Anti-semitism thread: onwards from 2023

"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.

<3

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.

Sorry for making assumptions. You are right that assumptions are not helpful.

My point was that it would be very nice if the focus could be on the horrific national origin and ethnic discrimination this plaintiff experienced at Carnegie Mellon. The buts seemed to minimize that and I was briefly annoyed.

By the way I didn't see any accusations that "people think they are antisemites" in reference to your specific friends.

My other point was that strawmanning that type of accusation and generalizing to groups is harmful and not useful. It can be used as a basis for showing that specific accusations are made in bad faith. I don't think that is what is happening with the plaintiff from CMU.

Don't know what to make of this weirdness:

The marketing materials for Anthony Hopkins latest feature film, a Holocaust biopic titled “One Life,” are set to be amended after controversy ensued over the lack of reference to Jews.

“One Life” tells the story of Nicholas Winton (played by Hopkins), better known as the British Oskar Schindler. Winton helped save the lives of over 600 children – the majority of them Jewish – from the Nazis during World War II.

But there has been disquiet over marketing for the movie after it was claimed Jews had been erased from the synopsis.

The furor started after British media retailer HMV tweeted about the film and referred to the children saved by Winton as “Central European” rather than Jewish. A number of independent cinemas also used the term “Central European” instead of “Jewish” while describing the film on their websites.

See-Saw Films, who produced “One Life,” and Warner Bros. Pictures., who are distributing it in the U.K., subsequently also came under fire for omitting the word “Jewish” from their marketing materials when describing the children saved by Winton, although they did not use “Central European.”

Warner Bros. in the U.K. declined to comment but Variety understands that following the criticism all Warner’s official marketing for the film will be amended to describe the children as “predominantly Jewish,” which reflects the fact that while most of the 600+ Czechoslovakian children were Jewish, a handful of them were non-Jewish political refugees.

I'm not surprised to hear about antisemitism in the UK film industry unfortunately but I am pretty surprised by this kind of soviet bloc style erasure

(I'm assuming the film itself isn't doing this? I hope not)

I really hope the marketing department just fucked this up somehow and it wasn't some kind of top down edict. either way it's baffling and troubling. especially if there are economic or political reasons why they made these choices and it wasn't just incompetence

A piece on the film itself.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/01/nicholas-winton-saved-my-father-from-the-nazis-heres-how-one-life-betrays-him

a handful of them were non-Jewish political refugees.

"100 or so" according to the Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/04/one-life-marketing-materials-altered-following-jewish-backlash

Contains the bizarre wording

the film-makers, who were conscious that 100 or so of the children were political refugees rather than Jewish.

"Rather than"

Children being ethnically cleansed from Czechoslovakia because of Nazi persecution are not also political refugees, ok Guardian.

Well, the Jewish children were being persecuted simply for being Jewish, the non-Jewish children because of the political backgrounds of their parents, so it's a shorthand way of differentiating between them.

They had it right the first time. It's not hard to word this in a way which doesn't deny agency to the Jewish parents as well (who no doubt held some politically opposed views too). It sounded like the non-Jewish children were being given some sort of politics test.

Understandable why this kind of saviour narrative would irritate in the film as well.

I mean letting people emigrate from a war zone they want to leave is good, I wouldn't be alive without it.

This kind of awkward wording is more like just cluelessness or implicit bias from the fact the Jewish population is so comparatively low in the UK and Europe because of ... (Friday Night Dinner neighbor Jim voice) you know

I do find they protest a bit too much about October 7 having nothing to do with this. I mean how could it not.

Reminds me of 2 sets of comments about the recent Isaac Chotiner New Yorker interview on the famine in Gaza. One was outraged the interview hadn't mentioned Israel at all. The other just as outraged it hadn't mentioned Hamas at all.

I do find they protest a bit too much about October 7 having nothing to do with this. I mean how could it not.

Reminds me of 2 sets of comments about the recent Isaac Chotiner New Yorker interview on the famine in Gaza. One was outraged the interview hadn't mentioned Israel at all. The other just as outraged it hadn't mentioned Hamas at all.

My wife and I had a chuckle at the idea of someone going to see this movie blind and being surprised that, wait a minute, this guy didn't rescue hundreds of Central Europeans, he was rescuing Jews! And then demanding their money back.

junker heirs who still think mitteleuropa belongs to them will be very disappointed

unfortunately the film does sound a bit like the usual british back patting bullshit that totally whitewashes our complicity in genocide (then and by implication now as well). UK media seems totally incapable of acknowledging any antisemitism unless we can be the heroes and unless it's coming from "outside". it's really gross

If UK media was ever to produce something more critical in the vein you describe, I can guarantee 100% it would not be a film with Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham Carter.

... or coming from Jeremy Corbyn.

corbyn is "outside" as part of a traitorous metropolitan fifth column that hates britain and is importing these radical foreign ideas like antisemitism that are totally alien to our national character

There was a YouGov/Economist poll discussed upthread that including an extremely alarming statistic about 20% of 18-29yr olds thinking the Holocaust is "a myth."

Pew Research looks at that poll in this piece, noting problems with opt-in online polls in general: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/05/online-opt-in-polls-can-produce-misleading-results-especially-for-young-people-and-hispanic-adults/

And they did their own survey with a different methodology and less disturbing results:

https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/SR_24.03.04_opt-in-polls_2.png

I'm not posting this to minimize anyone's concerns about antisemitism in general, but I was relieved to learn that rising generations likely haven't been duped into believing grotesquely racist lies. Anyway, it's worth reading the article if you're curious, plus Pew has a whole section on Holocaust awareness that looked interesting too.

Also the 18-29 demo being the most anti-choice group is a red flag for accuracy.

Yeah this was quite relieving for me to read. 3% feels far more in line with it being "fringe" rather than "widespread". Quite a disparity

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2024/mar/06/tory-peer-jacqueline-foster-pays-damages-university-challenge

in less relieving news, I learned this morning that the Republican nominee for NC governor is a Holocaust denier while his Democratic opponent in the election is Jewish

that nominee for Governor apparently has all sorts of nutty stuff in his social media background.

Yeah he’s basically the worst on every issue (Mark Robinson, that is)

Also, regarding Black Panther: “It is absolutely AMAZING to me that people… can get so excited about a fictional ‘hero’ created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic marxist. How can this trash, that was only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets, invoke any pride?”

Blimey.

He will lose.