On a recent live stream, with a photo of Jewish Michigan congressional candidate Jeremy Moss on screen behind him, Twitch personality Hasan Piker told his millions of followers that US Jews “have it coming.”
Those who “keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel” should expect that “eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews,” he said.
Piker called Israel “Jewish ISIS,” saying that Jews were “making antisemitism worse.”
Antisemitism has historically come in two forms. One is transactional: “Renounce whatever it is we are telling you to renounce and safety will supposedly follow.” The other is fixed: “You are the problem regardless of what you renounce, because your identity itself is the offense.”
Mistaking one for the other is how societies miss what’s happening until it is too late. Piker’s rhetoric looks like the first kind. It also smuggles in the second.
The transactional version has a long pedigree. In 1789, as France debated citizenship for Jews who had lived there for centuries, Count Stanislas-Marie-Adélaide de Clermont–Tonnerre delivered the sentence that would define it: “To the Jews as a nation, nothing. To the Jews as individuals, everything.”
In other words, he offered full citizenship in exchange for dissolving the national parts of Jewish identity, an offer Jews “could not refuse.” Every generation since has been handed some version of this, in French, in Russian, and now in the argot of Twitch.
Even the offer’s predecessor, religious-based antisemitism, was never as clean as it pretended. Medieval Europe held out baptism as the door out of persecution. Spain tested that promise and broke it.
After the mass forced conversions of the 14th and 15th centuries, the limpieza de sangre, “the purity of blood,” statutes barred anyone with Jewish ancestry, however distant, from public office, the priesthood, and social standing.
The room marked “convert, and you are free” had a false bottom. Blood, not belief, was the real test.
Sharansky’s litmus test for identifying modern-day antisemitism
Natan Sharansky, the Soviet dissident who spent years in the Gulag for wanting to live as a free Jew in Israel, built a test for recognizing this pattern in real time.
Does the rhetoric demonize Jews or the Jewish state, casting them as uniquely evil? Does it delegitimize Jewish self-determination, treating a Jewish homeland as illegitimate in a way no other nationalism is questioned? Does it apply a double standard, holding Jews or Israel to scrutiny applied to no one else?
Piker’s stream clears all three, and the double standard is easy to prove. US politicians Abdul El-Sayed and Rashida Tlaib have built careers around identification with the Palestinian Arab cause, and have each made claims about Israel that were false or badly distorted.
Imagine a streamer showing their photo and saying Arab Americans “putting this idea out there” should expect that “someone’s going to come around and take action” against them or accuse them of “making Islamophobia worse.” That would be denounced widely and instantly as incitement. No one would call it a warning.
Piker said the Jewish version of that sentence about Moss.
Moss answered for himself. “A California podcaster will not lecture me about what Oakland County’s Jewish community should and shouldn’t believe,” he said, adding that Jews “won’t be gaslit that we’re responsible for the antisemitic harm upon us.”
Rep. Hillary Scholten identified it for what it was. “Calls for violence against American Jews … unacceptable. Full stop,” she said.
El-Sayed, whose Senate campaign Piker spent months building, could only offer that antisemitism is “a scourge” in the abstract, without naming what Piker said or disavowing him.
Multiply that by the rest of the Democratic Party, the country’s largest, and the silence gets harder to explain. A handful spoke up. The overwhelming majority of a party that claims fighting racism and bigotry as a core value said nothing about an allied influencer telling millions that American Jews were inviting violence against themselves.
That gap between the outrage this would generate against any other minority and the silence Piker got from his own coalition is the double standard operating in real time, on screen.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism identifies both denying Jewish self-determination and holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions as antisemitic.
Piker did both – and named individuals. “Collectively” is a crucial term here because it marks the point where his rhetoric moves beyond a supposed bargain for safety and becomes more sinister.
When Wilhelm Marr coined “antisemitism” in 1879, he rebranded a hatred that had worn religious clothing for a thousand years into something claiming to be secular and scientific – race, not sin.
He took the false bottom already built into limpieza de sangre and made it official doctrine, a fixed, hereditary trait no conversion could erase. That closure metastasized into Nazi racial law under which converted Jews and decorated Jewish veterans of the First World War still had no path out. The category itself had become the crime.
Piker’s language borrows from both hateful traditions at once. On the surface, he offers a transaction: stop being “invested” in Israel, and the danger recedes. That is Clermont-Tonnerre’s structure.
But “Jewish ISIS” is a distinct kind of accusation. ISIS denotes a terrorist movement; attaching the label to a democracy makes sense only if “Jewish” bears the moral weight of the claim.
The phrase does more than condemn a state. It merges Jewish self-determination with an image of absolute evil. Stripped of its polemical language, the logic echoes Marr’s: An identity treated as inherently corrupt and collectively culpable.
Jew hate is back out in the open, justified and legitimized by all and any excuse
This is also why the “anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism” argument collapses so often on contact with reality. When anti-Israel rhetoric singles out Jews alone among all peoples on Earth as the one group undeserving of self-determination, and treats Jewish support for that state as evidence of a nefarious group trait, it isn’t a carve-out from antisemitism.
It is antisemitism in fashionable disguise, exactly as it was in Inquisition Spain, Clermont-Tonnerre’s Paris, and Marr’s Germany.
Piker’s own words supply the final tell. He never said he wanted to harm Jews. He said other people will, and that Jews will have brought it on themselves simply by existing and believing what many of them do. He sounded like a bystander describing a forecast.
But Piker is the one seeding the cloud.
Call this what it is. Piker did not warn Jews. He indicted them, collectively, for the crime of existing as they are, then dressed the indictment up as a safety warning. It is the oldest accusation in the book, updated for a platform that rewards it with millions of views instead of pulpits.
Jews have absorbed both forms of this hatred before, sometimes offered by the same movement in the same breath. Most know the difference when they hear it, even when people around them pretend not to. This time, the accusation had a name, a face, and millions of witnesses. Let the record reflect it.
What should concern everyone, Jewish or not, is that this happened to an individual who was called out by name.
The hypocrisy is clear: An equivalent threat made against Arab Americans over the rhetoric of their most visible leaders would be denounced immediately and near universally. Every politician, network, and platform that let this pass also fit
Sharansky’s test, though probably not with the answer they imagined.
The writer is an attorney and a former IDF soldier and NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.