The internet doesn’t know what a Nazi is

Two things happened online in the past week or so, both online, both quite mad. First was the spread of a podcast clip – hosted by “men’s health” influencer Myron Gains – featuring a rainbow coalition of Gen-Z Americans discussing whether Germany’s 1930s Jews had done something to make the Nazis hate them. They reimagined Hitler as someone who simply had to perpetrate a genocide because the Jews deserved it. The second event was an American Eagle jeans advertisement starring Sydney Sweeney. One of these moments caused a meltdown about the rise of Nazism, and it wasn’t the podcast.

Within hours of the jeans campaign going live, Sweeney – who is guilty of nothing but taking a presumably sizable paycheck to model some pants – was being accused of Nazi dog whistling due to a word play in the ad: she claimed to have “great genes/jeans.” In response came TikTok video essays and lengthy X threads and a cacophony of chatter from talking heads debating just how sinister the ad is. This kind of feverish reaction would be far more credible if the people getting so worked up were consistent.

The critics of the Sweeney ad – largely younger and leftist – are part of a growing population of Americans able to spot Nazi resurgences everywhere except, weirdly, those instances of actual attacks on Jews. I don’t remember seeing so many TikToks about the unprecedented rise of anti-Semitism in the real world following the shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, or after the Jew-hating arson attack in Boulder, Co., last in June.

The willingness of people to spot the specter of Nazism in meaningless examples is a worrying trend seen across the American political spectrum, from Candace Owens all the way to the National Education Association and Ana Kasparian. The Nazis and Hitler have become an all-purpose escalatory device – something you throw at your enemies to score a point – rather than representatives of an unparalleled human tragedy targeting the Jews. For the crowds calling for Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle’s cancelation, the Holocaust is a tool, a crude rhetorical device.

As time passes and the Holocaust moves from living memory to a historical abstraction, this trend will only worsen. When you don’t have survivors sitting there telling you what they saw with their own eyes, the Holocaust becomes just another weapon in the culture wars.

On one level, none of this feels important. Who cares if some random people see visions of eugenics in a commercial with an attractive actress? But as survey after survey reveals, young people in America are becoming not merely apathetic towards Israel, but actively hostile towards Jews. An Anti-Defamation League survey published recently found that nearly 25 percent of Americans thought that the recent attacks on Jews in Pennsylvania, DC, and Boulder were “understandable;” even more worrying, a further 15 percent said that this violence against American Jews – not Israelis, not anyone involved in anything happening in Gaza – was “necessary.” This is the context in which any diminishing of Nazism must be seen. The decentering or blame of Jews in the story of the Holocaust is a deliberate ploy to erode sympathy, to strip away the barely there taboo against anti-Semitism among young people. 

So yes, while it’s easy to laugh at those who see wisps of the Nazis in every facet of American life, for American Jews, it’s no laughing matter.