Anti-semitism thread: onwards from 2023

just me then lol

I can kinda see Kate's point in that although the reason Jesus was put to death was largely to appease an unruly mob, the desire to put him to death originated within the Sanhedrin and was largely for alleging he claimed to be the Messiah and other blasphemies. so one could see a connection to 'Jewish people killed Jesus' even though I HIGHLY doubt that's intentional.

what they really seem to be doing is appealing to people who might be otherwise interested in God but have been turned off by religion and saying "guys, religion is man-made, and even Jesus didn't love it, it's ok for you not to love it and love God instead". which is the same wishy washy way people who witness door to door always begin conversations - "I can understand your criticisms of the Church - we have them too!" etc

otm

what they really seem to be doing is appealing to people who might be otherwise interested in God but have been turned off by religion and saying "guys, religion is man-made, and even Jesus didn't love it, it's ok for you not to love it and love God instead". which is the same wishy washy way people who witness door to door always begin conversations - "I can understand your criticisms of the Church - we have them too!" etc

― ain't nothin but a brie thing, baby (Neanderthal)

drag lutheran agonistes

xp yeah that sounds more like a "personal relationship with Jesus" kind of thing, quasi-evangelical I believe in Jesus not religion sort of pitch. I never would have taken it as antisemitic, and frankly I'd be pretty shocked to see a Lutheran church posting an openly antisemitic message publicly given the Lutheran Church's history of having to reckon with Luther's antisemitism.

That’s still really weird as a message on a church unless it’s also known for BDSM ice cream socials… idk I wasn’t raised in any denomination but the more progressive churches here are focused on the church as a place of healing so to associate religion with pain is weird marketing… speaking of marketing and anti-semitism…

For a while there was a billboard campaign for “Jew Belong” and basically saying “you can be secular and Jewish… it’s ok if you eat bacon, you can still be a good Jew”… those went away over the past few months

"Religion Hurt Jesus Too"
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Those Jew Belong billboards were very much what I believe the kids refer to as "cringe"

Also racist & weird (e.g., bottom right on this composite: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/01/jewbelong-billboards-genocide-israel-hamas-archie-gottesman.html)

yikes

Also racist & weird (e.g., bottom right on this composite: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/01/jewbelong-billboards-genocide-israel-hamas-archie-gottesman.html🕸)

most recent Jewbelong social media post I saw said "a keffiyeh on an American college campus is just a hipster swastika"

(so I think their days of nuance and 'hey bacon is fine' are in the past)

grebt

That’s still really weird as a message on a church unless it’s also known for BDSM ice cream socials… idk I wasn’t raised in any denomination but the more progressive churches here are focused on the church as a place of healing so to associate religion with pain is weird marketing… speaking of marketing and anti-semitism…

― sarahell

god we could use some BDSM ice cream socials around here. thing is everything goes through fetlife, and god do i ever hate fetlife

anyway yeah i think the drag lutherans _are_ into "religion as a place of healing" but also, like, a lot of the reason i won't go near a church is because christianity is a source of the lot of the trauma i'm trying to heal from? and i think that's what the drag lutherans are trying to get across here.

i'm sure they mean well but when the progressive christians show up at pride around here people tend to avoid them like we avoid the booth staffed by harry potter fans who aren't transphobic. like, i get the sense that mostly they're working to let go of something that's really important to them more than anything else.

maybe that's just me, though. idk.

hearing about those "jew belong" billboards is super weird to me. in my daily life, i don't really know or see anybody who's defending israel's actions in palestine. well, a couple months back i did go to a comic shop that had some weird flyers, but i haven't been back. maybe there were some of those up around here. i don't get around much. mostly the billboards we have around here are the grotesque "real men love babies" billboards put up by the fucking catholics. textbook example of "patriarchy hurts men too"!

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/podcasts/2024-05-01/ty-article-podcast/for-jews-campus-wars-over-gaza-suck-but-theyre-not-a-violent-antisemitic-nightmare/0000018f-34c2-d0b5-a59f-35c7d90d0000

I really liked Ayelet Waldman’s take here that some of the accusations of antisemitism are a “coping mechanism” for shame, which I think is more accurate than claiming people are cynically “weaponizing” it (which does happen, but I don’t think it describes most people).

“ Waldman, the parent of two children in U.S. universities, also weighs in on the "obsession" with antisemitism on campuses in the midst of the pro-Palestinian protests taking place in Columbia University and colleges all over the States. "I really do believe that [the antisemitism] is overstated," she says.

