Ever since I’ve been writing about slut-shaming, I’ve been called a slut and a whore.

In the 1990s, the age of doorstopper phone books (the kind with white pages and yellow pages), I received alarming letters delivered to my mailbox. In the early 2000s, the letters morphed into emails. And when I began posting on Instagram, the insults followed me there, too.

Over three decades, the insults were consistent: I was called various synonyms for prostitute and vagina, and an ugly pedophile for good measure. The hatred was misogyny—targeted, specific and designed to put me back in my place.

Then Hamas brutally attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel retaliated in a devastating war in Gaza. The insults changed. I am no longer a regular slut and a whore; I am a “Jewish whore,” a “chosenite supporting the porn industry,” and a “whore” whom everyone could agree was bad apart from “tribes who hate Jesus.” 

I had never posted anything about Israel or the fact that I was Jewish—I hadn’t even worn my chai symbol or Jewish star necklace on social media—yet the comments found me anyway, intent on outing me as if to clear up any possible misunderstanding of who I really am. And who am I, really, to the people denigrating me publicly? I experience being called a “Jewish whore” in public as a far more sinister act than when I receive hateful emails targeting me solely for being a woman and feminist because “Jewish whore” is not simply a modular combination of anti-Semitism plus misogyny. It is a container of a more complex tangle of hatreds. 

The Louis Theroux documentary on Netflix about influencers of the “manosphere” makes this explicit. Theroux interviews Amrou Fudl, also known as Myron Gaines, who asked on his podcast Fresh and Fit: “Who pushed feminism? The fucking Jews. Who pushed homosexuality? The Jews.”

We need precise language to make sense of this phenomenon. 

Continue reading to find out what word I coined and why.