development of this new antisemitic trope will serve as a starting point for broader considerations of how digital media have transformed contemporary antisemitism, where antisemitism is part of a new cultural code of the contemporary far right.
William Pimlott is the inaugural Postdoctoral Research Associate at New York University’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism. Dr Pimlott is a modern Jewish historian whose work investigates Yiddish political culture within Britain and across the world in the period of mass global Jewish migration. He recently completed his PhD on the Yiddish press in Britain, 1896-1910, at University College London, and has subsequently held fellowships at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, and SOAS in London. Dr Pimlott has published articles on the South African Yiddish press and Yiddish art history in “Jewish Historical Studies” and “Shofar,” and has also written for the “London Review of Books,” “Tribune,” and “Jewish Currents.” Dr Pimlott will also be the Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow at the YIVO institute New York (2024-2025), where he will further develop his scholarship on global Yiddish politics and culture.
Co-sponsored by: Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies, Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies
Tuesday, November 19 @5:00-6:30pm
370 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley campus