The Jewish Troll – A True Life Story

by Daniel Slomka, Lendsey Achudi and Klaudia Wolniewic, HIA Fellows 2014

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No – it’s the Jewish Troll! And he is here to haunt anti-Semitic hate-speech over the Internet. Beware!

Here we are – Daniel Slomka, Lendsey Achudi and Klaudia Wolniewicz – the Jewish Trolls. We are like a colorful puzzle, made of intelligence, courage and awesomeness. And, of course a little bit of modesty. ☺

We were tasked with something difficult: to make a social campaign counteracting hate speech against Jews. So, we decided to run a really controversial Facebook page:  “The Jewish Troll”, playing with words by asking, “Hate juice?” Why the Troll? A lot of hate-speech, towards different groups, can be found over the Internet. It is, of course, provocative and outraging, but what should be the proper reaction? Should we get angry, and give the haters what they want? As the story says, “haters gonna hate”, so we might as well just fight back in a creative, funny and…well…a bit annoying way ;)

But before that, we had to respond to a key question initially: What language should we use to talk about the Jewry in contemporary Poland? We had to consider the 1,000 years of history of these two nations. We decided to talk about this sensitive subject in a funny way. This was a courageous yet risky decision. It was also a huge challenge to us and those who visited our page. The main goal of our action was to counteract hate speech against Jews by educating in a humorous way. So, Klaudia was responsible for the more formal things like searching statistics, articles, scientific researches and so on. On our page, you will find the results of CBOS research “Attitudes of Poles towards other nationalities” (2013). We will keep adding more information about the knowledge of Poles on Jewish issue and more. Do you know that 14% of Poles think that in there are 1 000 000 Jews currently living in Poland? In fact, there are only about 7 000 Jews! Daniel and Lendsey, they preferred creating spunky and funny memes and movies (you have to watch our movie: “Evil Hitler finds out about the Jewish Troll”).

Nonetheless, fame has its price, and as every popular page, we had to struggle with  haters and trolls ourselves. This was our main difficulty during work. Few pages blocked us (yes, “Młodzież Wszechpolska” and “Festiwal Orle Gniazdo”, we are talking about you), and some other nice people visited our page and left “love messages”. We responded, as expected from a troll, with some memes against them. The truth is we really wanted to start a discussion, but they refused. Too bad.

Fortunately, we also have a lot of supporters, like “Wielkie sprzątanie FB. Stop mowie nienawiści, faszyzmowi i agresji” or “No hate movement”, which are also Facebook pages against hate speech in general.  There are more than 200 people who already liked our page and the total reach is about 20 000.
Another step we took was to use offline means or spreading our message. We created “Hate juice?” t-shirts and we wear them during important events, like meeting with founder and Executive Director of Humanity in Action – Judith Goldstein or “Mowa nienawiści. Wykluczam wykluczenie” – an event organized by Jewish Historical Institute. And this is only the beginning: the Jewish Troll is here to stay, and he will continue to haunt for haters. Brace Yourselves – the Jew-lovers are coming !