Is this anti-semitism?

xp what percentage of the Jewish vote did Labour get last election?

― Mordy, Wednesday, 4 April 2018 16:50 (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Point being that it hasn't significantly changed anyone's minds. Jewish voters who intend(ed) to vote Labour will still do so, those who intend to vote Tory will still do so.

SV: radical Jewish politics have a long tradition not just in the UK but throughout Europe and the US but often that tradition is antagonistic to traditional Judaism (often itself veering into antisemitism - nb I'm not accusing Jewdas on this tho the name is certainly troubling) and represents small percentages of the Jewish community. i think you have to consider when dealing w/ small radical splinter groups that you're potentially poking the community in the eye even more than not engaging at all. you're dealing w/ a group that is openly hostile to most Jews and Jewish groups/practices. i don't have a problem with internal dissent but when an outsider sides with them it gives the impression that *they're* the one playing good jews vs bad jews.

xp i don't know how you can say that. 13% is an extremely low and ahistorical figure for the Jewish vote iirc. (nb i haven't researched this since the election but iirc Labour used to be able to count on a far higher percentage of Jewish voters.)

"jews who mock and dislike mainstream jewish organizations and communities? those are the jews for me."

by comparison Trump got something like 25% of the jewish vote

Is this really a worthwhile comparison??

it's pretty damning imo but explain to me what i'm missing. Trump, a guy who openly fraternized w/ white supremacists, got a higher percentage of the Jewish vote than Labour.

By Yair Rosenberg
May 30, 2017 • 2:06 PM

White supremacists or no, aren't the republicans considered far more pro-likud than democrats?

Oh, and if you want clickbait about Jewish voters:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/04/how-ed-miliband-lost-the-jewish-vote/

Somewhat dubious of a poll in The JC (!) but that figure doesn't sound inaccurate based on my North London centric Jewish experience. Most middle-class Jewish parents I know have been Tories - not their kids, though.

Any thoughts on the phrase MILITANT JEWISH GROUP appearing on the FRONT PAGE of the Mail?

i didn't see the headline but i did look at the jewdas website yesterday and they didn't seem militant to me

more just snarky and irreverent

So for those who israel is *the* issue, that'd be a reason to vote for trump. Clearly that's a minority, however.

This NS (usual caveats etc) article seems to suggest that Miliband picked up a fairly low % in 2015 too?

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/07/can-jeremy-corbyns-labour-win-back-jewish-vote

For reference

https://i.imgur.com/uJJpBgs.png

This NS (usual caveats etc) article seems to suggest that Miliband picked up a fairly low % in 2015 too?

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/07/can-jeremy-corbyns-labour-win-back-jewish-vote

― gyac, Wednesday, 4 April 2018 17:06 (six seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Exactly

i think it's a mistake to break it all down to israel. trump got a lot of orthodox voters who share other things in common with republican party than just israel affection (and some orthodox don't even like israel cf satmar). like they love school vouchers (bc they all send their kids to private schools) and they share certain culture wars tenets. but even if you said israel was the primary motivation surely you're not arguing that as a whole UK jews are more pro-israel than US jews? i mean maybe they are but i see no reason to assume that. & if they are it could only be because they feel more precarious than US jews but that's a whole other thing then where israel is just a surrogate for general feelings of safety/unease etc.

i wonder if w/r/t Trump's percentage of the vote if maybe the primary campaign of Clinton vs Sanders came into play there as well, meaning the bad feelings held towards Hillary on behalf of Sanders by the progressive left, feelings that clearly carried over to the general election, were also shared by a decent chunk of Jewish voters.

I'm not seeing how Corbyn is supposed to appeal to a massively centrist-to-right-wing voting base, short of turning into Tony Blair.

i'd be surprised. ime Orthodox jewish voters (who comprised most of trump's jewish vote) strongly disliked sanders xp

they held the beetroot aloft and shouted fuck capitalism !

Fwiw, the post-election survey with a much larger and less self-selecting sample size suggested that the 26% of Jewish voters opted for Labour in 2017, down from 29% in 2015 (when the Labour leader was, himself, Jewish). The argument would be that, with a broader swing to Labour across most groups, going backwards with Jewish voters indicted that Corbyn was a disincentive for some - and that seems to be highly likely. The vote share has not cratered though.

if you guys would like i could try and take a look at the jewdas haggadah at some point and give my opinion. if it really is openly derogatory and mocking towards judaism (which based on what i read on the website is at least possible) it would be worse than just hanging out w/ some fringe jews and that mail sub could be accurate (even if militant is obv inaccurate and i assume here being used more metaphorically - i doubt anyone believes they're actually armed?)

