Is this anti-semitism?

I read some of the article which, seemed fine. James Baldwin on this topic seems pretty relevant. Forgive me for not reeeeeeally caring what good points are made by vicious antisemites, though.

also like

how a philosemitism has been allowed to replace any sort of nuanced understanding of colonialism and the horrors of chattel slavery, particularly in a US context.

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table),

what the entire fuck is this

My inelegant way of trying to explain the way that philosemitism has been coupled with anti-Blackness in US racial discourse as well as the US racial imaginary. That is, an opposition was formed by those already existing as racialized White in the US between Jewish people and Black people, and the Jewish people were given some amount of White privilege as long as they did not band with Black people. It's the same playbook that Ignatiev talks about in re: the Irish, in many ways, the difference being that anti-Semitism is part and parcel of a conspiracist, flattening thinking about power and control in the US as elsewhere, whereas anti-Papist (and thus anti-Irish) tendencies have faded drastically over the years.

philosemitism

You clearly didn't read the article

I told you I didn't finish it!

I'm complaining about you

Too many prominent white Jews have reacted to the rise of antisemitism not by trying to join in solidarity with a broader antiracist struggle but by clinging to the institutions of racist states and accepting the leadership of racist communal organisations. Too many Jews are not seeing antisemitism as being connected to other forms of racism, including the racist and colonial structure of Israel, nor are they seeing antisemitism and colour-coded racisms, with all their specificities, as being imbricated in the structures of racial capitalism. Too many Jews have seen antisemitism as emerging only, and in its most dangerous form, from the radical Left. Many of the arguments mobilised by Jewish (and many non-Jewish) self-styled leaders of the fight against antisemitism have, for years now, singularly failed to stop themselves from engaging in their own racism, while also relentlessly attacking and delegitimising left wing Jews. This past weekend, Wiley’s comments have been met with flurries of claims by prominent Jews and philosemites that antisemitism is somehow allowed to flourish in public life like no other form of racism. This is an extraordinary claim in the world we live in. This claim of exceptionalism has been a constant refrain during endless debates about Labour and antisemitism in recent years. Wiley’s tweets have been linked to the Black Lives Matter movement for no other reason than that he’s Black. It has been demanded that other people involved in the grime scene take responsibility for Wiley’s comments.

I hate when people try to hold me responsible for the words and acts of all Jews. Examples abound of some Jews in recent decades making alliances with reactionary governments and even far right formations. Such far right projects can work through a focus on anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and “immigrants,” dropping traditional antisemitic frames for a philosemitic admiration for Israel and a highly limited construction of acceptable Jewish identity. Figurations of “the Jew’‘ through time are highly adaptable and offer different tropes to suit various political impulses or subject positions. Discourses of the greedy or capitalistic Jew can often be less tolerated by some Western societies, though antisemitic conspiracy theories about the spread of “Cultural Marxism” or around the figure of George Soros are increasingly mainstream on the political Right, as well as among some centrists and even some on the Left. These discourses are peddled regularly by Conservative and Republican politicians, on the front pages of national newspapers and enjoy wide global traction, especially in online spaces. The antisemitic structure and content of such discourses are often denied (or remain deniable) and can sometimes be given cover by Jewish establishment institutions. This is emblematic of the unevenness of how antisemitism is currently received or censured in the public sphere.

When Wiley tweeted: “What do you do when you realise the people moaning about anti Semetic are actually the most racist ones out here?”, in some ways it rings true. Britain’s political and media culture has, in recent years, managed to transform a genuine problem with antisemitism on the Left and in the Labour Party (not to mention in the general public and on the right) into political victories for the hard right and the far right. Boris Johnson can write antisemitic caricature in his novel (the least of his long history of public racism), Michael Gove’s wife can show off their collection of holocaust denial books and eugenic tracts, and the BBC’s Andrew Neil - chairman of the consistently antisemitic Spectator magazine - can have his own foetid history of publishing David Irving in a national newspaper, and face no political consequences for it. Nor has the mainstream’s supposedly deeply held rejection of antisemitism seemed capable of applying these standards to the legacies of rabid antisemites like Winston Churchill and Nancy Astor, both publicly lauded in recent months in the face of largely rejected counter-histories offered by racialised people. These political figures and dynamics of the centre and Right have been able to cynically wield antisemitism as a political cudgel to attack the Left and delegitimise struggles against anti-Blackness and Islamophobia.

As Alana Lentin writes in her new book, Why Race Still Matters, that “the political utility of antisemitism today is not to illuminate the operations of race, but rather to obscure them.” We must apprehend the functions of contemporary philosemitism as a primary and mainstream form of antisemitism, particularly in the West. Such philosemitism, practiced through state power and media discourses, homogenises Jews. It erases our various diversities and works to hegemonise Zionism as an inevitable outcome of Jewish life, rather than as the product of European antisemitism, racism and colonialism that it is. Philosemitism, like Zionism, often erases or deprecates Jewish diaspora and non-Zionist traditions. In recent years we have been subjected to the ugly spectacle of liberals & rightwingers cynically latching onto continuous cycles of “debate” and “controversy” over antisemitism with a gross philosemitism that objectifies the figure of “the jew,” freezes the Holocaust as a detached ahistorical event and cares little about other forms of racism. Lentin again,

publicly performing opposition to antisemitism and support for Israel - the two having been made equivalent - has also become a proxy for politicians and public figures’ commitment to antiracism. Leaning on antisemitism as the sine qua non of racism and associating it singularly with the Nazi Holocaust, reinterpreted as a unique and aberrant event rather than the manifestation of a 500-year process, silences any questioning of this professed antiracism.”

The writer James Baldwin broached these issues, with particular attention to the relation between American Jews and African Americans, in an extraordinary article in the New York Times in 1967. In it Baldwin explicated how the reception and discourses around anti-Jewish racism were fundamentally different to those experienced by Black people in American society. In many ways this is still true. The philosemitic public recognition of the unimaginable horror of the Shoah hasn’t led to the elimination of antisemitism or the discourses that sustain it, as we’ve seen. But Jewish suffering is honoured, even if instrumentally, in a way that the horror, mass death and lasting legacies of slavery and colonialism never have been. Baldwin wrote,

the Jew can be proud of his suffering, or at least not ashamed of it. His history and his suffering do not begin in America, where black men have been taught to be ashamed of everything, especially their suffering. The Jew’s suffering is recognized as part of the moral history of the world and the Jew is recognized as a contributor to the world’s history: this is not true for the blacks. Jewish history, whether or not one can say it is honored, is certainly known: the black history has been blasted, maligned and despised.”

The philosemitic public recognition of the unimaginable horror of the Shoah

This is so fucking tendentious

my mans here should've just copy-pasted the baldwin essay and called it a day

The writer is Jewish.

Also, for the record, I'm half-Jewish. My best friend is one of the main translators of Yiddish poetry in the world, and has dual citizenship. I grew up going to multiple mitzvahs on most weekends.

some of your best friends etc

I can't vouch for the US but my high school history classes devoted a significant amount of time to the Atlantic slave trade *and* the Shoah. I don't know anyone who came away from them with a binary axe to grind, except for a few dodgy motherfuckers.

Lol okay silby, you do you.

I bet you'd say the same thing to Ilan Pappe.

I don't know her

the exact same relevant points are made by people who are rabidly anti-semitic and turning it into an either/or thing where you can either support black people and hate jews, or accept jewish people and denigrate black lives, is the binary that groups that are hopefully fringe are capitalizing on

I think the use of “philo-semitism” is iffy at the very best because it implies that there is a specific affinity for jewish culture or people among those in power that connects an oppressor class. It’s not that. In the UK, from what I’ve observed online and read, there has been a weaponizing of claims of anti-semitism in order to cut down those who are anti-capitalist or socialist. Claiming those further on the left are anti-semitic is just another rhetorical tool used for attack, and it doesn’t imply those making the claims have any interest in jewish people at all! A lot of the people who used that claim are worse!

I think the Baldwin quotes in the article are good, but the framing fails by assuming the people making claims of anti-semitism have the interest of anyone jewish in mind at all. Through actions and words, it’s pretty obvious they don’t give a shit.

if there's anything at all to the charge that the Holocaust is focused on disproportionately compared to slavery & Native American genocide, surely the root isn't "philosemitism" so much as white Americans being cast as heroes/liberators rather than slaveowners/murderers

otfm

Wait, is THIS anti-Semitism?

🤔

The problem all along was that we loved those rotten Jews just too damn much.

rob otm and much more pithy

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed out of philosemitism iirc.

You don't know me, either, fwiw, silby.

The reason I don't think the term is iffy is that in the US, there IS a specific affinity for jewish culture or people among those in power that connects an oppressor class— see the Evangelical Christian honkies who cheerlead for apartheid and talk endlessly about how great Israel is, then say nothing when their constituents fly Nazi flags. Not to mention the anti-BDS legislation that is now on the books in 25+ states, placed there by people who don't give a FUCK about anti-Semitism or their Jewish constituents, but certainly love to pound down on Muslims and Black people every chance they get.

Ah yes, truly an affinity for Jewish culture, they savor it like a fine wine

yes that has anything to do with real Jews

Nothing spells Judaism quite like evangelical eschatology.

rob, I think your point is well-taken, but part and parcel of that is that many Jewish people in the US have been racialized as White, and so the Shoah is rightly viewed as a genocide, whereas Black people need to get over centuries of colonization and chattel slavery.

Make light of it all you want, but seeing as how there are entire books written about the relationship between people like Pompeo and right-wing Jews in the US and elsewhere, it's a little difficult for me to understand how such eschatology can be dismissed as a non-force in global affairs, as well as in discussions like the one we're having right now.

