Is this anti-semitism?

i know that's nagl and i sound like Tuomas, but i grew up in an environment where i wasn't exposed to other ethnicities/religions and yea i really am that ignorant

In general yes.

I was going to ask Shakey for examples where it's not anti-Semitic but I'd rather not know. I'll say that the closest variation to this that is not anti-Semitic is "Jewish people are heavily represented in the media," or "…in finance." Of course even that can immediately become anti-Semitic if you start manufacturing conspiracies from that statistical fact.

cf interesting note there are philosemitic correlations of those - "Jewish people are heavily represented in Nobel prizes," and even philosemites like to play up Jewish contributions to finance, media, along things like civil rights, academia, arts, etc.

Jews are heavily represented in the gem and precious metals trade, in the sense that I don't think I've ever met anyone in it who WASN'T Jewish except that one Italian guy who fixes watches.

Sorry, that's a total aside but that's one world where I don't know of ANY other group having a significant presence, or maybe that's just in New York.

Satmar esp

I guess as a general rule, if you find yourself obsessed with the Jewish people you should think about which particular things are fascinating you + why. conspiratorial thinking is anti-semetic.

Yeah its the "control" part that's ahistorical and anti-semitic. For example its acurate to say that Hollywood's movie industry was largely founded and developed by a predominately Jewish population, but the term "control" implies an organized and cohesive conspiracy type operation, which is a concept with deep and historically explicitly anti-semitic origins.

Rudipherous brought it up on a thread last week and I was pretty offended but let it pass w out comment (it was a fast moving thread)

xxxp Oh huh, I guess my jeweler employer doesn't work with any UO except at that one place and I don't know their background (and they love her)...the rest are all Orthodox presumably? Anyway. Strange world.

ok, right, i can see how "control" implicates a willful conspiracy and how the history of persecution based on that accusation makes that implication anti-semitic. what about this line of reasoning, where does it go wrong?

1. it is fair to point out, in certain contexts, that the representation of 'group x' in 'institution y' is disproportionately high
2. members of religious/ethnic/cultural group x are generally socialized to share the values which are generally held by other members of that group
3. if group x is disproprtionately represented in institution y, there is some cognizable effect of x group's values on the way y institution impacts society/is organized/etc.
4. this analysis can apply to Jewish Americans and, e.g., media outlets

(n.b. i genuinely am underinformed/agnostic about all of this)

also Mordy i don't think you were lobbying the "obsessed" thing directly at me, but really i don't feel comfortable with that as a general proposition. i think there's a risk inherent in accusing people of being "obsessed" with another group when they're genuinely trying to sort out the mechanisms of group dynamics. for example, as an Anglo American, i would feel very uncomfortable telling a Native American not to be "obsessed" with the history of interaction between Europeans and Native Americans.
(if they spend all their time thinking about a group's role/status/impact in society without ever trying to challenge their instincts or even talk to anyone in that group, i agree that that's quite clearly a sign of a problem.)

Pt 2 is wrong. See old joke about 2 jews in a room = 3 opinions

yeah, for part two to work you'd have to say that David Brooks and Sam Seder, since they are both Jewish people in the media, must share the same values.

I'm not sure about your Native American analogy.

Acting as though expressing an attitude towards a dominant culture and expressing the same attitude towards a non-dominant culture are equivalent is never a good look, fyi.

always a problem when someone says any race/ethnicity/culture is somehow inherently predisposed to a certain line of work or interest. there might be long periods of a lot of jewish people in certain fields, but you'd also have to look at things like the work they were prevented from doing in certain nations etc.

Yeah its the "control" part that's ahistorical and anti-semitic. For example its acurate to say that Hollywood's movie industry was largely founded and developed by a predominately Jewish population, but the term "control" implies an organized and cohesive conspiracy type operation, which is a concept with deep and historically explicitly anti-semitic origins.

I would say there's a difference between "control" in a "conspiracy" type way and "control" in a "there was a concerted effort to make films in the period that were not too 'Jewish' because of the rising tide of anti-semitism" way i.e. The Hays Code.

