Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

The Latest Anti-Semitic ‘Alt-Right’ Meme: ‘Fellow White People’

It’s hard to keep up with the lingo of the “alt-right,” which morphs and adapts at the speed of the Internet. Some of the phrases are obviously bigoted, others seemingly benign.

One relatively new, particularly anti-Semitic, meme known as “fellow white people” requires some unpacking. It’s not new but has recently bubbled up to the surface again in recent weeks — and it promulgates the belief that Jews are merely “masquerading” as whites as a way to tear down the white nation from the inside.

The meme is sometimes accompanied with a modified version of the “happy merchant” meme — picturing the hook-nosed anti-Semitic caricature wearing a “white” mask.

The meme is meant to highlight what the “alt-right” sees as the “shapeshifting” and ultimately non-white nature of Jews. Jews, the thinking goes, call themselves white when they want to appeal to “fellow whites” — and call for things like immigration reform or civil rights — but also call themselves members of a minority class when it suits them.

The broader debate around Jews and whiteness is fraught and breaks out within the Jewish community every few months. What this meme suggests is that, regardless of what any Jew may feel, the “alt-right” sees them as non-whites.

Email Sam Kestenbaum at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.