Anti-semitism thread: onwards from 2023

Fwiw, I can see the point— that repeating antisemitic tropes as a form of levity can merely reinscribe the antisemitism of the tropes— but the accusatory tone is a bit too much for me.

This was all you had to say.

Now why don't you try keeping my name out of your accusatory mouth. People can read for themselves what my posts say.

I will be more mindful.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Wednesday, May 15, 2024 4:50 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Thanks. I really try not to spend a disproportionate amount of time focusing on this, but Jews feel very much in the world's fishbowl right now. There are only 15 million of us in the world (roughly the same # as pre-Holocaust) and half live in Israel. A huge percentage of us have family in Israel or family who took refuge in Israel at some point. I'm well aware that there are people who "weaponize" accusations of antisemitism, but I also think that we are hypersensitized to antisemitism. I don't necessarily have the same reactions as Shakey or Felicity, but I can understand them. The glibness with which a lot of non-Jewish people are now weighing in on what is and what isn't antisemitic and who the "real" antisemites are and which side they are on disturbs me. There *is* real antisemitism on the pro-Palestinian side. I'm not sure that calling it "left" is necessarily accurate, because a significant part of it comes from reactionary Muslim sources or conspiracy kooks that are merely aligned with the left on this issue. But it is real. Not to mention that, while anti-Zionism is not per se antisemitism, "zionist" has been used as a code word for Jews/Jewish conspiracy by antisemites for a very long time. So it can be easy to fall into paranoia about what people are really saying or thinking.

So I get it, forked tongue, what's next, horns? But when I'm reading tweets from supposed pro-Palestinian activists (who admittedly I don't actually know who they are IRL) about how "Zionists" control worldwide organ theft, it does feel a bit less funny.

fwiw I'm not sure anyone was trying to be funny. Just acknowledging the lineage and persistence of the tropes. But fair points.

Sure. And I didn't take offense at the posts themselves, fwiw, I was more using them as a jumping off point. And also, fwiw, I'm not familiar with "forked tongue" being an antisemitic trope, other than just I guess having some general evocation of devil? It seems like evangelical GOP folks accuse people of speaking with a forked tongue all the time.

Yeah, I think of "forked tongue" as a Biblical reference, the Garden of Eden and all that. I'm also not aware of it as specifically antisemitic — and a quick Google bears that out — but it is ascribing Satanic characteristics that feel close to horns etc. I would think best avoided under the circumstances, but I agree it's not a blatant invocation.

fwiw I'm not sure anyone was trying to be funny. Just acknowledging the lineage and persistence of the tropes. But fair points.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Thursday, May 16, 2024 7:05 AM bookmarkflaglink

tipsy, thank you.

I said "I wonder" since I wanted to leave open the possibility of mere thoughtlessness. You answered that.

What for you is "just" hypothetical abstract, language is for the target, when repeated, circulated, and shared online on a massive scale, especially with "we" and "them" in-group-out-group signaling, something that causes real psychological and emotional harm. It's dehumanizing language which has been used for centuries to justify violence against Jews. It's a mark of privilege that you don't need to consider it after you made your post whereas here I was carrying it around a week later wondering whether it's worth the typical ILX knee-jerk backlash to register my objection.

Antisemitism is in the air we breathe. It wears a deep groove in the history of Western thought. Antisemitism offers many pleasures: the lure of tradition, the thrill of transgressiveness, the high of moral superiority. I understand a lot of this is passed on thoughtlessly or without conscious bad intent. The way to respond is to make people aware of what they are doing and ask them to be more conscious.

You'd think lawyers would have evolved, but this is the crap we are still dealing with in my profession:

Two ex-Lewis Brisbois partners were pushed out of the boutique they started after their former firm released racist, sexist and antisemitic emails the partners wrote while employed there.

The remaining leaders at the boutique, which was formed by John Barber and Jeff Ranen, will start a new firm, said Tim Graves, chief executive officer at the operation that had been named Barber Ranen.

“Effective immediately, the firm has requested and accepted the resignations of John Barber and Jeffrey Ranen,” Graves said in a statement Monday. “The remaining equity partners express their disappointment and disdain for the language Mr. Barber and Mr. Ranen used.”

The partners’ former firm, Lewis Brisbois, shared a tranche of emails spanning more than a decade that show Barber and Ranen making disparaging remarks about female associates, clients and others, as well as using racist, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ slurs.

“We are resigning from Barber Ranen effective immediately in order to allow our friends and colleagues to continue on without the cloud of our conduct hanging over them,” Ranen and Barber said in a joint statement.

They added, “We are ashamed of the words we wrote, and we are deeply sorry.”

Barber and Ranen were California-based leaders of Lewis Brisbois’s labor and employment group until last month, when they broke off from firm and took nearly 140 lawyers with them.

Lewis Brisbois opened an investigation into the two partners after receiving an “anonymous complaint” following their departure, the firm said in a statement Monday.

