Is this anti-semitism?

I have no doubts that there is a degree of anti-semitism coming from *some* people on the Left, but yeah, it's an easy out for those who want to dismiss criticism.

It's a funny thing because even the most anti-semitic of organisations like the muslim brotherhood have a kernel of genuine beef with Israel that is not in any way related to it being a "Jewish" state. They (perhaps rightly) look upon it as a symbol of Western colonialism, which is not entirely unfair. (I'm not defending the muslim brotherhood here, I'm just trying to point out the inherent difficulties in discerning anti-semitism and anti-zionism and anti-Israel sentiments in any argument ... my friend just last week explained to me how he was a Zionist, but was anti-Israel...it's very complicated).

Personally, it's hard to wrap my head around intelligent people in 2013 being anti-semitic because...ya know...why the fuck does an intelligent person want to discriminate against a specific religion?

http://www.scribd.com/doc/131652687/Recognizing-Hate-Speech-Antisemitism-on-Facebook

Since coining the term ‘Antisemitism 2.0’ in 2008

'Similar images, however, remain on otherFacebook pages. Item 34 in this report includes an edited image of Anne Frank with the caption “#YOLOCAUST”. This is hash tag with reference to the phrase “You Only Live Once” and the Holocaust.'

See I'm wondering if people sharing this around because they think it's funny (in that amoral, internet meme 'humour' way) is more dangerous than the supposedly 'principled' thing of 'let's put a swastika on the Israeli flag to make a Political Point'. You can see what's wrong with the latter a mile off. But the Anne Frank image involves reducing a historical figure to figure of fun/distracts the viewer from the real life and death of Anne Frank.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/anti-semitism-british-muslim-community_b_2922013.html?utm_hp_ref=uk

I posted about that upthread. It's certainly shameful.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2139164,00.html

hungary is a terrifying place right now. worst place in europe to be jewish?

can't imagine greece is great atm either, but much smaller jewish pop

Isolated anti-Jewish events occur occasionally throughout Europe, but the frequency of these incidents in Hungary has accompanied a measurable darkening of public opinion. Andras Kovacs, a sociologist at Budapest's Central European University, found that from 1992 to 2006, levels of anti-Semitism in Hungary remained relatively stable. About 10% of adults qualified as fervent anti-Semites, another 15% had some anti-Semitic feelings, and 60% of the population was not anti-Semitic at all. But beginning in 2006, when Hungary's economy began to deteriorate and far-right parties began to rise, the intolerance started to intensify. By 2010 the percentage of those who qualified as fervent anti-Semites had risen to as high as 20%, and the percentage who said they held no anti-Jewish feelings had dropped to 50%.

as eurozone deteriorates further i think we'll see a resurgence throughout europe

europe doesn't have a great history of economic crises and being nice to jews

About 10% of adults qualified as fervent anti-Semites

this is a pretty fucked up baseline

i wonder what the u.s. % is

more on how scary hungary is rn http://www.newstatesman.com/austerity-and-its-discontents/2013/04/hungary-no-longer-democracy

I think this is a counter to that piece:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/03/hungary-ignorant-nonsense

There's been a lot of noise about antisemitism and anti-Roma sentiment in Hungary. Yes, there's prejudice and poverty in Hungary as there is in every country.

...

im sure the new statesman article is overblown but fischer's column is a lot of handwaving

Changes to the constitution have provoked a furore. Are they good changes? Ask two constitutional lawyers in a room a question, you'll get three different opinions. Hungary has a system of parliamentary sovereignty, just like ours here in Britain, and if citizens don't like the changes, well, they can vote for the opposition and change things back.

changes to the constitution. are they good? are they bad? who knows! no one can ever say

Quite. It's not a convincing rebuttal by any means but the bit about them introducing laws against Holocaust denial and increasing the Roma presence in government is moderately interesting.

yeah, for sure

http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2013/04/yucardozo-update-carter-gave-anti.html

As decades-old tapes from his Church Sunday school lessons reveal, former President Jimmy Carter’s bias against the Jewish state may come more from an old fashioned Christian animus toward Judaism than from concerns over the situation of Palestinians. Carter taught Christian students in Plains Georgia that Judaism teaches Jews to feel superior to non-Jews, that Jewish religious practices are tricks to enhance wealth, and that current Israeli policy toward Palestinians is based on these “Jewish” values and practices.