Don't suppose these articles mention that the Jewish vote here constitutes about half a percent of the electoral total at best? Not a reason to ignore or indeed offend a majority of it but still, as with many other (demonised) minorities here the number is usually thought of as higher than it really is.

not necessary i think everyone understands that jews constitute a tiny minority of a given population even in the US where about half of world jewry is concentrated let alone the UK. it's more indicative of jewish attitudes rather than any kind of pragmatic concern about winning vote totals. nb some ppl would argue that jewish money is important even tho jewish numbers are not but as you can imagine i find that line of thinking creepy at best.

the situation may be very different on the ground in the UK but this seems to sit firmly on the line in US politics where groups that defend Israel's state actions, or have a semi-religious zionist stance (including the weird christian dominionists) are quick to brand anyone not on their side as antisemitic

the plethora of links claiming Corbyn has antisemitic tendencies seem to lean heavily on Daily Mail articles

if anyone successfully rhetorically untangles that particular ball of twine in my lifetime I'll be pleasantly surprised

here's how i break it down more or less: he doesn't have antisemitic tendencies. he's an idiotic ideologue who basically will hang with any fellow traveller no matter what odious views they may personally hold. he isn't particularly sensitive to antisemitism (why should he be tbh) - but it doesn't speak well of anyone's intellect i think who finds useful allies among holocaust deniers or fundamentalist actually militant organizations.

I only heard about jewdas yesterday (thx guido) but the impression that they have given me (as non-Jew) is that they seem quite invested and respectful towards judaism (running free religious lessons in their community, free yiddish lessons etc) certainly there were a number of personal attestations on twitter yesterday from people who had been previously dislocated from their judaism but had found a way to reconnect with it through the prism of jewdas. as I say though I am not jewish and so wd obv defer to experts. just my impression from 24hours as an outsider

like does it make him antisemitic to say hamas and hezbollah are "friends"? no. judith butler called them members of the international left. it's just so fucking dumb (for corbyn and butler). sanders sometimes got dinged for not being appropriately sensitive to racism at times and in some way i think it's similar. it's not really fair to call a lack of concern for an issue synonymous w/ being a bigot, but it is fair to assume such a person might not adequately represent your concerns in such an area.

It's a good job british voters don't give a shit about his intellect in comparison to his policies and human rights record, then. None of the smears about the IRA or the Holocaust or whatever tf have landed on him yet. You do get the odd Spectator write complaining he hasn't done PPE at a Russel group uni though

one of the jewish labour activists from my part of the world (“proudly”) used the jewdas haggadah at her seder. she has been an outspoken advocate for further work within UK labour on combatting and educating about antisemitism

you're dealing w/ a group that is openly hostile to most Jews and Jewish groups/practices.

This is, of course, nonsense. From the post that started this:

Although we enjoy the anonymity, it is a fairly open secret that nearly all of us in Jewdas are synagogue-going Jews, most with either paid or voluntary positions within our communities. With members across the country, for the last thirteen years we have been the only place many people could come to be both left-wing and religiously Jewish.

https://www.jewdas.org/?p=4780

Haaretz seems fine with them: https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-no-one-gets-to-say-who-are-good-jews-not-even-jews-1.5976112

re jewdas religious beliefs i don't feel like i know enough about them to say but "yiddish" alone isn't indicative of much since much of yiddish tradition is actively hostile towards judaism (except in chassidic circles it is a secular competing tradition that was meant to replace traditional judaism). it's important to distinguish between judaism and jewry since they're not synonymous. nb that they very well could be well versed in jewish traditions and texts and drawing from those but otoh their website is explicitly anti jewish parochialism and pro universalism so a move away from judaism per se seems likely. ultimately you do find groups in 2018 in the jewish world who are explicitly jewish but anti anything in traditional judaism. you have to determine to what extent you think that's a legitimate expression of judaism or apostasy whatever. like if you only like that quote about loving the stranger but find the rest of the Torah pretty worthless idk how keyed in you actually can claim to be. sorry this is a bit ot and nb nb i really should emphasize that i don't actually know enough jewdas to comment specifically - just to give a broader topography of the current environment.

daily mail says they’re a hate filled group who mock judaism tho so

Disgusting from Corbyn. He should not be mocking Judaism by raising a beetroot in the air and shouting "fuck capitalism." pic.twitter.com/wlP90mn4lZ

— heartbeeps (@hrtbps) April 4, 2018

but it doesn't speak well of anyone's intellect i think who finds useful allies among holocaust deniers or fundamentalist actually militant organizations

Sure but weighed against his counterparts and their equivalent mistakes and bad judgements plus the demonstrably absurd 'mainstream' bias, asking 'Corbyn seems stupid why do people love him' just doesn't seem amount to much.

he isn't particularly sensitive to anti-Semitism

This is probably true, I suspect you might have to develop a tin ear to mix in the company he's mixed in most of his political life, I couldn't have done it. Also he isn't the sharpest tool in the box.

