The FIFA “Jew Goal”: New Digital Antisemitism & the Far Right Cultural Code

Scholars cannot agree on when the “new antisemitism” started, whether it is indeed “new,” and what the correct means to combat it are. But an attention to new antisemitic trends is crucial to avoid what Hannah Arendt, Jonathan Judaken, and others have criticized as an unhistorical “eternal antisemitism.” This talk investigates a different new antisemitism: how antisemitism has festered and flourished in global digital media and in online gaming. The new digital public sphere of social media has globalised and changed “traditional” antisemitism (even if this is understood as a term grouping very different phenomena). This talk will take as the focal point for an investigation of the new digital antisemitism 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 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?  Historicising and contextualising 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; and what should be considered the "new" antisemitism.

Dr. William Pimlott is the inaugural Postdoctoral Research Associate at the NYU 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 UCL, and has subsequently held fellowships at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, and SOAS.

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 be the Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow at the YIVO institute New York this year, where he will further develop his scholarship on global Yiddish politics and culture.

Host or Publisher The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University