Is this anti-semitism?

Juan Thompson was fired from the Intercept for fabrication.

tweet from three days ago:

@JuanMThompson

The @SecretService visited me looked at my tweets, questioned my politics b/c some awful white woman I date reported me. I won't be silenced

xp he appears to be kind of an MRA type, too? I'm not sure there's a real clear left/right divide amongst those types, but idk. In any case, that still leaves a lot of these unexplained.

tweet from Feb 27:

Juan M. Thompson‏ @JuanMThompson Feb 27

Another week, another round of threats against Jewish ppl. In the middle of the day, you know who's at a JCC? Kids. KIDS.

+ obviously this dude hasn't been traveling the country desecrating cemeteries. still it's insane that at least some of these lead back to a former intercept guy. it's like this shit is scripted. (oh wait.)

This is great news. My gf just had to attend a JCC staff meeting with police last night that did nothing but freak her out more than she already was.

As far as I can tell, he's not implicated in the big national wave of calls, it sounds like he's an insane stalker who, seeing how much publicity the bomb threats were getting, decided to call in some more threats using his ex-girlfriend's name. What a fucking shit cocktail of terrible.

+ obviously this dude hasn't been traveling the country desecrating cemeteries.

Yeah, probably not, but he was arrested in St. Louis, where the first cemetery attack occurred.

http://imgur.com/sUWCRyL.jpg

fuck people forever

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

i sincerely think we could be headed towards a better equilibrium in jewish-muslim relations in America in the face of a common threat

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/03/02/jews-rally-support-burned-florida-mosque-18-time/98630894/

Please tell me that tweet is a bad joke and not the end of a thread, please tell me that tweet is a bad joke and not the... Oh for fucks sake.

lots of MAGA types on twitter triumphantly posting screenshots of this headline from the other day:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6Ak86lVAAAMrXE.jpg

the article is here, under a revised headline, but otherwise unaltered, Juan Thompson being arrested doesn't really contradict anything it says

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/28/trump-suggests-anti-semitic-acts-might-faked-make-movement-look-bad/

Looks like this has made it's way to the greater Cleveland area: http://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2017/03/06/swastika-carved-into-door-of-lorain-synagogue

http://forward.com/fast-forward/366240/end-jewish-privilege-poster-circulates-on-chicago-college-campus/

it scans to me like a right-wing production (the use of the word goyim, discussing 'jews' forthright rather than using euphemisms) but it's interesting how it utilizes left-wing memes (the top 1%, 'privilege') to make its argument. this reminds me of the jacobin piece about compatibility btwn identity studies concepts & far-right racialists/racists.

'the top 1%' is hardly and identity studies concept, though.

i was going to add a line noting the 1% something something socialism of fools vestige but i got lazy

To me it's more that abusers are always trying to turn their victims' words against themselves.

belief in exploitative jewish conspiracy theories is not limited to white supremacists

that jacobin piece is fucking stupid

That's one of the things about these assholes. They insist that they're 'using the lefts ideas against it' when all it shows is that they haven't even begun to understand the terms they're using.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/israeli-man-19-arrested-in-connection-with-threats-against-jewish-community-centers-in-us-other-nations/2017/03/23/15123300-0fcb-11e7-9d5a-a83e627dc120_story.html

A young Israeli man who also holds U.S. citizenship was arrested by Israeli police Thursday in connection with the wave of security-related threats made to Jewish communities and institutions in the United States and several other countries over the past few months, according to the FBI and local authorities.

bizarre

I wonder if Trump is going to crow about this.

don't really care, just glad it's a faraway nutcase and not somebody who might actually be planning to blow up a jcc

that said, i don't think this guy got on a plane and came to america to desecrate people's graves

No, he clearly wasn't responsible for domestic acts of anti-Semitism, and that's part of why I absolutely care that Trump is obviously going to get all DO U SEE about this. Just about the fucking worst case scenario, because now he'll actually have a legitimate example to point to when dismissing hate crimes, which will just further embolden people who are inclined to do this shit.

Has anyone confirmed the guy who called in the threats was Jewish? Or just Israeli? Is assuming every Israeli is Jewish ... anti-semitic?

Or anti-Arab, one of the two.

The religious affiliation of the Israeli population as of 2011 was 75.4% Jewish, 16.9% Muslim, 2.1% Christian, and 1.7% Druze, with the remaining 4.0% belonging to minor faiths such as Samaritanism, Baha'iism or no religion/

Let's blame it on the Druze, for once.

toi and haaretz both have that he's jewish (and american-israeli, and supposedly was rejected from serving in the IDF) - i don't think they'd run it without knowing for sure so i think it's safe to assume the information is correct.

Psh, it's clearly misinformation being spread, since we all know the Druze run the media.

oh man

The teenager, who was born in Israel, has a brain tumor that can affect his cognitive abilities and lead to “irrational” behavior, his lawyer, Galit Bash, said. She would not say whether her client, who she said did not have a criminal record, had admitted or denied involvement.

...

Israeli news outlets reported that when the teenager was arrested, he tried to grab an officer’s gun.

