Is this anti-semitism?

wasn't it supposed to be Steven Spielberg who convinced him to change it?

Well, he did make "Schindler's List."

I used to work at a place that had a lot of freight elevators and the company that serviced them was called Schindler Elevators. In my head I thought of this business as Schindler's Lifts.

Before that job, I had worked at a place with this real asshole named Ian. He was a bratty know-it-all, real condescending. I hadn't been at the job that long when an opening came up at the museum where my wife worked. I felt obligated to stay at the current job a little longer since the bosses had been really accommodating and had done me a few solid favors. Ian had applied for the museum job and I knew he had a good shot at it and he was very hopeful and upbeat regarding this.

We were working on installing some art at a gallery and Ian is complaining about how the gallery director was cheap and said he was "too much of a jew" to spend some money on improvements. My wife is Jewish and I immediately decided to apply for the job, to fuck Ian over and to keep my wife from having to work with the little shit. I got the job and I broke the news to Ian that they had hired me. His eyes got wet and he went home early. It felt delicious.

Yeah, fuck Ian.

A think I've been thinking about lately is how on sites like reddit, in subs like "r/mildlyinfuriating" or "r/terriblefacebookmemes" people will just post blatant antisemtic propaganda of the vilest sort under the guise of "OMG, isn't this bad?" And I can't help but think that's either the intention of the original disseminator or even the poster, because that just gets it more attention, and if even a small % of the people who see it are influenced by the propaganda, it's a win for the propagandist.

I wish Reddit would just not allow that sort of thing.

xpost Sounds like Ian was guilty of being white

haha

I grew up waaaay in the country in east Texas and until I was in grad school I had no concept of what a Jewish person was apart from knowing about the holocaust. I had heard "jew" used as a synonym for "cheap" but never thought about it. My wife was the first person I met that I knew who was Jewish, because at some point she told me.

"You're Jewish?"

"My last name is Levy."

*befuddled look*

Thinking back, there are two people that were probably Jewish that I didn't recognize as such because I had no clue what to look for. It was not on my radar at all, and I assume this is the case for a lot of people that grew up in rural areas before the internet. Or maybe I was just extra ignorant?

I was really into drawing pentagrams in Elementary school because I liked scary movies a lot and the Satanic Panic was in full swing. In our library there was a poster of religious symbols and I saw the Star of David and thought "oh, that's a cool looking star!" without reading anything about it. So I started drawing that along with pentagrams, thinking they're both cool looking wicked stars and whatnot. At some point a teacher or librarian saw me drawing the Star of David in a circle and asked what I was up to, and I said "THIS IS THE SIGN OF THE DEVIL!" and she became upset and tried to correct me but I didn't understand what was going on. I knew enough to stop using it that way because for some reason it was bad. Thinking back, she probably thought that I was saying Jewish people were evil, but I had no fucking clue about anything. Just a dumb redneck kid.

Now we're in the middle of planning our daughter's bat mitzvah. Sometimes in temple I still get a strong feeling of "How did I get here?"

Told this story before, but one summer in college we had a subletter from middle of nowhere West Virginia. He was a nice guy, and smart, literally a rocket scientist, but pretty sheltered, because ... West Virginia. One day he came up to me. Here is the more or less verbatim exchange:

Him: So, you're Jewish?
Me: Yep.
Him: That's cool. I don't think there are any Jews where I am from, but my parents saw "Schindler's List."

Exactly!

We also watched A Stranger Among Us which my mom and I liked quite a bit. I can't imagine how that holds up now.

I had no concept of what a Jewish person was apart from knowing about the holocaust.

xp I don't know if this is typical, or if I was also just extra ignorant, but I grew up in the UK in the 90s and my knowledge/understanding of Jewish people as a kid was also purely as the group of people who were victims of the holocaust, I specifically remember being surprised to find out (aged about 10, maybe?) that there still Jewish people around today, and living in the UK and the USA.

on that topic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/holocaust-student-education-jewish-anti-semitism/673488/

Interesting, I look forward to reading that. I remember many years ago reading a pretty compelling hand-wringy piece warning of the rhetorical dangers of teaching anti-Semitism so thoroughly through the Holocaust, at the risk of underemphasizing centuries of anti-Semitism beforehand (and at this point close to a century afterwards). It risks linking Judaism with victimhood, and also misleadingly implies said victimhood was acute and not both broader and ongoing. It invites the ignorant (innocent or no) to think/believe "yeah, but that was so long ago ... ", which is not that different from what like-mindedly wrongheaded people often say about other minorities and their persecution. "Yeah, but slavery was hundreds of years ago" or "we've come a long way from the '60s" or "the Japanese internment camps were just a one-time thing, and it's not like the US government was killing them." And so on.

maybe the wrong thread because there isn't much ambiguity about whether or not this is anti-semitism but the phrase "jews, they want to go through that freaking passover all the time" has not left my head lol

obviously there's a lot of other disgusting stuff in there but is rudy sure he's not jewish pic.twitter.com/Exk4OCLUTt

— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) August 2, 2023

me after every seder

In other examples of hilarious anti-semitism: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/08/bawaal-movie-amazon-prime-holocaust-auschwitz-bollywood.html

How many times has the Red Sea been parted?

srsly I have questions

the answer my friend

He marries Nisha, who is in every way superior to him, but has epilepsy. On the night of their wedding, she has a seizure. He worries that if anyone ever saw this happen in public, it would ruin his reputation, and so he leaves her at home with his parents all the time. “I’d have definitely left you by now if I weren’t worried about my image so much,” he says to her at one point.

loool, never change bollywood. ftr I had epilepsy up to my late teens and my son has it worse than I did. Still couldn't stop laughing at this paragraph!

