Anti-semitism thread: onwards from 2023

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

j/k. when I found out it was Waters that was behind that entire kerfuffle my jaw dropped. First off, Waters is a putz. He absolutely plays around with that line of what is antisemitic and what isn't, which is not good. He's a poor communicator and too strident. His music has sucked since 1981 and he is personally charmless. But the main allegation about his antisemitism comes from him wearing the Hammers uniform in Germany, which is obviously poking fun at the Germans. Also, no literary festival should invite him, wtf. They had legit writers at that festival. If I were on that panel and they invited Waters I'd be incensed.

Imagine losing your job as a university president because of the guy who wrote Radio KAOS

She actually banned him from the campus.

Imagine losing your job as a university president because of the guy who wrote Radio KAOS

The Roger Waters thing had nothing to do with it. This is 100% about Congressional Republicans and their bullshit hearing.

The head of Penn's Board of Trustees, Scott Bok, left too; in his outgoing email, he wrote:

The world should know that Liz Magill is a very good person and a talented leader who was beloved by her team. She is not the slightest bit antisemitic. Working with her was one of the great pleasures of my life. Worn down by months of relentless external attacks, she was not herself last Tuesday. Over prepared and over lawyered given the hostile forum and high stakes, she provided a legalistic answer to a moral question, and that was wrong. It made for a dreadful 30-second sound bite in what was more than five hours of testimony."

...

I believe that in the fullness of time people will come to view the story of her presidency at Penn very differently than they do today. I hope that some fine university will in due course be wise enough to give her a second chance, in a more supportive community, to lead. I equally hope that, after a well deserved break, she wants that role.

It’s more about the donors pulling out since that festival. It’s been rolling snowball since then.

the festival appears to be the precipitating issue

Also, UPenn did get sued by two students yesterday under Title VI. These incidents are much more disturbing than the festival, but I'm not sure if these particular incidents were discussed at that hearing or were widely known until now.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/08/business/students-claim-university-of-pennsylvania-civil-rights-antisemitism-on-campus/index.html

(there's only one incident in the article, sorry. but it's still concerning. I dunno that it's "university president must resign" concerning)

(and the festival is one of the 'incidents' in the lawsuit; the incidents go back to 2015, but the festival apparently "unleashed a wave" of antisemitism on campus...I haven't read the full allegation)

I dunno. Stuff like this:

"One of the plantiffs in the lawsuit says that on October 9, while walking on campus wearing garb that identified her as Jewish, including a Star of David, she walked by a group of pro-Palestine protestors.

One of the protestors yelled to her, “you are a dirty Jew, don’t look at us,” she said.

Other protestors joined in, taunting Davis with: “keep walking you dirty little Jew,” “you know what you’ve done wrong,” it says.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/08/business/students-claim-university-of-pennsylvania-civil-rights-antisemitism-on-campus/index.html

That is flatout wrong, unacceptable antisemitism. No doubt about it.

Stuff like this:

Columbia University senior Yusuf Hafez was in class in late October when his friend alerted him that his photograph was being shown around the university on a truck under a banner that proclaimed he was among “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites,” according to a recent lawsuit.

The conservative nonprofit, Accuracy in Media, also published a website containing his full name, he alleges. He says the website, which CNN has not been able to see independently, falsely claimed he was the president of a student organization that signed a pro-Palestinian letter that called for the university to cut ties with “apartheid Israel.” Hafez had not held a leadership role in the organization since May 2023, according to his suit.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/28/business/students-lawsuits-israel-hamas-war/index.html (weirdly linked to in previous article as reference to antisemitic incidents on the UPenn campus, but it isn't)

That is just flat out unacceptable, wrong, bigoted bullshit by a conservative outlet. That is also targeted harassment and completely wrong, if they are claiming Hafez is 'antisemitic' because he is critical of the actions of the Israeli government. Maybe he said something explicitly 'antisemitic' but I don't know what that would have been. This is going straight back to 'criticizing the government of israel is antisemitic' which I think is a dangerous, horrible belief but it seems to be one the government is happy to advance. It requires everyone to take for granted the legitimacy of ethnostates as organizations which I cannot accept.

It requires everyone to take for granted the legitimacy of ethnostates as organizations which I cannot accept.

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm), Saturday, December 9, 2023 7:02 PM bookmarkflaglink

What is an "ethnostate"? Aren't most countries like Japan and Korea "ethnostates"?

Didn't learn in any detail about: WWI, WWII, Holocaust, colonialism, the ongoing Nakba. All done via reading, film, social media, TV, media, any other scraps. Hardly perfect but it's what it is and you move in the world and have the hard conversations with it. Don't see any other way but look at who is being oppressed by whom and go from there.

if criticizing the government of Israel is believed to be inherently antisemitic, it would seem that the government of Israel is defining itself as an ethnostate. Or maybe it's something else, but something that's hard for me to define; some kind of theocratic ethnostate, like, well, Iran. No doubt it has a much more liberal and democratic type of government, but the state seems to define itself around ethnic and religious identity. That's something I'm uncomfortable with; as problematic as they are, I still believe in 'melting pots' or 'mosaics' where there are no barriers to liberty or power for any people regardless of ethnicity or religious identity.

(yes I am aware there are no other countries where that is 100% true)

if criticizing the government of Israel is believed to be inherently antisemitic

There plenty of actual antisemitism to discuss without introducing that particular red herring.

Here is the complaint in a lawsuit filed against NYU for Title VI violations.

From Paragraph 107:

Ingber recounted that students
are horrified and frightened as chants of “gas the Jews” and “Hitler was right” ring out on
campus, and students and professors serve up a “constant contextualization and justification of
Hamas’s brutal terror attack at NYU,” both in the classroom and around the school. I

Apparently Penn issued guidance to students to hide their Jewish garb.

