Is this anti-semitism?

i wonder what the chief rabbi of copenhagen says at the end of his pesach seder

― Mordy, Monday, February 16, 2015 8:50 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is why judaism is as bankrupt as any other world religion

i mean, sure call him out on it, i'm pretty sure bibi is made of more shit than the chief rabbi of copenhagen, but it's all BS.

I still don't get why people are so preoccupied with calling Judaism a "religion". And the concept of a "chief rabbi" is one that's pretty alien to my Judaism.

I mean I do get why but y'know rhetoric.

huh? among other things, it's a religion.

i mean, i don't see how you argue otherwise, even if you agree that it also describes a kind of nationality or ethnic group

from my pov judaism is 100% a religion. jewishness maybe some other things as well.

yeah saying "judaism isn't a religion" is kind of like saying "socialism isn't a political philosophy" -- i mean, judaism is an /archetypal/ religion.

on the other hand "religion" is kinda a nonsense paradigm which is why only christianity (the religion that hume used to design the term) is really the only one that doesn't seem chockfull of caveats + exceptions. but i'm not sure judaism is less of a religion than hinduism or buddhism or whatever tribal "religions" that hume tried to shove into his system.

i'm a little concerned that some ppl's response to an antisemitic attack in denmark is to get really angry at bibi.

I'm the guy who posted the thing about Bibi. Do you think that's my only response? Do you think I'm not angry at the murderer who killed innocent people? I am. But what would be the point of saying that on ILX? I talk to lots of people who sympathize with Netanyahu and I think a lot about whether my own reasons not for sympathizing with Netanyahu are good ones. And I think about how, if my reasons are good reasons, I can best express them to my Netanyahu-sympathizing friends.

And I think the question of whether Diaspora Jews are really "at home" in the countries of their birth and their parents' birth is really a live issue, one I feel strongly about, and one I want to talk about.

I have NO friends who sympathize with people who murder Jews in synagogues. So I don't really have to spend any time working out my feelings about those people. My feelings about them are already worked out.

tbh i was responding more to "Fucking hell how I hate Netanyahu," which seemed bizarre to me

You were just too chickenshit to name me? And do you think that's my only response as well? It's what was going on in this thread, of course that's what I reply to.

i've read enough ppl on the internet who claim that this (and the kosher mart attack) were mossad false flags to convince jews to move to israel, or in its more polite wink-wink version say something like 'well, these certainly work to israel's benefit, right?' that i don't want anything to do w/ the argument that somehow bibi is to blame for islamist terrorists confusing diaspora jews w/ israeli jews.

This is of course a different story and I hope nothing I said makes it sound like I think Bibi is secretly rubbing his hands with glee when Jews get murdered in Europe. I do, to be honest, think the line that "a Jew's true home is Israel and only Israel" feeds anti-semitism, but I don't really think it feeds the kind of anti-semitism that drives the murders in Europe. Those people weren't killed for not being French enough or Danish enough.

my wife asked me if there was an attack in our neighborhood on one of the synagogues here would we think about moving. i said i thought probably not - but more bc it would be an aberration, we don’t feel threatened every day, i wear a yarmulke on the street etc. but if an attack happened already in the context of feeling threatened and hiding being jewish etc?

I get this, and I can't honestly say how I would feel if anti-semitic violence in the US became more than a very occasional aberration. Would I leave? I guess I might. But what I feel Bibi fails to grasp is that, if I moved to Israel, I wouldn't be coming home. I would be leaving my homeland and moving to a foreign country for the sake of my family's safety.

I feel both ways about this - in some ways I'd feel like I was leaving home, but in other ways I'd feel like I was coming home. Israel is not just a foreign country to me but a place intricately connected to the texts + prayers i've been studying + reading since i was a child. my middle name is "israel," i say "lshana haba b'yerushalayim" at the seder, i light candles, fast and read eicha on tisha b'av, like my whole life has been very intimately associated w/ israel (and not - or at least not just - as a political entity). when i've visited i've immediately felt welcomed + among family. but i understand this isn't true for all jews.

it probably helps that my hebrew language skills are good and that i have multiple friends + family who already live there that i'd be joining. it wouldn't really be like moving to a totally foreign country where i didn't know anyone and didn't speak the language.

that said, there's a reason i don't live there now. i love my home in the US - it's where my Rebbe lived and family for 3 generations and it has been warm and welcoming to me, and the fact that it's probably safer to be a jew in the Northeast US than in Israel definitely plays a role bc at the end of the day i'm extremely pragmatic about keeping my family safe + alive. not to mention i'm so totally acculturated into US culture, music + literature + television, etc. it would be a bummer to only get to see a band i love when they bucked the BDS vitriol and played their one israel show of the decade or whatever >> nb i feel like this last reason is very superficial but idk it feels substantial to me?

