Is this anti-semitism?

Context is good and useful...just seems a little convenient to me that his artistic/personal motivations fell so in line with the antisemitism of the Nation of Islam. I don't see anything personally or artistically brave about joining an angry mob.

http://www.jta.org/2014/01/27/news-opinion/world/paris-anti-hollande-march-turns-against-jews

I'm of about three minds when it comes to French anti-hate-speech laws. Dieudonné hasn't been funny in ages and he's a hateful tool at this point but giving him so much free press for violating the hate-speech laws and throwing free speech rights into the mix with old fashioned French anti-semitism and general right-wing provocation is awful. I mean he pals around with exactly the kind of ppl he used to lambaste and as much as I support taunting the French establishment, this situation is appalling.

My interest in French antisemitism is more linked to what I see as an inevitable emigration of French Jewry and less about policy recommendations.

As I pointed out up-thread, French Jews are caught between left-wing anti-semites and right-wing anti-semites and the presence of a considerably larger Arab population often, itself, marginalized by racsim, and increasingly anti-semitic. After the attacks in Toulouse, I'm not sure I wouldn't want to leave myself. I saw friends who grew up in the banlieue once united in their resistance to racism and the extreme Right, torn asunder by the Gulf War. When you throw into the mix the differing traditions and outlooks of Ashkenazim from Poland and Germany and Russia and the Shephardim from North Africa, the whole situation gets even cloudier.

I'm sure you know this, but the vast majority of French Jews today are Sephardim. The Ashkenazi community almost entirely disappeared after the war.

It wan't until the 60's following Suez and the 6 Day War that Sephardim outnumbered Ashkenazim in France. I think it's probably about 3/2 these days. I an't find anything on the Crif website and The Republic doesn't officially recognize race or religion.

is it anti-semitic to say "Jews control the media" or "Jews control the financial sector"?

i know that's nagl and i sound like Tuomas, but i grew up in an environment where i wasn't exposed to other ethnicities/religions and yea i really am that ignorant

In general yes.

I was going to ask Shakey for examples where it's not anti-Semitic but I'd rather not know. I'll say that the closest variation to this that is not anti-Semitic is "Jewish people are heavily represented in the media," or "…in finance." Of course even that can immediately become anti-Semitic if you start manufacturing conspiracies from that statistical fact.

cf interesting note there are philosemitic correlations of those - "Jewish people are heavily represented in Nobel prizes," and even philosemites like to play up Jewish contributions to finance, media, along things like civil rights, academia, arts, etc.

Jews are heavily represented in the gem and precious metals trade, in the sense that I don't think I've ever met anyone in it who WASN'T Jewish except that one Italian guy who fixes watches.

Sorry, that's a total aside but that's one world where I don't know of ANY other group having a significant presence, or maybe that's just in New York.

Satmar esp

I guess as a general rule, if you find yourself obsessed with the Jewish people you should think about which particular things are fascinating you + why. conspiratorial thinking is anti-semetic.

Yeah its the "control" part that's ahistorical and anti-semitic. For example its acurate to say that Hollywood's movie industry was largely founded and developed by a predominately Jewish population, but the term "control" implies an organized and cohesive conspiracy type operation, which is a concept with deep and historically explicitly anti-semitic origins.

Rudipherous brought it up on a thread last week and I was pretty offended but let it pass w out comment (it was a fast moving thread)

xxxp Oh huh, I guess my jeweler employer doesn't work with any UO except at that one place and I don't know their background (and they love her)...the rest are all Orthodox presumably? Anyway. Strange world.

ok, right, i can see how "control" implicates a willful conspiracy and how the history of persecution based on that accusation makes that implication anti-semitic. what about this line of reasoning, where does it go wrong?

1. it is fair to point out, in certain contexts, that the representation of 'group x' in 'institution y' is disproportionately high
2. members of religious/ethnic/cultural group x are generally socialized to share the values which are generally held by other members of that group
3. if group x is disproprtionately represented in institution y, there is some cognizable effect of x group's values on the way y institution impacts society/is organized/etc.
4. this analysis can apply to Jewish Americans and, e.g., media outlets

(n.b. i genuinely am underinformed/agnostic about all of this)

also Mordy i don't think you were lobbying the "obsessed" thing directly at me, but really i don't feel comfortable with that as a general proposition. i think there's a risk inherent in accusing people of being "obsessed" with another group when they're genuinely trying to sort out the mechanisms of group dynamics. for example, as an Anglo American, i would feel very uncomfortable telling a Native American not to be "obsessed" with the history of interaction between Europeans and Native Americans.
(if they spend all their time thinking about a group's role/status/impact in society without ever trying to challenge their instincts or even talk to anyone in that group, i agree that that's quite clearly a sign of a problem.)

Pt 2 is wrong. See old joke about 2 jews in a room = 3 opinions

yeah, for part two to work you'd have to say that David Brooks and Sam Seder, since they are both Jewish people in the media, must share the same values.

I'm not sure about your Native American analogy.

Acting as though expressing an attitude towards a dominant culture and expressing the same attitude towards a non-dominant culture are equivalent is never a good look, fyi.

always a problem when someone says any race/ethnicity/culture is somehow inherently predisposed to a certain line of work or interest. there might be long periods of a lot of jewish people in certain fields, but you'd also have to look at things like the work they were prevented from doing in certain nations etc.

Yeah its the "control" part that's ahistorical and anti-semitic. For example its acurate to say that Hollywood's movie industry was largely founded and developed by a predominately Jewish population, but the term "control" implies an organized and cohesive conspiracy type operation, which is a concept with deep and historically explicitly anti-semitic origins.

