• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 4, 2022

With a last name like Mandese, friends and colleagues are sometimes surprised to learn I’m Jewish. Specifically, a Ukrainian Jew on my mother’s side. And even though my great grandparents emigrated long before the Nazi holocaust, I’ve been taking a personal interest in Russia’s invasion, as well as Putin’s pretext that it was made to remove Nazis from the Ukrainian government, given that the head of its government – President Volodymyr Zelensky – is also a Jew.

My great grandparents fled a small shtetl near Odessa during one of Russia’s pogroms following the Bolshevik Revolution, which I guess is why I’m here in the U.S. writing to you about it today.

As horrible and unjustified as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is, I can’t help but wonder whether his disinformation campaign won’t also accelerate the surge in anti-Semitism that has been growing around the world, including the U.S. in recent years.

“As anti-Semitism continues to surge across Europe – one recent study found 10 anti-Semitic incidents daily around the globe, almost half of them in Europe,” Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, noted in a statement released today.

The statement was part of a release the WJC issued applauding the EU for adopting new measures to combat racism and anti-Semitism in Europe, which comes just as anti-Semitic speech is accelerating -- especially via social media, despite efforts by the major platforms to curtail hate speech.

The WJC also called on digital platforms, tech and communications companies to “adopt solutions enabling them to rapidly detect, assess and remove illegal online hate speech.”

It’s been more than four years since ProPublica broke a story about how it used Facebook’s custom audience platform to target users who were self-described “Jew haters,” and Facebook has made major strides to fix its ad targeting, as well as its user posting and sharing around hate speech.

In an update earlier this week, Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg and his team reported that hate speech incidents have fallen to 0.02% of the platform’s content and that it continues to make inroads.

As an American Jew of Ukrainian descent, I was also struck by the ironic symbolism of Russia’s bombing of Ukraine’s Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial, and can’t help wondering how intentional a message that was from Putin -- and can’t help wondering whether other agendas aside, part of his rationale isn’t just a modern day Russian pogrom.