Is this anti-semitism?

JK Rowling had an Asian character called Cho Chang, an Irish one called Seamus Finnigan and a Black one whose last name was Shacklebolt.
Also, consider her recent transphobic novel. When problematic tropes are regularly used by a writer it's not an accident it's what they think.

— Chardine Taylor Stone (@ChardineTaylor) January 5, 2022

she's been very dodgy at best, incredibly questionable at worst when it comes to depicting non-Brit/non-white characters it seems, but she's had a free pass on this for a long time because she's a Blair apologist and a transphobe, and like ufo says, on multiple culture war fronts and a tireless apologist for atrocities against Palestinians etc

Don’t know much about Rowling but I recently did a paper on the moral effect tropes can have (In the technical guise of Gadamer’s “wirkungsgeschichtliches“), basic thesis being “hey, Cain and Abel being interpreted as Jews killing Christ and God commanding Cain to be marked was used in Vichy France as Church justification for marking Jews with the yellow star and soooooooo violent tropes contain the potentiality of violent power no matter how long they remain dormant and should be maimed as they are identified.”

So I think it is a good thing people are noticing this particular furtherance of a violent trope. Regardless of how harmful/harmless it is in this particular instantiating, its the long game to me that is worrisome, especially with how high profile Harry Potter is. If you’re going to go this big, I think you have a moral responsibility to weed this stuff out before it hits the screen but aaaaayyyyyyy there ya go

Fuck Harry Potter and JK Rowling.. nothing more absolutely pathetic than adults who read and re-read these awful, terribly written books for children.

The Twitter discourse around this is really something. Corbyn Vs Rowling: choose who is the cunt that should be fucking demonised. Or perhaps goblinised in this case.

think Tolkien gets away a bit with the dwarves in the hobbit and lotr. haven't actually read the books - actually planning on it after this year, at 37 years old - but I understand they were based on jews, and they are into mining gold and gems and multiple characters go insane because they are obsessed with gold? the Jackson films making them all british or Irish probably has kept this out of the public eye?

The dwarves are fleshed out a bit more, they’re not portrayed as (largely) mercenary traitors, right? Whereas iirc the main goblin with a speaking role in HP sells them out.

the inherent cultural conservatism of JR Tokes or the abundance of dodgy misogyny/christian white supremacy from his pal CS Lewis' books are excused as a generational thing. Like they were born in the Victorian era, how would you expect these fucking pobby Oxford don types of that era to be more enlightened blah blah. I was a 13 yr old goy when I read LOTR and obv didn't think about AS tropes at that age but JKR - who admittedly I've never read! - seems much worse. It's some kind of thing that an author born in 1965 manages to be much more cavalier with them than even JR Tolkien born 80 years earlier in British South Africa was.

The idea that the dwarves are supposed to be Jews is something that never occurred to me at all when I was a (Jewish) kid reading those books, indeed, had never occurred to me until I just this week read something where Tolkein himself makes the connection in an interview -- all I can say is that he did a really terrible job making them seem anything like Jews! Maybe they resemble some kind of stereotypical Jew that exists only in the Anglo-Saxon imagination and which American Jews are entirely not aware of?

Kind of like the way I think I know what anti-semitic stereotypes about Jews are but reading early 20c British stuff I learn that we are supposed to have been, like, coated in a thin sheen of OIL -- really?

Probably for the best that we are deciding to ignore this whole Whoopi Goldberg kerfuffle.

It's really not very interesting to me and as you can see elsewhere in this thread I do like to discuss some anti-semitism

It seems I have posted 87 times in this thread, I may need a hobby

A thing I was thinking just now: do Jews in America tend to have a Plan? Like, keeping passports up to date, looking into what European nationality they might be entitled to, wondering how they would get by in Vancouver or Mexico City

In my circles (notably more secular than Mordy's but religiously involved / synagogue members etc.) I have never heard of such a thing in my life and anyone making such plans would be thought of as slightly kooky. On the other hand, I certainly know Israelis who are trying to figure out how workable it would be for them to move to the US.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Saturday, April 30, 2016 9:56 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

My remarks above are no longer operative and I miss April 2016

The Whoopi thing I feel like was just sort of momentarily airheaded, not really antisemitic. I'm much more concerned about the school district banning the book than I am about her well-meaning but poorly thought out criticism of the ban.

yeah publicly opining about whether Jews are a race is just a minefield. Whoopi's heart was in the right place.

Don't really care about what Whoopi said, but today I learned that she got her stage name because she was gassy, and adopted the last name Goldberg because (rumor has it) her mother didn't think her last name "Johnson" was Jewish enough. Regardless, Whoopi for a long time claimed to be kind of a crypto-Jew, that she didn't practice but that the name "Goldberg" and being at least distantly Jewish was part of her heritage. But then she took part (according to wiki) in one of those Henry Louis Gates know your roots shows and, nope, no Jewish heritage.