I would say there's a difference between "control" in a "conspiracy" type way and "control" in a "there was a concerted effort to make films in the period that were not too 'Jewish' because of the rising tide of anti-semitism" way i.e. The Hays Code.

It's also, I'd argue, quite different from anti-semitism to say that being Jewish influenced an outlook and product a la

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&docid=3Fvs3VsO8YybBM&tbnid=D0KUzjcm6NhFcM:&ved=0CAUQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FAn_Empire_of_Their_Own%3A_How_the_Jews_Invented_Hollywood&ei=K33tUtKpJ8rA2QWpsIC4DA&psig=AFQjCNFj9oTYJ1RXGIHRBT55teSvtFbEYQ&ust=1391382171885314

(mind, I've never read the full thing, so there could be some bad shit buried there i'm totally unaware of)

grues control the media

http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/14440/danish_government_bans_kosher_slaughter?print=true

Memo to Rankin: US attitudes to Israel are not enforced by "Jewish zealots". Also, he doesn't appear to realise that ScarJo is Jewish and might have opinions of her own.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/10635778/Rankin-Power-of-Jewish-zealots-led-to-Scarlett-Johansson-resigning-from-Oxfam.html

I don't think that is, is it? xpost

I need to read more about the eugenicist zookeeper though.

well at least they didn't kill jews during ww2 amirite

My wife just the other day told me about a radio story she heard talking about dwindling anti-Semitism in Poland, and I was immediately pretty much, yeah, no way in hell is that happening. Indeed, there was a study just last year or so that showed a drop of, like, 2%, from 65% to 63% or something, of firmly held anti-Semitic beliefs along the lines of blood libel, using Christian blood in ceremonies, etc. And this in a country that went from 3 million Jews to less than 10,000, currently. One theory is that anti-Semitism is so ingrained that people don't even think of it as anti-Semitism. Doesn't stop them from defacing Jewish cemeteries, though.

This is the study I saw:
http://forward.com/articles/191155/poland-poll-reveals-stubborn-anti-semitism-amid-je/?p=all

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/02/25/article-2567167-1BCDD55000000578-343_634x368.jpg

ffs

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/20/imaginary-jews/

interesting stuff. i was pretty skeptical on reading the synopsis you posted earlier but that review is a little more convincing.

it's a really fantastic piece of scholarship (the book i mean) - he does a lot of very careful incisive readings of a diverse set of historical texts. it's not really polemical at all either - more of a intellectual history of anti-semitism in western culture than (like the NYB review points out) a documentation of antisemitic events.

i reviewed it too (w/ far fewer word count) in the jewish exponent last july:
http://www.jewishexponent.com/booked-wrap-up-your-beach-reading-with-these-titles

http://m.chronicle.com/article/Release-of-Heidegger-s/144897/forceGen=1/

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/problem-judith-butler-political-philosophy-movement-boycott-israel

Judith Butler, who has become the movement’s premier philosopher and political theorist,

frightening words

why?

that article linked to this paper which is long but deals in a pretty forthright, intelligible way about the link between anti-semitism + anti-zionism:
http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/2061/1/Hirsh_Yale_paper.pdf

http://spme.org/anti-semitism/professor-strips-thesis-judith-butler-sourcing-calls-rds-retractions-disavowals-scholarship-oppose-bds-interview/16898/

From Mordy's link from two days ago:

Also missing — at least from Butler’s account — is the fact that a comparable number of Jews were forced out of their ancestral homes in Arab lands as a consequence of the establishment of Israel; they and their descendants make up the majority of Israeli Jews today.

Is this true? I did not know this, and I suspect very few of the people I've talked Israel with knows this.

yes- i thought it was common knowledge but maybe not:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_Arab_and_Muslim_countries

fanatics will argue that zionist conspiracies were responsible for undermining the security of jews in those countries (a popular accusation is that zionists were responsible for bombings in egypt + iraq to convince jews to emigrate). i'm sure the state of israel was happy to accept more jews (esp since the state's position has been that all jews should ultimately move to israel - including american jews) but hopefully that conspiracy is self-evidently insane.

the jewish population of france that suffers continued deprecation from soi disant antizionists contains a large number of sephardic/mizrahi refugess from the maghreb

from what i understand they now comprise the majority of the jewish french community, whereas pre-war it was primarily ashkenazi

I don't think a lot about 1948 is common knowledge. I've been thinking a bit about it lately, like, why did so many people flee on both sides. That rarely happens without people being pretty concerned for their safety...

But Israel mainly being made up of descendants of Arab jews I think could be brought up a lot more in discussions of the right to return. Because then the problem isn't, that Palestinians don't have a right to return - since neither does the jews. The problem is, that the Palestinians want to return, and that problem is created by the other Arab countries keeping them in refugee camps (as well as by the fact that Israel isn't a xenophobic cesspool, where the returnees would probably feel less than safe)

It just seems like a really good point to bring up often. (Though, obviously, it's not that I didn't grasp that the Arab countries keeping the refugees in camps is awful.)

I think the exodus of Jews from Arab countries is an important part of the discussion but I don't think it's entirely analogous to the creation of Palestinian refugees, hence I dislike the construction of "people fleeing on both sides"

FWIW though, I often hear the disingenous comment that Palestinians were "not kicked out" but "left of their own free will," as though fleeing a war is ever considered that in any other conflict.