Anti-semitism thread: onwards from 2023

anyway I'm not sure what to make of the 20% of that demographic thinking the holocaust is a myth. I glibly blamed tiktok but it's obviously a deeper problem. I have a hard time believing the holocaust is not being taught in schools; my son is a senior and they certainly covered it in world history when he was in 10th grade (they didn't cover the Armenian genocide though.. I wonder what percentage of that demographic is even aware that was a thing at all?). So is it being taught, and then unlearned due to internet propaganda? The pattern on the final three elements is disturbing and I think might bring to light antisemitism in the progressive left. But I dunno.

Keep in mind those reported studies that find some non-zero percentage of students can't (for example) find America on the map, and that's the sort of learning that doesn't even face the headwinds of concerted propaganda efforts.

Conversation in one of the other threads about I/P mentioned American young people not knowing about/denying the Holocaust:

On the subject of 20% of American children not knowing about/denying the Holocaust - you have to question their education. It’s something I learned about in school like everyone does, though I think many of the worst details aren’t taught to children. I remember doing a history project when I was nine which was a newspaper about the defeat of Hitler. I wonder how much damage has been done by history being an elective subject at the stage when you are learning a lot more detail, of how to contextualise events, the details of said events.

To me, such a possibility would never cross my mind because I knew it happened - we learned about it, there are photos. I remember seeing a video which showed the room with the shoes at Auschwitz. To learn about history you are learning about events that you have never personally witnessed, but which have occurred. If you don’t choose to continue learning history in school, you might never learn about how to establish which things are true, or why it’s worth doing so.

I worry that increasing authoritarianism in governments across the world leads people in search of their own information to charlatans and monsters who dilute their truth with conspiracism. There is also a problem with discerning which sources are accurate and real - if you are at all left wing living in the UK, you know that the BBC runs cover for the government. This is a problem - the BBC is lying to you about stuff that you can see, so why could they be trusted on anything? You would always see this on ukpol Twitter, a certain seam of media-illiterate people falling for conspiracies all over the place because in their desperation to find information sources that told them what they saw was true, they were more inclined to believe less credible sources than before. Tl;dr if you fall for one thing you are likely to fall for others.

Needless to say, this is bad.

But then Germany supposedly has educated its children on the Holocaust and the country’s role in it, and the country is still riddled with Neo-Nazis. So it can’t just be as simple as education, but it would certainly be something. I can’t speak to how it is in America since I don’t know anything about the curriculum or what freedom schools have to teach it as they do, but I would be really surprised if it wasn’t at least a factor.

It’s something I learned about in school like everyone does

Nope.

Really? What did you learn about? Not even the Kindertransport?

I saw that too, and with younger people more likely than older to think the holocaust is a myth that does point towards a change in education. But the fact the same pattern is followed with liberals more likely than conservatives, Biden voters more likely than Trump voters, and Democrats more likely than Republicans, I don't know if education is necessarily the whole story here

And the 28% thinking Jews have too much power, this feels more of an active opinion than the holocaust opinion, which could be a more passive one due to a lack of education

I asked my 17 1/2 year old what he thought about it and his immediate response was the same as mine when I heard it: "conspiracy morons read about things on twitter and believe it"

(FWIW he had plenty of holocaust info in world history, but we live in Berkeley where, despite a lot of fucked up shit about our school district, I'm convinced he got a solid education)

Really? What did you learn about? Not even the Kindertransport?

Nothing at all. Nothing about World War II in general.

where were you located?

(and when I guess)

Learned a lot about Mao and the China though for some reason! And the Russian revolution!

China, not the China.

the China was Human League's b-side to the Lebanon

20% of American children not knowing about/denying the Holocaust

Not children. Americans 18-29. Voters.

https://archive.ph/2023.12.09-072959/https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/12/07/one-in-five-young-americans-think-the-holocaust-is-a-myth

Another 30% "don't know" if the Holocaust is a myth.

As I said this on the USpol thread a while back, the lesson we should have all learned is to pay attention to wackadoos like Trump and Marjorie Taylor Green and watch for trends. There is a difference between some vile outlier data point on social media and when it gains momentum and becomes mainstream.

