Is this anti-semitism?

Ultimately the problem with Israel-agnostic Jewish American leftists is that they're too comfortable in the US. They've forgotten that not all Jews throughout the world are as safe as we are here, and they have the hubris to believe that the ways things are now are the ways they will always be. I have a ton of hakaras hatov to the US, but it's important to remember imo that living here puts you in a bit of a bubble

that probably describes me pretty well, actually.

(who thinks the jewish homeland could just be around Avenue A)

But history says that - despite the unprecedented tolerance Jews have in the US (that will hopefully last forever) - it's a good thing to have a backup plan.

I do live in the United States. I don't think Israel is the backup plan for us. I think we're the backup plan for them.

Or another way to put it: what's more likely? That the US of 2050 is an anti-Semitic swamp where my children and grandchildren can't live? Or that the Israel of 2050 is an Orthodox-dominated religious state where my children and grandchildren can't live?

I would flip that and say that it's troubling, if sort of understandable, that Jewish existence should be predicated on feeling threatened as the default mode of being. And I think that the context of the holocaust is causing the treatment of incidents that do not actually threaten the existence of Jews as a community in various European countries as though they do. In other words, some racist attacks against Jews is not the same thing as being on the verge of another holocaust. Some racist attacks against Jews will always happen. Some racist attacks against Jews happen within Israel too. I don't accept at all the idea that this "troubling rise in antisemitism" is swelling to some inevitable crest in mass atrocity, in fact I find little evidence of such.

um, that was kind of my point.

Sorry, now I get what you meant, pardon my snark...

I do live in the United States. I don't think Israel is the backup plan for us. I think we're the backup plan for them.

I think it works both ways (don't put eggs in one basket) but I can't predict the future and I don't know if either of those events are likely. I think we're really bad at long-thinking + projection and we assume that the way things are now is the way they'll always be.

Can't the same be said for Israelis?

The famous example are Jews in Berlin who in 1934 said "oh no, we are at home here, this will never happen, etc"

xp what do you mean? i agree, all humans have this shortcoming. we think we can predict the future but we're really really bad at it.

I mean Israelis are also guilty of thinking "we can maintain this forever, we can keep Israel a Jewish majority state and totally safe," not to mention "we can keep the occupation going as long as we need to, we can keep expanding settlements as needed," etc.

I think it works both ways (don't put eggs in one basket)

But the point is that this is exactly the opposite of the Netanyahu/Tablet line, which holds that Israel and Israel alone is the guarantor of my grandchildren's safety.

The famous example are Jews in Berlin who in 1934 said "oh no, we are at home here, this will never happen, etc"

― Mordy, Wednesday, January 14, 2015 5:04 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If the United States elects a president who has written an openly paranoid and anti-semitic memoir, I will probably change my tune.

xp right we're all guilty of it. when liberal zionists promote a pal state in the west bank and an israeli withdrawal from the occupation, they can't guarantee that the wb won't become gaza 2.0. they can't even guarantee that it will lead to be results for any of the actors involved than indefinite occupation.

But the point is that this is exactly the opposite of the Netanyahu/Tablet line, which holds that Israel and Israel alone is the guarantor of my grandchildren's safety.

...which in turn he uses to give credibility to /his/ vision of israel, which is as a much more closed, bigoted, religious state than what it has been in the past.

lead to better* results

If the United States elects a president who has written an openly paranoid and anti-semitic memoir, I will probably change my tune.

ok but once that dude gets elected you can't just set up a jewish state really quick. it has to already exist.

the other argument is kinda the more incredulous one bc if you look at jewish history it's more likely to get killed/expelled from a country than it is to stay there indefinitely. i do believe that the US is a unique case but not enough to say, 'ok, US is safe we can get rid of israel now'

also it's weird to me for someone who is otherwise very, very critical of the US and believes the US is capable of horrific acts against its own citizens to believe that it is a guarantee forever of jewish safety.

This breaks down the data behind the YouGov poll by region, political orientation and age:

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/921pn4p2fh/CampaignAgainstAntisemitismResults_MergedFile_W.pdf

Does suggest antisemitism is stronger in Conservatives / UKIP supporters but obvious commonalities across the spectrum.

the other argument is kinda the more incredulous one bc if you look at jewish history it's more likely to get killed/expelled from a country than it is to stay there indefinitely. i do believe that the US is a unique case but not enough to say, 'ok, US is safe we can get rid of israel now'

― Mordy, Wednesday, January 14, 2015 4:18 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also it's weird to me for someone who is otherwise very, very critical of the US and believes the US is capable of horrific acts against its own citizens to believe that it is a guarantee forever of jewish safety.

