Anti-semitism thread: onwards from 2023

Xposts ah ok - think that's north shore maybe near Salem

xpost Yeah, it would be pretty obnoxious. I think my point was that the protest itself should not strike fear into the hearts of Jews, let alone fear of being "hunted." But that it wouldn't take much provocation to invite negative attention.

Hey, good timing, Isaac:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/where-does-antisemitism-come-from

Lemme know if anyone needs it copy and pasted.

You heard about Paul Kessler then? That happened in what is considered a normal suburban enclave in LA.

I don't think anyone should be assaulted for counter protesting.

i also wouldn't wave an israeli flag at a free palestine rally, idk why that would be so controversial.

― is he disgruntled adrian? (voodoo chili), Tuesday, November 7, 2023 11:46 AM (one minute ago)

Just read this story of an 65 year old counter-prostestor waving an Israeli flag at a Free Palestine demonstration in suburban LA who was involved in a physical altercation and has died as result of a fall (witness details are mixed whether he was struck, or tripped and fell to the ground on his own). The other person (a 50 year old man) involved in the altercation is cooperating with authorities but there is a burst of social media claming this incident was anti-semitic/terrorist (source: my pro-Israel friends IG shared stories).

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-11-06/man-dies-after-fight-at-protest-westlake-village-israel-hamas-war

his discovery, in 2nd grade, so around age 6 or 7, of anti-Semitism, by way of his soon to be ex-best friend, Wally Mitler

Woah, Wally Mitler?

But imagine the response to any other marginalized group's discomfort being "get some perspective."

xp to steve shasta, to be clear, i don't think the guy had it coming, obviously that's a terrible thing to happen. of course it's now going to be used as evidence that none of the hundreds of other worldwide protests were peaceful at all.

gyac, I really appreciate that.

Re: taking pain seriously, I agree that it's rarely as much as is warranted or needed, and regardless, it's not like sympathy can be quantified. But here's another story involving one of my kids that I can offer (I've probably told it before). A few years back some knucklehead scribbled racist and anti-Semitic stuff on a bathroom stall at the high school. There was the expected outrage, protests, eventually an assembly, but none of it ever addressed the specifically anti-Semitic aspect of the incident. My daughter came home that afternoon and basically asked, "what about us?" She's a strong kid, and the school responses have improved some since then, but I know she still carries that hurt with her. It's probably curdled into cynicism, which helps no one.

Re "settlers" -- there were a lot of arguments going around right after October 7 that the people who were killed were not civilians because they were "settlers." (This is not true by any international law standards btw, as they were living within the 1948 borders, not to mention that I would guess few of them were first generation in Israel). In that context, putting up a sign about "settlers" being "the problem" across from a synagogue seems like pretty clear intent to me.

of course it's now going to be used as evidence that none of the hundreds of other worldwide protests were peaceful at all.

― is he disgruntled adrian? (voodoo chili), Tuesday, November 7, 2023 12:05 PM bookmarkflaglink

I think there is a difficulty in engaging with this kind of claim if there appears to be a willful blind spot or what looks like an oblivious/disingenuous denial that some symbols of hatred are mixed with legitimate political protest. Kind of a mixed-motive situation.

Notice I didn't restrict this to pro Israel or pro Palestine.

Has this happened with other peaceful protests?

The BLM protests in 2020 are still constantly talked about this way

That's terrible

For sure cops are often fucking up peaceful protestors.

There's an ongoing perception that the BLM protests were 100% violent and destroyed entire cities

Ok the last question in my post was poorly worded. Were people saying there were hate symbols and messages mixed in to otherwise peaceful protests, what were they, and what should be the response?

maybe I need a gut check on the "settlers" one, maybe it's just my media-addled brain seeing something that isn't there, idk. I'm not exactly sure what it means anyway, Brooklyn itself was a Dutch settlement so it seems odd to say settlers are "the problem" within Brooklyn. Brooklyn is mostly settlers by the broad definition used in theory about "settler colonialism" as I understand it. If it means gentrifiers, I think calling them "settlers" is kind of a poor analogy but w/e.