sorry frederick, i didn't mean to call you out personally bc tbh even tho i see the bibi-evocation as part of a continuum obv your post was barely participating in what really bothers me which is that the moment these incidents occur there's this almost knee-jerk gesture back towards the Jews. whether it's BBC reporter Willcox after the Kosher Mart attack, or Jimmy Carter, not to mention even less acceptable arguments like ppl saying that it was a mossad false flag, etc. so i'm kinda sensitive to any discursive shift that in anyway seems to blame (or assign culpability to) Jews, or Israel, or the government of Israel, for totally unrelated attacks in the diaspora. this kind of thing has a long history obv, from WW2 (jews were blamed for the German defeat at WW1 and the bad terms they got at Versailles), as well as this conspiracy i keep hearing about how post-1948 violence against mizrachi jews were mossad false flags intended to convince jews to move back to israel, or the really hideous suggestion that Zionists helped plan the Holocaust to force European jewry out of europe. that's the subtext i see when ppl talk about how bibi is cynically using these attacks to bring jews back to israel (w/ the double subtext that he's bringing jews back to israel so that he'll have a pretext to "steal" more land from the palestinians). when the more likely explanation is that bibi sincerely believes that europe is dangerous for jews (for very good reason, present + historical) and that israel is their home. nb i'm sure it doesn't need to be said, but i don't think europe in 2015 is remotely comparable to europe in 1938 - for one antisemitism is, for the most part, not coming from official governments and being backed by State militaries. that's obv a huge difference. but i don't think any jew who looks at europe and says, "jews might be safer elsewhere" can just be discounted as a cynical opportunist.

and as israel was partially founded as a response to european antisemitism (both from the pov of early zionists + the UN countries who voted for its existence) it's not insane at all for bibi to respond to european antisemitism by saying, 'hey, this is why we founded israel.'

"Europe is dangerous for Jews" seems to me to be demonstrably false, given that by any indicator Western European (at least) societies are safer by pretty much any measure than either the USA or Israel, and so far as I am able to tell this applies to Jewish communities as much as any others. This does not mean that there isn't a problem with anti-Semitism in Europe, of course.

http://dsadevil.blogspot.com/2015/02/outward-bound.html

Last week, a former colleague of mine from Illinois emailed me about a German decision where torching a synagogue was not anti-Semitic, just "criticism of Israel" (not the first time I've heard that argument). And earlier this week, a law school classmate sent me an Austrian prosecutor's conclusion that putting up a picture of Hitler captioned with "I could have annihilated all the Jews in the world, but I left some of them alive so you will know why I was killing them..." was likewise just a means of exposure displeasure with Israel. Seriously, this argument has to be bounded somewhere, yes?

Oh, and half of all racist attacks in France are directed at Jews, who constitute one percent of the population. Makes me glad to have the #JewishPrivilege of living in the United States, where we're only the second most common (per capita) victim of hate crimes.

Yeah, honestly, I've not looked at the statistics/numbers (and maybe I should), but last I heard the US was the safest place for Jews, not Europe.

Neil S seems to be conflating general safety with where are Jews least likely to be victims of racism, hate crime, etc., which albeit is sometimes hard to quantify (racism comes in many ways).

Thanks, mordy. I am quite on edge at the moment, I don't mean to be too much of an asshole. Realizing that one of the guys talking at the attacked meeting was an old professor of mine from college. A girl from work was at the synagogue just a few hours before the shooting - it's at one of the most crowded streets in Denmark. And the murderer was killed a few blocks from where I used to live. It does all of a sudden become pretty close, and pretty stressful.

But the attacks on Bibi weren't 'kneejerk'. Nobody was talking about Israel until he inserted himself in the conversation, with his stupid comments. And I would be okay if he said 'hey, this is why we founded Israel', but that wasn't what he said. This is me cutting and pasting, but he did say: 'Obviously Jews deserve protection in every country, but...' Like, that isn't a sentence that anyone should put a 'but' behind, no matter what is the followup (the followup is ...'but we say to the Jews, to our brothers and sisters: ‘Israel is your home') He said 'Israel is the home of every Jew.'

Also, with the other moves Netanyahu is making at the moment, I don't think it's unfair to accuse him of cynisism. I just read his speech about the speech in Washington. I hate him.

Jews have been in Denmark for hundreds of years. They were made citizens back in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Most of them survived the German occupation. We haven't had a deadly terror attack on anyone in almost thirty years. The standard of living is high, and the murder rate is low. I don't think Jews are much safer elsewhere but here.

According to estimated numbers of populations in the US and FBI data, per capita, Jews make up the largest, not second largest, group of hate crime victims in the US:

(as a percentage of each group)
Jewish Black LBGT
0.00012 0.00004 0.000091

oops there go my spaces

does that statistic only capture hate crimes where a conviction was obtained? it is notorious that prosecutors are reluctant to bring charges under hate crime statutes because the burden of evidence is harder to meet than simply proving that a crime was committed by the assailant. when you add that filter, it is hard to say if it skews the distribution.

There is an election coming up in Israel, just to give a little (more) context to Netanyahu's remarks.

Ok fine ("Bibi")'s a jerk but is he really the villain of this event? I expect to hear that ppl fucking hate Islamist terrorists, not the PM of Israel.

yes let's not hold the head of an alleged democracy to a different standard than that for assassins. this trick is always boring.

i will consider your analogizing Netanyahu to Al Sharpton as throwing in the towel, though

i think everyone but maybe u can agree that we should treat burning ppl alive as a more serious offense than giving a speech about the dangers of iranian nukes.

