Is this anti-semitism?

It's kind of a lose-lose, either that person isn't anti-Semitic but was nonetheless keenly aware they were doling out anti-Semitic stuff for the sake of ad hominem shock, or that person *is* anti-Semitic, which would explain why they went straight to that kind of rhetorical Godwin's law dead-end extremity when any number of less incendiary insults might have done. I mean, that tweet may not compare Jews to dogs, but afaict it's comparing their *dog* to *Jews* and joking that for that reason it should therefore be left behind, which seems ... worse.

So yeah, unless better knowing who that person is provides some important context, the tweets kind of fails (passes?) the "if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck" test.

particularly pointless bit of hairsplitting here

that kind of "hairsplitting" is literally the explicit named purpose of this thread

any person or group that thinks or tries to raise itself above others is racist!

wtf

Another day, another xzanfar pvmic.

xps the considerable overlap between antisemitism and transphobia/homophobia/(trans/)misogyny which was under discussion makes this participar hairsplitting pointless at best

thought experiment: what if these particular bigots were Palestinian but otherwise saying the exact same things

yes

The narrative being pushed is dangerously accurate in many details, as the Frankfurt School really did want to end Western Civilization and is almost wholly comprised of Jews. This allows anti-Semites to recruit new anti-Semites *who wouldn't have otherwise been recruited*.

— James Lindsay, won't fit in your box (@ConceptualJames) February 4, 2021

Who is this person and what the heck is he talking about

I have no idea but it sounds like some kind of galaxy brain 'the Jews were the real anti-semites all along!' take and it makes me very glad I don't have a Twitter account, yet again.

intellectual dark web culture warrior, popular among the anti-woke/anti-trans crowd, spreading literal nazi judeobolshevik conspiracy theories

To stop the anti-Semitism you must first become the anti-Semitism.

apart from anything else the frankfurt school was way too reverent towards "western civilization" but this isn't actually about them is it

jacob rees-mogg and priti patel among others have also endorsed this nazi narrative with minimal outcry

intellectual dark web culture warrior, popular among the anti-woke/anti-trans crowd, spreading literal nazi judeobolshevik conspiracy theories

― Left, Friday, February 5, 2021 3:36 PM (thirty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This. I feel like you have to be a way too online person to get it, but if you go down the rabbit hole you'll find plenty of outright, overt antisemitism rather than dog whistles -- people who read The Culture of Critique and all that kind of stuff.

That stuff goes through multiple levels of filtration and bubbles into the "mainstream" trumpist right in disguised form. I don't know how many people are or aren't aware of the roots of it -- there's that famous quote about the southern strategy admitting it's about racism but noting that at some point with enough coded language maybe even the target audience isn't overtly aware of it. There are Jews among that crowd so clearly it's lost on some people.

you don't have to go paticularly deep

you might have to be too online to totally "get it" which is how some very mainstream conservatives and even liberals have been getting away with this. I assume the accusations of nazism sound paranoid if you're lucky enough not to recognise this bullshit

I don't think it's as lost on people as it often appears to be though, the antisemitism still works

https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/31128746/massachusetts-high-school-fires-football-coach-anti-semitic-play-calls

I have zero understanding of what actually happened in this story

That makes two of us

It's so vague as to be nonsensical.

..that the words "rabbi" and "dreidel" were also used...

Ah, the evergreen passive tense: 'mistakes were made'. Who said them, and why? I expect so much more from ESPN reporting.

https://www.wbaltv.com/article/massachusetts-high-school-fires-football-coach-after-team-used-anti-semitic-language-in-game-play-calls/35936348

One of the plays was named "Auschwitz".

Oh wait, it says that in the espn article too. Never mind.

Meanwhile in England, people are donning yellow stars with “no covid certificates” on them. Photos from @chloe_adlestone. pic.twitter.com/OCTtFdMFQy

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) April 24, 2021

stupid fucking English people

Behind the Bastards Podcast did a massive 2 part history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion last week which was quite edutaining like. Looked back at hundreds of years of antisemitism which started off as simple oppression of the other but then took on the conspiracy theory thing of they're trying to control things.
Looked at the rise every time there was a period of turmoil. I don't remember mention of the Americas as a potential resettling ground for Jews being kicked out of post-moorish Spain which I've heard elsewhere.
But does look at awareness of the text being plagiarised from a satirical source and the given explanation as to why that didn't matter.
Very good show with guest Langston from My Momma Told Me which is a really good podcast too. About black conspiracy theories and reasons for white ones. Quite amusing.

https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/new-jersey/2021/05/03/orthodox-rabbi-nj-accused-double-life-missionary-israel/4868837001/

performing brisses is pretty deep cover

stupid fucking English people

there's that footage of a German anti-vaxxer doing a speech comparing herself to Sophie Scholl so I'm afraid the brainworms are Europe-wide on this one

stupid fucking Scottish people (... I assume)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-57025065

Why is he wearing a star of David?

this was a relief honestly: https://film.avclub.com/lakeith-stanfield-apologizes-for-participating-in-clubh-1846853124

rough week

Weird ass exchange I just had, just need to write it down somewhere -- I'm outside taking some mulch bags out of my car, and this pickup truck suddenly pulls over, wiry oldish guy driving it, has an accent, starts yelling something to me about whether I'm the new owner and that he knew the old owner. Immediately asks me my background, and then asks if I'm Jewish, I say yes.

He tells me he was just doing some work at a Yeshiva nearby and helping them with their Sukkah. I say that's nice and tell him I'm not "Yeshiva Jewish" but celebrate the holidays - he seems familiar enough with Judaism to understand the distinction. He explains that he's from Poland. He runs a tree service, so I assume he's trying to get some business from me, as he explains that he did work for the old owner. Which is fine.

