Jewish Baby Strollers – The Anti-Sematic Search Engine Meme
When the front page of Google search results leads you to pictures of gas ovens with “Jewish Baby Stroller” as the caption, something has gone seriously wrong.
We are living in an unprecedented time. While the Jewish Baby Stroller image search has reached headlines worldwide challenging Google and other search engines to change their algorithms, many other civil rights issues have been swept aside.
For the first time in history many oppressed groups are speaking out and mobilizing, not just to secure their legal rights, but to have a stake in the culture that creates our world. Women are no longer willing to tolerate being equal under the law while experiencing misogyny in the culture. The black community is no longer willing to tolerate having civil rights on paper, while facing racial discrimination in their lives. A new civil rights movement wants to demand the same conversation about Jews. End Jew Hatred wants a Jewish mother to be able to push their Jewish baby stroller down the street dressed in a visibly Jewish way without worrying about being harassed by bigots.
According to Brooke Goldstein, a lawyer on behalf of the Law Fare Project, equality is about more than just what’s in the constitution. It’s about how we treat each other. It’s about who gets respect and who doesn’t, who gets prioritized and who doesn’t, and who gets mocked and who doesn’t.
End Jew Hatred wants to do for Jews what feminism has done for women, and what the new civil rights movement has done for the black community. End Jew Hatred wants to challenge discrimination and oppression against Jewish people not at the level of law but at the level of culture.
What this new civil rights movement wants is not more laws. End Jew Hatred is demanding a complete societal shift in the culture. It wants to dive deep into the subconscious narratives we tell ourselves and our children and remove the nasty stories about Jews being evil tricksy bankers and manipulative scoundrels. Building a better culture requires everyone to work together to think deeply about what kind of a society we want to have, and who is included in it.
At this time in American history, there has been a sharp increase in bigotry and hatred. Many different communities are at each other’s throats and political polarization is at an all time high. This is a cultural issue, not a legal one. It concerns the stories we tell about identity, belonging and heritage. These are not trivial questions and they should not be treated lightly.
End Jew Hatred argues that the answer is to lean into a national conversation about culture, and not shy away from the tough questions. It wants to demand respect for Jews and solidarity from other communities, to end the erasure of Jewish uniqueness and culture and the targeted harassment of Jewish bodies. In their view, Jewish baby stroller memes are just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath them lie 2,000 years of hatred, discrimination and persecution.
The old slogans of the past are not enough for this new movement. “Never Again” is viewed as an antiquated slogan which only prioritizes a certain kind of paranoid physical safety, while denying the Jewish community true liberation and integration. End Jew Hatred argues that the 21st century Jewish community needs something more. A fully redemptive participation in a national dialogue that transcends old faultlines and creates a new culture in which all are, for the first time in American history, truly equal.