It's the conflation of the alliance between conservatives in the US and Israel with the dubious claim that Jews in the US are pushing an educational agenda to whitewash slavery that is probably the sticking point here.

I'm not dismissing it as a non-force. I'm questioning whether it can be credibly labelled 'philosemitism'. Jews and Judaism are merely provisional tools for these creeps.

xp

presentation of the nazi holocaust as an inexplicable aberration of/from colonial history, obfuscation/denial of its context & antecedents, is a real thing, which can take philosemitic or antisemitic forms (not mutually exclusive)- both tendencies generally condone empire’s racism & downplay/deny its antisemitism- or project it onto colonised people, whose suffering is always depreciated in comparison to the ultimate event, which they are retroactively held responsible for. meanwhile jews are objectified as the ultimate symbol of empire’s righteousness or of displaced responsibility for its crimes & failings (or both at once)

none of this means “the elite love jews too much” or anything classically antisemitic like that but since that trope is already here people can and will run with it in various terrible ways so maybe a different word is needed

It's a real thing where?

Initially misread that as 'a different world is needed' and instinctively nodded in agreement.

xp

Reminds me of that famous slogan about the holocaust, "this was a wild aberration that will surely never happen again."

I don't think Jews are pushing an educational agenda to whitewash slavery... that's the whole part of this that reeks of anti-Semitic, conspiracist thinking that I specifically am against!

But I do think that it is demonstrable that many schoolchildren learn more about the Holocaust than they do about the genocide of Indigenous people and chattel slavery, not to mention continued colonial venturings in Africa.

All of it should be taught. As should the continued anti-Semitism that runs rampant in the US today.

Left, yeah, a different word would certainly be better.

As would a different world.

philosemitic or antisemitic forms (not mutually exclusive)

"philosemitism" is clearly itself antisemitism as it has nothing to do with actually loving/supporting/allying with the Jewish people

It's a real thing where?

― Mario Meatwagon (Moodles), Thursday, July 30, 2020 6:08 PM (two minutes ago)

I don't know how you'd go about proving this, but ime the Holocaust has definitely been treated like a unique, or nearly so, event. I don't think that's a particularly controversial claim?

^that was an xpost...point taken about the fear of it being repeated, but rarely do I see people cite, say, the British empire inflicting multiple famines on India or King Leopold's actions in the Congo as precedents, let alone anything the USA ever did

NB to the best of my knowledge the prominence of holocaust remembrance was in part the work of Jews of the subsequent generation seeking to mourn and honor the memories of relatives they never knew, sometimes against the wishes of the survivor generation, for whom silence was strongly preferred. If genocide in Congo, India, the Americas, then and now, get short shrift in our collective memory I doubt it's because the Holocaust is taking up all the space.

Idk, maybe I have a skewed perception of this. I worked for years at an educational foundation for holocaust curriculum, and a central point of that curriculum was centering the holocaust and anti-Semitism alongside the history of slavery and racism in the US and elsewhere. Perhaps that is an unusual approach to teaching the holocaust, I always assumed it was pretty typical.

silby, we actually agree then! There's room to teach all of the horrible shit.

"philosemitism" is clearly itself antisemitism as it has nothing to do with actually loving/supporting/allying with the Jewish people

yeah, I agree that the Christian right's fetishization of Judaism is not philosemitism, but we shouldn't be thinking of philosemitism as something positive; it implies othering as much as antisemitism does.

if anything I don't really buy that the Holocaust gets all the attention at this particular moment when Black movements in the US are more visible and influential than any prior point in my life, and Never Again Action is out there working against ICE

i was pretty shocked to see the numbers here particularly re millennials https://www.newsweek.com/one-third-americans-dont-believe-6-million-jews-were-murdered-during-holocaust-883513

(not asking if it's anti-semitic)

― Mordy, Wednesday, January 23, 2019 4:47 PM (one year ago)

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/most-americans-say-the-legacy-of-slavery-still-affects-black-people-in-the-u-s-today/

british context:

Why is genocidal antisemite Winston Churchill celebrated as an antifascist hero?
Why does Hitler’s badness automatically become Britain’s greatness?
Why does no one seem to want to know what Britain actually did to make itself so great?
Why do the most publically identified antisemites always seem to be Black, Muslim and/or perceived traitors to empire?
Why do many people only seem to care about antisemitism in the above context?
Why does the UK left dislike Israel so much more than it dislikes Britain?
etc

the education described above does sound atypical in this context

If genocide in Congo, India, the Americas, then and now, get short shrift in our collective memory I doubt it's because the Holocaust is taking up all the space.

― all cats are beautiful (silby), Thursday, July 30, 2020 6:21 PM (six minutes ago)

I just want to be absolutely clear that I agree with this!

An obvious problem with this discussion is we're all reflecting on our own personal experiences of learning history in a range of formal and informal ways. Even in formal education there could be significant differences regionally or over time.