And Then There Were None: The Toxic Culture of Antisemitism Driving the Jewish Exodus from “Binders”

In secrecy, Jews are meeting to discuss a wave of anti-Jewish activity that threatens their livelihoods. In professional spaces, Jews are being interrogated over their political leanings. They are told that the bigotry they are calling out isn’t antisemitism at all. To gain access to work opportunities, Jews are hiding their identity. Keeping quiet. If they speak out — and sometimes even when they don’t — they are discreetly removed. Jews are being forced out of spaces they have participated in and served for years.

It’s deeply worrying, they say. And yet, no job opportunity is worth this misery.

This isn’t Germany, 1938.

This isn’t even Hollywood, 1959.

It’s Facebook, 2021, in a network of loosely connected secret groups intended to provide networking and job opportunities to people of marginalized genders (cis and trans women, trans men, and non-binary folks).

Many people who joined these groups, also known as “Binders,” at first thought the secrecy was in good fun. A sort of club or secret society of the sort that men had always had access to. “The first rule of Binders is…”, well, you know the rest. Others felt the secrecy was vital to protect them from the potential backlash of speaking openly about their experiences in a male-dominated field.

Predictably, the groups underwent waves of turbulence as group members grappled with — and engaged in — transphobia, racism, and ableism. Some groups were archived. Others found their membership substantially reduced as a group defected to create more intentionally anti-racist versions of the same spaces. Writers of color were supported by legions of white writers; trans writers defended by cis writers — albeit often imperfectly.

Chillingly, as Jews point out incidents of antisemitism, our gentile defenders are few. Even those who initially consider themselves our champions turn on us when we point out, gently, that they, themselves, are engaging in the same antisemitism they claim to revile. Instead of groups being permanently archived or antisemitic admins being ousted, Jewish writers are simply leaving groups en masse when they are proven unsafe environments. Or, in some cases, being removed from groups by the admins.

We don’t want to talk about Israel, but first, we have to talk about Israel.

“Despite how it might seem at times,” I wrote in a lengthy Facebook post on May 17, “I don’t actually spend much of my time thinking about Israel.”

Why publish this post here nearly in its entirety? It was, perhaps, the first time I had ever claimed an actual position on the Zionism spectrum. I did so openly and in the full view of people who would go on to call me a racist, because of “my Zionism,” over and above my repeated objections that I did not even identify as a Zionist, but rather sought to clarify what Zionism was for the benefit of less educated gentiles who didn’t know.

And Zionism is, whether we like it or not, at the root of much of the antisemitism we face online.

I thought my opinion on Israel up to this point had been clear enough: I did not, and do not, approve of the way the Israeli government treats Palestinians or allows its citizens to treat Palestinians. On May 10, I listened to an NPR podcast that described Muslims at the Al Aqsa Mosque being sprayed with what smelled like sewer water, according to a correspondent’s first-hand account, during Ramadan. It horrified me. Whatever my thoughts may be about a mosque having been built on the site of the Jewish Second Temple — and they are complex, as they are for many Jews — the Muslims worshiping there today are human beings.

I didn’t think it was unclear.

Unfortunately, as is usual, violence in Israel spurred terrifying waves of antisemitic sentiment and violence in the United States (and other countries, particularly in Europe). I have been very active for years on Facebook discussing the many forms of antisemitism, and highlighting incidents for at least my circle that the mainstream news often doesn’t cover. In the wake of the outbreak of violence, there was much to discuss about antisemitism occurring in the States.

What I noticed was that the flavor of antisemitism seemed to have changed slightly. I was well used to seeing anti-Jewish graffiti, seeing Jewish gravestones vandalized, seeing comments about the Holocaust (what must be dozens or even hundreds of comments over the years, many of which are conveniently “not against Facebook’s community standards”). I was not used to seeing the word Zionist used as an epithet quite so much.

It had shaken the Jewish Facebook groups I was part of, and this wasn’t even new. For years I listened as strongly Zionist Jews talked about their disappointment in and anger at the Israeli government. I heard them lament the loss of a place in the American political sphere. Leftist groups interrogated prospective Jewish members and any deviation from the lockstep “Israel must be destroyed” resulted in exclusion. Meanwhile, they said, they were progressive, sometimes socialist and communist Jews. They had no interest in the American Right at all.

