Zach Kornfeld was 15 when someone asked him where his horns were.
After growing up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, it was the first time he had experienced blatant anti-Semitism. The moment would go on to shape his understanding of what anti-semitism — and hate, in general — really is: an ugly, powerful lie.
“She acted like she was joking, but then I realized she wasn’t joking because she kept looking,” he said. “I laughed because that’s a very crazy thing for somebody to say … It showed me at a very young age, I must have been 15 or 16, that if you lie to someone, you warp their brain.”
In a virtual conversation on Wednesday between the comedian and leaders of the Ole Miss Hillel, the Jewish student association on campus, Kornfeld delved into his experiences with anti-Semitism, both lived and historical.
“I have relatives who died in the Holocaust,” Kornfeld said. “When we talk about this not being old history, this is current. I have a living relative who was 14-years-old in a concentration camp … When I look at my family tree, there’s just dead ends. So much of my extended family stopped, stopped to exist — because of hatred, because of a lie, because of this horrible event.”
Kornfeld, who has been a long-time outspoken advocate against anti-Semitism, first rose to fame through his work with the popular online media outlet Buzzfeed as a member of a comedy quartet called The Try Guys. After formally severing their ties with Buzzfeed in 2018, the group members went on to start their own production company and have garnered over 7.5 million subscribers and 1 billion views on their YouTube channel.
Richard Gershon, a board member of the Oxford Jewish Federation who funds and facilitates the Hillel, said the group hoped to attract a larger crowd of university students ready to learn about Jewish culture and anti-Semitism by hosting such a popular creator.
“This is probably the smallest Jewish community I’ve been involved in,” he said. “We’re growing and developing, but I think I think a lot of people don’t know about it … We want people to understand what anti-Semitism is. I think a lot of people don’t really understand that they don’t know what it is.”
Francesca Kirdy, vice president of the Hillel, said that this ignorance and lack of awareness has been the driving factor behind many of the anti-Semitic experiences she and other members of the Hillel have had while at UM.
“There have been anti-Semitic incidences with some members in our Hillel,” she said. “When we confront those incidents, most of the time, it comes down to not understanding what they’re saying and the impact that they’re making … A lot of these people haven’t been around Jewish people besides the South Park jokes they see on TV or the Family Guy jokes. So they’ll just say something that might be offensive to me, but not realize that it’s offensive.”
While these jokes, stereotypes and microaggressions may seem insignificant, Kornfeld said they speak to and exacerbate larger, harmful lies about Jewish people.
“Microaggressions aren’t that big of a deal in a vacuum,” he said. “But the kernel of that kind of joke is a lie, and that lie will then metastasize and grow, and like a snowball, it will continue to pick up. Now 15 years down the line, the person who makes those jokes, and makes those jokes to their friends and to their children, carries with them this idea that Jews are bad.”
Kornfeld said that seeing anti-Semitism for what it is — a combination of harmful lies told over time rather than isolated incidents — leaves Jewish people and their allies with one charge: to look for lies and prejudice, and to call it out when you see it.
“To me, anti-Semitism is not just about Judaism,” Kornfeld said. “It really isn’t. It is the kernel of insidious misinformation and hatred that seems to sprout out at every minority culture. So if you are a Jewish person, I believe this with all my heart, your job on this earth is to reject hatred every single place you see it. It is to recognize those patterns that led to the murder of millions of your brothers and sisters and to ensure that that hatred can never spread again.”
