Are we frogs in a boiling pot?

Under my family photo from last Purim on Instagram, where my husband, our little son and I are dressed as pirates, a sickening message appeared. “I wonder how would you feel if your son is killed as many kids have been killed by Israel! I Hope karma hits you!,” a woman named Cristina wrote.

Cristina displays her full name and photo on her Instagram profile. She is not hiding behind nicknames or watermelon graphics, and she is clearly not a bot. She looks like an overwhelmingly normal woman. But she is consumed by antisemitism and hate to the point that this sort of behaviour makes perfect sense to her.

On that day, I received death threats directly to my DMs, and a tsunami of nasty, antisemitic comments. “Shut up soapy”; “I wish the painter finished his job”; “Someone call the camp coordinator, one of them escaped and is now posting nonsense :/”; “Rot in hell Satan worshippers, children killers, Jesus haters” – and so on and so on.

My ‘crime’ was to leave an early comment on a CNN video report, where I called out their reporting on the Gazan doctor Hussam Abu Safiya, who was arrested by Israel over his alleged links to Hamas. Somehow, CNN didn’t find it journalistically crucial to cite Palestinian press reports that repeatedly referred to him using high military ranks, or to include a photo in which he is documented wearing a uniform. This was enough to open the virtual gates of hell on me (and the 171 likes on my comment, along with the few brave people who dared to endorse me in the replies, couldn’t sweeten it).

These were not my first online death threats. Like many other Jews and Zionists online, I almost completely stopped commenting after the post-October 7 eruption of anti-Jewish hate. Nowadays, I am rarely moved by antisemitic and Israelophobic rhetoric, as it has become part of the mainstream; I just sigh and keep scrolling.

I know that this is one of the most dangerous issues facing Diaspora Jews, and although I regularly cover and investigate antisemitism, as a journalist I find myself declining stories about it that probably would have gained public interest three years ago. The scale has become too extreme, and the attention span is limited. This is a new era for Jews, one that is being defined once again by the banality of evil.

Yet Cristina’s audacity in threatening my own child, on my own profile, shook me more than I expected. CST and the police were helpful, but not much could be done, as we couldn’t identify where she was based. But one ‘good’ thing happened after this: I realised how severely I had been numbed by all this trivialised antisemitism. To what extent have Jews collectively become desensitised to the hate against us? Are we frogs in a boiling pot?

The normalised anti-Jewish hatred doesn’t desensitise only the Jews, but also the wider society. Recent experimental psychological studies into desensitisation to hate to have found that exposure to hate speech can lead to prejudice, dehumanisation and a lack of empathy towards members of outgroups. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue,” as the old Jewish wisdom of the Book of Proverbs says.

This understanding is particularly relevant to the current Jewish Diaspora experience. Last July, the Journal for Deradicalization published a psychological study titled ‘After 10/7: Normalization of Antisemitism in the West’. Its findings indicate that antisemitism was already becoming normalised before October 7, and that it was this normalisation that created the preconditions for the explosive rise witnessed afterwards. The author, David R. Mandel, warns that “misattributing the current wave of antisemitism principally to radicalization endangers Jews because such explanations can inadvertently minimize the breadth and severity of the problem.”

Social media, as I experience first-hand, plays a huge role in the normalisation of antisemitism. “The prevailing view now within the Jewish community is that what we thought was a new normal after the Holocaust, that we were then living in a time where Jews would be largely untroubled by antisemitism, that was in fact not a new normal but an aberration,” said Stephen Silverman, director of investigations and enforcement at Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), in a recent interview with me.

“There was a vein of antisemitism lying beneath the surface that was far greater than we realised. But unlike previous outbreaks of antisemitism in history, it now has an incredibly powerful tool at its disposal: the internet and particularly social media,” Silverman added, stressing that “we’re all now waiting for the next terrible thing to happen.”

And while we wait and cover our schools with another layer of security and shove our Stars of David necklaces under our shirts, we know that history often rhyme. And we all carry this historical, intergenerational memory of the violence to which the prolonged normalisation of hate can lead.

The Holocaust, and all the other pogroms and massacres, did not take place overnight. The Jews of Baghdad – once one third of its residents and an integral part of its society – were massacred in the Farhud following years of Nazi propaganda that had found a receptive audience. German Jews – many of whom believed after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 that the Nazi regime would be short-lived – fled en masse only after the violence of Kristallnacht in 1938.

CAA’s polling in 2025 showed that a majority of British Jews do not believe they had a long-term future in the UK. As we are cooked in the fumes of hate, and as the flames grow higher, will we know to jump out of the pot in time?

• Florit Shoihet is a UK-based Israeli journalist