We've Gone Viral...

by Diane Joy Schmidt

We've just started working to make short videos about community events to put on Facebook, and later on YouTube and TikTok, and we have put our new student reporters to work on these. Sharing positive images about the Jewish community we feel will naturally generate positive energy and perceptions.

The first video we posted, on the Pride Parade in Santa Fe, went viral to our great surprise – but not for the right reasons. It now has more than 6,000 views and all week people have been posting positive likes (thumbs up and hearts emojis) to combat the negative ones (laughs or angry emojis). We're almost neck-and-neck.

Please add a positive like (a thumbs up or heart) on the video here: https://www.facebook.com/dianejoyschmidt/, which is on my author page. It went viral from that site apparently because it has been up for many years.

Also please follow us on the NM Jewish Journal Facebook page! We're now up to 86 followers (ten of you joined last week, thanks!) and we need over a hundred followers to start getting more traction with the algorithm.

The attention started with a lot of negative disparaging comments, but immediately people started pushing back with replies. (The comment section has since been closed.) The negative comments fall into two groups, the bible-quoting-you're-going-to-hell type, and derisive comments making fun of the parade-goers.

Most views lasted only 3 to 8 seconds — just enough to see it was a gay pride video, not long enough to reach Rabbi Neil Amswych's trenchant comments on the Jewish values behind why Temple Beth Shalom shows up for Pride year after year. With that number of viewers, there is a certain irony in that there were almost no antisemitic comments; the commenters were just reacting to the Pride topic.

We feel overall this first foray into social media is a good thing; it put something out into the zeitgeist, and that alone makes a difference. We hope you will watch the entire 1:45 minute video here, and read De Anda's article, "Come As You Are: Santa Fe's Jewish Community Shows Up for Pride."

We've noticed negative comments showing up on social media reels displaying Pride parades in other cities. It's not new, but it's not right. The majority of the comments made were to mock the parade-goers with comments like 'here come the clowns.'

Jewish readers are likely to be more aware than the general public that 'othering' any group is extremely dangerous. History offers a documented pattern: fascist movements have repeatedly used dehumanizing rhetoric about minority groups as a step toward legal and physical exclusion. This is a pattern well documented in 1930's Italy, Nazi Germany, and other cases. Words that suggest that people are deformed or different may seem humorous, a process that seems to soften and normalize this sort of speech, but there is escalation.

Over the past couple of years, gay pride parades have made overt efforts to exclude Jewish floats over the Israel-Gaza war. We were especially glad to be able to do a story about the booth that Temple Beth Shalom had at the Santa Fe Pride Parade.

Diane Joy Schmidt is the founding publisher and editor of the New Mexico Jewish Journal.

Tori De Anda, 20, a student at the University of New Mexico with a double major in Political Science and Journalism (multi-media), is doing community engagement multi-media work for the NM Jewish Journal.

A generous gift from the David Specter Shalom House Board has enabled the New Mexico Jewish Journal to expand its coverage of community events.

Community Supporters of the NM Jewish Journal include:
Jewish Community Foundation of New Mexico
Congregation Albert
Jewish Community Center of Greater Albuquerque
The Institute for Tolerance Studies
Jewish Federation of El Paso and Las Cruces
Temple Beth Shalom
Congregation B'nai Israel
Shabbat with Friends: Recapturing Together the Joy of Shabbat
New Mexico Jewish Historical Society

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