Anonymous Jewish Googler –

The Jewglers claims to represent and advocate for “all Jewish people at Google”. This is clearly not true, because I am Jewish, and the Jewglers’ behavior has been one of the biggest sources of my mental health struggles at work since 2018. Jewglers steering and other members have shamed, bullied, and silenced me simply because I don’t agree with Zionism. In many cases, Jewglers have even reported people, sometimes even fellow Jews, to HR for quote-un-quote “antisemitic behavior” simply because they spoke up for Palestine. My grandmother fled the Holocaust. Growing up I heard white people shouting “death to the Jews” and saw the windows of my synagogue covered in hateful vandalism. I know what antisemitism is because my family and I have experienced it across generations.

I know that supporting Palestinian human rights is NOT antisemitism. Mixing Palestinian rights advocacy with antisemitism diminishes the very real threat of antisemitism; such minimizing of this very real form of oppression further harms Jewish people across the diaspora. I shouldn’t need to even say that it's more in Jewish people’s interests to be aligned with other marginalized communities than divided from them. Institutions that claim that Palestine advocacy is antisemitic are perpetrating an intentional, strategic tactic systemically designed to isolate Jews from progressive movements in order to weaken these movements.

If you understand what antisemitism is, you will understand why it is so dangerous to minimize and distort it by falsely associating Palestinian advocacy with antisemitism. ​​Antisemitism is bigotry and discrimination against people of Jewish religion, culture, or ethnoreligious background. Many antisemites also classify Jews as their own inferior race. Antisemitism has many manifestations, including centuries of land theft from Jews, pogroms, and even genocide. One manifestation of antisemitism is the trope that Jews are traitors to their country– having “dual loyalties”.

A recent example is former President Trump addressing a Jewish audience in 2019 referring to Israeli Primer Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “your Prime Minister”. In present-day, the main proponents of antisemitism are white supremacist organizations. QAnon claims that a secret cabal of Jews control the world and sexually abuse and traffic Christian children for their blood. A huge number of January 6th insurrectionists displayed antisemitic messages on their flags and clothes such as Camp Auschwitz and “6MWE" - meaning "6 million wasn’t enough”. Many of the same insurrectionists also held Israeli flags to represent their alignment with fascism and ethnonationalism. That is to say, these people love Israel but hate Jews.

In SF where I live, there were recent leaflet drops of hate literature all over various neighborhoods including mine, espousing Holocaust denialism and blaming Jews for Covid-19. The fight against antisemitism starts with uprooting the “Great Replacement Theory”, uprooting fascism, uprooting nationalism, uprooting white Christian supremacy and the whole system that privileges white Christians to the extent that not being white and Christian is literally still deadly even in 2022.

It is a grave danger for one of the world’s most powerful tech companies and the world’s largest search engine to continue to endorse false information about how antisemitism operates within our society. Google is purposely dividing the Jewish community from other protected groups, driving a wedge between the Jewish ERG and other internal communities. It is making us all less safe but it especially harms our Palestinian coworkers by creating a company culture that erases their experiences even while Google continues to claim that it’s a leader in diversity and inclusion in the industry. Imagine how frustrating it is to see the company’s leadership consistently partnering with the Jewglers to treat them like an authority on Jewish identity, taking their advice to form official company stances, even when the majority of Jews at Google and in the U.S. do not agree with the Jewglers. Not only do we disagree with Jewglers, we have been actively harmed by them. They have never been held accountable; instead they have managed to get the company to send official financial donations to pro-Israeli army organizations.

The company shamelessly does this in my name as a Jewish person even though many of us Jews have asked company leadership to stop this. If they truly cared about antisemitism, Google would actually bother to meet with their Jewish employees who have been harmed by the fact that Jewglers is company-funded and continues to shame fellow Jews for supporting Palestinians. But it is clear Google doesnt care about antisemitism when it comes to truly protecting religious and ethnic minorities from the threats of the rise in white christian nationalism. All they care about is using their own convenient and false definitions of antisemitism to set the stage for their profits off of business with Israel. This would be a different conversation if we hadn’t tried so hard to write to leadership begging them to listen to us. But we have. I saw my anti-Zionist Jewish colleague receive a letter with death threats and still leadership refused to even let that person have a meeting.

I saw a Palestinian colleague get called into HR for simply wearing traditional clothing in their ID picture. HR told them they were reportedly being “divisive” simply for wearing clothing that represents their culture! Jews in Israel are a convenient pawn for the white Christian evangelical Zionist lobby. Jewglers are a convenient pawn for Google to justify its business with Israel instead of admitting what it really is: Google’s campaign to profit off of violence, war, and apartheid.