How viral clips of antisemitism splinter our shared reality

A man recently went viral for accosting two women in a New York subway station. Photo by Photo by Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images

By Arno Rosenfeld September 10, 2025

Last week, a video began circulating that purported to show a man wearing a “Hot Girls for Zohran” T-shirt harassing two Jewish women in a New York City subway station. The 18-second clip shows him calling one a “b—-” and yelling that they’re “monsters.”

It went viral in a particular corner of the internet popular with those who are concerned that Jews are under siege, especially by progressives, and that one of the best ways to fight this threat is by aggressively naming and shaming the perpetrators of antisemitism.

This brand of activism traces its roots back at least a decade to Canary Mission’s database of alleged antisemites, but it now includes the “Antisemites of the Week” award by StopAntisemitism, the “knowledge base” being created by Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus and the Shirion Collective, which relies on facial recognition technology to identify individuals captured in viral clips, among others.

But if there’s a journalistic veneer to cataloguing and amplifying instances of antisemitism, this particular ecosystem often seems to play by a different set of rules than traditional media.

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Take the subway video. The subject of the video was quickly identified as Greg Schlotthauer, but the clearly spliced-together set of clips failed to show what sparked the interaction, or what the women behind the camera may have said to Schlotthauer.

Melissa Chapman, a Jewish influencer, was the first to share the footage, with a quote from the anonymous camerawoman. “My mom and I were going to Union Square, and then he starts screaming at us when he sees my Jewish star,” the account read in part.

As the footage spread, the description intensified.

“Maniac Hunts Jewish Mother and Daughter in Subway,” the Shirion Collective posted to its account, which also shares videos like one of a car forcing its way through a pro-Palestinian demonstration, captioned, “This is glorious. 🥹”

StopAntisemitism followed with its own observation: “Greg likes to harass and scream at Jewish mothers with their children in subways.”

Schlotthauer said he’s embarrassed by his behavior but insists the clip and accompanying narrative is deeply distorted. He told me he was riding the elevator with the two women when one noticed his Mamdani shirt — Schlotthauer had canvassed for the Democratic mayoral nominee — and started playing “Am Yisrael Chai” on her phone and gleefully shouted “Israel, b—-!”

He asked if the woman had ever spoken to a Palestinian, and an argument over the war ensued, with Schlotthauer saying he snapped after one of the women responded to his concern over Palestinian deaths in Gaza with a mocking “aww!”

The 58-year-old musician acknowledged that it was wrong to scream at two strangers in the subway, and said that engaging with them at all “was probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.” But his description is essentially that of a political disagreement gone off the rails as opposed to the unprovoked harassment of two Jewish women on the basis of their identity.

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I tried to track down more information about the incident to see which version best matched the reality, but the online network that spread the footage of Schlotthauer is not set up to share detailed evidence.

Chapman, who first received the subway footage, declined to send the full video to me or even to let the woman who had filmed the clip know that I was interested in her perspective. “I would never ever do anything with your self-hating Jew rag,” she said in an email.

In a recent court case, lawyers for StopAntisemitism argued that the group is not liable for getting specific facts wrong — it had accused a man of spraypainting swastikas outside a Jewish campus hub when he had in fact drawn a penis — so long as its descriptions are “substantially true” because reporting on a “hateful message does not demand a lexicographer’s precision.”

This view holds that what really counted in the subway exchange was that a Mamdani supporter accosted two Jewish women, cursed at them and made them feel afraid. “If this were your mother or daughter, how would you feel?” Daniel Linder, whose Shirion Collective first identified Schlotthauer, wrote to me in an email. “What context makes that OK?”

Linder might be right. One of my guiding principles in covering antisemitism is that I’m not here to tell you what is and isn’t antisemitic. Reasonable people often land in different places on that question. But I firmly believe that everyone deserves as much accurate information as possible when making that judgement.

Even if Schlotthauer’s description of what took place was completely accurate, one could still consider what he did to be antisemitic. My hunch, though, is that if his version of events was included alongside the viral clip, many of the people who sent him violent threats — “we gonna break you in two motherf—er,” a man who appeared to be an Israeli soldier said in one screenshot he shared with me — might have reacted differently.

On the flipside, if Chapman had agreed to connect me with the woman who took the video of Schlotthauer, it’s possible that she would have more footage or details to confirm her account of an unprovoked attack and the claims against him might prove more durable than those attached to a brief video clip.

Instead, many of these viral attempts to expose antisemitism sit in a liminal space between confirmed offenses against Jews and spurious allegations that can’t hold up to scrutiny. They are viewed as “substantially true” among those predisposed to believe antisemitism is an especially menacing threat — and serve to strengthen this conviction — but the scant details mean they generally fail to spread much beyond that bubble.

The result is yet another set of alternate realities depicting what is happening to Jews in this country. Did a Jewish woman and her child get accosted in the subway for wearing a Jewish star? Did a Florida State University student get punched by an antisemite while trying to drink his smoothie? To pose a question that my colleague Louis Keene tried to answer last year by examining a similar Jewish media bubble, were protesters “hunting and bludgeoning Jews” outside a Los Angeles synagogue?

That more and more people are seeking answers on social media — where a belief in a kind of spiritual truth rather than a detailed set of facts often reigns — is no doubt part of why the Jewish community is increasingly divided over not only the scale of the danger posed by antisemitism but also over what remedies are necessary to address the problem.