Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on the Internet: From the “goyslop” craze to AI commercials

A housekeeper sleeps with the son of her employers, a “Jewish billionaire family.” He tells her the secret why no one in his family is fat: oregano oil capsules. The whole thing is animated and lasts eight minutes, an AI-generated commercial from the company Resilia. Another video: This time the gardener sleeps with a Jewish billionaire's wife and discovers the garlic capsule secret against heart disease: another anti-Semitic secret knowledge fantasy, updated with a buy button.

Jew-haters online and offline are always inventing new voltes. In American, something like this is called “whack-a-mole”: you don't look for a moment and then there's another new variant. As the magazine “Forward” reports, the Resilia spots are probably based on a kind of trend. Anti-Semitic influencers like Ryan Matta have recently been advising their followers to look for kosher seals in the supermarket. Because the popular conspiracy fantasy is: Jews control the food industry and poison non-Jews with “goyslop” while they eat healthily themselves. We know who has the industry under control, says a woman in a video peppered with the anti-Semitic “Juice” emoji. The solution of these “crunchy” influencers: eat what Jews eat.

An old, updated craze

Of course, in the United States, kosher symbols are about as secretive (and health-conscious) as Coca-Cola, whose lids and cans also feature them. Kosher seals appear on countless everyday products. Manufacturers have food certified so that people who follow dietary laws can buy it.

The neologism "goyslop" - which is made up of the Hebrew word for non-Jews and the English term for food - and the fantasy that Jews would fatten the rest of the population with cheap industrial food is thriving in an alternative health scene in which distrust of conventional medicine, vaccinations and the food industry merges with conspiracy thinking, anti-Semitism and racism. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not use expressions like “goyslop,” but he has given scientifically baseless ideas even greater social reach.

As is well known, the connection between health madness, purity fantasies and anti-Semitism also has a long history in Germany. Parts of life reform and naturopathy were early connected with ethnic thinking.

Even today the problem does not only lie with the right. People from pop culture like YouTuber Kareem Rahma and “Strokes” frontman Julian Casablancas, who recently accused “Zionists” of portraying themselves as victims in a “Subway Takes” video, are helping anti-Semitism gain social acceptance. So now “goyslop”: a new-old muesli variant of Jew-hatred, which above all illustrates its tenacity. His old motives are not going away. Anti-Semitism, or rather its propagators, are constantly adapting.