AncientEstablishment

Hi Professor Lipstadt,

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How can we fight the new online forms of Holocaust denial, mainly trivialization through humour and memes?

How do you challenge the anonymous sharing of memes though?

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I'm loathe to call memes that make light of the Holocaust satire, but they are hard to combat for the same reasons that satire is. How do we combat a 16 year old's sense of humour without reinforcing the taboo that the memes exploit?

I'd say that Muslims are more likely to be scapegoated for things like terrorist attacks these days

What I have a hard time wrapping my head around is that antisemitic and denial memes will typically appear alongside memes that make fun of "untouchable" subjects like child abuse or mass shootings, or issues like feminism. A lot don't deny the Holocaust but actively mock or celebrate it.

It's hard to tell if a meme was created by someone with a dark sense of humour soliciting guilt-inducing laughs, or a white supremacist hoping to numb young people's sensitivity to trivializing the Holocaust. In both cases the person generally has been educated about the Holocaust, but it seems like that awareness is not preventing antisemitism.

Perhaps an approach to combating antisemitism in the future could be to teach how antisemitism often accompanies often deeply troubling bigotries?

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It's because he's a crazy right-wing extremist

Yes, and antisemitism was a part of that. John Mulaney, one of the first people to bail from the NYer festival, openly mocked him for being an antisemite. Separating antisemitism from his extremeism is a weird (and simplistic) stance to take