In a series of sermons Carter recorded between 1999 and 2003 that were published as a CD set by Simon and Schuster called “Sunday Mornings in Plains,” Carter attacks modern Israel by retreading ancient anti-Semitic tropes that go back to the early church fathers and the Judaism/Christianity schism that gave birth to a millennia of Christian persecution of Jews.

1. Jews hate and feel superior to non-Jews: In the tapes, one hears -- in Southern drawl -- his ancient animus: Jews hate non-Jews:

“…this morning I’m gonna be trying to relate the assigned Bible lesson to us in the Uniformed Series with how that affected Israel and how it affects us through Christ personally… It’s hard for us to even visualize the prejudice against gentiles when Christ came on earth. If a Jew married a gentile, that person was considered to be dead. … How would you characterize from a Jew’s point of view the uncircumcised? Non believer? And what? Unclean, what? They called them DOGS! That’s true. … What was Paul’s feeling toward gentiles in his early life as a Jewish leader? [Paul was not a Jewish leader. Ed.] Anybody? Absolute commitment to persecution! To the imprisonment and even the execution of non-Jews who now professed faith in Jesus Christ. … We know the differences in the Middle East. But the differences there are between Jews on the one hand who comprise the dominating force both militarily and also politically and the Palestinians who are both Muslim and Christians. …”

2. Jewish ritual sacrifice is a dodge that relieves one from taking care of one’s parents, while preserving one’s wealth:

“Corban was a uh prayer that could be performed by usually a man in an endorsed ceremony by the Pharisees that you could say in effect, ‘God, everything that I own all these sheep all these goats this nice house and the money that I have, I dedicate to you, to God.’ And from then on according to the Pharisees law those riches didn’t belong to that person anymore. They were whose? God’s! So as long as those riches were belonged to the person, that person was supposed to share them with needy parents right? But once it was God’s it wasn’t theirs and they didn’t have anything to share with their parents. So with impunity, and approved by the Pharisaic law, they could avoid taking care of their needy parents by a trick that had been evolved by the incorrect and improper interpretation of the law primarily designed by religious leaders to benefit whom? The rich folks! The powerful people! Because the poor man wouldn’t have all of this stuff to give to God. He would probably, in fact he might very well have his parents in the house with him or still be living with his own parents.”

3. Carter ties this Jewish feelings of superiority and religious malevolence to current Israeli policy:

“One reason is that the Israeli government headed now by Netanyahu has to depend on the ultra-right or fundamentalist Jews to give them a majority in the parliament which they call the Knesset, and the recent resignation of foreign minister Levy has left Netanyahu with only one vote margin in the parliament. So the ultra-conservative Jewish leaders demand always that they have total control over anything that relates to religion inside Israel, in particular in Jerusalem. Well, I’m not here to condemn anyone but to point out that even within ourselves, there is an inclination for, I’d say, a feeling of superiority. Wouldn’t you think so? Would you agree? I know I have it.”

Carter’s beef with the Jews is not simply a disagreement over how Israel should treat the Palestinians. His is a deep theological hatred of the type that most Christians (including the Vatican in the 1960s Nostra Aetate) have long disavowed. This is not the “new anti-Semitism: it’s the old. All the more indefensible for an orthodox Jewish religious institution to give this man an award.

#1 maybe. the other two, uh no. "that Jewish religious practices are tricks to enhance wealth" -- those practices being animal sacrifices 2000 years ago

READER: Labour peer Lord Ahmed suspended after 'Jewish claims' - What jewish claims? there were no 'jewish claims' - it was antisemitism. The EUMC Working Definition of antisemitism clearly states that one of its manifestations is: “Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.” Racism isnt 'anti-black' - call it what it is: ANTISEMITISM.

BBC: Thanks for your email and please accept our apologies for the delay in replying. We try and stick as closely as possible to the words used, so, in this case we used 'Jewish claims' in the short space available for headlines to summarise his comments.