I think there is a difficulty in engaging with this kind of claim if there appears to be a willful blind spot or what looks like an oblivious/disingenuous denial that some symbols of hatred are mixed with legitimate political protest. Kind of a mixed-motive situation.

Notice I didn't restrict this to pro Israel or pro Palestine.

Has this happened with other peaceful protests?

The question that is elided here is what is "legitimate," who decides what is "hatred" or not? While I think what happened to that person in LA is execrable, I would also argue that waving an Israeli flag in that situation is essentially cheering on ethnic cleansing, and is pretty illegitimate as a result.

Regarding your follow-up, I remember very clearly a moment during the early days of Occupy Oakland when I came upon the camp and a friend of mine was in a small group yelling at a woman and asking for her to be escorted away from the camp. The reason? She was spouting off one of the standards of economic antisemitism regarding Jewish people controlling the gold supply, etc etc. The woman *was* escorted away and I never saw her again. There are absolutely fucked up antisemitic things that go on in leftist protest movements, but many times that I've seen, the people being antisemitic are pretty quickly put in their place and told to fuck off.

Over here we've got the UK Home Secretary explicitly calling the pro-Palestinian protests "hate marches". This despite the fact that there's been barely any arrests made at the dozens of marches that have taken place in towns and cities the length and breadth of the UK.

x-post Again, that's just my experience in protest and social liberation movements, not universal since much of that experience was in the Bay Area or Philly.

From what I've read the marches in London have been overwhelmingly peaceful. It would be infuriating to have the Home Secretary call them hate marches.

There are absolutely fucked up antisemitic things that go on in leftist protest movements, but many times that I've seen, the people being antisemitic are pretty quickly put in their place and told to fuck off.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Tuesday, November 7, 2023 12:45 PM bookmarkflaglink

I am very glad to see this acknowledged and to hear that this is the response. It feels like a topic that is absolutely not tolerated for discussion whatsoever.

Free Palestine is not exclusively a leftist protest movement.

I never said it was, I was answering more generally about my experience in such movements. I haven’t seen anything antisemitic at recent Philly rallies, fwiw

Ok the last question in my post was poorly worded. Were people saying there were hate symbols and messages mixed in to otherwise peaceful protests, what were they, and what should be the response?

― felicity, Tuesday, November 7, 2023 3:38 PM (twenty-nine minutes ago)

the george floyd protests are not really relevant to the discussion of hate speech, hate symbols etc bcuz the police aren't an ethnic class. you're asking about a dynamic that just wasn't present at that conflict. i'm sure there were "counter protestors" in places saying horrible shit about black people but i don't think that's what you're asking

there were speakers at the DC rally leading the crowd in chants of stuff like "israel go to hell" & things of this nature. personally speaking bcuz of my upbringing that phrasing & concept is not something i'm entirely comfortable with, but i also don't think such chants were intended as anti-semitic dogwhistles even if i'm sure there were some people in the crowd who were receptive to hearing them as such. ultimately i saw/heard nothing that day that made me think the rally was about anything other than an end to the bombing of innocent civilians and achieving permanent humane living conditions for the people of palestine, both of which i just see as plainly agreeable causes

man alive, fwiw I think you're right about that sticker. I thought about it more after posting, and while it's basically impossible to parse with confidence, one possible reading of its co-opting of the anti-colonial term "settler" to refer specifically to Brooklyn is that its implying the project of European settler colonialism was a Jewish conspiracy, which is repulsively racist in multiple ways

plausible deniability is a big part of that kind of thing, so that's a reason why they don't always make clear sense

That's what I mean about the subliminal advertising too.

If anyone's curious, the tests at https://www.projectimplicit.net/ about implicit bias are pretty eye opening. And that's on well-educated adults.

Imagine the effect of all these inputs on children.

Interestingly, I tried one of those tests (the Religion test) and when you select "White" as your race, it gives you a bunch of ethnicities/nationalities to choose from. "Jewish" is not one.

