Antisemitic Attacks on Jewish Scholar Likely Coordinated, Experts Say

6:07 PM ETDeveloping

Faith Desk

In Short: Many online attacks against Amy-Jill Levine, a newly appointed president of the Catholic Biblical Association of America, appear to be part of coordinated anti-Israel, anti-Jewish social media campaigns, according to experts.

Many of the online antisemitic attacks against Amy-Jill Levine, the newly appointed president of the Catholic Biblical Association of America, appear to be part of ongoing anti-Israel, anti-Jewish social media campaigns, with several actors already known to extremism experts, according to sources consulted by OSV News.

‘They have this anti-Israel government issue, and they end up lumping in all Jewish people with that,’ CBA executive director Archie Wright told OSV News.

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The controversy also reveals the deliberate amplification of many so-called viral social media posts and the financial incentives for promoting such content online.
It also hopes to educate Catholics on “how Catholic (biblical) scholarship can help the Church,” he said, particularly in fostering the Jewish-Catholic dialogue called for by the Second Vatican Council.
Camillo Barone, a New York-based staff reporter for the National Catholic Reporter, and NCR news editor Carol Zimmerman told OSV News that Barone’s Aug. 12 article likely marked the first media coverage of Levine’s appointment.
Once NCR’s story was published to its website and social media, several online accounts began commenting on the piece.
OSV News confirmed with a researcher at the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism that the spike in antisemitic posts against Amy-Jill Levine showed a “tight cluster of accounts that posted verbatim, identical scripted text within minutes of each other” on Aug. 14.
Specifically, a number of the CBA-related social media posts attempt to correlate Levine, the association’s first Jewish president, with the Israeli government amid the war in Gaza, and to vent opposition to the war using Levine as a target.
“And that turns to antisemitism against all Jewish people.” In addition, numerous posts denouncing Levine’s appointment repeat common antisemitic tropes, with others also invoking fears of heresy while upholding hardline traditionalist Catholic stances critical of Pope Leo XIV and several bishops.
Several of the posters — including two interviewed by OSV News, who both espouse anti-Israel and, in the case of one poster, deeply antisemitic views — monetize their content on social media through one or more common strategies, such as direct subscriptions, ad revenue sharing, paid posts or online brand-building that can be transferred to revenue gained from merchandise and appearances.

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