Is this anti-semitism?

Oops

thought this was good:
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/187652/my-jewish-feminist-problem

I don't know why this popped into my head since I haven't read it in years, but any thoughts on Cohn in Sun Also Rises? I have heard the portrayal described as anti-semitic, but I didn't find it to be at the time because 1) it didn't seem like the typical Jewish character portrayal and 2) it felt believable to me, this overcompensating, insecure Jewish boxer character. Like I think it's a very fine line, but recognizing ways in which someone's religious/cultural/ethnic upbringing could put insecurities into them, and that a particular individual might react to that in a particular way, even if it's a negative trait, doesn't strike me as anti-semitic per se.

Mordy, I did not think that Chesler article you linked was good. Because like many such articles it features characters like this:

Her tone is no longer light; it has become dark, coarse, mocking.

“Israel?! It deserves exactly what it’s getting. And more. And don’t think America doesn’t deserve what it’s getting too.”

We are sitting a mile away from Ground Zero in New York City.

“Have you no compassion for the innocent?” I say, shocked by her cold, driven, vehemence.

Who are these people? I live in a lefty town and move in lefty circles and I am a big old Zionist and nobody ever acts like this to me. Mind you there are plenty of people who think Israel is wrong a lot. Who would call themselves anti-Zionists. But they don't talk this way. Or think this way.

Also: this is nitpicky but

She answers me by coolly saying that “15 percent of the United States Senate is Jewish. The American Jewish Israel Lobby is very powerful. They will never allow America to broker a just peace in the Middle East.” Actually, the 108th Congress (which includes both the Senate and the House) has 535 members of whom 37 or 7 percent are Jews. But no matter.

According to Wikipedia, 10 Senators, or 10%, are Jewish. I mean, 10% is not 15% but why change the question to one her interlocutor wasn't actually asking, by including the House, just to make the number farther off from 15%? (Note: I do NOT know how many senators in the 108th congress were Jews and I am not going to bother to check.)

But do I think the Chesler article is anti-Semitic? No I do not. I think it demonstrates a lot of antipathy towards Jews and our practices (seriously? She takes it upon herself to stand up in shul and deliver a political proclamation and then she doesn't get it that the people praying there are annoyed?) But I don't think her attitude is predicated on antipathy towards Jews generally, I think it really is grounded in a political disagreement which is prior.

I was also gonna say that any time an essay uses the device of "my anonymous friend said _____" my strawman detectors go off

And I also disliked the move-the-goalposts thing she did with the senate vs the "congress."

https://twitter.com/EVKontorovich/status/549799373153255424

Yes, that is anti-Semitism. Was that supposed to be a hard one?

ok here's a harder one:
http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188052/harpercollins-leaves-israel-off-school-atlas

A HarperCollins atlas designed for students at English-speaking schools in the Middle East published in May 2014 has apparently scrubbed Israel from the region. According to the similarly-named U.K. Catholic newspaper The Tablet, the maps in Collins Primary Geography Atlas for the Middle East “depict Jordan and Syria extending all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.”

Collins Bartholomew, the subsidiary of HarperCollins that specialises in maps, told The Tablet that including Israel would have been “unacceptable” to their customers in the Gulf and the amendment incorporated “local preferences”.

Still parsing this magazine cover, don't know enough French or context (cartoon image, posting as link)

http://i.imgur.com/IW0j7.jpg

A HarperCollins atlas designed for students at English-speaking schools in the Middle East published in May 2014 has apparently scrubbed Israel from the region. According to the similarly-named U.K. Catholic newspaper The Tablet, the maps in Collins Primary Geography Atlas for the Middle East “depict Jordan and Syria extending all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.”
Collins Bartholomew, the subsidiary of HarperCollins that specialises in maps, told The Tablet that including Israel would have been “unacceptable” to their customers in the Gulf and the amendment incorporated “local preferences”.

how is this any different or less odious than publishers eliminating references to evolution, etc. in textbooks to be purchased by e.g. texas public schools?

whether it's anti-semitism or not seems a secondary question since it's clearly an instance of disgusting cowardice

tbh anti-semitism bothers me a lot more than disgusting cowardice

They've pulped the books, fwiw.