A lot of people dismissed Trump and MTG out of hand on the merits of their views. Now look who is running the House and leading the polls.

my UK holocaust education was probably better than average with a lot of focus on the brutality - which was effective at burning the horror into our brains - but there was little to nothing about the context or history, and way too much crowing about how "we" stopped it (I assume every allied country does this shit). it was a bad thing that happened but the badness is then taken to somehow justify whatever the current political situation is in a very roundabout way. if you don't like the political situation and are willing to entertain antisemitism then I suppose the lack of context could make denial easier to consider

xps Germany has educated its children to believe that their national redemption will come through support for Israel and Jewish forgiveness which is awful in all kinds of directions

I haven't read this piece since it came out but I remember it being a much needed shot of cold water
https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2021-05/judaism-antisemitism-germany-israel-bds-fabian-wolff-essay-english

too much crowing about how "we" stopped it

I don't remember learning about the Holocaust in school so much as in popular culture at the time.

If the US was stopping the Holocaust I don't think that vast majority of American civilians or soldiers inteneded that or knew they were stopping any kind of mass extermination program at the time because they were not even aware.

My very ahistorical understanding is that the U.S. entered the war becaue Pearl Harbor was bombed. There was a general awareness of mistreatment of Jewish people in Europe but I thought the evidence of death camps did not come out in America until after the war ended.

Feel free to correct this ofc

(when I say "mass extermination program" I refer to Holocaust specifically, not all the people the US and allies killed including mass atrocities in Japan)

Not children. Americans 18-29. Voters.

notably, I found out that poll had a sample size of 200 people so I'm not sure it's representative

I don't know how accurate that YouGov poll is but one element here is that the Holocaust is now history for an 18-year old and is subject to the same problems as expecting any normal young person to know much about history. Here at ILX our parents or grandparents lived through the war, potentially fought in the war (or experienced the Holocaust itself) - it wasn't really part of the past, it was an element in the lives of people we interacted with regularly.

Sadly these kind of social media driven antisemitic sentiment and conspiracies are on the American left or "left" as well. I think it's been a forbidden topic for far too long.

I have appreciated ilxor Left's consistent acknowledgement that some antisemitism exists when discussing the left.

the left has been antisemitic for as long as there has been a left (of course so has the right and the right has been worse but why do I feel the need to say this) - it's very difficult to talk about it without being perceived as having some sort of agenda

"Learned a lot about Mao and the China though for some reason!"

same here, I had a history teacher who was a Marxism Today reader and he went heavy on The Long March! Never did anything about the holocaust in history. The teacher who talked the most about the holocaust was an RE one, Father Myers, who had a Jesuit missionary background and was quietly scathing when he had to play some Catholic anti-abortion propaganda video to us 13/14 yr olds.

I received what I realize now is a very comprehensive education about the Holocaust, but I also grew up and went to some of elementary and middle grades in Philadelphia’s suburbs, which have an enormous Jewish population.

I didn't do history, I did "Modern Studies", I was the only one actually interested in the subject though, the rest of the class consisted of wasters who were only there because they didn't want to do History or Geography. Our teacher was very right wing, but he was fucking great though, definitely my favourite teacher! A really interesting person.

Now wondering if it was strange that I had a teacher who taught us about Agent Orange and showed us pictures of the Viet Cong tunnels when I was eight.

There is a very good book(let) about the manifestations of antisemitism in left wing spaces. The author shared it online before his death and it is freely and legally available here. I know his daughter a little bit - she is a wonderful person.

Americans 18-29. Voters.

It strikes me that voters in this cohort have grown up in a world where the digital manipulation of media, elaborate conspiracy theories, and the saturation of the internet with falsehoods and propaganda are taken for granted, and critiques of colonialism/imperialism that undermine confidence in the reliability of historical records have become popular in academia. iow, their sense of what is believable beyond the limits of their personal experience has become subject to much higher levels of doubt and cynicism than previous generations.

Not sure where this goes - but on the subject of sources, I learned about The Forward (forward.com) from posts on ilx.

