Is this anti-semitism?

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.

The argument isn't about attention, it's about what is taught in schools. Per Rob's point above, it seems pretty obvious to me that among the main reasons the Holocaust is taught more to school children is that the genocide and its aftermath allow for a more rosy vision of the USAmerican project to emerge, whereas teaching chattel slavery and its legacies as well as Indigenous genocide and its legacies implicates the USAmerican project in two ongoing historical acts that are also deeply despicable and tragic.

I've taught Indigenous history and lit classes to students, and let me tell you, none of them know a damn thing about any of it.

Why do the most publically identified antisemites always seem to be Black, Muslim and/or perceived traitors to empire?

Well, Wiley is a Member of the Order of the British Empire after all.

I still don't get where schools in the US are teaching about the holocaust more than about slavery. Is this a known fact or more of a vague feeling?

The very idea that a historical atrocity so vile as the Holocaust could ever "take up too much attention or time" with regards to classroom education and activism compared to other historical instances of racial genocide that it shares some surface level similarities with is.... antisemitic, or at least very problematic IMO. The fact that we still have celebrities brazenly spewing the kind of unacceptable shit like Wiley/Nick Cannon did every week/month/year, while a depressingly large % of the US population is still misinformed or uneducated about the realities of it as evidenced by stuff like that newsweek article shows that, if anything there is still not enough time or at least proper detail and context devoted to it when it comes to how we educate our people about it growing up. The perceived lack of attention devoted to colonial and indigenous genocide in schools by some ppl in this thread doesn't and shouldn't change that; it's not a competition.

I'd also like to point out, I'm well aware of an effort to whitewash slavery in US history textbooks. What I'm more skeptical about is that the people making this happen are doing so by replacing it with a really awesome unit in the holocaust.

from 2018:

Two-thirds of American millennials surveyed in a recent poll cannot identify what Auschwitz is, according to a study released on Holocaust Remembrance Day that found that knowledge of the genocide that killed 6 million Jews during World War II is not robust among American adults.

Twenty-two percent of millennials in the poll said they haven’t heard of the Holocaust or are not sure whether they’ve heard of it — twice the percentage of U.S. adults as a whole who said the same.

“a historical atrocity so vile”
“other historical instances”
“some surface level similarities”
“perceived lack of attention”
who’s making it a competition?

the point isn’t about the holocaust taking up space it’s about, among other things, the civilisation that perpetrated the holocaust disavowing it by portraying it as outside of history altogether, an atrocity caused by nothing, except maybe free floating hatred and madness. what does this serve?

I'm sorry, I find the idea that the holocaust is generally taught as some contextless blob to be utterly perplexing and pretty much unbelievable.

Especially if we are saying that holocaust studies are stealing oxygen from other valuable tooics.