He tells me that he just visited a Jewish history site in Poland relating to the holocaust. He shows me a brochure in Polish and proceeds to translate large parts of it for me -- it is of course difficult to hear stuff about families who were killed in the holocaust. It feels uncomfortable of course, I guess the kind of thing some people might call a "microaggression," but I figure he mostly means well even though it's like "thanks dude, but I don't really feel like interrupting my pleasant afternoon to hear about the holocaust from some guy in a pickup truck." He seems sympathetic etc. and mostly well-meaning if a little odd.

Trying to be, IDK the right word - gracious? Benevolent? I mention that Poland also suffered greatly in WWII, which I think is a fair point even if Jews had it much worse and some of that was at the hands of Poles. I don't really like suffering contests, and the world wars were all around horrific for civilians and soldiers alike. I mention what little I know about the Katyn massacre, as there used to be a huge Katyn memorial near where I lived. He now starts to explain that Jews who joined the communists turned in the Poles who were massacred (even though, in fact, around 8% of the Katyn victims were Jews). IDK really to what extent that might be true, certainly there would have been some Jews who defected to the Russian communists, and I'm sure some of them did in fact turn people in, but it certainly sounded like antisemitic conspiracy to focus on that. Still I listened, but ultimately diverted him from discussing the holocaust or WWII any further before things got any worse. Finally he started talking about how great Poland is now, even better than the US, because it's "mostly white people" and how "the elites" are trying to bring everyone over here to ruin things, and at that point I said I had to get back to work, nice meeting you etc.

Were you thinking of the Katyn memorial at Exchange Place? Because that's quite a sculpture.

Polish nationalism is awful btw. I feel like the fascist Soviet-controlled occupied years broke something and everyone is deathly sick with this disease that they don't see creeping over them. This is undoubtedly being too charitable to a bunch of anti-semitic white supremacists, probably. Idk maybe it's just the people I know, my boyfriend's family were refugees who fled because of his dad's participation in a resistance group, imprisonment, threats, etc.

The suppression of Polish culture, language, Catholicism, etc for those years means that there's a really weird line between, like, being fiercely proud to express those things again and believing that no one can be "Polish" unless they share every aspect of that. I'm not a historian so I don't know of good parallels of countries who have gone through similar. Maybe it's a pattern. Anyway I'm sorry that guy was that guy. :(

We had a run-in with the whole “restoring Poland’s good name” thing in greenpoint a couple of years back, when we got home I looked up the group that was leafleting us and I was totally disgusted

Were you thinking of the Katyn memorial at Exchange Place? Because that's quite a sculpture.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Friday, September 17, 2021 6:23 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yup! And I felt like it really helped me understand the, uh, Polish psychopathology around WWII, a giant sculpture of a guy being bayonetted through the back.

I also told him about my polish grandpa, who left decades before the holocaust and made suits in Brooklyn. All of my family left decades before the holocaust, which is another reason I don't particularly feel like talking about it with rando pickup truck guy, but probably I'd want to even less so if they hadn't left.

When you don't know whether to post in the "is this anti-semitism" thread or the "Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread"

https://midhudsonnews.com/2021/09/18/member-of-nypd-arrested-for-vandalizing-jewish-camp/

Powerful Sarah Silverman follow-up to Joan Rivers bio casting news, Jewish representation, how her blackface scandal ties in, Falsettos, how it feels to watch gentiles play Jewish caricatures. Captures a lot in 15 mins. https://t.co/DknmlupUrO

— Jason Zinoman (@zinoman) September 30, 2021

Speaking as a Jewish person, I assumed Kathryn Hahn was one of us. She's a Sandra Bernhard type!

fake jews

her performance as a reconstructionist rabbi in transparent was on point

Her sister's a rabbi, iirc.

Hahn, not Silverman, played a rabbi on Transparent.

While I’m sympathetic to Silverman’s argument, she does omit that the Jewiest member of the Pfeffermans was in fact played by a Jew, Judith Light.

does silverman actually complain about Transparent on that pod? The Pfeffermans rang pretty authentic to me, I was also shocked that gaby hoffmann isn't Jewish. Didn't look at the spelling of the last name carefully enough.

Anyway I'm genuinely and shamefully ignorant about Joan Rivers. Was her Jewishness central to her persona?

this was the worst non-Jews playing Jewish caricatures movie I've ever seen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH0cEP0mvlU

I wouldn’t use the word complain, but she cites Transparent in running down a list of shows and movies where Jewishness is integral to character/plot/tone and nonJewish actors are cast to play Jews and to play them in a sort of caricatured way. Which Transparent again isn’t the best example of. And I too was surprised to find that Hoffman isn’t Jewish - her story is pretty wild - she grew up in the Chelsea Hotel and her mother was a Warhol superstar.

I'm considerably more familiar with the mother than the daughter!

I showed the video to my kids and their reaction was basically "well, yeah."

I think the "Jews don't count" mentality has been so pervasive for so long at this point that a lot of Jews have maybe internalized it themselves (myself included). Which is I suppose kind of odd, given that there was a serious and almost successful attempt to wipe Jews off the face of the earth *in my own mother's lifetime.* It's odd to be part of a minority in some ways famous for surviving and being successful in the face of adversity, which, combined with decades/centuries of the anti-semitic tropes Silverman illustrates (Jews are rich, Jews run Hollywood/the world, Jews are smart, whatever) has eroded sympathy and perhaps instilled no small degree of self-consciousness/self-loathing, which Silverman also illustrates, and which critics of her criticism have glommed on to. "If Jews run Hollywood, and Jews produce and write the movies, then why don't they cast more Jews as Jews?"