― Mordy, Wednesday, January 14, 2015 4:19 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

see, i rather agree with you about this, and am skeptical of the idea of the U.S. as a classless/colorless/neutral meritocracy as much as i'm skeptical about that idea of any other country. otoh, given this, i think it's unfair to label people who agree with the statement "Jews' loyalty to Israel makes them less loyal to Israel than other British people" (see SV's post) anti-semitic. that's damn near a truism!

i don't think there's any reason Jews shouldn't, as an ethical matter, be less loyal to the countries they live in than a Jewish state. but if one of your reasons for advocating the existence of a Jewish state is that you don't trust the non-Jewish country you live in not to "kill/expel" you for being Jewish, it really stretches the meaning of the word "loyalty" beyond any meaning to say that you're just as loyal to the non-Jewish state as anyone who isn't loyal to Israel.

(xp) Also suggests London is most anti-Semitic and Scotland least!

xp i guess i don't think that loyalty is a zero-sum game.

the anti-immigrant/nationalist tradition of insinuating that an ethnic/~foreign~ minority cares more about their home country whatever that means than their country of residence where they may have also been born and that is to the detriment of the country in which they reside

do people who think heaven's cool care about the earth

i don't think there's any reason Jews shouldn't, as an ethical matter, be less loyal to the countries they live in than a Jewish state. but if one of your reasons for advocating the existence of a Jewish state is that you don't trust the non-Jewish country you live in not to "kill/expel" you for being Jewish, it really stretches the meaning of the word "loyalty" beyond any meaning to say that you're just as loyal to the non-Jewish state as anyone who isn't loyal to Israel.

― een, Thursday, 15 January 2015 12:12 (2 hours ago) Permalink

Actually I would say you're the one stretching the meaning of the word "loyalty" -- fear seems like a separate concept to me.

Pretty on-point Haaretz cartoon

http://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.636994.1421209895!/image/1024171360.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_640/1024171360.jpg

seems about right.

in a dark half-acknowledged corner of our minds, that there is one state in the world—however imperfect it is in some of its particulars—where we and our children will be welcome

you couldn't pay me to live in Israel tbh. I'm cool with it existing - hopefully in some form different than its present one - but gtfo with that projection shit.

Abouaf insisted that I sit with him to watch a video that had spread widely after the incident, under a headline announcing that Serge Benhaim – the president of the synagogue – denied any attack had taken place. The video shows a young journalist, Julien Nény, repeatedly asserting in an interview with Benhaim that the violence had been instigated by the notorious Jewish Defence League; his questions to Benhaim focus on the reputation of the JDL for violence rather than on the events of the afternoon. Under Nény’s insistent questioning, the quietly spoken Benhaim repeats that “that version of events is wrong” Eventually, the spooling, repetitive question-and-answer becomes hard to follow. It was only after watching the video four times that I understood: Benhaim is repeatedly denying, in the same phrase, Nény’s repeated suggestion that the violence had been provoked by the JDL. His endlessly looping denial ends up being twisted by Nény’s bullying persistence into the opposite of what he is saying – it sounds as though he is denying that the synagogue was attacked. It’s an impressive journalistic sleight of hand, so successful, indeed, that it made its way round the world, written about by journalists who may have simply read the headline and not even bothered to watch the video – evidence, perhaps, of a surprisingly widespread taste for the notion that antisemitic violence is a chimera, faked by Jews and supported by the government as part of a strategy to demonise Muslims in France and elsewhere.

I've never heard this story before. So fucked up.

I normally hate the Guardian but this article seems remarkably fair:
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/jan/15/-sp-threat-to-france-jews

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/188423/jews-lose

Last week, the Community Security Trust—the institutional body primarily responsible for the safety of Jews in Britain—released its preliminary figures on the number of anti-Semitic incidents that had occurred over the course of 2014. The news was not good. Anti-Semitism had hit an all-time high, with a particular spike occurring in July during the course of renewed hostilities between Israel and Gaza. Another poll found that nearly half of all non-Jewish Britons held at least some anti-Semitic views, and for their part British Jews expressed unprecedented feelings of fear and vulnerability. More than half of the Jewish community stated that they feared for their future in Great Britain, and a quarter claimed to have considered leaving the country.

Because I am a lawyer and law professor (albeit not a British one), my natural instinct in these circumstances is to appeal to the law for protection. Anti-Semitic harassment, intimidation, violence, and discrimination are illegal, and a primary purpose of the courts is to provide a shield for vulnerable minorities. Unfortunately, when it comes to Jewish litigants coming to the English courts with allegations of discrimination, doctrine, precedent, and case law all fall away at the hands of one simple rule: Jews lose. They lose consistently, they lose badly, and they will often be humiliated in the process. In her magnificent 2011 book An Unfortunate Coincidence: Jews, Jewishness, and English Law, English law professor Didi Herman concludes that—since the passage of the Race Relations Act of 1976—a Jew has never won a reported discrimination case against a non-Jewish defendant.

