On January 20, 2026, inside a Miami Beach nightclub, a crowd of young people raised their arms and chanted “Heil Hitler” as a Kanye West song by that name pulsed through the speakers. Among those celebrating were social media influencers with tens of millions of followers between them. The club fired three employees.
While the internet quickly moved on, I found myself wondering how we arrived at a moment where Nazi salutes feel like content, where genocide becomes a fad, and where the murder of Jews is something you can simply choose not to believe.
I’ve come to believe the answer lies in shared reality itself. The collapse of consensus truth accelerated by AI-generated content and algorithmic manipulation has created the conditions for antisemitic extremism to flourish in mainstream discourse.
Distance today isn’t measured in miles but in detachment. Digital media lets us hold the world at arm’s length even as it unfolds on our screens. A massacre, wedged between an ad and a meme, becomes abstract rather than real, glowing inches from our faces yet emotionally distant. This is why people can watch footage of terrorists murdering civilians and comment “fake” or “AI.” The screen creates permission to disbelieve, and algorithms reward doubt. When horror is endlessly scrollable, reality becomes optional and violence becomes content.
Antisemites have learned to exploit this crisis of truth with terrifying efficiency. Within days of October 7, AI-generated deepfakes flooded social media, making it nearly impossible for ordinary users to distinguish authentic documentation from fabrication.
When anyone can manufacture evidence, evidence itself loses authority. And when evidence loses authority, so does history. Taken to its logical extreme, this erosion enables thoughts like”perhaps then Hitler wasn’t so bad. If Hitler wasn’t so bad, then why not chant his name for fun?” Each step follows logically from the one before, provided you never have to confront anything real.
But every generation has its propaganda and its rebellious youth, right? Yes, but these points alone are insufficient. Previous generations encountered manipulated media through gatekeepers like newspapers and broadcasters, who imposed friction on distribution. AI tools now allow the masses to fabricate convincing content instantly, while algorithms reward engagement over accuracy.
We need to educate people how to navigate digital information more skillfully and we need platforms to be held accountable for the content they allow. But even these solutions only address symptoms, not the disease. The disease is a culture that has convinced itself that mediated experience is equivalent to direct experience, that knowing about something is the same as knowing it. Those Nazi-loving influencers have seen countless images of Nazi atrocities. The images did not stop them. Images alone never will.
What stopped me-what made October 7 impossible to relativize or dismiss-was standing where it happened. When I stood in Kibbutz Be’eri, walked through a house where a family had been executed, and saw the bullet holes at child height. Meeting survivors whose grief was not a performance but a weight they carried in their bodies. You cannot algorithm your way out of that or scroll past it. It envelopes you, and in doing so, it makes you responsible.
I am not suggesting that every young person must visit a massacre site to develop moral clarity. Only that we must recognize what we have lost by living so much of our lives at a digital distance, and we must fight to recover it. Talk to witnesses. Distrust the frictionless. When something important happens, ask yourself: what would it take for me to truly know this?
The crowd in Miami was young. Many of them are college-age. They have grown up in a world where reality is always already digitized, and where commitment to truth feels like a sucker’s game. I understand the temptation to surrender. But I also know what I saw in Be’eri. I know that it was real and that the memory of people who died deserve better than to become content that is liked, shared, doubted, and forgotten.
The choice before my generation is stark: We can let these algorithms dissolve our capacity for moral seriousness, or we can practice the stubborn, uncomfortable, irreplaceable work of encountering reality on its own terms. The stakes are not abstract. They are measured in bodies, in history, and in the frequency of casual Nazi salutes from people who have never actually had to look evil in the face.
This article was originally published in the Times of Israel Blogs.