When faced with the terrible images from Gaza, Waldman asserts, Americans, especially progressive Jewish ones, feel "tremendous shame." The way she sees it, painting themselves as victims of antisemitism on campuses is a coping mechanism of sorts. "What makes you feel better when you're forced to think of yourself as a victimizer? A moment when you can feel like a victim," she says.”

Really eating away at me that the mendacious crowing about antisemitism perpetrated by the unholy American alliance in support of Israeli nationalism is going to just poison the well for actually reckoning with antisemitism in America for the rest of my life

Wish I could count on my coreligionists not to make common cause with christian dominionists over anything

yeah

The coping mechanism thing mentioned there I think potentially has a lot to it. It reminds me a bit of something I read a while ago I think about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where some of mothers or wives organization fought against the idea of that was being pointless, because that meant their sons/husbands had died for nothing. So the war had to gain a reason because then it meant the sons/husbands death was not in vain and they could at least be proud.

I'm not sure if that was the conflict or if it was a different one, article was a while ago, but I wonder if there's something similar in Russia today regarding Ukraine, that the invasion HAS to become justified in peoples minds, because the alternative is worse, and this is how a population is made complicit

I don't like catchphrasey things like 'manufacturing consent' because I think its more complicated than that and in cases like this I think its probably more self-directed than orchestrated, but I can see how and why it might happen

The interview with Waldman starts at about 18 mins if you want to hear the whole thing:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/podcasts/2024-05-01/ty-article-podcast/for-jews-campus-wars-over-gaza-suck-but-theyre-not-a-violent-antisemitic-nightmare/0000018f-34c2-d0b5-a59f-35c7d90d0000

I don’t think she’s 100% awful but waldman is the name I keep forgetting to post to the writers who are bad thread. She was almost going to do some tonedeaf show around the ghost ship fire but then “reconsidered” after the community was vocally wtf about it… She lives near enough to me that we go to the same medical facility

She is annoying sometimes but I agreed with her take on this

https://jewishcurrents.org/anatomy-of-a-moral-panic

^ excellent article

https://i.redd.it/prkj8mig5iyc1.jpeg

This is apparently from US Santa Cruz. I don't think that it's inherently antisemitic, but I think it gets to the heart of a really problematic tension in this whole thing. Hillel is pretty much the center of mainstream Jewish life for non-Orthodox Jewish students at many college campuses (personally I never liked Hillel, but that was for other reasons and beside the point). It also happens to have ties to Israel, just as much of mainstream Jewish life does.

This has sometimes been portrayed as a "cynical" effort to "equate Zionism with Judaism" or to "brainwash" Jews. But I think that's an unfair characterization that avoids the complexity of it. I think these Jewish organizations have promoted Israel because they genuinely attach Israel to Jewish survival and Jewish self-determination. In fact I think even a lot of the most awful people in Israeli leadership feel that way. I mean otherwise it doesn't really make any sense - the purely "cynical" reasons to be Zionist don't seem that strong. Israel isn't a giant oil field or a strategically essential strip of land (at least I don't think it is today). I don't think anti-zionism is anti-semitism, but I think the reason some Jews experience it that way is that Israel is very much genuinely entangled with their sense of Judaism, Jewish identity, and liberation from generational trauma and persecution.

I don't really have an answer to this tension. I don't expect Palestinians or their advocates to accept the idea that liberation from Jewish trauma should have come at their expense. I just think that's what makes the anti-zionism vs anti-semitism issue very difficult. I would prefer that divestment efforts targeted things directly associated with the Israeli regime and Israeli military, even though I don't think the reasoning behind targeting Hillel is entirely crazy.

First sentence of the wikipedia article on 'Jewish population by country':

As of 2023, the world's core Jewish population (those identifying as Jews above all else) was estimated at 15.7 million, which is approximately 0.2% of the 8 billion worldwide population. Israel hosts the largest core Jewish population in the world with 7.2 million, followed by the United States with 6.3 million.

Seems like each one of those numbers and their relationship to one another carries enormous implications for understanding some of the complexities man alive has tried to convey.