I have many friends in leftist circles and I wanted to set the record straight.

Again, nearly all of the text in the preceding screenshots was written by someone else, whose perspective I appreciated and thought was valuable.

I also posted a bit about gentiles believing they are entitled to define Zionism and antisemitism — a concept leftists should be familiar with as they are constantly saying that white people aren’t entitled to define racism, and straight people aren’t entitled to define homophobia. Yet, this basic leftist ideal is often thrown right out the window when it comes to Jews.

It wouldn’t be my first personal experience with antisemitism online, but it was the worst.

To orient the reader unfamiliar with the groups I will be discussing: An incident occurred in the Binder Full of Writing Jobs that resulted in a number of people wishing to create a new group with a similar focus that had slightly different rules. Feeling that I had the emotional bandwidth and the time to do the work of starting a new group, I chose to create that new group. I dubbed it Binder Full of Writing Jobs v2.0, and immediately brought on two fellow admins and several moderators for a solid team with Latinx, Black, Jewish, queer, and disabled representation.

Aside from the usual start-up bumps, things ran fairly smoothly for several weeks. And then a comment was posted — not coincidentally, just before Shabbat was to start. I say not coincidentally because I was very open with the group at large that as a Jew in the process of reconnecting culturally and spiritually, I was trying to make it a habit to be offline from Friday evenings through Saturday evenings.

So it was no mistake that the comment questioning my political beliefs and ability to fairly moderate an anti-racist group came on a Friday afternoon. What followed was a brief exchange in which I attempted, fruitlessly, to clarify and defend myself — to a white, non-Jewish woman who decided to speak on behalf of unnamed others in the group.

Worth noting here is that initially, my fellow admins — Liv Monahan and “Krystal Rene’ Nurse” — expressed irritation with Amy. Liv is a pale-skinned WOC, who Amy erroneously assumed was white despite Liv having introduced herself in the group very clearly as a WOC. Krystal is a Black woman; Amy private messaged her specifically due to her skin color, to “alert her.” Krystal said she was pissed at being singled out because of her race.

I chose to allow this to be a group discussion among the mod team instead of taking action unilaterally. This decision resulted in several sustained hours of antisemitic bullying by a member of my own mod team — Jennifer Stavros. ”I’m still waiting to be called an antisemite,” she taunted, after telling me that she would “check with other Jews” about what Zionism meant and what antisemitism was instead of listening to my lived experience.

This was followed by a suggestion from another admin that the entire team should “privately vote” on which one of us should be removed from the mod team: Me, a Jew expressing that I was enduring, at that moment, antisemitic harassment, or Jennifer, who subsequently suggested she might reconsider her decision to move in with someone because he, too, was Jewish.

Initially I had promised to abide by my fellow mods’ decision about what I should do. But after a few lukewarm comments in the group chat — and some private messages to me saying I had their support, but. . . — I admittedly grew angry that they were allowing my repeated statements that I was experiencing antisemitism to go unremarked upon. They allowed Jennifer to harangue me — including bringing up murdered Palestinian children multiple times, as if I were personally responsible — for literally hours at the holiest time of the Jewish week, despite my having said, repeatedly, that I had wanted to be offline.

Meanwhile, Amy’s comments in the group and my subsequent comments had spurred another hours-long “debate,” if it can be called that, during which two “anti-Zionist Jews” and one individual who isn’t Jewish (or, it should be added, Palestinian) were allowed to engage in intellectually dishonest debate: strawmanning, gaslighting, questioning the Jewish status of those few who felt safe enough to defend my perspective, and claiming that we — including a Middle Eastern Jew and a Black Jew — were racist for merely trying to point out that many Jews who identify as Zionists are pro Palestinian liberation.

[Note: You’ll notice there are no screenshots for the rest of this in-group incident. Primarily, this is because I feel it’s important to protect my fellow Jews, and my Muslim cousins — no matter how much we disagree, and no matter how much pain they contributed. We are at high risk of being targeted for harassment, and I won’t add to that potentiality for them.]