Things are better in the United States—but not by as much as one would hope. In terms of raw numbers, Jews are the third-most common victim of hate crimes in America, behind African-Americans and gay men (per capita, they rank second). Yet in his own examination of American First Amendment jurisprudence, University of Wyoming law professor Stephen Feldman found that Jews had never successfully won a Free Exercise challenge before the United States Supreme Court (they also have not, to my knowledge, won a Supreme Court case under the primary federal statute providing for religious liberty, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act). Free Exercise and RFRA cases typically concern the asserted need for an exemption from a generally applicable legal rule that conflicts with a person’s religious obligations. Christians certainly do not always win these cases, but they do sometimes—most recently (and notoriously) in the Hobby Lobby case about insurance coverage for contraception under the Affordable Care Act. Jews, by contrast, have enjoyed a constant string of defeats before the high court.

whole thing is worth reading tbh

Despite this history, the same tropes discussed above—that Jews perpetually cry anti-Semitism, that discourse about anti-Semitism is so ubiquitous in America to the extent that it squeezes out other important discussions—are prevalent here as well. The far left and far right unify around the idea that Americans need to struggle against “Jewish privilege.” Moving closer to the mainstream, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt devote an entire section of The Israel Lobby to the idea of “anti-Semitism” as “the great silencer” (they suggest that while “the charge of anti-Semitism can be an effective smear tactic, it is usually groundless”). They are in grand historical company—in 1941 it was Charles Lindbergh who complained about the “smear” of anti-Semitism in the course of assailing Jewish desire for the United States to intervene in World War II and indicting “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”

The point is not to oversell the peril of being Jewish in America. Rather, it is to stress that even where Jews are well-integrated these stereotypes about the Jewish position—Jews are dominant, Jews are hyper-powerful, Jews have infinite political sway and influence—remain active and distort our view of the world. When talking about the role of the “bad faith” response against claims of anti-Semitism at an academic conference this past November, I was asked about AIPAC—AIPAC really does use “anti-Semitism” cynically and opportunistically for political ends, right? Well, wrong—AIPAC actually refers to anti-Semitism very rarely. It isn’t a substantial part of their political playbook. Yet it is so ingrained in our collective psyche that Jews of the AIPAC sort deploy anti-Semitism incessantly, even recklessly, that we “know” about AIPAC’s malfeasance in this regard even though they really don’t participate in the discourse at all. One does not have to be a backer of AIPAC to be alarmed at the distorted, even mythic, role they play in discussions about the status of Jews in American life. (I get similar shivers when I listen to conservatives talk about George Soros’ links to progressive organizations, a discourse which has a distinct undertone of “… backed by the Jewish money you didn’t know about.”)

More than half of the Jewish community stated that they feared for their future in Great Britain, and a quarter claimed to have considered leaving the country.

On a purely anedoctal level, as a UK Jew, this stat is a massive heaping tablespoon full of bullshit, unless they mean leaving the country for a retirement flat in Portgual

or maybe yr anecdotal experience isn't definitive?

Quite possibly! That's why it's anecdotal.

ok fair enough, "massive heaping tablespoon full of bullshit" just seemed over-the-top for what was essentially a comment that read "not in my experience."

I think the bigger question is what it means by "considered" leaving the country. I mean, I've "considered" living in other countries before.

sure, but even if you ignore that stat you're still left w/ "More than half of the Jewish community stated that they feared for their future in Great Britain," and "Anti-Semitism had hit an all-time high," and "nearly half of all non-Jewish Britons held at least some anti-Semitic views, and for their part British Jews expressed unprecedented feelings of fear and vulnerability." seems odd to focus on that one bit.

But if you can't trust that stat, can you trust the others... just saying like.

^_-

My sister lives in England, in Leeds, and I think may be in some degree of denial, in that she's always harping on about how secular it is in the UK across the board, and how Jews are pretty low-key, etc. Though to my ears it sounds like the same as my other family in Australia: totally secular man, once you discount Christmas celebrations and Easter parades and all sorts of Christian stuff built into everyday life except no one *really* takes that at all serious. Like, my sister talks about Jewish friends she has who have Christmas tree, because nbd, it's just what everyone does.

Sort of reminds me of folks in the UK who are progressive and thoughtful and friendly and totally defensive about golliwog dolls.

i have no doubt that life is better for jews in the UK than it is in most other places

Sort of reminds me of folks in the UK who are progressive and thoughtful and friendly and totally defensive about golliwog dolls.

You own a time machine I take it?

josh even though you provide value as one of ilx's most consistently entertaining and voluble idiots you might want to do some research about how many people in the uk like golliwog dolls, and whether or not they would describe themselves as 'progressive'

Mordy might have a poll to hand.

idk what that means, is it an englishism?

xpost Man, everybody is in a snit on ILX this morning. I just mean that you can still find them in shop windows in some places. In my limited experience.

No idea, I'm not English.(xp)