There are men, and there are women, and there are Jews. 

I recently learned that some people see the world this way. Louis Theroux’s Into the Manosphere had limited appeal for me – I already know enough about the gross things people say on the internet – but this weekend my partner started watching it, and in the way of lazy Sunday afternoons, that meant I was watching it too. Most of the opinions its interviewees expressed were familiar: women should be subordinate, women are trying to become men.Then we got to the climax, at which point it was revealed that all these men also think – or say they think – that Jews run the world.

Maybe I should have expected it. Internet subcultures in general are magnetised by antisemitism, particularly those that claim the power to expose some great truth; “Jews run everything” arrives at the moment their imaginations fail. But I still couldn’t make out the connection between the idea that men need to reclaim traditional masculinity and the idea of Jewish control. Feminists are to blame here, I thought, surely – not Jews? 

To them it’s all the same. In the manosphere’s analysis, Jews inject movements like feminism into an otherwise orderly society to cultivate division, which keeps everyone distracted from the true source of ill in their lives: Jewish power.

I’m not convinced that any of the men Theroux spoke to actually believe this stuff. These are individuals who have monetised the small thrill teenagers get from saying things that shock (that and the compulsions of widespread porn addiction): their solvency depends on digging ever deeper into taboo. But hearing them repeat it reminded me of older ideas about Jews fomenting sexual degeneracy. Specifically, it reminded me of Magnus Hirschfield’s Institute for Sexual Research, and the Nazi book-burning that destroyed its 20,000-volume library. 

Hirschfield, a gay Jewish doctor, had established the Institute in Berlin in 1919 to provide affirmative care to LGBT+ people, alongside running sexual health clinics and offering advice on contraception. The Institute was where the world’s first sex reassignment surgeries took place. The Nazi idea that Hirschfeld’s true goal was to weaken the noble Aryan race is a great example of the twisting Naomi Klein breaks down in Doppelganger; it was the Nazis who would shortly be performing torturous sterilisation experiments on unconsenting victims, not the other way round. And yet the memory of the Institute suggests there’s some truth to the idea that Jews have posed a challenge to normative ideas about gender.

By coincidence, a few days before watching Into the Manosphere, I’d read ‘Among Men’, a 2021 essay by Jewish writer Calvin Gimpelevich. The essay recounts Gimpelevich’s experience unearthing the unconventional masculinity once prized by diasporic Jews. Where European traditions idealised the warrior, defined by his physical strength, military prowess and adventurism, Jews preferred the rabbi: the “gentle, intelligent, modest” thinker cultivating “wisdom and sensitivity”. In the early stages of his transition, Gimpelevich says, the widespread subconscious recognition that Jewish masculine traits sometimes present differently from gentile ones helped him be identified as a man. 

This version of masculinity was not – is not – a simple good. For one thing, it still valued itself above womanhood, and did little to eliminate misogyny from Jewish communities. For another, it could be transformed, in its perception by gentiles, into proof of weakness. Gimpelevich writes that “physicians believed, as late as the seventeenth century, in the menstruation of Jewish men.” For those so inclined, this apparent effeminacy served the dual purpose of justifying hostility and making it easier to carry out. 

Twenty years before Hirschfield opened his doors, a different Jewish doctor, Max Nordau, proposed a new set of ideas about this community idiosyncrasy. In a speech at the Second Zionist Conference in 1898, Nordau argued that physical weakness and monkish withdrawal were the scars Jews bore from ghettoisation and persecution. He called for a “Muscular Judaism” to replace them – for Jews to grow physically strong, and, implicitly, capable of the acts that would prove necessary to the foundation of the State of Israel. 

That much-discussed shift, in Jews, from diasporism to nationalism, was therefore also a shift in male archetypes. To become nation-builders – to become Israelis – Jews adopted the gentile masculine ideals that continue to feed national mythologies all over the world. (Look, for example, at how many far-right “patriots” in Britain want to think of themselves as chivalric knights.) 

We are living through a regression in ideas about both masculinity and nationalism. The nostalgic versions of both are connected, I think, by more than just the fantasy of dying on the battlefield, which was once (and for many, still is) the means by which you both ensured the longevity of your nation and proved yourself a man. They’re also connected in terms of their philosophical outlooks – by the way they conceive of themselves in terms of what they must not be more than what they are.

I noticed this in the Theroux documentary: how cautionary the ideal on display is. The belief that a man should be able to fight seems always underpinned by the sense that he should not allow himself to be beaten. The belief that he should make lots of money is a reaction to the feeling that he should not be dependent. Ideas about what men should be, about what they should seek beyond the eradication of their own perceived vulnerabilities, are lacking. The same is true for nationalist nostalgia. The idea that Britain should not allow itself to be “invaded” by migrants gives us no sense of what it should be like to live there. Both belief systems, in other words, are motivated by an obsessive fear of weakness, despite their actual and obvious strength.

The US and Israel’s war on Iran is this fear at its extreme. Or maybe it’s a new development, a way of abusing the liberties granted by a public sphere that has already become used to that fear as a fate-determining force. That’s certainly true of the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Lebanon. The attack on the Jewish volunteer ambulance service in London this week struck me as similarly paranoiac, an action focused on inflicting harm on anything that even attests to the existence of the (misidentified) “enemy”, with no thought given to what ends it might achieve. As much as cruel, it seemed stupid. This is something we all have to carry around all the time now, I sometimes think, how cruel and stupid everything is.

Gimpelevich’s conclusions in ‘Among Men’ are ambiguous. One strain argues against a prescriptive masculinity of any kind, gentle or muscular, dominant or strange. Is one kind of hierarchy better than another, he asks, a chauvinism of brains rather than brawn? Maybe not. Rereading his work in the context of these wars, though, and of the manosphere which forms their pop-culture counterpart, does make me wonder if the diasporic ideal has something to teach us today, Jews and non-Jews, men and non-men. I do think we need more modesty and sensitivity and wisdom. Honestly, I think we need more prayer, if prayer can be understood as an attempt to struggle with the moral questions that feel difficult, that disrupt the beliefs we have been fed.

Writing this has made me consider the examples of conventional heroism I admire. I love stories of activists being brave in their pursuit of just causes. I love stories of Jewish socialists knocking out blackshirts. But two points stand out. First, that the blackshirts would not have been more right, more justified, had the Cable Street fighters failed to beat them back. The problem with weakness is not its existence, but the presumption strength makes that weakness signifies a legitimate target. And second, that those activists and socialists were and are fighting for something beyond what the Trumps, Netanyahus, and red-pillers of the world are fighting for, which is only the shoring-up of pre-existing power. Like most things, the truth is mixed. Contemplation alone can’t build a good world – but to build a good world, you do have to think about it first.▼