Anti-semitism thread: onwards from 2023

*we* aren't the ones who are creating these dichotomies.

That's fine if you mean a we= everyone.

Rather than a "we versus Jewish people," which is how it feels when you repeatedly shove "Israel slaughter" in the middle of other topics being discussed by Jewish posters.

If you could stop that, at least on the antisemitism thread, that would be great. If you want to start another thread or even board about the wider topic that would be great.

What's annoying too is people coming along and creating dichotomies or hierarchies of privilege and being like "who did this??!!" Super annoying especially to get lectures on privilege from white men. I thought you felt it was infantilizing to assign virtue based on identity, anyway.

yes I agree with table. I think university administrations should be held accountable for harassment that happens on their campuses if it crosses the threshold of acceptable behavior. I don't love administrators in education; I think they get paid too much to the detriment of professors and adjuncts. At the same time I don't envy their roles that much, given the accountability they have to face. I'm not crying over Magill losing this role specifically; I didn't go to UPenn, my kid isn't going there, and I only know one person who teaches there, but I am concerned that she's having to step down over a situation that seems less dire than the Amy Wax situation, frankly (though admittedly I also don't know how Wax's tenure and contract protects her).

I think it's important to differentiate clear offenses (someone telling a jewish student 'this is all your fault' or telling them they should be gassed) versus nebulous ones (the Palestine Writes festival, students and teachers saying "from the river to the sea"). If there is a preponderance of the former that went unaddressed, then she absolutely should have resigned, and the university better get specific about what violates the code of conduct or not. If they adopt the NY standard that Hochul wants--that calling for genocide violates Title VI--they'd better be clear what 'calling for genocide' means. If it means saying "from the river to the sea" then I think we are in dangerous waters (forgive the sea pun).

I personally don't feel I know enough about the facts to draw any ultimate conclusions. What I saw indicates a duty to investigate under the law.

The Wapo opinion piece from the person in UPenn's Open Expression Committee is clear that words like "intifada" and "from the river to the sea" are antisemitic calls for genocide, and need to be restricted. It makes me wonder if there are any pro-palestinian statements that can be made that would not be defined as antisemitic under these rules. The irony is that there is an actual genocide underway, which is why these statements are being made in the first place.

Notwithstanding my feeling about the term "intifada," I in no way support the witch hunt against these U. presidents

Prof. Finklestein's WaPo piece didnt refer to to any rules. It's her opinion.

I'd say your paraphrase misreads it a bit.

With or without the First Amendment, calls for genocide against Jews — or even proxies for such sentiments, such as calling for intifada against Jews or the elimination of Israel by chanting “from the river to the sea” — are, in the present context, calls for violence against a discrete ethnic or religious group. Such speech arguably incites violence, frequently inspires harassment of Jewish students and, without question, creates a hostile environment that can impair the equal educational opportunities of Jewish students.

While it sounds unreasonable to you reading about it online, I would give some deference to Prof. Finklestein being on Penn campus. She seems to have some insight into the coding of words and how they are taken as threatening or not, and to whom.

Man alive explained how this in understood with knowledge of the conflict. Do you feel the need to center your own perception over those who are arguably closer to the facts or more affected?

With another racial minority or sex would you say, well I'm not threatened by X, therefore X is not harassing?

We don't have to agree. I dont see it as a witch hunt against presidents. I have worked on civil rights cases. I want to see if there is harassment or discrimination.

xp to akm

Btw The Amy Wax situation has been going on since 2017. Magill became President in July 2022.

That's atrociously slow.

With another racial minority or sex would you say, well I'm not threatened by X, therefore X is not harassing?

I think it would depend on what X was. By this criteria, anyone could make up any situation, say it's threatening, and you'd have to take their word for it, which I don't think is a good thing to do.

I'm struggling to think of another real scenario where a statement is being interpreted as a proxy for a genocidal or even racist/bigoted belief and is making people uncomfortable enough that they they feel unsafe (i'm sure there are a million, but I can't think of any right now). The closest thing I can think of is the display of confederate flags. If a black student said they were made uncomfortable by this, obviously I wouldn't question it, because it's been thoroughly debated in culture, and confederate advocates have lost their argument that the flag stands primarily as a 'symbol of heritage' and not a proxy for a racist system.