Yes, exactly. and that 15.7 million is only roughly the level it was at pre-Holocaust. So it puts many Jews in somewhat of a difficult or uncomfortable position, caught between what might hit them in the gut as right/wrong vs what they have learned to believe is necessary for survival. I mean yes, there *is* a concerted propaganda effort to get Jews around the world to identify with Israel. But many of the Jews targeted by that propaganda also have familial connections to the Holocaust and/or pogroms. I don't so much because my family came to the US relatively early, but my wife does on both sides. In my small progressive Jewish synagogue discussion group on Israel recently, in which nearly everyone in the room was at a minimum pro-Cease Fire, if not outright anti-Zionist, several of the older people in the room of 20 mentioned their familial connections to the holocaust.

One of the things I have tried to confront over the years is this obsession with survival, which I have internalized somewhat, and how it dominates thinking. There's a clip I love in a documentary about Yeshayahu Leibowitz where the interviewer asks him "What can guarantee the survival of the Jewish people?" and he responds: "Nothing."

On some level IDK why I even bother continuing to press these ideas. It feels a little like a lost cause at times. It is hard sometimes to see Zionism demonized, but it also feels like the absolute worst aspects of Zionism are the ones that are winning, so it's a strange place to devote my energy, making this kind of partial defense. I still prefer "post-zionist" to "anti-zionist" for myself only because of the historical background.

Asking to ban this group because of its political ideology is dangerous waters IMO. Obviously campuses should ban outright racist organizations, but Hillel does not strike me as that. I suppose it’s curious though that they will not extend membership to Jews who describe themselves as anti Zionist.

Things get dicier if the university is public.

Xp is that a national Hillel policy or a local
One? Wasn’t aware of that.

Thanks for those posts man alive. I won’t speak for them, but a few good friends have gotten at some of these tensions in talking about how they turned away from Zionism not as a means of rejecting Israel— some are dual citizens, even— but as becoming more in touch with how their faith cannot be defined or encompassed within what is essentially an ideological apparatus that was, at one time not too long ago, “on the fringes,” so to speak.

Xp is that a national Hillel policy or a local

I do not know. I only know what I've seen other jewish people saying on Bluesky (Helen Rosner from the New Yorker, for instance, who posted the following):

http://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did%3Aplc%3Afkpg2nmdux5jxsykgsicpjkq/bafkreic6ba4wd4osjrxmhofr2ebvj3on7fdid46iz7fyqz5y6lccaxbgde@jpeg

which I realize looking at this does not support her contention, and she got a bunch of pushback on it then didn't answer when asked if she was ever in Hillel.

Not understanding how the first point isn’t just incorrect but also an incitement

Being a Jewish AND Democratic state is not possible without continual ethnic cleansing

^ ^ ^

I didn't get a chance to watch this, but the superintendent of our school district was involved in this today; from what I read she handled herself well, though maybe not as well as the NYC superintendent. These people seem better able to handle this horseshit than the presidents of Ivy League colleges.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/08/us/antisemitism-hearing-schools/index.html

Being a Jewish AND Democratic state is not possible without continual ethnic cleansing

yes

Show your work.

Where I am coming from here is that there was a history of ethnic cleansing in Christian countries of Europe… and for the most part, they are not doing anything like this anymore…

I'm persuadable either way here as its not an opinion I hold with strong conviction but what is it that makes Israel not a democracy? I realize this things are on something of a sliding scale with a lot of hybrid regimes out there too but don't know what it is that would push it out of the category entirely

inclined to agree with table here tbh. Any country where there's a state religion and/or explicitly priveleged ethnic class... the track record is not good. With Israel being created with this *specific* goal, is it really any surprise things turned out the way they did.

Basically if Germany got to remain a country after what they did….

inclined to agree with table here tbh. Any country where there's a state religion and/or explicitly priveleged ethnic class... the track record is not good. With Israel being created with this *specific* goal, is it really any surprise things turned out the way they did.

Most countries were founded with an explicitly privileged ethnic class! That is historically the rationale for creating a state (country)… I feel like the recency of Israel’s creation is a key factor

In my reading the demand for Israel to remain "a Jewish nation" means that Jews will always be in control of the government. If Israel has a Democracy and the non-Jewish population continues to grow at current rate they will eventually be able to command political power. Which is why Israel has to remove non-Jews from the voting population by one means or another.

How many of European states in question are still de jure "Christian" in the laws being written and enforced?

Is reactionary hostility to refugees and immigration (or the mainstreamed Islamophobia of a state like France) not a modern version of the ideology that lead to ethnic cleansing in the past?