READER: Thanks for your reply, but with all due respect that is utter nonsense. 'Jewish claims' 13 characters. 'Antisemitism' 12 characters.

but you would need to add another word after it

reading them, i imagine those carter sermons in the voice of mr. rogers

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/128998/poland-undead-gravestones

This is an interesting article:
http://nymag.com/news/features/east-ramapo-hasidim-2013-4/

and it raised some uncomfortable questions for me about anti-semitism and prejudice. You have this discreet and distinctly identifiable group of people behaving, I think, pretty badly to the rest of the population of their area, and they happen to wear an identifying costume and quite deliberately separate themselves from the rest of the community. Under the circumstances, it's not surprising that people are going to say "the Jews" do x and y, even though it's really just this sub-sub-set of Jews. Is that anti-semitism?

That's anti-hasidism. Those dudes are jerks.

Some of the staff where I'm working got called anti-Semitic, in an insane email, by one of our "customers". Despite the fact that no-one knew this person was Jewish. So, that wasn't anti-Semitism.

That article is really upsetting. It seems like the end hits a strange note? Where he goes to sit shiva and is all blah blah community "oh you have to see us in our time of grief to really understand" what the shit? THE SCHOOL DIDN'T HAVE RUNNING WATER. OR CLASSES. Don't educate your own kids if you don't want to, unfortunately that is still your prerogative to have them not learn English or history or in the case of the girls, anything, really. But to systematically dismantle the public school system, in cold blood, because you don't actually care about it or any of the people affected by it because they're not you, and anyway they're unclean, corrupt, and you're a religious extremist, is HORRIBLE. That makes you horrible.

This post kinda brought to you by living around Satmars for a year and having just read Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots.

There are a lot of different chassidic groups. New Square is particularly extremist (they have their own little city!).

i think we can always fairly object to the actual actions of a specific group acting together - even if that group happens to share an obvious characteristic in common, and even if that shared characteristic is often the target of bigotry. reacting to what we perceive as bad behavior isn't really prejudice, it's post-judice (though the one can certainly inform the other).

problem arises when we extrapolate out from the actions of the distinct actor-group in question, expressing large-scale prejudice about anyone who happens to share the characteristics we perceive them as having in common. so it's fine to object to the specific actions of the hasidim in that particular neighborhood, but expressing it as "the jews" do x and y is always gonna be anti-semitic.

Satmar is also really extremist. And they also have their own city! (Kiryat Yoel, supposedly the poorest city in America.) They used to feud a lot w/ Chabad. xp

Yes, I know. I know there are different groups (does anyone actually call them courts?) and I made a little study of ultra-orthodox life and beliefs for a while there. My manager's sister was Lubovitch and lived by me in Crown Heights and went to her daughter's wedding, and then lived in South Williamsburg, all that insanity, plus was just really curious. Mostly I'm interested in people who get out, who deprogram. Also my conclusion is basically that religion makes people terrible.

It's kinda weird imo that ppl keep posting to this thread asking if it's okay to be angry at particular groups of Jews.

No one calls them courts in 2013.

or in the case of the girls, anything, really

in some hassidic sects the girls actually learn much more "wordly" stuff than the boys, because the boys are busy being torah scholars. I don't know particularly about the satmars though.

Kiryas Joel is not a city. It is a village within the town of Monroe.

I don't really grok the distinctions between cities/villages/towns/etc. Is it just about population size?

in some hassidic sects the girls actually learn much more "wordly" stuff than the boys, because the boys are busy being torah scholars.

I would get really really happy to see dads with their boys AND girls at the public library on Sundays, especially after reading on Orthomom (I think?) that it was so controversial to some people.

No

The author of Unorthodox supposedly went to the library every weekend with her mother.

On the other hand, I got suspended from my Yeshiva in 9th grade for illegally visiting the library.

Haha well yeah, her mom, who was gay, and who left the community.

Orthomom, though, was a blog I followed for a while, after that guy who did the secret one, I forget his name now....

The Reluctant Hasid? Something like that. There was an uproar about his identity and he may have stopped blogging.

since we are on the subject, I might as well encourage you to read my friend's piece:
http://narrative.ly/culture-crossings/heretic-hasidim/

orbit is "Unorthodox:" a worthwhile read? I have to be pretty selective about my extracurricular reading these days, so I try to choose wisely.

It's exactly what you think it is, sensational and very clear about who the good and bad guys are. I wouldn't spring for it if I were you, I read it in...a day?