It's also, I'd argue, quite different from anti-semitism to say that being Jewish influenced an outlook and product a la

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&docid=3Fvs3VsO8YybBM&tbnid=D0KUzjcm6NhFcM:&ved=0CAUQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FAn_Empire_of_Their_Own%3A_How_the_Jews_Invented_Hollywood&ei=K33tUtKpJ8rA2QWpsIC4DA&psig=AFQjCNFj9oTYJ1RXGIHRBT55teSvtFbEYQ&ust=1391382171885314

(mind, I've never read the full thing, so there could be some bad shit buried there i'm totally unaware of)

grues control the media

http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/14440/danish_government_bans_kosher_slaughter?print=true

Memo to Rankin: US attitudes to Israel are not enforced by "Jewish zealots". Also, he doesn't appear to realise that ScarJo is Jewish and might have opinions of her own.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/10635778/Rankin-Power-of-Jewish-zealots-led-to-Scarlett-Johansson-resigning-from-Oxfam.html

I don't think that is, is it? xpost

I need to read more about the eugenicist zookeeper though.

well at least they didn't kill jews during ww2 amirite

My wife just the other day told me about a radio story she heard talking about dwindling anti-Semitism in Poland, and I was immediately pretty much, yeah, no way in hell is that happening. Indeed, there was a study just last year or so that showed a drop of, like, 2%, from 65% to 63% or something, of firmly held anti-Semitic beliefs along the lines of blood libel, using Christian blood in ceremonies, etc. And this in a country that went from 3 million Jews to less than 10,000, currently. One theory is that anti-Semitism is so ingrained that people don't even think of it as anti-Semitism. Doesn't stop them from defacing Jewish cemeteries, though.

This is the study I saw:
http://forward.com/articles/191155/poland-poll-reveals-stubborn-anti-semitism-amid-je/?p=all

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/02/25/article-2567167-1BCDD55000000578-343_634x368.jpg

ffs

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/20/imaginary-jews/

interesting stuff. i was pretty skeptical on reading the synopsis you posted earlier but that review is a little more convincing.

it's a really fantastic piece of scholarship (the book i mean) - he does a lot of very careful incisive readings of a diverse set of historical texts. it's not really polemical at all either - more of a intellectual history of anti-semitism in western culture than (like the NYB review points out) a documentation of antisemitic events.

i reviewed it too (w/ far fewer word count) in the jewish exponent last july:
http://www.jewishexponent.com/booked-wrap-up-your-beach-reading-with-these-titles

http://m.chronicle.com/article/Release-of-Heidegger-s/144897/forceGen=1/

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/problem-judith-butler-political-philosophy-movement-boycott-israel

Judith Butler, who has become the movement’s premier philosopher and political theorist,

frightening words

why?

that article linked to this paper which is long but deals in a pretty forthright, intelligible way about the link between anti-semitism + anti-zionism:
http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/2061/1/Hirsh_Yale_paper.pdf

http://spme.org/anti-semitism/professor-strips-thesis-judith-butler-sourcing-calls-rds-retractions-disavowals-scholarship-oppose-bds-interview/16898/

From Mordy's link from two days ago:

Also missing — at least from Butler’s account — is the fact that a comparable number of Jews were forced out of their ancestral homes in Arab lands as a consequence of the establishment of Israel; they and their descendants make up the majority of Israeli Jews today.

Is this true? I did not know this, and I suspect very few of the people I've talked Israel with knows this.

yes- i thought it was common knowledge but maybe not:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_Arab_and_Muslim_countries

fanatics will argue that zionist conspiracies were responsible for undermining the security of jews in those countries (a popular accusation is that zionists were responsible for bombings in egypt + iraq to convince jews to emigrate). i'm sure the state of israel was happy to accept more jews (esp since the state's position has been that all jews should ultimately move to israel - including american jews) but hopefully that conspiracy is self-evidently insane.

the jewish population of france that suffers continued deprecation from soi disant antizionists contains a large number of sephardic/mizrahi refugess from the maghreb

from what i understand they now comprise the majority of the jewish french community, whereas pre-war it was primarily ashkenazi

I don't think a lot about 1948 is common knowledge. I've been thinking a bit about it lately, like, why did so many people flee on both sides. That rarely happens without people being pretty concerned for their safety...