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/05/entertainment/jamie-foxx-apology/index.html

"Foxx’s message was in reference to a prior post, no longer found on his feed, which read, “They killed this dude named Jesus… What do you think they’ll do to you???!” He ended the post with the hashtags #fakefriends and #fakelove.

Critics of the post interpreted “they” as the Jewish people, and historically antisemitism has been linked to the belief Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus.

In his message on Saturday, he continued, “To clarify, I was betrayed by a fake friend and that’s what I meant with ‘they’ not anything more. I only have love in my heart for everyone. I love and support the Jewish community. My deepest apologies to anyone who was offended.”

was his fake friend Pontius Pilate or something? hard to figure out what killing Jesus could possibly have meant.

I'll attribute this lapse in judgement to his stroke which he seems incapable of admitting happened in public for some reason

AAVE getting dissected by people outside of the community and then Black people having to apologize for it is but another example of folks superimposing their culture into ours. Instead of asking questions, folks assume and now he’s apologizing for using language HIS community…

— Swipa (@SwipaCam) August 5, 2023

is it too much to ask for some of this energy to be redirected towards cancelling the white christian antisemites who are actively organising against everything good in the world right now?

Critics of the post interpreted “they” as the Jewish people, and historically antisemitism has been linked to the belief Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus

weird that this syllogism goes uncompleted: clearly critics of the post are antisemitic

Verbal assassin, my architect pleases
When I was twelve I got cancelled for snuffin Jesus

Not sure I'm ok with telling Jewish that took offense people they're dumb for doing so

I’m not a Jewish that took offence person but absent any other context I would interpret “they” to mean #fakefriends in that post

But it is a phrase in many other contexts that usually does mean "Jews" and many neo-Nazis RTed it - seems like a misunderstanding yes and Foxx doesn't require any cancellibut I don't get incredulity at why the misunderstanding occurred

*cancellation

Yeah I def get why someone would jump to that conclusion esp in the current climate (esp esp on Twitter which was basically all nazis last time I peeped)

it's less incredulity and more weariness over the obsession with rooting out any signs of potential antisemitism from certain types of people while the most fucking blatant stuff from other types of people is repeatedly given a pass

Has Foxx ever said another word even remotely anti-Semitic? If not, I think maybe we don't have to credit the Eve Barlows of the world for jumping to the conclusion that he decided to announce his conversion to being a Nazi through a Myspace meme about fake friends.

at this point I'm really willing to accept his apology at face value. it's not like Rudy or Hanania (just to name two very recent examples) are apologizing for the anti-semitic shit they spew

it is so fucking racist how selectively this level of scrutiny and these demands for repentance are being applied right now and that even goes for cases that are far less ambiguously bigoted than this one

A LOT of people on Black Twitter were saying that that saying is fairly common and is about betrayal rather than the Jews.

yeah its a p clear line about judas

people are desperate to unload the baggage of centuries of european christian antisemitism onto whoever looks like they might be an easy enough target and it doesn't matter what they actually said or did or meant the important thing is that it's on them now

You don’t even need to go on Black Twitter, I doubt anyone who has lived in a Christian community won’t have heard “they killed Jesus” referring to general persecution it’s kind of foundational

(As is the fact that the killing of Christ was literally the entire plan all along to wash our sins away & therefore good not bad)

Xpost

Or

Maybe

People mistook what he said for a common antisemitic trope, heard the apology, and said "ok understood".

I don't think there's anything left to critique after his apology but going after Jewish people of all ages for having an understandable misread the first time is also dumb.

And it's pretty weak to lump in alt-right dicks who jump on supposed Black antisemitism to espouse their barely concealed racism without pushback vs people who are vocal against all anti-Semitism from all camps. Why does everything always have to be binary with convenient labels attached

Xpost fwiw I was in those communities my entire youth through adolescence and there was definitely a non-zero number of people who meant it the other way, particularly in the Fundie church. Not a majority by any means but between them and neo-Nazi trolls on mIRC, there's a reason I was very familiar with the "JEWS KILLED JESUS" trope by age 19

Anyway given the explanation I don't think that's how he meant it and it should be dropped by any decent person at this point

in case I said something I didn't mean to say - by people I meant european christian antisemites and their descendents and allies; by baggage I meant their guilt and moral responsibility; in europe the projection I tried to describe is often barely hidden and a lot of mainstream european liberals will just come out and say (with minimal pushback) the kind of shit that american conservatives tend to dance around when it comes to racist/antisemitic conspiracy theories that purport to explain the presence of antisemitism in their midst despite "defeating" it being central to their national and continental identities

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/aug/16/bradley-cooper-in-jewface-storm-after-leonard-bernstein-trailer-reveals-prosthetic-nose

The family of Leonard Bernstein has released a statement defending Bradley Cooper after online backlash begun about Cooper’s appearance for Leonard Bernstein in ‘MAESTRO’. pic.twitter.com/rcM8IOWdx7

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) August 16, 2023

apparently Bernstein's children, who were involved in the making of the movie are pro the nose? But it still seems like an odd decision, if Cooper had used his real nose I can't imagine that people would be complaining that he didn't look enough like Leonard Bernstein. If I was Bradley Cooper I wouldn't have gone with the prosthetic nose even if Bernstein's kids were ok with it, just seems not worth the hassle aside from anything else.

As the person quoted in the Guardian points out, if Cooper was able to play the Elephant Man without prosthetics, he could play Bernstein without prosthetics.

yeah, but his resemblance to Joseph Merrick is already uncanny.

I think part of the problem is even before you get to the anti-semitism angle, prosthetic noses are inherently comical, like everyone had fun of Nicole Kidman's prosthetic nose in that fil where she played Virginia Woolf. Are there any examples of acclaimed non-comedy films that feature a lead actor wearing a prosthetic nose?

Raging Bull?

Lawrence of Arabia?