“Because the vast majority of these emails were sent in private between John Barber and Jeff Ranen, neither the Lewis Brisbois HR department nor the executive committee were made aware of their behavior until after the anonymous complaint first came in,” the firm’s statement said.

In one email, after Ranen complained about a female colleague’s overtime request, Barber told him to “kill her” through a sexual act. In another, Ranen mocked the religious practices of a Jewish attorney who asked not to be emailed during the sabbath.

Many states have training mandates for lawyers that require them to complete continuing education courses to topics related to ethics and bias. California requires lawyers to complete at least 25 hours of training every three years.

Emails from Barber and Ranen demonstrate the little quality control that state bar associations perform on these trainings, said Rima Sirota, a Georgetown University law professor.

“This kind of stuff is unethical,” Sirota said. “Most companies wouldn’t want to be associating with a firm with that kind of atmosphere.”

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/ex-lewis-brisbois-partners-quit-firm-after-racist-sexist-emails

These weren't some white collar criminal defense attorneys. They were leaders of the labor and employment law group.

It really pains me to see this being taught to younger generations.

Yep, totally hear you. My own comment about drinking blood was a shorthand nod toward the way QAnon has updated and recirculated blood-libel slander and that all of these things are connected. But I realize that things that sound one way in conversation can scan differently in text. The point of all it being that antisemitism remains endemic in our social and political rhetoric.

The point of all it being that antisemitism remains endemic in our social and political rhetoric.

Thank you. And my point is we don't need to see a demonstration of the dog whistling to see that antisemitism in the air like wild yeast.

You can refer to "blood libels" and tropes, like the N-word, without inhabiting the role of a person who says slurs yourself.

I hear and affirm.

I am glad that we can all be gracious about this. The jokes actually did make me feel uncomfortable in the context of this thread… says the goy with a Jewish best friend

curious about this author, haven't read this one, plot summary gave me pause
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Hallows%27_Eve_(novel)

reminded me of weird antisemitic tropes popping up in Chesterton's (who I don't otherwise like) "The Man Who Was Thursday" (which was still v entertaining)

a Jewish magician, born in Paris at the end of the 18th century, with an urge to master the world

truly vintage reaction

what can I say, the peculiarities and specific manifestations of UK anti-semitism often take me aback.

but obviously it's basically impossible to imagine a context where valiant Christian theologians combatting an evil Jewish magician bent on world domination is not anti-semitic

one of the things The Algorithm is feeding me is videos by this guy named Dave Hurwitz, like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=344ySyAbp94

he's got lots of videos, he's got lots of lists. doesn't have the production values or the camera presence that means that every video by rick beato gets millions of views. anyway, i like classical music but i don't listen to a lot of it. it's one of those types of content where i only watch it in private videos, because i watch too much of, i start getting recommended really hard right-wing shit. i had some trepidation about clicking on his videos, because, i mean, old white guy talking about classical music, you don't know what you're gonna get.

except in the context of classical music fandom, he doesn't get seen as an "old white guy" the way i see him, he gets looked at as _jewish_. i mean to be clear i'm a total goy, i just happened to grow up in new jersey, is all. all hurwitz being "jewish" means to me is that i have less hesitation in watching him because he's less likely to suddenly start saying nazi shit the way a lot of classical fans do. i'll be watching a video about one of the Great Composers, because i _do_ like a lot of the Great Works by the Great Composers, i'm basic that way, and all of a sudden the person will start dog-whistling. that's really unpleasant. i really feel taken and and gross and disgusted when someone who's knowledgeable about something i'm interested in outs themselves as anti-semitic.

his demeanor is a little boomerish but idk he's kinda fun to watch, he's kinda the stuff i like about older folks (even though honestly he's maybe not even _that_ much older than me, haha). he's really opinionated but i also know enough to know that he's really knowledgeable. when he starts dunking on, like, celibidache, i'm right there rooting him on, cuz the celibidache i've heard, it's fuckin' tedious. i don't have the musical knowledge to have an informed opinion on this stuff, but in general i feel like this dude has his head screwed on right when it comes to classical music. like even when he's saying "controversial" stuff it's not _that_ controversial, something like "kleiber's recording of beethoven's fifth is overrated", i mean, it's hard to do something that acclaimed and _not_ be overrated. it's like when something is acclaimed as the Best Wine Ever, is it really _that_ much better than the Second Best Wine Ever? no, but all anybody wants is The Absolute Best and nothing else counts for shit. that's capitalism, baby!

anyway the thing i like about this video is his talking about the anti-semitic crap he faces and where it comes from. and a lot of it is from the celibidache fans. i mean celibidache is the closest i can think of to an _actual_ zen fascist. not a literal fascist - in 1945 he replaced furtwangler while he was being "de-nazified" - but the fucking bullshit he pulled on abbie conant, because, horror of horrors, she's a _woman_... it's so appalling. and hurwitz doesn't even _talk_ about that that i've seen. mostly he talks about the recordings, which he says often sound pretty boring. and then people come at him with anti-semitic crap and _then_ he takes a break from talking about the music to talk about celibdache's "cult".

