I’m pretty new to following Piker, who will join Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed at two universities next week. I think he first came onto my radar when he interviewed Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before one of their “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies last year. I knew he was a popular Twitch streamer with a significant following among young men—essentially the exact “liberal Joe Rogan” figure that Democrats identified in the aftermath of the 2024 election as one of their greatest needs—as well as an unabashed anti-Zionist critic of Israel.
“Here’s the structural problem with what I do as a livestreamer,” he told me on Monday. “I’m talking for 10 hours a day on very volatile issues, oftentimes from a perspective that most Americans are not privy to, an anti-imperialist framework. These are issues that people closely identify with, so tensions are high. And then on top of that, I have a policy of letting whoever wants to speak in this 30,000-person, Madison Square Garden–size arena.” (That’s the size of his average livestream audience.)
Piker has done almost 20,000 hours of entirely unscripted, off-the-cuff streaming. I spent some time watching a tiny fraction of that footage. What I found left me disturbed—but not about Piker. Rather, I was floored by the hypocrisy and bad faith of those attacking him.
Greenblatt didn’t cite specifics, but Third Way’s Cowan and Cohen, in their Journal op-ed, identified four comments as evidence of Piker’s antisemitism: “He has referred to ultra-Orthodox Jews as ‘inbred,’ employed antisemitic dog whistles (‘bloodthirsty, violent pig-dog’) against an anti-Hamas viewer of his stream, compared liberal Zionists to ‘liberal Nazis,’ and said ‘Hamas is a thousand times better’ than the Israeli state.” Piker has also been attacked for having said, “It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th. It doesn’t change the dynamic for me.”
“It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th. It doesn’t change the dynamic for me.”
“Hamas is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state” of Israel.
Comparing “liberal Zionists” to “liberal Nazis”
Much of the argument that anti-Zionism is antisemitic boils down to a sense that Jewish ethno-nationalism is treated differently than other ethno-nationalisms. But it’s clear that Piker has long demonstrated a universal opposition to ethno-nationalisms of any kind. You can argue that his comparison between Zionism and Nazism is insensitive, but it’s not antisemitic—particularly when you consider that prominent Zionists like Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse recently made a similar comparison, albeit framed (horrifyingly enough) as a positive.
“I’ve never heard that be referred to Jewish people,” Piker told me, referring to “pig-dog.” “Someone showed me there has been one instance where a Nazi called Jewish people that, but I didn’t know that.” To be clear, I have never before heard anyone claim that “pig-dog” was an antisemitic dog whistle. The only other use of “pig-dog” I’ve been able to find was in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which a taunting Frenchman tells King Arthur, “You don’t frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottoms, sons of a silly person!” I suppose one could argue that “bloodthirsty” and “violent” are dog whistles referencing the antisemitic “blood libel” trope, but this comment occurred in the context of an exchange about bloody acts of violence—that certainly seems like a more reasonable explanation to me.
I told Piker that I thought calling ultra-Orthodox Jews “inbred” was dehumanizing and indefensible. He essentially agreed with me, though he provided some important context. “As far as the utilization of the term ‘inbred,’ there’s a 10-minute compilation of me calling white nationalists, white supremacists, racists, neo-Nazis all inbred, because at the end of the day, I just use it as a substitute instead of other pejoratives.” (I checked, and it’s true that Piker does frequently use the term “inbred” as an insult for all sorts of groups.) Having said this, Piker also expressed regret about this comment, saying, “But yeah, I agree, that’s the one quote that’s like, someone could hear that and sincerely be like, ‘Oh, this guy’s actually antisemitic.’ It’s one that I will be more careful not to utilize in the future. Yeah, of course I regret that.”
In his broadcasts and elsewhere, Piker has called antisemitism “a canary in the coal mine of fascism” and “a problem in Western society in perpetuity.” He has said, “There’s nothing grosser than both being antisemitic and then using the cause of Palestine to feed people more antisemitic commentary.” He has shut down the antisemitic trope of a global Jewish cabal—“Zionists don’t run the world.… That just sounds like you’re antisemitic but trying to hide it. No, capitalists run the world.” He has praised Judaism, saying, “The history of the Jewish people is one of withstanding pogroms and resisting genocide” and noting that Jews have “been at the front of any matter of injustice globally, whether it be the Civil Rights Movement in America, whether it be apartheid in South Africa.” And he regularly calls out his followers—risking backlash from paid supporters—when they engage in antisemitism during his streams.
Given this demonstrated commitment to pushing back against antisemitism, I asked Piker whether he thinks it’s possible to arrest its growth. He was surprisingly optimistic.
Between Piker and his critics, it seems pretty clear who’s in a better position to do that shaking.
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