Love Island USA: does Gen Z have an anti-Semitism problem?

The seventh season of Love Island USA is taking America by storm. Already, it’s the second-most watched streaming show on television this summer, with a whopping 1.2 billion minutes viewed across the first nine episodes of the series. But it isn’t just the young, attractive singles that have caused a stir recently. It now seems the mere presence of a Jewish contestant is enough to cause controversy.

Last week, a show usually known for providing vapid entertainment took a surprisingly sinister turn. Rather than oohing and aahing over the abs, tattoos and five-inch inseam swimming trunks of the six men, social media erupted with rage. The vitriol was directed at Elan Bibas, a 24-year-old Jewish Canadian who had arrived at Love Island’s ‘Casa Amor’.

Love Island might only be a TV show, and one aimed at a young demographic at that. But such is its popularity that the commentary around it, particularly when it turns hateful, cannot be ignored. In some ways, it reflects the thinking of a generation.

The show’s concept is simple. Attractive singles are sent to an island – in this case, somewhere in Fiji – and must remain ‘coupled’ or face expulsion. The winning couple nets $100,000.

The combination of skimpy outfits and raunchy challenges – examples include ‘kissing booths’ and truth or dare – has proved particularly addictive for a Gen Z audience. The timing of the show is also deliberate: it’s currently summer break in the US, which means students are free to tune into the show on the six nights of the week that it airs. Its booming young audience has developed an almost parasocial relationship with the contestants. Bibas has now found himself at the centre of this cultural phenomenon – not, however, in a pleasant way.

It’s an indictment of our times that Bibas’s entrance sparked an almost entirely predictable wave of anti-Semitism, mainly on TikTok. Although his own social media contains no trace of politics, that didn’t stop some from sifting through years of content to find a supposedly incriminating Instagram post from 2022, showing him on a ‘Birthright’ trip to Israel, which all young adults of Jewish heritage are entitled to. Much has also been made of him following StandWithUs, a non-partisan American charity aimed at combating anti-Semitism.

Things got particularly ugly over the weekend, when Bibas committed the sin of kissing Huda Mustafa, a Palestinian American. Mustafa was challenged to name who she thought were likely to be the two best kissers in Casa Amor. Her first selection was Bibas. The pair duly shared a long, passionate kiss.

Sickeningly, even this display of affection was met with blind hatred. The comment sections of all Bibas’s videos, most of which are of motivational videos or showcases of his style, have since been flooded with emojis of the Palestinian flag. He has been labelled an IDF soldier and ‘Israel apologist’ – both supposedly deplorable things in the eyes of Gen Z TikTokers.

The connection between Israelophobia and anti-Semitism is now impossible to ignore. There was no shortage of people who, as soon as the young man from Montreal stepped foot on the island, went digging for evidence that he had visited Israel. Once they found this, it legitimised their desire to target him. You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief: here was a green light to villainise the Jew.

The demonisation of Bibas is a bleak window to the future. An entire generation associate now Israel with one thing: genocide. For Jews, there is clearly no escape from this pernicious falsehood.

Love Island USA is a dating show. Elan Bibas joined it looking for love. Instead, all he has received is hate.

Hannah Kotkin is a collegiate associate at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a rising senior at Sarah Lawrence College.