It was a bloodbath, and I felt both raw and slightly traumatized afterward — as did the dozen or so Jews who privately messaged me to commiserate and say that they felt afraid to speak out.

One of the most frustrating exchanges came as yet another of my Facebook friends — Sarah Ratliff (aka Sarah Sarita, Sarita Ratliff, and SE Farmer, as she has most recently changed her display name to show), herself an admin of a different Facebook group — expressed that so-typical complaint that “any defense of Palestine gets one labeled antisemitic.” One of the Jews in the group commented that she, too, chose to stay out of these conversations because it’s so common for gentiles to use antisemitic language and tropes when they critique Israel. Sarah immediately shot back that she couldn’t believe someone would dare to call her antisemitic. She couldn’t be antisemitic, she said, because she “grew up in an area where she was the only non-Jew.”

I chose to leave the group. Several other Jews I know of did the same.

This is how the mod team chose to respond after I stepped down.

I chose to leave the group rather than read dozens of comments by the same small group of individuals who had harassed both myself and several other Jews. Instead, I vented about it on my own Facebook wall, feeling stressed and upset after literally hours of what felt like willful misunderstanding of my words — over and over and over by bad actors.

Sarah private messaged me to tell me that calling her a gentile was “racist as fuck” before blocking me. The following morning I woke up to more private messages from her alternate (sock) account letting me know that even though I had already left the group she co-adminned, they had “made the decision to ban [me] anyway.”

In the week that followed my exit from that group, I heard from many Jewish members that the remaining admins had essentially disappeared. The small cohort of anti-Zionists were being allowed to go on a comment rampage, brutally harassing any Jews who dared to express even the mildest disagreement or factual correction. Several Jews who reached out to the admin team privately to express feeling unsafe in the group were booted from the group.

As I would discover, this wouldn’t be a solitary incident.

On June 15, my former Facebook friend Sarah Ratliff and her fellow admins decided to bring up the issue of Israel and Palestine — apparently apropos of nothing — in their group. The following screenshot, and the ones that can be found at the Dropbox link found below, were culled from a secret Facebook group and are all redacted to protect my Jewish colleagues.

What followed was more of the same behavior. Any Jews who attempted to correct factual inaccuracies were accused of calling supporters of Palestine antisemitic. Many Jews were booted, blocked, or muted — some simply for saying they, too, were Jewish. Their experiences are summarized in the following paragraphs, and were recorded in a number of screenshots that can be found at this link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/b7k90onub2dxii6/AAD4EvioqFiIfwa8PjhSmXura?dl=0

After many comments seeking clarification and raising objections to the way things had been phrased, the admins of that group chose to edit their comments, delete entire comment threads (which goes against Binders-wide ethos of not deleting emotional labor, and is written in their own group rules specifically), and then archive the group.

One week later the group was un-archived and no mention was made of the previous posts or any of the many bannings and blocks that occurred. One Jewish group member asked why several Jews who hadn’t even commented had been kicked out of the group — a mod hiding behind the anonymity of the “mod page” instead of commenting from their own profile opined that the commenter was commenting “in bad faith.” Despite the group member offering the names of two Jews who had been booted, she found herself muted for the rest of the month.

Not surprisingly, the woman who started the chain of events that led to me leaving the group I had started was, somehow, at the center of this. Amy Collier had also, I was told privately, started conversations about Zionism in yet a third Binder group — one for comedy writers — which had also resulted in the exodus of a number of Jewish group members.

A public post was never my intention. I did everything I could to keep this issue within Binders.

For those who don’t know about Binders, there is a “central” or “parent” Binder, the original “The Binders” group, from which all of these sub-groups originally sprang. Because each Facebook group is independent, the admins of the parent group don’t have any real authority over sub-group admins. But they do reach out to admins who are having trouble with their groups, and most folks who are in sub-groups are also in the parent Binder group.

Many of us thought it was vital to open a discussion in the parent binder group so that others could see what was happening — and, importantly, that it was a multi-group problem. In fact, when I stepped down from adminning my own group and found out that three days of antisemitic dogpiling had been allowed to occur, I attempted to make a post in the parent Binder group to discuss it. That post was declined without comment.