Eyal Yakoby, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, said that while walking to class a few days ago he had seen "90 percent of pigs are gas chambered" written in chalk, adding: "Let me be clear: I do not feel safe."

https://www.newsweek.com/jewish-college-students-campus-antisemitism-experience-1849959

yes those students should be expelled.

(the ones shouting that at anyone, that is. Or anyone who writes that on campus. That should violate a code of conduct. I would have to hear specifics on this: “constant contextualization and justification of Hamas’s brutal terror attack at NYU” to know what i think about it. Justification sounds bad to me; contextualization seems necessary to understand what even happened?)

187. In response to a survey distributed to NYU Jewish groups, other students
recounted egregious acts of antisemitism, including:

. . .  Professor Valerie Forman insisted on discussing in class the conflict in the
Middle East, which was completely unrelated to the subject she was teaching,
and asserted that “Hamas was a military group, not a terrorist organization,
and Israel was a group of colonizers.” Professor Forman also claimed that not
many Jews had been killed, and that there was no proof of babies being
beheaded and nodded in agreement at the statement the “Israeli
people . . . deserve what had happened to them.”

 A few days after Hamas’s October 7 attack, Professor Marie Cruz Soto
addressed her class, asserting that Israel is a colonizing power and deserves to
be destroyed, Hamas is part of the resistance, violence from Israel permeates
the entire world and directly causes violence in America and for people of
color globally and “rich Jewish donors that control NYU” are trying to silence
her.

https://www.kasowitz.com/media/bnblicby/complaint-v-nyu.pdf

Here is the Penn complaint

https://www.kasowitz.com/media/focjlca0/university-of-pennsylvania-complaint.pdf

‘For example, over the weekend of September 22-24, 2023, Penn proudly hosted an anti-Jewish hate- fest, euphemistically dubbed the “Palestine Writes Literature Festival,” that calls to mind the infamous August 2017 Unite the Right hate rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.’

‘After Hamas’s horrific mass slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of more than 1,200 Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, one of the invited speakers at the Palestine Writes Literature Festival stooped to the previously unimaginable low of joking about an Israeli baby Hamas had burned in an oven, asking “with or without baking powder?” Similar stomach-turning anti-Jewish conduct, by students and faculty alike, are commonplace at Penn.’

Subject of the infamous Bari Weiss tweet.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/08/palestinian-poet-refaat-alareer-killed-in-gaza

Aren't most countries like Japan and Korea "ethnostates"?

those countries are and it's to their immense discredit. I don't think most countries are even if they aspire to be. Israel is more ethnically diverse than those examples but is governed according to principles of ethnic supremacy so I think the label fits

Israel is not ein the top 37 countries with 85% or more monoethnicity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoethnicity

Not sure why people are so invested in the ethnostate label.

Because of the occupation of Gaza, the settlement of the West Bank; it is by definition an apartheid state, even if one doesn't want to label it as such

Having listened more to that Congressional Hearing, (talked about it on another thread but there was a point that was more relevant to this one), it is asserted and agreed upon by both Congresspeople and Uni presidents (and a former-president) that "education" is the best method of combating anti-Semitism in the West. I don't disagree, but find that the "education" that is being described so often falls exclusively to "Holocaust education". A much-more salient line of education insofar as fighting anti-Semitism is post-WW2 expulsions of Jews across the Arab peninsula and Northern Africa; the Farhud in Iraq and the 60s massacres, the expulsion of Jews from Oman and Syria and Jordan and Yemen. How many Jews reside in Egypt now? three, according to Wikipedia.

Arguments about archaeological evidence indicating that "Palestine belongs to the Jews, historically" avoid a much more convincing argument for Israel's existence as "a place for Jews to live safely": there are literally no other nations in the area where they can exist, safely.

if criticizing the government of Israel is believed to be inherently antisemitic

There plenty of actual antisemitism to discuss without introducing that particular red herring.

This, to me, is the crux of the issue, though. The argument that "anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism" (isn't this the law in Germany? it is absolutely asserted by ADL and so on), seemed to be the focus of the Congressional hearings; this conflation is endangering Jewish people. The bullshit intention of this conflation is "if you criticize Israel, you're being anti-Semitic, so don't criticize Israel". But: the inverted logic of this assertion is, "if you are being anti-Semitic, you are fighting Israel"-- a student yelling "gas the Jews" might themselves feel that they're just expressing solidarity with dying Palestinians, without understanding that they're actually being stupid Nazis who deserve expulsion. Am I making sense here? I'm trying to say "the anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism conflation is very dangerous, will inflame anti-Semitism rather than quell anti-Zionism, and deserves far more pushback than simply labelling it as a red herring."

According to wikipedia the scholarly term is "ethnocracy"

Israel has been labeled an ethnocracy by scholars such as Alexander Kedar,[14] Shlomo Sand,[15] Oren Yiftachel,[16] Asaad Ghanem,[17][18] Haim Yakobi,[19] Nur Masalha[20] and Hannah Naveh.[21] It is also viewed as an apartheid state by various organisations, including B'tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, due to actions committed against Palestinians that they see as emblematic of such a state.[22][23][24]

However, scholars such as Gershon Shafir, Yoav Peled and Sammy Smooha prefer the term ethnic democracy to describe Israel,[25] which is intended[26] to represent a "middle ground" between an ethnocracy and a liberal democracy. Smooha in particular argues that ethnocratic democracies, allowing a privileged status to a dominant ethnic majority while ensuring that all individuals have equal rights, are defensible. His opponents reply that insofar as Israel contravenes equality in practice, the term 'democratic' in his equation is flawed.[27]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocracy