This semester I am teaching two new courses, “Antisemitism: A History” and “Introduction to Digital Humanities.” Except, of course, I’m not anymore. Better: I’m paused. I’ll pick the courses back up, online, in a bit over a week. The pause has been highly unnerving, but has also given me a little space and time to play around with an idea that came up in the last couple of meetings of my “Antisemitism” class. The idea of Jews as contagious and spreaders of disease is a very old trope (strongly connected to notions of a “pure” corporate body threatened by invisible outside forces). With no empirical evidence whatsoever to blame Jews for the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, is such a theory nevertheless afloat, and if so, what does it look like? While looking at the usual antisemitic websites can provide some insight, I thought it might be interesting to explore Twitter. My original approach was indirect: If we simply counted the number of times Jews were mentioned in tweets over the course of the last few months, do we see any significant upticks? I posed that question to my class, played around for a couple of hours to see if […]
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