For this particular issue, the reason I have a hard time believing that the statement 'from the river to the sea' MUST be accepted as a proxy for advocating genocide is that the Likud party uses essentially the same phrase.

such as calling for intifada against Jews or the elimination of Israel by chanting “from the river to the sea”

This is an abuse of language in incredibly bad faith.

it's also rich to argue that pro-palestinian student activists in the US are advocating for genocide with a phrase when Israel is actively perpetuating a genocide.

and to clarify: there are obviously many, many, many jewish people who do not to agree that 'from the river to the sea' is inherently antisemitic or genocidal. The only person I know who believes this is an elderly Finnish American woman who converted to judaism two years ago and who also tells me that Israel isn't an apartheid state, arabs are just 'lesser citizens' and that's ok.

Masha Gessen wrote this astonishing piece that covers territory as broad as Germany’s memory of the Holocaust, the notion of singular evil, the remembrance of ex-Soviet Jews, Ukraine and Russia and Poland, and how the past isn’t past. I went through after reading looking for a particular paragraph to share and maybe the conclusion is most fitting. It covers a lot of what we have discussed over these various threads. Maybe this thread isn’t the best place for it but it seemed to be to me.

The day I arrived in Kyiv, someone handed me a thick book. It was the first academic study of Stepan Bandera to be published in Ukraine. Bandera is a Ukrainian hero: he fought against the Soviet regime; dozens of monuments to him have appeared since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. He ended up in Germany after the Second World War, led a partisan movement from exile, and died after being poisoned by a K.G.B. agent, in 1959. Bandera was also a committed fascist, an ideologue who wanted to build a totalitarian regime. These facts are detailed in the book, which has sold about twelve hundred copies. (Many bookstores have refused to carry it.) Russia makes gleeful use of Ukraine’s Bandera cult as evidence that Ukraine is a Nazi state. Ukrainians mostly respond by whitewashing Bandera’s legacy. It is ever so hard for people to wrap their minds around the idea that someone could have been the enemy of your enemy and yet not a benevolent force. A victim and also a perpetrator. Or vice versa.

Yeah that is a great piece of writing and reporting. Clear-eyed and tragic.

I'm not finished reading this yet, so I'm just dropping the link:

How Bad Is Anti-Semitism In America, Really?

The author (Eric Levitz) offers seven points:

1. Antisemitism is a genuine social problem in the U.S. But the U.S. is nevertheless an exceptionally safe country for Jews.
2. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.
3. Antisemitism is much more prevalent on the American right than on the American left.
4. That said, some of the more doctrinaire variants of social-justice ideology are problematic from a Jewish point of view.
5. Some strains of pro-Palestine activism in the U.S. betray anti-Jewish animus.
6. The existence of antisemitism within the pro-Palestine movement tells us nothing about the merits of the Palestinian cause.
7. Anti-Palestinian sentiment is a much bigger problem in America today than antisemitism.

That piece is kind of a mess.

That Gessen essay ends with three mighty paragraphs.

Like the New Yorker's recent hit piece on Hasan Minhaj I didn't think much of it.

Really? What did you object to? Not looking to argue, just curious. I thought it was pretty powerful.

That Gessen essay ends with three mighty paragraphs.

hard agreement.

Naomi Klein's Doppelganger ends with a very good examination of Palestine/Israel that much of the instant opinion/thinkpiece space doesn't have the room for. Big recommendation for the book - make room for it if you can.

Going to put a hold on that at the library asap.

felicity, I appreciate what you've said and I get you, my wife has been hurt and troubled by so much from both sides of the conflict, and a lot of that comes from the discourse and the dog whistles (both unintentional or clearly intentional) appearing within it. I suspect it's something she thinks about more than when she was younger, both bc of recent upticks in anti-semitism and due to us having a young kid.

Found a swastika on a desk in my classroom today. No way of knowing if it's a random swastika or one specifically directed at me.

Ugh. I often wish it wasn't so easy to be so hurtful.

Naomi Klein's Doppelganger

Started this the other day and have already recommended it to several people.

she sold me on it with her appearance on the Jewish Currents podcast - I'm telling everyone I know about it and hoping someone will buy it for me this year since I have no money atm

I'm really sorry to Lily and everyone else who is going through this shit right now. I don't think it has been this bad within my lifetime before. I hope saying that isn't contributing to a climate of fear but I doubt it's news to anyone

so sorry Lily :(

"random swastika" ugh. I'm sorry Lily

So sorry Lily.

Lily, that sucks. I’m so sorry.

Sorry Lily, that is terrible.

Horrific.

awful

I was mulling this more and I really, really do not want to see language that is meaningful to people taken away from them. I understand that "intifada" has a long history and many contexts. I even think it is kind of a beautiful word. I don't want to tell people never to use it. I care more about whether people are actually justifying murder of civilians than what word they use. If people want to say that, they can say it. I just hope that people really think through what they are ok with, what kind of carnage is acceptable to them to achieve their goals, which goes every bit as much if not more for supporters of Israel.

