Recent years have witnessed an explosion of online anti-Semitism, particularly among Gen-Z men. Some of what is called anti-Semitism is legitimate criticism of the Israeli government. But plenty of it is straight-up, old-school Jew hatred. An obvious example is the onslaught of Instagram reels to the tune of “Hava Nagila,” with stereotypical caricatures of “the happy merchant,” often captioned, “Well, well, well,” or accompanied by Nazi imagery. Then there are the Groypers and others who openly, unabashedly attack Jews as Jews.
It’s a paradox of our online life, then, that one of the most popular figures among this very cohort is an ultra-Orthodox rabbi who believes that Jews do and should run the world: “The goyim gets angry, ‘the Jews in control, the Jews in control, they control the money.’ So who will control the money — you?” he exclaims. “You compare yourself to the chosen people? … It’s good for you that they run the country.” (“Goyim” is the Hebrew word for Gentiles, or non-Jews.)
His name is Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi, and he has rapidly ascended over the past year on online shows and X, the app formerly known as Twitter. “Your entire story, it’s a made-up story,” he said flat-out of the New Testament, much to the anger of one interlocutor. Mizrachi has also debated the manosphere-icon-turned-Islamist streamer Sneako, who opened the stream by praising Mizrachi for being “a breath of fresh air, because at least you are honest about what you believe in.” And the rabbi has become the subject of a whole genre of memes — first on X, and now increasingly on Instagram, where more “normies” are encountering him for the first time.
One type of self-help reel, featuring a speech of Mizrachi’s set to a melodramatic tune, is especially viral on Instagram at the moment. It goes: “I’m not interested to be religious, but I don’t have a choice. If I stay the same bum I am, in the clubs of Manhattan, smoking grass all day, walking like a goy everywhere I go, what kind of a girl will I get?”
It is this latter type of message that especially attracts younger men to the rabbi’s message. His voice is like that of the tough but benevolent father many of them never had, whether because Dad was absent or permissive to an excessive and destructive degree. As he tells me in a recent interview at UnHerd’s New York headquarters, “every teenager — 16, 17 — when he begins to take drugs, he knows that’s not a positive thing to do. What makes him take that risk anyway to destroy his life, to destroy his future marriage, to destroy his future family, to destroy his own parents? Why would he jeopardize his future in such a horrible way? The answer is pure desire.”
It helps that the rabbi, in his strong Israeli-inflected accent and somewhat broken English, cuts to the chase and says what he actually believes, however controversial. And he is hilarious, to boot. His viral quips about the goyim also come at a time when the use of the word “goy” is being popularized. Some of the term’s usage is obviously anti-Semitic: look at those all-powerful Jews, demeaning us goyim. But in Zoomer parlance, it also has a light-hearted valence, as a means for distinguishing between positive attributes and degeneracy.
For something to be “goy-coded” means it is déclassé, for the masses, and dumb. Indeed, Jews themselves can be “goyim.” And a Gentile doesn’t necessarily have to be a “goy.” Studying for your classes, working hard at your job, and eating healthily are definitively not “goy-coded.” Endlessly watching Sunday “goyball” (football), consuming “goynip” (marijuana), and binge-eating your DoorDash “goyfeed” (caloric fast food) are, as their prefixes would entail, “goy.” Mizrachi himself has mocked “some Gentiles” who “are very stupid, they never think. They only want the beer, and the alcohol, and the sport, and the football, and the Fourth of July barbecue, and the beach, and the tattoos, and the clubs … Nothing in life, no values, no ethics, no conscience, no calculation about where I am heading.”
Strip away the hard-line sectarianism — and some of it is unquestionably gross — and Mizrachi’s message to young men, Jewish and non-Jewish, is simple: clean up your act. The impulse to enjoy lower pleasures, Mizrachi believes, must be tempered — and the problem is that too often in today’s society, it isn’t. As he tells me, summing up the prevailing consumerist ideology: “‘Let me enjoy the moment and deal with the problem later on.’ But that’s pure stupidity, because people are not supposed to be that stupid.”
The rabbi was born in Israel in 1968 and moved to New York nearly two decades later. He now lives in Monsey, the ultra-Orthodox hamlet in Rockland County, and teaches night classes on the Torah in Brooklyn and Queens.
Mizrachi’s journey to becoming a rabbi started with his fatherly impulse: “I saw that I have influence on my friends to starting to change their lifestyle, and that’s — it’s like God was pushing me to that direction.” He was already married, but he wasn’t religious. In his telling, he came to be influenced by religious lectures being delivered by rabbis in the New York area. Mizrachi would go to these lectures, where he discovered that he “had power to influence people.” In 1994, he started his own religious lectures, which initially drew small crowds. Eventually, his followers made him a website, and he started to gain a limited online following.
The “turning point,” Mizrachi tells me, was in 2015, when he had a debate with a Jewish believer in Christ and teacher at the New York School of the Bible, Daniel Mann, whom he simply calls the “Christian professor.” In response to Mann’s message, Mizrachi tells me, he set out to prove that “Christianity is not a divine religion, no connection to God.” Christianity, as Mizrachi explains, has “a lot of good values, and they learn a lot of things from the Torah and from Judaism. They have one major issue: they took a human being and turn him into a god, and that’s against the Ten Commandments.” “Righteous Gentiles” are those who follow the Noahide laws, which he believes everyone can.
From this early provocation against Christianity to his widespread virality today, the rabbi has been mired in controversy. In 2015 and 2016, he came under fire for suggesting that the Holocaust had taken the lives of only 1 million halachic Jews (those recognized as Jews by traditional Jewish law). He later issued a formal apology after having been shown “the accurate statistics” and realizing that “those that were not halachically Jewish were a very small minimal number.”
Also in 2016, the chief rabbi of Britain had warned that a planned visit by Mizrachi to the country would elicit “widespread offense and upset,” particularly due to Mizrachi’s comments that sick children were being punished for sins in a previous life. Mizrachi canceled the trip amid the uproar. Three years later, when he yet again sought to go to Britain, he was barred by the UK Home Office.
There have been other low points: in 2020, Mizrachi claimed that blowing a hair dryer in one’s mouth was “guaranteed” to stop the novel coronavirus; in 2023, an Israeli court found him liable for defaming the mother of former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, whom Mizrachi had alleged was not Jewish.
At the same time, Mizrachi can sound surprisingly universalist notes for a religious leader widely known for his Jewish supremacism and mocking of the goyim. He tells me, “I wouldn’t like a Gentile that is Nazi, but I also wouldn’t love a Jew that is a terrorist. There’s no difference. I don’t discriminate between Jews and non-Jews.” He adds that he’d rather live in an apartment building full of religious Muslims, even if he believes their religion is wrong, than to raise his children next to “wicked Jews.” When it comes to people, as individuals, he emphasizes, “the last thing I care about [is] if they are Jewish or not Jewish.”
So what about his apparent belief that “goyim are not people,” a saying widely ascribed to him on social media? Mizrachi replies unequivocally: “I never say and never dare to say such [a] thing.” Later on, he contextualizes some of his more demeaning statements about the Gentiles: “When I say sometimes in my speeches, ‘He dresses like a goy,’ meaning there’s a Jewish religious dress code, and there is the way that the rest of the world dress, right? So it’s not necessarily an insult.” Moreover, “when I speak in Hebrew,” the rabbi mentions, “I tell the people you look like Chiloni. Chiloni means secular, you know. And the Chilonim are not offended by that. They’re proud of how they dress.”
Such statements can seem disingenuous. Mizrachi has made many demeaning statements about the goyim, though he’s never precisely said “goyim are not people.” The closest thing might be when he once said, “At least 6 [or] 6.5 billion people are idol-worshippers that, according to the Torah, do not have the right to live. Idol-worshipper goy [deserves the] death penalty.” And he counts Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus equally among the ranks of “idol-worshippers.”
It is also hard to believe he has all due respect for the goyim and secular Israelis, when in one viral clip, he blames the IDF’s inability to beat Hamas on half of Israeli soldiers being “Russian goyim and other goyim,” and the others being earring-wearing, tattooed, secular Israeli Chiloni, who, “when they join the army, 20% to 30% of them are gays, hate religion, hate rabbis, make fun against Hashem [God] all day on the internet. That’s the army. So why should Hashem help us when half of our soldiers makes fun at him all day?”
He is, to some extent, shirking responsibility for the uglier side of his statements, a contradiction from a leader who believes his following stems from his honesty, as Mizrachi tells me, with all appearance of sincerity. “The most popular compliments that I get from all the people — Jews, non-Jews, Muslims, Christians, even atheists, is we like you because you are honest.”
The arch-Groyper Nick Fuentes, for one, is a fan: “I saw Rabbi Mizrachi challenge me to a debate. Increasingly, I’m not even interested only because I don’t know what we’d debate about.… I think Rabbi Mizrachi was right about literally everything.” Among the areas of agreement, Fuentes believes, is that some goyim don’t have souls, with Fuentes’s own, rival online anti-Semites (of the more conspiratorial variety) — Dan Bilzerian, Jake Shields, Ian Carroll, and Candace Owens — being the prime examples.
