Now, a wide swath of Twitter users, both Jews and gentiles, has also adopted the parentheses, hoping to spread awareness of the issue and make it more difficult to target individuals. In an interview, Mr. Rosenberg said it would also allow more people to see the parentheses and ask what they’re all about, turning anyone into a potential educator on anti-Semitism.
He said the typical cycle of exposing bigotry — someone says a dumb thing, the target retweets it, other people get outraged — is a bit of a downer, and typically reaches people who are already aware that bigotry is bad. Instead, he prefers to mock the vile attacks he receives, hoping humor will help him find a wider audience and increase awareness.
“The only thing you can do is mock it, and show these people: ‘You are outside our discourse,’ ” he said.
Gentile Professor says: “It’s so bizarre. Do they realize that the alt-righters think Jews and NYT writers are ‘bigots’? Do they really think that anyone in our world today doesn’t realize that ‘bigotry is bad’? When you’ve been outside the mainstream discourse for long enough it becomes very hard to understand what these people are thinking (or pretending to think). What is ‘bigotry’ for them? It’s ‘bigotry’ to say that Jews are powerful and ethnocentric and over-represented in various fields, but it’s not ‘bigotry’ to say similar things about whites. So what is it? Just whatever claims elite Jews or liberals or minorities don’t like? Their discourse seems so irrational that it becomes hard to believe that _they_ really believe what they’re saying. And yet, it really does seem that they believe it, or that lots of them do anyway. E.g., that ‘principled conservatives’ really do believe their gas about the constitution or individual rights or whatnot, while at the same time they think it’s best to align themselves with BLM and Hilary Clinton rather than Trump.”