So very sorry, Lily

Absolute crap Lily; is this a higher ed institution or HS or lower? Any investigation or announcement from the administration?

The other night, somebody smashed up a large menorah by Oakland's Lake Merritt, and threw it in the lake. So last night they brought a new one, and a bunch of people were there, maybe a hundred or so, to watch the lighting. It was a very Bay Area crowd, a lot of people wearing keffiyeh scarves... the AG Rob Bonta spoke, and then they lit the menorah. It was a pretty cool scene all in all, I'm glad I went down.

At least there was a more or less happy ending.

This lawsuit just filed against Carnegie Mellon documents an alleged long campaign of anti-Semitism against a Jewish student:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24223185-canaan-v-carnegie-mellon

much of that is terrible, but again there are moments of conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism which obscures the very fucking real and scary incidents of the latter. Terrible that the student had to go through that.

(to be specific, the act of emailing the student articles from an explicitly anti-Zionist magazine is definitely anti-Semitic given the context, but that magazine is not anti-Semitic, it has published work by numerous Jewish scholars and architects, including numerous people who are close friends of mine)

A menorah was vandalised in Islington Green, less than a mile from my place but has been relit this evening.

And I don't think anybody had posted news or clips of that far right Polish politician that dramatically extinguished a menorah in their parliament.

The Oakland incident may or may not have been anti-semitic.. to be fair, there are crazy people who throw things in the lake all the time, including rental scooters and trash cans
But it's being investigated as a hate crime

I think the targeting of not really religious Jewish totems associated with a not really religious holiday really underscores the amount of latent anti-Semitism out there. It's like, people are generally so ignorant of Judaism and its customs that the menorah is probably about as far as they go. Of course, that could also be because it's pretty much the only public display of Judaism you see anywhere.

there are crazy people who throw things in the lake all the time, including rental scooters and trash cans

not to mention bodies

I deleted a mention of the Pole because I wasn’t sure which government building the menorah was in.

As to Islington, who would do such a thing? Horrible.

Lily I'm so sorry to learn about the swastika.

Belated to Lily - that's terrible.

This lawsuit just filed against Carnegie Mellon documents an alleged long campaign of anti-Semitism against a Jewish student:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24223185-canaan-v-carnegie-mellon

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, December 14, 2023 11:04 AM bookmarkflaglink

Horrific. That's classic harassment, discrimination, and retaliation. That this took place in the shadow of the Tree of Life massacre is beyond.

Really not understanding this urge to define people, magazines, etc. as instrinsically not "anti-Semitic" because of the inclusion of certain pieces of content. Surely it's the individual acts or statements complained of that matter.

people who are close friends of mine

Respectfully, if you are referring to Steven Salaita, what is the point of mentioning your being friends with him in view of these horrific allegations.

Pointing to other things mixed in there seems like a fetishization or tokenization of certain points of view. The "some of my best friends" argument.

And since when has professors making students read blogs or write blogs become an instrument of campus harassment. I've seen this elsewhere.

it would help if that complaint actually stated what articles were being sent to her (this is the site: https://thefunambulist.net, btw). There are lots of things on this site. That said, sending anything to her as a response was idiotic. I'm regularly surprised by how badly organizations handle serious complaints. Everything leading up to the sending of the article is bad enough.

Here's a strange irony -- the Funambulist featured, in 2018, a positive article about eruvs. Something I randomly found poking around the website.
https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/cartography-power/atlas-legal-fictions-jewish-eruv-piper-bernbaum

In fact, it notes

Although it is intended to facilitate Orthodox Jews specifically, it does not eliminate others from being part of the designated space. The consequence is an open, permeable boundary that establishes community, maintains tradition, and yet allows interaction with new environments and other cultures. It is both spatial and social in its existence, a true place of “mingling” between public and private, old and new, the traditional religious practices of one culture, and the modern urban fabric of contemporary cities.

Which only highlights the deep wrongheadedness and antisemitism of the professor who compared eruvs to the west bank wall and sent the student this website. But it's also hard for me to see the site as "anti-Jewish" from what I am reading.

Belated thanks for all the sympathy, everyone. It made me pretty depressed for about a day, but ultimately I've got 165 students and 164 of them didn't do it, and once I'd had a day with them to remind myself of that, I felt comfortable in my classroom again. It does make me worry about what's showing up in spaces the teachers don't see, though.