I have thoroughly looked into the Whoopi Goldberg controversy and determined that she did not deserve a suspension

it was a tone deaf thing to say but ultimately I think she comes from a good place

wait so crypto is our fault now

Well, yeah.

lol wtf

if it's Chinese food & Holocaust films at Christmas, must be Jewishish. https://t.co/bKyCAzTzvT

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) February 2, 2022

she's posted some pretty unhinged stuff lately, even by her standards

Surprisingly little engagement for something that unhinged.

you want engagement

when I was first married to my (Jewish) husband two Jewish women friends of mine took me aside & said with wry smiles: "Welcome to the club." soon, I knew what they meant.

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) February 2, 2022

Whoopi’s mistakes could be a teaching moment, dunno if a suspension from the show will lead to any learning.

I don't even understand what the "welcome to the club" tweet is supposed to mean

The Jewish wives' club?

https://sjlmag.com/2022/02/08/classroom-nazi-salute-controversy-at-mountain-brook-high-school/

Excellent essay from my buddy:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/arts/television/comedy-jewish-identity.html

The rare anti-semitism chuckle:

I'll give them this at the University of Michigan: they're right that they definitely need to do a lot of work to understand what "anti-Semitism" ishttps://t.co/9qjQRkj0RH pic.twitter.com/viYWBJjCQs

— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) March 10, 2022

ha. It would probably be at least equally funny if they replaced it with "philo-semitism"

what the actual f at the joyce carol oates tweet and i'm a man who's read a lot of joyce carol oates tweets

I'm gonna say yes

https://www.dansdeals.com/points-travel/airlines/airline-news/outrageous-german-airline-bans-jews-flying-lufthansa-supervisor-jewish-people-mess-made-problems-everyone-pay-couple/

Perhaps a more rounded and less hysterical report: https://www.businessinsider.com/jewish-men-barred-from-german-lufthansa-flight-allege-antisemitism-report-2022-5

Still strikes me that there was obvious anti-semitism involved, but I'm slightly more inclined to believe BI than a site that sells airline tickets.

from https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/05/09/florida-banned-textbooks-math-desantis/

He also labeled text featuring data on implicit-bias tests and prejudice as critical race theory and highlighted an antisemitic joke that appears in the book: “Why do Jewish divorces cost so much? Because they’re worth it.”

that sounds like a weird joke to include in a math textbook

I just had an interview with a prestigious scholarship awarding body to help with maths teacher training. They asked for an example of a "diverse mathematician". I gave Emmy Neother, a Jewish woman expelled from her position in Nazy Germany in the 30s.

— Izzy Posen (@PosenIzzy) July 20, 2022

The interviewer said, "she's white and we asked for someone who is diverse." So I said, I don't think that a Jew in Nazi Germany in the 30s is not diverse. Her response was, "You did say Germany, which is a white country, and your pupils might not know about the holocaust."

— Izzy Posen (@PosenIzzy) July 20, 2022

The interviewer said, "she's white and we asked for someone who is diverse." So I said, I don't think that a Jew in Nazi Germany in the 30s is not diverse. Her response was, "You did say Germany, which is a white country, and your pupils might not know about the holocaust."

— Izzy Posen (@PosenIzzy) July 20, 2022

people are getting mad about this and his it sounds like the interviewer's response sounds crass - but is this just an issue of word choice, like if the interviewer had said 'non-white' instead of 'diverse' would that have been OK? I get the impression that the people on twitter who are angry about this would still not think that was OK, that framing anything in terms of white/non-white is implicitly anti-semitic and erases jewish experiences of racism - but presumably the scholarship people are asking this because there are a disproportionately low number of high-profile non-white mathematicians and there is concern that this discourages non-white pupils so teachers should demonstrate knowledge of non-white mathematicians to counteract this, which seems legitimate?

He could have asked them to clarify what they meant by diverse, but Twitter clout is a powerful drug

seems like a clusterfuck all round tbh. if they'd said non-white they would look a bit better but it would still be problematic - like what does "white" mean in nazi germany, how relevant is it that she seems obviously white to people now, why is this discipline still so white anyway, also the whole "white country" can of worms, problems with tokenism, top-down diversity, essentialism... on top of the inevitable bad faith actors piling in on

uncomfortable resonance with the recent (totally manufactured) "did anne frank have white privilege" shitshow the other week

it is a genuine crisis how concern about antisemitism is repeatedly being equated (by "both sides" or whatever) with whiteness/europe & almost necessarily opposed to or in competition with concern about antiblack/islamophobic/other colonial racism in a way that makes all of these problems worse but idk the solution other than the kind of mutual education that requires overcoming a lot of entrenchment at this point

xp
Yeah the tweeter is being obtuse, but this is a good example of why you shouldn't use "diverse" to describe individuals, rather than something more precise like "a mathematician of color" (I would avoid "non-white") if that's specifically what you want to hear about.