Yikes. But also...this is a fairly elaborate and sustained undertaking to blame on a brain tumor.

i heard they found bitcoins and stuff on his computer and there's speculation that he was being paid to do it?

fuck i hate how much i want to know who paid this kid

paid/groomed whatever

Front page of the London Review Of Books: article about Israel buying super expensive missiles from the US (haven't finished it yet, but didn't see anything objectionable in it so far - it's online at https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n07/daniel-soar/the-most-expensive-weapon-ever-built).

HOWEVER, on the bottom of the page, ads for two books from one publisher - one about the Hebrew language, the other about resistance and compliance within Jewish communities during the holocaust (looks interesting).

Is this probably just a coincidence of who bought the advertising space, or am I right in detecting a sort of hyper-defensive "don't you even try call us anti-semitic for this" stance in the placement?

Princeton university press always have that advertising slot under the first page of the first article, so I think it's probably a coincidence. (though looking back over past issues there does sometimes - not always - seem to be a thematic link between the subject of the article and the two books being promoted?)

i think it's reasonable to assume ppl reading about israel might also be interested in a book about hebrew + jews - i wouldn't read any nefariousness into it esp since LRB has run far more questionable articles before so it's not like they're afraid of controversy.

Having read the whole article now it's barely about Israel anyway so I certainly jumped the gun, sry.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/anti-semitism/real-trump-link-threats-jews/

kinda tendentious if you ask me

Makes no mention of the swastikas/grave desecration, anything that wasn't done remotely.

seems reasonable to me and no less tendentious than multitude of articles that initially blamed it on Trump. Politically inconvenient for sure but probably otm. xp

author tips her hand early on with the line about "media’s hysterical reaction to" antisemitic threats. if one could make the case that there was literally no increased incidence of antisemitic speech/activity in the run up to & immediate wake of trump's election, then one might reasonably characterize the response by jewish organizations and news media as excessive. but i very strongly doubt that such a case could be made. there was every good reason to be focused on the issue. that a couple of disgruntled attention-seekers took the opportunity to cause havoc doesn't negate criticisms of the trump camp's flirtations with the alt-right.

i'm also a little dubious about the author's attempt to spin this as evidence of trump as a potus of action. one might just as well say that the the suspect's recent flurry of activity - and, in turn, the news media's reaction to it - attracted the attention of the intelligence community. and, not coincidentally, put quite a bit of pressure on the trump administration.

to that pt:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/02/17/is-anti-semitism-on-the-rise-does-anyone-care/

wapo article says that it's hard to a) definitively tie this or that antisemitic incident to trump's election, and b) say for certain that american anti-semitism is on the rise. i don't disagree. but nor do those points suggest that jewish political organizations and news media in general should have been less worried about the possible consequences of trump's association with the alt-right.

What do people think of The Alien Corn, by Maugham? I'll admit that I love Maugham, and know very little about anti-semitism, so after re-reading it this morning I was wondering if it was thought of as anti-semitic at all.

He does seem to present British Jews as being 'apart' from 'Englishness', but I'm not sure if he's describing something he perceives or whether there is a normative/essentialist position behind it.

It did make me realise (why it hadn't occurred to me before I don't know) that Jewish people in the First World War faced a double-prejudice because of their 'German' names. Anyway, just an idle question.

I read the story today just to do justice to your question and imo it was a very sensitive treatment of English Jewry and spoke directly to issues of acculturation and alienation. I certainly found nothing in it objectionable or offensive. Even were he to present something normative/essentialist in it (which I don't think is necessary to read and it certainly feels more observational to me) I don't think that would inherently be problematic. I mean I think what you're noticing is this idea that "Jewishness" is baked in, even generations removed. But here it had never completely gone away and the family's Jewishness continued to play a role in their lives - both in terms of neuroticism (as they try to escape it), glib superficiality (telling Jewish stories), and ultimately this kind of direct grappling w/ it (in the case of George). But to that last point it is also a story about being caught between worlds as George observes the Jews in Germany and feels utterly alienated from them as well - linguistically, culturally - he's afraid he'll be thrown out of synagogue for doing something wrong. I quite liked it and I like these twin themes of repression/denial + explosion between this ethnic/religious heritage that they willingly repress but continues to come back, and this artistic urge that literally explodes by the end of the story. Certainly in comparison to some of my favorite writers (like Gogol) this is a world's apart in its treatment of Jewish characters and even Jewish themes.

OT Tablet published this today - http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/231133/gorka-forward-vitezi-rend-trump . nb that I know nothing about Vitezi Rend and have no authority to contest or confirm Leibovitz's conclusions here. nbx2 I went to Yeshiva with a student whose grandfather, a Hungarian poet, was one of the 1,600 Jews that Kastner saved in exchange for condemning the rest of Hungarian Jewry to death. At the time he was studying Hungarian to try and translate his grandfather's poetry. We were fairly close being as how we were the only two (maybe there was a third) students in the school with any interest in literature of any kind. I saw him a few year's later - he was the counselor at a Jewish summer camp my brother was attending. We haven't been in touch since.