Then learned this past Thanksgiving that my grandfather, an old time progressive socialist, used to read the newspaper version of The Forward in Yiddish every night.

My hometown is a suburb with a significant Jewish population, where I went to the same schools as my mum did, with many of the children of her Jewish classmates. She said that in the 1950s and early ‘60s when she was a schoolkid, the Holocaust was only talked about in hushed ways because it was so close, and so painful to the survivors. But they knew something unforgivably terrible had happened.

By the time I got to school, we had Anne Frank in the curriculum and the Holocaust miniseries on TV. We also had a World Religions curriculum developed by two history teachers because kids were being antisemitic about Jewish kids getting extra days off school, so the adults in the room were like: here’s why, and it’s a unit this semester. After Mom’s time but before mine, we had people’s aunties and uncles who were camp survivors come to assembly, tell the story, explain and show their tattoos.

I feel so fortunate to have grown up there.

their sense of what is believable beyond the limits of their personal experience has become subject to much higher levels of doubt and cynicism than previous generations.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Saturday, December 9, 2023 12:22 PM bookmarkflaglink

True, and AI aggravates this. There's also human nature and prejuduce and disbelief combined with cognitive difficulty processing what was happening the first time evidence of the Holocaust started coming out.

From a 2018 Time article about what Americans knew and when:

public opinion polls demonstrating that while half of U.S. respondents in 1943 thought the fact that 2 million Jewish Europeans had been murdered was just a rumor, by 1944 about three-quarters believed concentration camps were really part of the Nazi plan — and yet they still couldn’t fathom the number of victims involved. (A Gallup poll that year shows that most people who dared to guess thought the number killed would be in the hundreds of thousands, or less.)

https://time.com/5327279/ushmm-americans-and-the-holocaust/

tbh I struggle to fathom the numbers even though I know they're real. part of me wants to find fault in these polls because I don't want them to be representative but whether they are or not it's disturbing

xps "that's funny..." is an excellent and informative and provocative text and everyone should read it. the stuff about the 80s helped make a bit more sense of the mess in the late 10s UK left for me. few people will agree with him on every single point but you expect that from a self described "anti-zionist zionist"

(the link gyac posted upthread)

I haven't read this piece since it came out but I remember it being a much needed shot of cold water
https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2021-05/judaism-antisemitism-germany-israel-bds-fabian-wolff-essay-english

― Left, Saturday, December 9, 2023 11:03 AM bookmarkflaglink

Read that. And saw it had been put through some intense fact checking process because apparently the author later said he is not Jewish and people wanted to confirm the author was Jewish. Which fact checking process involved going through and reading a bunch of the author's mother's emails.

Which all seems very sad to me, in the category of uninvested people feeling they have the right to demand independent verification of things they ordinarily would accept. And people with Jewish ancestry possibly feeling it's easier just to hide it or not highlight it rather than deal with the scrunity coming from people who just must know.

As for the article itself - regardless of whether the author is "truly" Jewish (a concept that seems strange to me as the daughter of a convert) this notion of other people "fetishing" a point of view becaue they believe it comes from a Jewish person hit with me.

Like to the effect of what Lily Dale said, if you find yourself pressurizing your Jewish friends to say just the right things ... maybe look at why you might be doing that.

We have some friends that are pretty strong Evangelical Christians. To their huge surprise the wife's ancestry test came back with over 50% Ashkenazi DNA. So these blood based tests always strike me as weird. So yeah ... contradictions.

When I was in high school we had a Holocaust survivor as a featured speaker in our history class. I don’t think that kind of thing is possible nowadays.

xp wow I didn't know about any of that drama

the fetishization also applies to the way anti-zionist or Israel-critical Jews are sometimes held up or used as shields by leftists. it puts them (your supposed comrades) in a very difficult position that people don't seem to even think of or care much about

hopefully people on the left understand these days that it's racist to interrogate Muslims and Arabs about where they stand on "islamism" or whatever so I don't know why this is different. because most Jews are perceived as "white" these days (sort of, by most people)? idk

xp that happened at my dad's school in Germany. I don't know if it still happens anywhere. it's very sad to think about

As mentioned before my wife's father was a Holocaust survivor.he never talked about it, he was the oldest of four children and the one who was sent out on secret errands to get food and supplies. He was only 11 when Greece was invaded so his early teenage years were spent in hiding on at best in a very precarious place. His younger brother, however, wrote a whole book about the family during the war. It's very detailed. The most sobering parts, for me: the list he compiled of thr number of their relatives who died in the holocaust (86 people), the 10 classmates in his first grade class who died (out of 15), the percentage of the Jewish population of his city who died (97%).

