An Interview with Noa Tal on Confronting Ancient Hatred in a Digital Age
Dave Gordon
When slogans can travel farther and faster than facts, knowing Israel’s history is critical. It is a defense against letting others define the Jewish story. Understanding the conflict – and recognizing when criticism becomes something older and more sinister – requires more than outrage. It requires information, context, and the confidence to ask: Where is the evidence?
Noa Tal tackles this task in Seeds of Subversion: The Modern Weaponization of Ancient Jew Hatred, published by Entrechat Press. Her argument: anti-Semitism is not merely resurfacing. It is being used to exploit classrooms, newsrooms, and digital platforms to turn hostility toward Jews into a weapon against democratic societies.
An Israeli-American technology and corporate lawyer in Silicon Valley, Tal is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and the daughter of Iraqi Jews who fled persecution. She believed that inheritance belonged largely to the past – until October 7th, and an encounter in her own community shattered that assurance.
Tal spoke about that awakening, the audience she hopes to reach, and why protecting the integrity of information is everybody’s concern.
The interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
What made you want to write the book?
Despite being a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and a daughter of people who had to flee persecution in Iraq, I felt insulated. We thought history didn’t apply to us, that America was different or people were more enlightened now.
Ten days after October 7th, there was a multifaith prayer event for Palestine and Israel where my child’s school rented space. Accusations of genocide and apartheid, and even blaming Israel for George Floyd, were being thrown at Israel and the Jewish community before the IDF had even gone into Gaza.
My husband and I were shocked. Our neighbors were nodding along. Nobody was asking: How do you know that what you’re saying is true? Do you have evidence?
That made me want to research how we got here. How had these people become convinced? What had been going wrong for a long time, and how had it spread?
Was the reaction in the West a separate awakening from October 7th itself?
Yes. October 7th was unspeakably horrible. We thought Israel’s defenses were stronger. Everybody had been lulled into a false sense of complacency.
But the wake-up call for writing the book was Westerners’ reaction. I think we expected solidarity and sympathy, a rallying cry, and we got the opposite.
Who are you trying to reach?
Ideally, young Jews, but also professors, anybody involved in education, and allies.
It’s not just a book about anti-Semitism. It’s about its weaponization after October 7th. I understood that anti-Semitism existed. I didn’t understand the extent to which it was being purposely pumped into education and legacy media, and amplified through social media.
The book is supposed to empower readers to do three things: rebut anti-Jewish libels from a Jewish perspective; understand how and why those libels are being weaponized; and advocate for the integrity of our information systems.
My argument is that this is being used to destabilize the larger West. It’s not just a problem for Jews.
How do you distinguish political criticism from anti-Semitism?
We’re told this is fundamentally a political conversation: “We’re not criticizing Jews; we’re criticizing the secular government of Israel or Benjamin Netanyahu.”
But these conversations often don’t look like discussions about politics or how to run a war. They’re not comparing Israel’s military with other Western militaries and figuring out how it could operate better. They’re full of religious undertones: accusations that Jews enjoy killing children, or that Jews adhere to a vengeful morality.
Those accusations say something much more sinister than their proponents would have you believe. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be told that this is merely a conversation about land or politics.
Why would authoritarian leaders find anti-Semitism useful?
I don’t believe they necessarily harbor the illusion that Jews run the world. They know very well that they run it – or want to. But they can use anti-Semitism to destabilize our democracies.
Russia, the largest country in the world, is engaged in recreating its empire. Yet it can deflect outrage and attention by accusing one of the smallest countries, Israel, of expansionism. It’s almost laughable how obvious it is when you recognize it, but it works for them.
What did you learn from Shabbos Kestenbaum, who added commentary to the book?
He had to deal with a lot at Harvard and was willing to stand up publicly and sue. It’s hard to put yourself out there. What I learned is that you have to be pretty tough as a young Jew these days.
He is far from the only one. Once you start talking to parents, students, and Jewish community organizers who help families, you hear so many cases of how the biased curriculum we discuss has real-life consequences.
It isn’t simply a matter of enduring a curriculum. Students describe harassment and discrimination: threats, being barred from areas of campus, noise outside their rooms that stops them sleeping and studying.
When those things happen, you have to stand up and fight with all legal means. That’s what he did.
What about the commentary added by urban-warfare specialist Col. John Spencer?
What I most admire is his commitment to the truth. He isn’t Jewish or Israeli, but he recognizes that he has a stake in this: if the United States and other democracies hope to win wars, we need realistic standards for fighting them.
We can’t expect soldiers to have perfect information at all times, never make a mistake, or never cause collateral damage when undertaking dangerous missions in extremely difficult circumstances.
Urban warfare is incredibly difficult. Spencer has fought in it himself and studied others fighting in complex situations. Unless we’re going to capitulate, we need realistic standards, applied consistently to everybody.
How does technology change the problem?
The most toxic messages can now spread throughout the globe in milliseconds. Propaganda existed before, but those messages took time to spread.
The adversaries of Jews – and of the West and democracies generally – are exploiting technology to spread these messages inorganically, virally, and very fast. Much of the book’s second part is devoted to that.
We have to understand what is happening to our information systems, including education, social media, and crowdsourced knowledge bases such as Wikipedia and Reddit. Recognizing the problem is part of being able to advocate for their integrity.