But Israel mainly being made up of descendants of Arab jews I think could be brought up a lot more in discussions of the right to return. Because then the problem isn't, that Palestinians don't have a right to return - since neither does the jews. The problem is, that the Palestinians want to return, and that problem is created by the other Arab countries keeping them in refugee camps (as well as by the fact that Israel isn't a xenophobic cesspool, where the returnees would probably feel less than safe)

It just seems like a really good point to bring up often. (Though, obviously, it's not that I didn't grasp that the Arab countries keeping the refugees in camps is awful.)

I think the exodus of Jews from Arab countries is an important part of the discussion but I don't think it's entirely analogous to the creation of Palestinian refugees, hence I dislike the construction of "people fleeing on both sides"

FWIW though, I often hear the disingenous comment that Palestinians were "not kicked out" but "left of their own free will," as though fleeing a war is ever considered that in any other conflict.

Yeah, reading that wiki-article, it's more complicated than what I got from that other article. The jews didn't really come from the countries where the palestinian refugees went, for one, and it was over a much longer period. So the two things aren't really comparable.

I don't think that's precisely correct:

The number of UNRWA registered Palestine refugees by country or territory in January 2010 were as follows:
Gaza Strip 1,106,195[44]
West Bank 778,993[44]
Lebanon 425,640[44]
Syria 472,109[44]
Jordan 1,983,733[44]

Lebanon and Syria both had Jewish communities that emigrated.

Of course the craziest thing is the 1.1m and 778k "refugees" in Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Not to mention Jordan.

Well, yeah, but hardly any refugees in the Maghreb, for example.

Well yeah, they didn't go far. All the above-mentioned countries share a border w/ Israel.

Judith Butler, who has become the movement’s premier philosopher and political theorist,
frightening words

― espring (amateurist), Sunday, March 23, 2014 4:24 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why?

― My god. Pure ideology. (ey), Monday, March 24, 2014 6:42 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well YMMV of course but if I were part of a movement Judith Butler is the last person I'd want as my "philosopher and political theorist." she couldn't philosophize or theorize her way out of paper bag.

whoops last part not supposed to be a quote!

xx-post, well yeah, but it still makes it more complicated than the quite simple quid-pro-quo I had gotten in my mind.

i finally finished that Yale paper i posted above and it's good. some parts are redundant as he clarifies points over + over, and it's long so i don't expect a lot of ppl to read it. here were some parts i thought were interesting/well argued:

Ilan Pappe (2006) argues that Israeli forces are committing genocide in Gaza. The charge that Israel commits genocide, in Gaza or the West Bank, or in Lebanon, is a charge commonly made by anti-Zionists. At first sight, such a characterization would appear to be entirely counter-productive, since while Israeli forces are regularly responsible for serious human rights abuses, they can easily show themselves to be not guilty of genocide. When there is no genocide in Gaza why do anti-Zionists like Pappe continue to assert that there is? These repeated allegations have the effect of demonizing Israel, of implanting and reinforcing the notion that Israel is a unique evil. It simplifies: Israel is the ‘oppressor’, Palestine is the ‘oppressed’ and anything more complicated only serves to confuse this central issue.

The genocide charge is a particular kind of demonization. Genocide has a particular relevance to Israel, which was created three years after the end of the Holocaust. The contemporary claim that there is a genocide in Gaza is related to the claim that Israel uses the Holocaust instrumentally to justify its violence. The charge that Israel is like Nazi Germany functions to neutralize this alleged instrumentalization of the Holocaust. In order to neutralize the Holocaust in this way, it is necessary to normalize it and to distort its reality.58 So anti-Zionists often push a number of myths: (a) what happens in Gaza today is, in some sense, the same as the Holocaust, which is the point of naming it ‘genocide’; (b) ‘Zionists’ collaborated with the Holocaust and so were partly responsible for it;59 (c) ‘Zionism’ is ideologically akin to nazism.60