My wife has felt caught between a rock and a hard place, with recent events. So she's simply inclined to not think about it. For many the Holocaust isn't ancient theoretical history, it's a vv near miss.

fwiw can confirm didn't learn anything about WWII at school. I also didn't do History GCSE. we got as far as Victorian England and I think the last thing we did was about Bismarck, we didn't even get to WWI.

I hung out with an intelligent mid-30s guy recently who didn’t know anything about WWII except there was “a guy named Hitler or something”. But I also knew somebody who even at age 26 considered himself “Christian” but didn’t know there was a difference between Protestantism and Catholicism, or even that these distinctions existed. Both were schooled outside of the public school system

I don’t remember learning about Holocaust in school, but remember I learned about it (and segregation) by bombarding my parents with questions after reading Starring Sally J Freedman As Herself

As mentioned before my wife's father was a Holocaust survivor.he never talked about it, he was the oldest of four children and the one who was sent out on secret errands to get food and supplies. He was only 11 when Greece was invaded so his early teenage years were spent in hiding on at best in a very precarious place. His younger brother, however, wrote a whole book about the family during the war. It's very detailed. The most sobering parts, for me: the list he compiled of thr number of their relatives who died in the holocaust (86 people), the 10 classmates in his first grade class who died (out of 15), the percentage of the Jewish population of his city who died (97%).

My wife has felt caught between a rock and a hard place, with recent events. So she's simply inclined to not think about it. For many the Holocaust isn't ancient theoretical history, it's a vv near miss.

― omar little, Saturday, December 9, 2023 2:18 PM bookmarkflaglink

Those are some very sobering statistics indeed. Thank you for sharing that.

When I was in high school we had a Holocaust survivor as a featured speaker in our history class.

my american history teacher was a WW2 vet who was basically a socialist, looked just like Kurt Vonnegut and regaled us with the horrors war for a whole year, he was amazing. This was 1987.

the same high school just had to let go of the current history teacher this year for apparently denying the holocaust and distributing conspiracy nonsense to students. He had been doing this for years until someone did something.

https://www.ktvu.com/news/hayward-teacher-on-leave-after-complaints-of-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories-being-taught

Our high school actually has a holocaust studies class.

I recall Spielberg I think made it his mission to interview and document every Holocaust survivor he could.

Starring Sally J Freedman As Herself is a wonderful book.

So glad to see it mentioned, like an old friend.

We had to read Night as the centerpiece of our 8th grade language arts curriculum— realizing that this was exceptional was truly unnerving to me.

The "citizenship in the UK" test you need to do to apply for British nationality has a section on WWII that never mentions the holocaust or Jewish people at all. And if you think "well it's just about the British experience of it", nope - it does mention Pearl Harbour.

i was taught absolutely nothing about the holocaust at school here in scotland and had to educate myself about it. my teenage step daughter has been taught a tiny bit about it but in a very nebulous fashion. she has however been taught about WW1 in great, great detail. seems mad.

Mcgill out at Upenn
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/us/university-of-pennsylvania-president-resigns.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20231209&instance_id=0&nl=breaking-news&ref=cta®i_id=162391437&segment_id=152208&user_id=de55aa93334761c67172b9effa0847b0

The amount of people online who were calling her a raging antisemite even before the hearing (and not to mention the trucks with screens that said ‘Magill is an Antisemite’ drive around Upenn campus make me wonder about what the hell people mean by anitsemite.

She allowed Roger Waters to be invited to a literary festival. ANTISEMITE