That was a pretty egregious and stupid mistake imo. There's disputed borders and then there's pure fantasy.

It's notoriously difficult to produce educational resources 'in line with Saudi norms and standards' . Other Gulf states aren't so bad but if you're only doing one edition, it has to match the most restrictive country. I've never heard of anyone doing this with maps before, though, and it's transparently stupid. I doubt it would have been mandatory.

It's tough. International education companies will inevitably play a part in modernising and secularising the Saudi education system given the chance but it also means they're stuck with compromises they would normally be very uncomfortable with.

Are there similar requirements in the japanese market?

(That kind of market-driven editing seems worse than state censorship to me but then I've never had to live with much of the latter)

It's also such a weird result, like they didn't even call it "palestine" they just extended other countries' borders.

Not sure but Japan typically produces most of its educational resources domestically so it would come up less often. Gulf states are investing lots of money in bringing in external expertise.

Still parsing this magazine cover, don't know enough French or context (cartoon image, posting as link)

http://i.imgur.com/IW0j7.jpg

― cardamon, Wednesday, January 7, 2015 6:55 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's a reference to the film Intouchables; I think the message is that making jokes about Muslims and Jews is not permitted ("faut pas se moquer" = it's not allowed to mock), when in the view of Charlie Hebdo nothing should be immune from satire. There's a lot more to unpack here but I'm not expert enough to be the one to do it.

My sort-of francophile sister-in-law who lived in france for a while told me that she met many people there who couldn't comprehend why a seemingly secular/liberal person would maintain a Jewish identity, or really any identity I suppose.

i got some of that when i was in france, but there are also plenty of proud jewish folks in france who roll their eyes at such talk.

I love the shootout with the baby carriage and the staircase.

More on the publishing restrictions though that's more tangential to this thread now:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/14/pigs-textbooks-oup-authors-pork-guidelines

The Independent led with a report on antisemitism in the UK today:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-new-antisemitism-majority-of-british-jews-feel-they-have-no-future-in-uk-says-new-study-9976310.html

The YouGov numbers are depressingly plausible, as is the CST tracking of rising antisemitic incidents. I'd suggest a note of caution around the headline survey, given that it was coordinated by a slightly contentious campaigning group rather than the CST (which is the main organisation tracking antisemitism in Britain), but it's obviously troubling either way.

been feeling this lately:

My friend Hill Wellford commented on Facebook with a brief but extremely insightful analysis, which aptly sums up how Willcox’s interjection reflects a strain of European thought that helped lead to the Holocaust, and which the Holocaust obviously did not extinguish: “Interesting that there are two contradictory assumptions made at the same time. First, that Jews aren’t really Europeans even when they live in Europe; instead, they are Israelis or at least some form of collectively non-European other. Second, that Jews in Israel/Palestine are not really from there, either, but are some sort of colonizers that is oppressing the natives. The assumption seems to be that Jews are a stateless people, deserving to call nowhere home, but a coherent one that must answer for its collective guilt.”

or as a friend bitterly considered, maybe the con is to chase all the jews into israel so there's only one/easy target. obv very cynical + dark but i couldn't help but remember going to six flags for passover as a kid and waiting outside the gates w/ hundreds of young jews and being told by a friend 'u know if someone wanted to kill a lot of jews this would be a good place to do it' :/

I think that's an interesting analysis. There's a sort of root problem to statelessness that I think the zionist movement, for better or worse, recognized, i.e., when you are a minority group in a country or countries, there are always people who feel you don't belong, that you are foreign, yet without a state you have nowhere else you "belong" either. The strongest critics of the existence of Israel never have a good answer to the question "but where should the Jews have gone?" (during/after the holocaust). They could not easily return to their homes in Europe even after the war was over. Perhaps they could have gone to palestine and established a bi-national state rather than a partitioned state, but it seems that many Arabs living there as well as leaders in the region would never have accepted such a plan. "Where should they go? Not our problem," is what they, understandably, said. The clash of Jews feeling they had nowhere else to go with Arabs who said "not our problem" is what created the conflict, imo.

