I'm pretty much out on the edge on these threads: I follow oyceter since I met her at last Wiscon, and I'm very glad to have stuff coming in from directions I don't usually get.
So I've missed a lot in this cable (rope? hawser? - a LOT of threads twisted together), including most of the very beginning.

I have a question, though, which I haven't seen anything addressing. What do you mean by "fandom"? I know the terminology and some of the tropes have been appropriated by ever-widening circles, with ever less knowledge of the histories, but when there's this big flap about anti-Semitism in fandom, I have no clue what you're talking about.
I'm an assimilated American Jew who still takes Judaism seriously. I've been to a couple of hundred science fiction conventions (social gatherings, not commercial expos) over a few decades, and I have no idea who the problem people all this is about are.