'bibi' has done both, so

i wonder if you're aware that your contributions to almost every discussion on ilx are totally worthless

can we lock you two in a room? you already have complementary names.

tbh i had no idea there was still a Temani community in yemen, but maybe not for much longer:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/world/middleeast/persecution-defines-life-for-yemens-few-jews.html

they're one of the few jewish groups that have a custom/tradition that allows them to eat kosher locusts. other groups (like all ashkenazim) lost the tradition and so it's not in the kosher canon

According to Yemenite tradition the four types of kosher locust in the Torah are:

The red locust (Hebrew: ארבה, Arbeh, Aramaic: גובאי, Govei, Arabic: الجراد, Al-Jaraad).
The spotted gray locust (Hebrew: חרגול, Chargol Aramaic: ניפול, Nippul, Arabic: الحرجوان, Al-Harjawaan).
The white locust (Hebrew: חגב, Chagav, Aramaic: גדיאן, Gadayin, Arabic: الجندب, Al-Jundub).
The yellow locust (Hebrew: סלעם, Sal'am, Aramaic: רשון, Rashona, Arabic: الدبا, Al-Daba).

did u inform lex that you were gonna talk about the canon

wow, i honestly had no idea there were more than a tiny handful of jews left in yemen.

depends what you consider a handful: "The Houthis, who now dominate the country, are particularly strong in the two places with confirmed remaining Yemeni Jews: here in Raida, where there are 55 Jews, and in Sana, the capital, where a small number of others live under what amounts to house arrest by the Houthi leadership."

interestingly, tho way off-topic from temanim, a lot of nearly immigrated kosher jews to the US weren't sure whether it would be okay to eat turkey bc they didn't have a tradition for it being kosher (a giraffe is also theoretically kosher but there's no tradition for how to slaughter it). the custom eventually spread throughout europe after the early explorers of the americas brought them back, but for a while it was controversial. i guess turkeys were too delicious to prohibit tho.

meanwhile no one (but me) is clamoring for a new kashrut custom for locusts

more of the same from sweden

this game crusader kings 2 has been free on steam this week and i've been playing a little. there are different plots you can execute by spending prestige (along the lines of 'visit a holy site,' 'invite a nobel to court,' etc) and two of them are 'borrow money from the jews' and 'expel the jews,' executing both of which can net you a one-time quick influx of like 5,000 /currency/. i don't have any problem w/ its inclusion in a game committed to accurately depicting the messy religious politics of like 15th century europe (i mean, it's a game about the crusades so i don't think sensitivity should be emphasized), but i do feel a little weird about a mechanic that can net u the biggest immediate currency gain in the game, therefore almost always making it - on a gamey level - the right move.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/us/debate-on-a-jewish-student-at-ucla.html

LOS ANGELES — It seemed like routine business for the student council at the University of California, Los Angeles: confirming the nomination of Rachel Beyda, a second-year economics major who wants to be a lawyer someday, to the council’s Judicial Board.

Until it came time for questions.

“Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community,” Fabienne Roth, a member of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, began, looking at Ms. Beyda at the other end of the room, “how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?”

For the next 40 minutes, after Ms. Beyda was dispatched from the room, the council tangled in a debate about whether her faith and affiliation with Jewish organizations, including her sorority and Hillel, a popular student group, meant she would be biased in dealing with sensitive governance questions that come before the board, which is the campus equivalent of the Supreme Court.

The discussion, recorded in written minutes and captured on video, seemed to echo the kind of questions, prejudices and tropes — particularly about divided loyalties — that have plagued Jews across the globe for centuries, students and Jewish leaders said.

The council, in a meeting that took place on Feb. 10, voted first to reject Ms. Beyda’s nomination, with four members against her. Then, at the prodding of a faculty adviser there who pointed out that belonging to Jewish organizations was not a conflict of interest, the students revisited the question and unanimously put her on the board.

holy shit

and yes, that is anti-semitism, for those wondering.

i remember arab (muslim and christian) students getting a similar treatment (questioning their ability to make decisions without "bias") when i was in school. it was awful then, and it's awful now.

and... a bunch of disgusting comments on that article prove is point, e.g.

Unfortunately, these students are paying the price for Israel's aggression again Palestine and Palestinians. While the Baby Boomer generation more or less acquiesced in the human rights violations and war crimes committed by Israel in its quest to annihilate the Palestinian people, we don't. We are more aware of Israel's actions and therefore it is not unreasonable to question her. It is regrettable but the blame belongs with Israel, not the student. But she pays the price.

imagine saying that US muslims "pay the price" for ISIS violence with harrassment. oh wait, plenty of people—on the right-wing—would say something like that. pot, meet kettle.

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

awwww

I was going to ask what kind of decisions a student organization might possibly have to make that being Jewish could possibly bias them but then I remembered that these fucking morons think that an important part of college is divesting from Israel

the comments (from all sides) on all the articles about this UCLA thing make me despair. are people really that knee-jerk and stupid?

(note to self: stop reading comments on news articles)