At the same time, it is true that many Jews living there today are in some sense colonizers or their descendents, and the "natives" are oppressed. So it's not just made up to tar Jews with collective guilt. But there is a certain irony to the nations who pushed Jews there in the first place now complaining about them being there.

i think it's a complicated question but basically for me it ultimately comes down to thinking that myself/jews are very lucky to have the united states in the world - i have tremendous gratitude. a lot of talk in my community this week about staying in the US bc you can't put all your eggs in one basket.

I think a lot about the sort of "american multiculturalist experiment" -- especially living in Queens where there are probably 100+ ethnic/religious sub-communities -- how there is the possibility here for people who wish to create a community, to not fully assimilate, and to be left alone about it. I am more assimilated anyway, although I happen to live in a very Jewish area. There's also the whole "American civic religion" thing, where everyone gets to have their own brand of church or temple as long as it doesn't get in the way too much.

a kind of american libertarianism / (frontierism?) does suit judaism which is so non-hierarchical and thrives so much when it's left alone by the State

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/188290/bds-after-paris

putting myself in the position of a Jewish settler/holocaust refugee in Palestine in the late 1940s kind of tests the limits of my moral understanding. For what it's worth, my wife's great grandfather, who came there in 1920, strongly believed in co-existence and a binational state, although I think he eventually dropped that position once it was clearly not going to become one.

the facts on the ground changed a lot of ppl's opinions. almost all of charedi judaism was against the formation of a state but once it came into being they decided that supporting jewish compatriots was more important than their religious objections to settling the land before the arrival of the messiah.

First, that Jews aren’t really Europeans even when they live in Europe; instead, they are Israelis or at least some form of collectively non-European other

Exactly like Muslims in Europe in other words.

your point being?

i think the author of that paragraph might suggest that muslims, of whom make up a majority of 49 countries, are not stateless in a similar way

Plus ca change.

What is the purpose of coming in the antisemitism thread and saying #whataboutmuslims ?

That wasn't the intention but that's what you want it to be, not much I can do about that.

tom i think the point is that you're doing what a lot of these pieces are discussing - diverting attention from the victims to talk about the faith of the perpetrators. #whataboutmuslims is a way to ignore the issues of antisemitism, or minimize them. i'm not sure what other relevance it has.

Well, I don't want to project any intention onto you, but I think that on one hand, yes, muslims, like Jews, now face the feeling of always being "other" in Europe. On the other hand, that leaves off the second part of the analysis, the "stateless" part, where since Israel is not treated as a wholly legitimate state (and most of the Jews of Europe are not "from" Israel in the sense that a Moroccan immigrant is from Morocco), the Jews are both other and stateless. Not trying to say that's "worse" than the problems of Muslims in Europe, just different.

it does bother me tho that when a muslim commits a violent act, all my leftist friends become very concerned w/ islamophobic blowback, but when a jew is a victim of a violent act, they start talking about the culpability israel shares in generating violence against jews in the diaspora bc of the way they treat the palestinians. i'm sure it's a totally different phenomenon on the right (where it seems like a lot of right-wingers are willing to support jews if it lets them bash muslims), but i don't have really any right-wing friends. i'm a product of the american academy + liberal society so those are all the discourses i'm exposed to.

(xp) OK agreed, that passage just leapt out at me because it's precisely what is said by some about Muslims in Europe and I'm not sure Americans are aware of how often and how loudly it is said. That's all. I am shutting up on this subject forever. On ILX anyway.

In Queens, we're all other, there's no visibly dominant group. It's something I find fascinating every time I ride the subway or move through different neighborhoods.

Many muslim immigrants/refugees are stateless. Kurds, palestinians, sunni iranians or shia iraqis. It's a BIG problem in European populist politics, having signed on to conventions about treating stateless people respectfully.

Don't want to get involved in the discussion, because, true, this isn't the islamophobia thread, and this isn't the right time either, but just wanted to correct. It's still not quite the same as anti-semitism, and I'm shutting up as well.

those are good points

i admit i'm a little grossed out by netanyahu inviting european jews to come to israel, or at least the /way/ he did so.

but of course, "i'm a little grossed out by netanyahu" is something i could say, without qualification, at any time.

bibi is gross no doubt but he's not the reason why french jewish immigration is at such historical highs

yeah, but he's more than happy to exploit that for his own agenda

i think he sincerely believes that israel is the home of worldwide jewry - i don't think his agenda is necessarily more cynical than that