Several days ago I attempted to make a second post, this time being more direct and specific about the problem that was occurring. I made a follow-up post inquiring why neither of my previous posts about antisemitism in these groups had been approved. Both posts are still “pending admin approval.”

Out of options, I chose to comment on an “announcement” post in the group instead, asking why none of my posts had been approved and explaining why I thought it was so terribly important that we discuss the issue of antisemitism in Binders — groups that are supposed to be for uplifting marginalized writers. I tagged the other admins on that post. Twenty-four hours later, it, too, has been ignored. Not just by the admins, but by everyone in the 40,000-member-strong group. Facebook algorithms mean that, very likely, only a tiny percentage of the group membership has seen the post, but some assuredly have. *crickets*

Jews are being systematically silenced.

Of my personal friends who are part of the Binders network, just TWO chose to interact with any of my posts on what I and fellow Jews have been experiencing. One of them is herself of Jewish descent. None of them have spoken up in any Binders groups on my behalf, to my knowledge.

[EDIT: Tonight, just after publishing this story, I remembered that I was part of a special group for admins of Binders. It was my last shot at bringing this issue to the attention of the two dozen admins of various Binders groups. Following are the screenshots of my conversation with the admin of that group, who decided that adjudicating my “eligibility” for membership in the group was more important than addressing antisemitism — or, as she put it, “an argument I was bringing from another group.” Unfortunately, characterizing antisemitism as a difference of opinion is a huge part of the problem.]

It’s demoralizing, and yet it’s come to be expected. No one cares but us.

That’s why I wrote this post, and why I made this public. Jewish writers deserve to know that the Binders groups are not a safe space for us — unless we are the “right kind” of Jew, the “good” Jew that the progressive left gets the privilege of defining.

Anyone who cares about Jews deserves to know that the Binders groups, so precious to so many of us for offering job opportunities we might never have discovered otherwise — for me, too — is actively harming Jewish writers.

We are being silenced.

We deserve to be heard.

After days, weeks, of silence from many of my friends, diminishing likes and shares on posts about antisemitism, I wrote the following. It got more interaction than many of my recent posts — of course, I’ve been adding more Jews to my friends list.

Being a Jew in the 21st century means knowing that we are truly alone.

We deserve better than that.
Especially from those who claim to be our allies.

UPDATE // June 30, 2021: After several days of numerous group members commenting, the main Binders admin team finally issued the following statement. Note that when they thank someone for speaking out, the name they highlighted was not mine. Admins have not directly responded to any of my comments or spoken to me in any way.

A group member voiced a concern I very much share:

UPDATE // July 3, 2021: I was quoted in an article published in The Forward about this problem. Link: https://forward.com/culture/472428/facebook-binders-writers-jobs-antisemitism-israel/?fbclid=IwAR3GWCcR3UpVLCr9N__YLnAXV7lnw7fAftPnfssbpvWNQniaWkVXPppuLEA

It appears that I have been kicked out of the main Binders group. I still have not been spoken to by any of the admins at any time.

UPDATE // July 4, 2021: Julia C. Mead, admin of the Binder Full of Binder Admins, messaged me this morning to request I delete any reference to her name from this piece out of fear that her inclusion might materially damage her career. I noticed that she didn’t mention once how the persistent antisemitism in Binders is already materially damaging the potential livelihoods of Jewish group members.

Moreover, Mead shows her agenda and her biases by her suggestion that she was prepared to offer me “the benefit of the doubt,” instead of merely listening to and accepting my first-hand account of antisemitism. She notes that “other admins” accused me of lying. Actually, it was only one admin — one of my former co-admins, who had passively allowed a mod to be antisemitic and then equated her antisemitism with my defense of myself — and Mead tells on herself when she suggests that the person who helped perpetrate the antisemitic abuse is as reliable a source as I, a marginalized person speaking out on my own behalf.

Mead also accuses me of libel — a serious charge with potential legal consequences and a charge which I reject whole-heartedly. Libel and defamation require lies passed off as the truth. I didn’t even call Mead an antisemite, as she charges. And I provided screenshots to bolster my argument. In the interest of transparency, here is the entirety of our brief exchange.