And the fandom is mutual. “Even though he’s an anti-Semite,” Mizrachi says of Fuentes, “I actually admire some of the things he says because at least you can see that he has some kind of truth in him.” Mizrachi is against “stupid liberalism”: “they want to push all kinds of immigrants into the country. They want to bankrupt the country. They want to give freedom and rights to people that nobody even know who they are.” Among these liberal people are Jews, and white supremacists, in the rabbi’s telling, frame all Jews for liberalism’s excesses.
Fuentes, Mizrachi says, “makes a lot of noise, and it’s a very interesting theater, you know, his shows.” Mizrachi also makes the distinction between genuine anti-Semites and those he believes are in it solely for the clicks, with Tucker Carlson as an example. “For years, he works for Fox News. He’s an extreme Righty, is pro-Republicans, is pro-Israel, is you know, has a lot of Jewish friends. All of a sudden, Qatar buys him out,” Mizrachi alleges, and Carlson “becomes a representative of Qatar, number one sponsor of terrorism.” (There is no evidence that Carlson is on the Qatari dole.)
More ugliness comes, also, in Mizrachi’s treatment of Israeli Arabs. “Stupid liberalism,” as he calls it, which he believes rules in his native Israel, has led to a situation in which Arabs, apparently, “have the best rights than any other Arab country in the world.” Israel’s hospitals “are full of Arab doctors, Arab nurses. It’s enough that 1% of them are jihadists, and they catch all the time these guys with ISIS, these guys pro-Hamas, these foolish doctors. They write in their social media, ‘It’s time for jihad, kill all Jews.’” So, Mizrachi asks, “Do you want to go as a Jewish person to a hospital to be operated by a doctor that last night wrote in his Facebook page that you have to kill all Jews and he’s supposed to save your life? Do you understand the contradiction? This is the price of just liberalism.” (The idea that some Arab-Israeli doctors seek to kill their Jewish patients is false and has been condemned by the Israel Medical Association.)
Mizrachi’s unlikely emergence as a Gen-Z icon says something about the state of the Gen-Z soul: it reflects the emptiness and spiritual fatherlessness into which three generations of ultra-permissive liberalism has plunged them. To the audiences that fall for his style of edgelording, Mizrachi also offers a spiritual balm of a kind — and this may be the secret of his appeal. Maximum “freedom” and “acceptance” have been bad for many young men, especially the hyper-online. Mizrachi uses their favorite medium to urge them to restraint, self-respect, and the acceptance of limits.
On addiction, a plague of this generation, Mizrachi laments: “I can’t say today that goyim smoke more marijuana than Jews. I think the statistic is just about the same. Secular Jews, secular Gentiles, they consume drugs. Unfortunately, alcohol, drugs, anything you can think of.” Cigarettes are “killing, everybody knows it’s killing. When people argue with me in my lectures, it always will be smokers.” Instead of arguing back, the rabbi thinks it would be healthier to say: “‘I’m a weak character. I’m an addict. I wish I can overcome that addiction,’” but most people aren’t willing to admit as much, because “most people are not honest.”
“Ego, pride, and money, greed, desire,” are the evils he believes we must grapple with. And on this front, the rabbi’s concern is once again universal. “And what do you think: Gentiles think different than Jews?” he asks me. “Don’t they know what’s right and what’s wrong? They also know. And people are tired of the corrupted society we live in, they are tired of this. They look at the politician. They look how the president talk. They see his ego. They see everyone around. One day, they say one thing, and an hour later, they say … the exact opposite.”
President Trump, somewhat like the rabbi, was also once a favorite among hyper-online Gen-Z men, and may have fulfilled a similar aspirational-authority-figure role. Mizrachi, perhaps, offers something better. He appreciates the president for his support for the Jewish state, he tells me, but “his personality, his personal character, needs a huge improvement, starting with his ego and pride and insulting people in public. That’s not the way of a president.”
The same Tucker Carlson whom Mizrachi now demonizes as a Qatari operative, said about Trump at a Turning Point Action rally in the run-up to the 2024 election: “If you allow people to get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous, if you allow your hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter to like slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you’re gonna get more of it. There has to be a point at which Dad comes home.”
Is Mizrachi that imperfect Dad? Like Trump, Mizrachi delights in offensive provocation and dabbles in conspiracy theories. But unlike Trump, he offers a normative account of good behavior: to dress respectably, to cultivate good manners, to stay off drugs. The young men are loving it — because many of them have no one else to tell them these things.
