Jewish Reporter in New Hampshire Targeted by Anti-Semitic Trump Supporters
Trump photo via AP
If you’re wondering about all the parentheses you might have been seeing on Twitter lately, it’s how anti-semitic trolls tag Jewish reporters who cover presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, targeting them for online harassment.
Once their names are nested with two or three parentheses, they are often crudely Photoshopped inside a gas chamber, with Trump, dressed as a Nazi, hovering his stubby finger over the button and the caption, “SOON.”
Ella Nilsen, a reporter for the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire, was the latest target of the Trumpkins. She was placed on a Twitter list titled “Train Depot,” composed of “(((people))) awaiting Disinfection and Bath before entering Main Camp.” Nilsen said she had been aware of other journalists experiencing the so-called “echo” during the campaign, but that it had “always seemed to be an arm’s length away.”
“When I read my name on a list of people that an anonymous Twitter troll dreamed of sending to the gas chamber, to, as he put it, ‘#MakeAmericaGreatAgain,’ that changed,” she wrote in a column describing her experience Thursday. “To say I was creeped out is an understatement. Immediately, dozens of questions raced through my mind. ‘How did this person find me? Why did he put me on this list? Did he do research on me? How can I delete my entire online presence?'”
Nilsen recounts how her grandmother, born of two Russian and Austro-Hungarian immigrants, was subjected to anti-semitism in New York City, even hiding her mother’s—Nilsen’s great-grandmother’s—maiden name, for fear of a second Holocaust.
“What disturbs me is that the new standard-bearer of the Republican Party has not yet disavowed his neo-Nazi supporters,” Nilsen continued. I don’t want to regress back to the world in which my grandmother was terrified of the consequences of revealing her mother’s Jewish-sounding maiden name. I am disturbed because it’s 2016, and I am typing these words.”
You can read Nilsen’s column here.