Did you do the test? Were you surprised? I did one as a CLE in NY and I definitely was.

tbh, I didn't finish it, I started to feel both uncomfortable and annoyed with the seemingly endless barrage of categorizing things into "Good" and "Bad" and "Islam" and "Judaism" and it weirded me out that it put "Islam" and "Bad" on the same side even though I'm sure there was some subtle effect being tested for.

You can do one that's much less emotionally charged. Mine was about male and female careers I think.

A relative of mine goes to the private girls’ school in London where some kid painted a swastika and “kill Jews” on the wall recently. On the one hand, you know it’s just some idiot kid, maybe’s not even a serious risk, maybe just a kid confusing righteous rebellion tor something stupider. On the other hand… who knows?

― Chuck_Tatum, Tuesday, 7 November 2023 19:41 (two hours ago) link

That is indescribably messed up. Sorry to have skipped over it when you first posted.

There were swastika's in my daughter's public middle school too recently. I'm actually not 100% clear on whether they were pre- or post-Oct 7 though. I saw them scratched into desks in my schools growing up too, nothing new.

doesn’t make it any less fucked up of course

You'd see swastikas everywhere when I was a kid. Not used as specifically targeted hate speech but just the symbol being drawn, mostly on desks or notebooks or bathroom stalls etc. I do think most of it was done by kids who didn't really have the context or if they did, just didn't understand the true depth of abhorrent evil it represented. Lots of kids grew up seeing the symbol in WW2 films or stories with the Nazis as genuine bad guys but one who were as threatening as Cobra in GI Joe. This is what I like to believe anyway, that most of it really was wrongheaded and regretted later. I don't think that excuse still holds water but I don't know what the kids across America are being taught about it and the Nazis at a young age.

Keeping in mind I grew up in the midwest sticks

My sister left high school (in the Philly burbs) early because, among other things, someone scratched a swastika into her locker. Pretty confident the person doing it knew what they were doing, even if they weren't explicitly a Nazi or whatever.

Imagine the effect of all these inputs on children.

There was a really long radio piece (or podcast?) about the woman that discovered implicit bias, at least from an academic vantage. It began with her assisting another researcher in a memory study about finding familiar or famous sounding names in the phone book or something, and iirc she learned that male names were more likely to be remembered or identified as "famous" than female names. Something like that. Anyway, once she pursued her new field of research she made all sorts of surprising discoveries, including the revelation that while she expected children to display implicit bias less than adults (innocent, blank slate, etc.) that was often very much not the case, revealing the impact environment (among other factors) has on even young kids when it comes to bias. Illuminating.

I thought the New Yorker interview (David Feldman, the director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, at Birkbeck College, University of London) I posted was full of interesting observations. Like:

I have written about antisemitism as a reservoir in the culture, something there to be drawn on. And this is a reservoir which has built up over centuries, even over millennia. There are three key elements in this: one is the idea that Judaism has been superseded by Christianity (the notion that Jews have a particularistic and narrow morality is one consequence of that idea); second, the idea that Jews are forever conspiratorial and up to something against the common good; and, third, the connection of Jews with money. These ideas have been repurposed over centuries in multiple political contexts. And we see them repurposed in some of the antisemitic attacks on Israel.

One thing shown by multiple opinion surveys in the United States, Germany, and in the U.K. and elsewhere, is that the percentage of committed ideological antisemites is relatively small, but the diffusion of negative stereotypes and narratives about Jews through the culture is much higher and much wider. At certain moments, people draw on these, especially at political flash points when these ideas appear to be useful, and when they appear to explain something. Yes, there are antisemites, sort of ideologically committed individuals and groups who have an antisemitic world view, but much more commonplace are individuals who draw on the well of antisemitism within the culture. And that’s what we see in antisemitism around Israel.

Tied in with the second is probably linking anyone Jewish to Israel and its policies, and the implicit suggestion that they support those policies. There is a Jewish deli in West Hollywood which was tagged with anti-israel graffiti, pro-palestinian slogans, etc. perhaps not anti-semitic in another context but in that context it feels quite obviously to be the case.