one depressing thing about all this is in the last week there did seem to be a shift where Corbyn supporters who were previously reluctant to acknowledge any kind of anti-semitism problem in Labour were coming out and saying that there was a serious issue, and that the left and Corbyn personally had not done enough to challenge it, there was some pushback from Corbyn supporters against other Corbyn supporters who were suggesting that it's all a right-wing smear campaign etc - and then there's this attack from Guido that is so incompetent and mendacious that the conversation has shifted back to how terrible the anti-Corbyn media is (which is true and a legit point to make in this particular instance imo, and like Tom says a lot of Jewish commentators who are generally v critical of Corbyn have been offended and angry at the way Guido and the Mail etc have portrayed Jewdas, but is does seem to have killed some of the momentum in dealing with the genuine anti-semitism on the left?)

this is from their website and what gives me pause:

Written in Yiddish (which turned out to be a far older, more authentic language than Hebrew), it teaches of the great radicalism of Jewish tradition, a tradition of dreamers, subversives, cosmopolitans and counter-culturalists. It waxes lyrical on the virtues of cosmopolitanism, putting loyalty to ideas of international justice over tribalism and parochialism, and attacks the opressiveness of the ‘natural’ in favour of ethics designed to meet the face of the other. It preaches of the need to widen Judaism beyond the boundaries of those born Jewish, towards an ethic of wider concern, a Judaism that might at times stand in critique of the Jews. It prophesised a rise of ‘international subversives’ who would undermine power wherever they found themselves, who would preach veganism, pacifism and pickled cucumbers.

none of that is bad but it is a break w/ jewish community as a collective by intention

ok uk ppl who don't actually care about jewishness or antisemitism please stop posting here it's not helpful for you or anyone else

asking 'Corbyn seems stupid why do people love him' just doesn't seem amount to much.

who is even saying this? i know why ppl love stupid politicians. our POTUS is Donald Trump. what does it have to do w/ any of the issues at hand?

soref OTM

ok uk ppl who don't actually care about jewishness or antisemitism please stop posting here it's not helpful for you or anyone else

― Mordy, Wednesday, 4 April 2018 17:35 (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Heh. It's very much the issue here at the moment, so I (we) very much care about it. I've been very concerned to ask my Jewish acquaintances what they think, and none has given me an answer which demonstrates a newly anti-Corbyn opinion after this media campaign. And those who think there might be a mild problem with some of his previous opinions and affiliations also think it's way, way down the list of important factors in their and everyone else's vote.

i mean if you're concerned about antisemitism qua antisemitism or antisemitism qua labour's political chances. if it's the latter probably the uk thread is a better place to talk about how it doesn't matter or it's not a major concern and jews don't vote in such big numbers anyway.

it's striking how intelligent all of corbyn's critics are

you're the one who revived the thread with a commentary about British politics, Mordy!

I care about my Jewish friends and loathe anti-semitism; please don't tell me or others who is allowed to answer you on British political topics where you lack information and are seeking clarification.

Hamas and Hizbollah only got called 'friends' in a single meeting where many groups came together for peaceful discussion; it is part of a long-standing British legal and political tradition where one's opposite counsel/elected official in council chambers and Parliament are addressed eg. 'my right honourable friend', 'my learned friend'. British Tory politicians tried to cast aspersions on Corbyn for this but it got zero traction, probably because of this very old tradition.

like i'll agree 100% that ppl are cynically using charges of antisemitism to try and smear corbyn for electoral gain. that doesn't mean the charges are foundless (tho like i mentioned i think it's more that corbyn doesn't mind antisemites than that he personally dislikes jews).

suzy do you think corbyn would've referred to bibi netanyahu as friends?

i mean with all due respect it's so obvious to me how your opinions on these topics are driven by political necessity it's kinda lame to have to point out that he didn't refer to hamas as his friend because of political tradition.

I think a lot of the arguments about this particular event on social media etc have been fruitless b/c it's really about trust, it's not necessarily that Corbyn's critics object to him going to this event per se, but they don't trust him when he professes to believe that anti-semitism in labour is a serious problem and he is determined to work with the jewish community, and when they see him go to an event held by a group that has downplayed the significance of left-wing anti-semitism it confirms their belief that he doesn't *really* mean it?

so there are these arguments where ppl defend Corbyn on the basis that he never held up Jewdas as being representative of the jewish community as a whole, or delving into exactly what kind of position Jewdas takes on certain issues don't really schange anyone's mind because it's more about a general lack of trust in Corbyn b ased on his entire career and history rather than this one particular incident - I don't think there's any quick fix, just Labour and the left constantly showing that they do take this issue seriously over a long period of time

xp

My opinions are not at issue here. I'm sorry you don't like my answer but that's the answer you're getting.

If Netanyahu came to a meeting like the one I referenced above, he too would be called 'friend'.