Pappe (2006) writes: ‘Nothing apart from pressure in the form of sanctions, boycott and divestment will stop the murdering of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip.’ Perhaps his wish to advocate for this campaign is what has led him to make the over-blown claim of genocide; he does not use the term ‘genocide’ to describe events in 1948, which is his area of historical expertise. Yet his proposed remedy today does not seem to fit the alleged disease. If there was really genocide occurring in Gaza, surely a more urgent, powerful and desperate response would be appropriate than carrying on the long, slow campaign for sanctions, boycott and divestment. Pappe finishes by exhorting the world ‘not to allow the genocide of Gaza to continue’. He precedes this exhortation with the words: ‘in the name of the holocaust memory’. The irony is that so long as Pappe employs this kind of political rhetoric, then it is unlikely indeed that it should communicate successfully with the majority of Israelis and Jews. But perhaps he is not writing for Israelis. Perhaps he has given up on building a peace movement and he has given up on Israelis as potential agents for progressive change: ‘There is nothing we here in Israel can do against [the genocide in Gaza]’, writes Pappe. Shortly after writing this piece, Pappe accepted a job at Exeter University in England.

"We’ve received death threats for actually daring to discuss the idea of a boycott of a racist university system within Israel itself. And so in fact the rise in antisemitism is precisely because this equation of being Israeli and being Jewish. We don’t say that but the Israelis do."

Rose is clearly implying here that it is ‘the Israel Lobby’ that sends out death threats to him and his colleagues. And he is right. Because his understanding of the term ‘lobby’ includes everyone from AIPAC, the ADL, the AJC, Campus Watch, Melanie Phillips, to the UJS, the Board of Deputies, the All-party Parliamentary Committee, to Engage, Workers’ Liberty, Jonathan Freedland, David Aaronovitch, Meretz USA - to loony late night green-ink letter-writers who send death threats. All those who stand against Rose’s characterization of Israel as apartheid and illegitimate speak, in his imagination, with one voice, say one thing, adopt one tactic, have one politics. In other words, the ‘lobby’, in the way that Rose uses the term, is a global Jewish conspiracy. Nearly all newspapers, TV stations, websites, publishing houses, Hollywood itself, oppose his focus on Israel as a uniquely racist centre of global imperialism. And Rose can not just be wrong; the fact that most people disagree with him needs to be explained; and it is explained with reference to the existence of a vast conspiracy.

The Liberal Democrats are the centre party in UK politics, generally understood to be politically to the left of the Conservatives and to the right of Labour. Notwithstanding the complexities of such a characterization, they are a mainstream party in British political life and could not be understood as either an extreme left wing or an extreme right wing party. Jenny Tonge was fired as a Liberal Democrat spokesperson in January 2004 after having said that if she had been a Palestinian, she would have considered becoming a suicide bomber.68

There are two senses in which these remarks are interesting. Firstly they demonstrate an ignorance of conditions in Palestine and of Palestinian politics and of Palestinian paramilitary capability. Palestinians respond to the world in which they live in a whole number of different ways; some respond politically, as nationalists, as socialists, as Islamists; some try to look after their communities, as doctors, as teachers, as leaders; some struggle to look after themselves and their families; some are involved in peace organizations and in groups which aim to bridge the divide; some argue for a boycott of Israel; some engage in forms of armed resistance. It is not empirically true that Palestinians have no choice other than to blow themselves up near Israelis. The overwhelming majority of Palestinians find other ways to live and other ways to respond.

Yet Tonge’s premise is that ‘if she were Palestinian’ then she would think differently from the way that she does, being British. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that at the bottom of such a sentiment is an ‘orientalist’ (Said 1978) othering of Palestinians. I am British, so I am a Member of Parliament, I think, I act politically, I speak. But if I were Palestinian then I would not think and reflect and act politically or ethically, but rather I would be driven by rage to the only course open to me, which would be suicide bombing. I would be forced to extinguish my life in a drama of anger and despair because no other form of expression would be open to me, if I was a Palestinian. But the truth is that most Palestinians do not act as though reading from the script of a twentieth century orientalist movie; they do not act the part of the irrational emotional anger-driven Arab, who has no choice and who cannot think beyond their fury. Tonge misrepresents, de-politicizes and essentializes Palestine.