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<\/a><\/p>\nHasan Piker looks on as U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed delivers a stump speech in Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 7, 2026. Piker, a popular Twitch streamer accused of antisemitism, prompted controversy for campaigning with El-Sayed. (Andrew Lapin\/JTA)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
I am a historian of antisemitism. My gaslighting alarm goes off loud and clear whenever someone tells me what is and is not antisemitic. Other minorities get to name the bigotry, prejudice and hate they face. But some voices, Piker among them, deny my right to call out antisemitism. That is classic gaslighting. <\/p>\n
Gaslighting works by making victims doubt their own perceptions. Piker asks Jews to believe that attacks on the overwhelming majority of their community are not really attacks on Jews at all.<\/p>\n
Piker, gaslighter-in-chief of the left, says that \u201cZionism is a racist ideology.\u201d He proclaims \u201cHamas is a thousand times better than Israel.\u201d Earlier this year in an interview with JTA, he boasted of his opposition to the \u201creal antisemitism,\u201d the one manifest in attacks on synagogues and swastikas graffitied on Hillel buildings. <\/p>\n
He condemned the \u201cheinous\u201d antisemitic attack in March on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. That the perpetrator, who loaded his truck with explosives and rammed it into the synagogue, intended to murder as many Michigan Jews as he could because \u201cIsrael is pure evil\u201d should, if Piker were consistent, count as justifiable anti-Zionism. After all, that was his view of Hamas\u2019s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. <\/p>\n
Just last month, the British journalist Lewis Goodall pressed Piker on why he keeps saying that \u201cHamas is a thousand times better than Israel.\u201d Piker\u2019s response: \u201cIsrael has done an Oct. 7 a thousand times over to the Palestinian people.\u201d Piker shrugs off the horrific sexual violence of that day (and the assaults on the hostages) saying: \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter, it doesn\u2019t matter if f\u2014ing rapes happened on Oct. 7, like that doesn\u2019t change the dynamic for me even this much (holding up his thumb and forefinger to show scarcely an inch). The Palestinian resistance is not perfect.\u201d He ignores the Hamas terrorist who called his parents from Liraz Asoulin\u2019s cell phone after he murdered her as she tried to flee the Nova Festival, exulting: \u201cLook how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!\u201d <\/p>\n
Piker demands \u201cdecoupling Zionism and Judaism.\u201d Zionism, born out of the conviction that Jew-hatred would never end and that Jewish people needed the protection of their own nation state, cannot be decoupled from Judaism. For millennia, Jews have yearned to return to their historic homeland. The Passover seder ends with the hope \u201cNext year in Jerusalem.\u201d I, for one, am not willing to grant Piker the right to redefine Judaism to fit his worldview.<\/p>\n
Then there are his proclamations foregrounding classic antisemitic tropes. He called a listener who condemned the Oct. 7 massacre a \u201cbloodthirsty violent pig dog,\u201d bringing the medieval ritual murder canard that Judaism needs blood into the 21st century. He traffics in the conspiracy theory of world Jewish power. Following a CNN story that mentioned that the United States and Israel struck Iran during Purim this year, he wrote: \u201cThis is Jewish supremacy. It\u2019s what netanyahu said after Oct7.\u201d<\/p>\n
Piker conflates Zionism with historic evils. Seeking \u201ca totally just world,\u201d he has called anyone displaying a \u201cZionist tendency\u201d a \u201crabid neo-Nazi.\u201d Turning Israelis and Jews into Nazis is the antisemitic trick of Holocaust inversion invented by the Soviets.<\/p>\n
Piker is convinced that anyone having \u201cpositive feelings about the state of Israel\u201d should never even be the \u201clocal dogcatcher.\u201d But a recent survey reports that nearly 9 in 10 Jews continue to support Israel\u2019s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. <\/p>\n
When Piker says these Jews are not worthy to serve even as dogcatchers, he is calling to boycott Jews. American Jews know a lot about this kind of discrimination. For decades in the 20th century, colleges and universities had quotas on Jewish admissions. Newspaper want ads, whether for salesmen or secretaries, brought antisemitism to the nation\u2019s breakfast tables as they advertised \u201cChristians only\u201d should apply. <\/p>\n
Maybe Piker never meant to embolden antisemitic violence from the left. Nevertheless, rhetoric like his has. In May 2025, a couple leaving an event for Jewish professionals at the Capital Jewish Museum was gunned down by a man who yelled as he was arrested, \u201cFree, free Palestine.\u201d In June 2025, in Boulder, Colorado, a man threw Molotov cocktails at marchers calling to release the hostages still held by Hamas. He burned a demonstrator who had survived the Holocaust. Another died from her wounds. Authorities found a document in the alleged perpetrator\u2019s car calling for the expulsion of the Zionist enemy \u201cfrom our land.\u201d <\/p>\n
What makes the College Democrats of America hosting Piker so shocking is that his animosity extends way beyond Zionists and Israel. He has publicly declared that \u201cAmerica deserved 9\/11, dude.\u201d He routinely spews anti-American, anti-Western and anti-women rhetoric as well as antisemitism. <\/p>\n
That young Democrats chose to give Piker a platform rather than denouncing him should give all of us pause, not just the Jewish Caucus of the College Democrats of America, who have asked their national leadership to apologize for platforming Piker. At the CDA convention, he denounced \u201cDemocrats who collaborate and cooperate with the fascists, who will fund ICE, who will fund Israel, who will help poison the planet, who will stiff workers and help bosses. We don\u2019t need those Democrats anymore.\u201d <\/p>\n
The danger is not simply that Hasan Piker has extreme views. It is that he asks Americans \u2014 and now the country\u2019s largest Democratic student organization \u2014 to accept that Jews cannot define the prejudice directed against them. That is what gaslighting looks like, and we should not be afraid to speak the truth by calling it out \u2014 and naming antisemitism for what it is.<\/p>\n
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.<\/p>\n