Getting more into the Jews vs "Zionists" thing, one popular strain of thought that comes up a lot in the context of Palestine is that European Jews are not "real Jews" - they are Khazars or some other similar theory. This is again a good example of the messiness of anti-semitism vs anti-zionism. Part of the reason this theory is so popular is that it is seen as undermining the idea that "Zionists" have any actual historical connection to Israel. But it also bleeds into the idea that European Jews are "not real Jews" but rather evil "zionists."

I thought the New Yorker interview (David Feldman, the director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, at Birkbeck College, University of London) I posted was full of interesting observations.

Agreed. Although Feldman didn't answer some of Chotiner's questions in less than 30 seconds or in the form of a haiku, he seems to have kept a sense of humor.

European Jews are not "real Jews" - they are Khazars or some other similar theory

Ah! But what about all those Lost Tribes of Israel? Chances are that the Khazars were just Jews who got lost for a while and then suddenly remembered about that covenant thing. Makes as much sense as the "not real Jews" theory.

There’s plenty of historical record and genetic evidence of ancient Israelite migration to Europe, as well as slaves taken by Romans. It’s not some great mystery why there are Jews in Europe.

I dug into that Khazars thing recently. Saw it mentioned in the context of the 10 Myths about Israel book and got curious. Read a bit more about the source of it, and there's this ironic thing that it's from somebody trying to use that fact to COUNTER semitism. Regardless, I think it's been debunked by DNA testing. Ashkenazi jews (of which I am one) share enough DNA with mizrahi and sephardi jews and not with "khazars". Personally I feel about as much connection to the holy land as I do to the eastern europe from which my great-great grandparents fled, which is very little, and mostly heritage-wise feel connected to the tri-state area, so that's my homeland.

The history of cranks who theorize what happened to the Lost Tribes of Israel is both voluminous and foolish, occupying the same precincts as cranks who seek a perpetual motion machine. Ashkenazi Jews are as Jewish as any other Jews. Anyone who says different is just huffing moonbeams.

the khazar thing is something I've only ever seen from neo-nazis and conspiracy theorists if it has been adopted more broadly that's really unfortunate

My family are a mix of Sephardis and Ashkenazis and Dutch Catholics and Muslim (peace is possible!) although everyone is non-practicing. My homeland is the entire Northwest branch of the Northern Line.

I was at a family wedding this weekend and dreaded the inevitable Israeli national anthem section. Pleasingly it was accompanied by a tentative speech with a lot of qualifiers.

I was at a family wedding this weekend and dreaded the inevitable Israeli national anthem section.

emi, is that a common thing?

Israel never qualifying for international football tournaments (altho they've a chance of making next summer's euros, as if that wasn't shaping up to be moody enough) means I've never heard the anthem. Any good, or a dreadful dirge like most?

Scotland have played Israel about 10 times in the last 4 years so I've almost certainly heard it.

The Israeli national anthem is iirc pretty sad (surprise). Fun fact: it apparently did not officially become the national anthem until November 2004.

Is it okay to threaten people with the cops if you don't actually intend to call them because you aren't a narc?

ok I watched the video yeah that owner's being a dick/antisemite

the hat... I mean, I wouldn't wear it but it's not an Israeli flag

Where is the owner threatening to call the cops? Apologies if I am missing something obvious

The part I quoted earlier: “I will call the police, even though it’s against my ethos.”

the jokey drink names really trivialize something important imo

An example of how a combination of general ignorance and social media can lead even an ostensibly well-intentioned voice of dissent down some dark and dumb roads:

https://jewishinsider.com/2024/10/new-chicago-education-board-president-has-history-of-antisemitic-pro-hamas-facebook-posts/

https://archive.ph/kpOoB

this happened with a friend in our parent group (thankfully not in an elected/appointed position of power) where he just went all-in on posting whatever anti-Israeli stuff came across his feed and of course it very quickly spiraled way out of control. I imagine we are all familiar with this dynamic by now.

i had to unfollow an acquaintance bc of shit like that

many such cases

I haven't spoken to an old girl/friend in months as she was posting shit on Instagram like 'The Zionists control everything!'
I told her: look I get what you're saying but be careful with that language, you sound like a Proud Boy

She blocked me for awhile, which is fine, but we seem to be mending the bridge