auroras and sad prose

he’s “demonic”, he looks “satanic”, he’s secretly controlling everything behind the scenes. he’s allegedly harming actors he doesn’t like. he has this hidden power over the workplace, over the show, over people’s careers, over the rest of the writers, over the SHOWRUNNER. he will fire fellow cast members that piss him off or are “too progressive” to his liking. and whether people intend it or not, that is not neutral language when it is being aimed at a jewish man, because this is the thing: antisemitism is not just slurs and swastikas, and a lot of the time it works through older narrative patterns. the jew as secretly powerful, the jew as manipulative, the jew as corrupting, the jew as physically marked by evil. the jew as someone who tries to appear respectable in public while supposedly pulling the strings in private. those ideas have been around for a very long time, and they do not suddenly become harmless because the people saying them are in a fandom space and think they are just “criticizing a celebrity.”

and to be clear, this doesn’t mean ashkenazi jews are never white, or that jewish celebrities can’t have white privilege, class privilege, or industry power. the point is that jewishness does not always fit neatly into the sometimes flattened american white/non-white framework we’re all familiar with. ashkenazi jews can be perceived as white, move through the world with many of the advantages of whiteness, and still be racialized through antisemitism when the context shifts. that conditional quality matters. jewishness can be treated as irrelevant when people want to talk about privilege, then suddenly become legible through conspiratorial or dehumanizing tropes when people want to construct a jewish person as dangerous.