The larger problem is conceiving of diversity and representation as an exercise in box ticking. Hard to weigh in on a one-sided anecdote, but it does sound to me like the interviewer isn't actually invested in "diversity" (and the history of race & racism) since I can think of better responses that acknowledged what Posen was saying but still prompted him to answer the desired q. So I don't think it's *just* a word choice problem; I see a lack of genuine commitment, assuming this is a faithful account of the exchange.

Jews would often not have been considered white in the 1930s, if it helps

Also, obviously (unless it isn't), there are many Jews of colour

I assume people don't use the term "non-white" because it centers whiteness

Either way the question is poorly phrased and the tweeter's reportage is dubious

it is a genuine crisis how concern about antisemitism is repeatedly being equated (by "both sides" or whatever) with whiteness/europe & almost necessarily opposed to or in competition with concern about antiblack/islamophobic/other colonial racism

yes, this is v well put

I've no clue how academia has codified diversity, but the US corporate world seems to have adopted an ad hoc rubric that, while flawed and pointedly avoidant of history, at least provides a checklist from HR

My impression is that, for a given group, would an individual be seen as "other" for that group or break some construct of homogeneity, perceived or actual, at this point in time. It's weighted toward positive inclusion, where historical exclusion might be a basis for deeming someone as adding diversity to a group but only if that person would still be a minority (seen as "other") at this time

also, that interview sounds like it was terrible

It seems clear to me that the person was just asking "Can you give me a mathematician from an under-represented ethnic/racial minority" and wouldn't just say that for some reason. If they had said "mathematician of color" that would include East Asian and Indian, which I don't think are underrepresented. Being a female mathematician in the 1930s seems underrepresented regardless of being Jewish, but that wasn't the point here. The point was pretty clearly that black and latino and perhaps other ethnic minority students don't see enough mathematicians like themselves. So the interviewer phrased it in a stupid way, but at some point it starts to feel obtuse to go down this rabbit hole of the positioning of antisemitism in relation to other ethnic/religious/cultural discrimination because there is no problem whatsoever with Jewish representation in math.

When you get beyond that narrow context, I agree that there is a kind of crisis in constructs of racism that impacts antisemitism and also goes beyond it (e.g. the position of Asians as "white adjacent" yet experiencing racial violence at high rates, including from other minorities). But I don't really think that was at play here, this was literally just a dumb way of asking "What is your level of awareness of black and latino mathematicians so you can present them to students in a way that makes them feel represented in a field where they are not historically well represented."

If they had said "mathematician of color" that would include East Asian and Indian

ime there isn't a consensus on whether that is true or not, so you're right that wouldn't have been a good choice either. You're also right that explaining why you're asking the question is key to getting better answers

that's assuming the interviewer understands why they're asking the question

it's increasingly obvious that a lot of people on the right are using antisemitism as a proxy for anti-white and it's really hard to know how to respond sensitively and effectively to this

europe and its nation states are constitutively antisemitic - both european (/christian/white) identity and european national identities constructed themselves significantly through their relations with european history's primary internal other - but somehow they've managed to flip the script and the culture responsible for the holocaust now professes its unique love for jews and israel and claims anti-antisemitism as constitutive to their nation/culture *while maintaining* their actual constitutive antisemitic logics and weaponising all the old tropes against the "new antisemites" (who are usually not white and *always* portrayed as either disloyal or alien to the nation/culture), while simultaneously ramping up all the classical (proto-)fascist dogwhistles about finance and marxism and degeneracy with hardly any pushback

it's particularly disgusting in germany where the whole "we've learnt our lesson" bullshit is constantly being weaponised to exclude allegedly bigoted minorities (including/especially jews) from society, particularly viciously if they express any reservations about either israeli policy or the new tolerant germany/europe (these things get equated conceptually in a weird probably telling way) or dare to suggest that nazism and colonialism have any connection whatsoever

as someone with nazi ancestry I really need to tread more carefully than I probably am here but I've been repeatedly told I need to excuse blatant anti-black and anti-arab racism because of this which seems fucked up in a way I can't really respond to. I don't pretend to understand these things and idk if any of this makes any sense but fuck britain and germany and europe and their smug hypocrisy and violence on this issue it's truly repulsive

booming post. it's such an enraging phenomenon.

Assumed the revive was going to be about Lenny Dykstra and it's somehow even worse, worse than Lenny Dykstra, wow

I mean he's an example of the whole thing