it's kinda fascinating because in his case i'm listening for, like... i'm almost hearing reverse dog-whistles. the way he's _not_ calling out furtwangler's fanbase as being only interested in the nazi 9th because they're wehraboos. which is like... i mean, i don't have the depth of classical listening knowledge that hurwitz does, but i listen to that and honestly, i can't imagine people being interested in it for simply musical reasons. it's the narrative around it. i'm guilty of that myself! there's some recordings i love mostly because there's a good story around them. i'm not gonna claim to be "all about the music". i don't just like martha argerich because of her performance skills. i like her because she's _temperamental_. i'm _temperamental_ myself.

but what hurwitz says is that celibidache supporters are _more_ anti-semitic than furtwangler fans. i think that's really interesting. because he also goes on to say that everything furtwangler stans say to him is some sort of apologia for his support of nazi germany. well he rips apart that apologia, but _doesn't_ say that those arguments are anti-semitic. that interests me. because when i hear him describe the arguments furtwangler apologists make, those arguments _sound_ pretty anti-semitic to me.

generally i'm not a huge fan of videos of some old white guy talking to the camera about classical music i haven't heard, but i admit to having enjoyed the videos of his i've seen. he's cranky in all the right ways. like at the beginning of the video he goes off on this rant about how hard it is for him to offer critique of classical recordings because when he tries to present excerpts of those recordings one of the major conglomerates goes off and files a copyright claim, which isn't about the money for him _directly_, but the knock-on effects. one of these companies files a claim and it fucks up the entire channel. like to me i see something like that and my response is "death to capitalism" and some really cute emoji but he's not like that, he's just trying to do his job, which is talking about classical music. it's not something i often get to encounter on the internet, and it was cool to spend a little time hearing his perspective.

Kate, have you seen his website? I can’t stand video reviews but I sometimes check out the website.

that guy is pretty hilarious. and i never really knew anything about Celibidache's life or career but i do like some of his Bruckner recordings on DG

Kate, have you seen his website? I can’t stand video reviews but I sometimes check out the website.

― Are you addicted to struggling with your horse? (Boring, Maryland)

i probably should check out the website. i got an old penguin guide that i never use and that's getting increasingly obsolete...

i'm the kinda weirdo who prefers the oct 12 1978 live kleiber/chicago beethoven's fifth

could i tell the difference from the studio version in a blind test? no. do i care? no.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/12/nyregion/anti-zionist-graffiti-jewish-museum-officials.html

Can anyone explain to me why Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak was targeted as a "White Supremacist Zionist" with "blood on her hands" and had her house painted with upside-down red triangles used to denote targets of violence? Because it sure just reads to me like "Jewish person with very Jewish name in position of status and power."

Probably this:

Protests at the Brooklyn Museum in December called out the institution’s corporate partnership with Bank of New York Mellon, which has investments in Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems and which has supported the Friends of Israel Defense Force Donor Advised Fund. (The Bank told the Financial Times in April that it invests in Elbit “as a result of requirements by its passive index investment strategies.”)

That seems like an extremely weak and tenuous connection for a personal attack on someone's house

Yeah, but they also protested at the Museum and 37 people were arrested, so this may be revenge of some sort

A friend of mine lives in one of the buildings in Brooklyn that was spray painted with the red paint. He thinks he was the man "weeping" referred to in the NYT story.

After 8 months of reading Jewish Reddit I no longer break my brain trying to find a rational explanation of why some of the otherwise most normal, sane, kind people in the world completely lose all critical thinking skills and empathy when it comes to justifying violence against Jewish people.

It's not rational. I just accept that it exists, and has been well documented for thousands of years. As one Jewish Redditor put it, most US Jews wo leave the large metro areas in the US have encountered plenty of casual, unintentional antisemitism. People who want to negate antisemitism by demanding proof of conscious intention or providing some plausible alternative explanation are completely missing the point.

There is an interesting theory I came across called Deutsch's Theory of the "Pattern." It describes a form of neurolinguistic programming. Whether it's true or not, I think it does bring to the fore a lot of the thinking that occurs at the subliminal level.

I shared Deutsch's Theory of the Pattern with a high school friend of mine who is quite interested in religion when I was trying to explain that the world population of Jews is only .2%, which seems like a rounding error compared to the world population of Christians (less than 1/100%). So when she was saying the protests were "mostly" peaceful, I explained that could be true, and it could also be true that the small percent that wasn't peaceful would have a disparate and outsized impact on the Jewish students on campus, so for them it would actually be quite significant. Fortunately, we are good friends and she saw my point.

I have been watching people mindlessly spread Soviet-era anti-semitic propaganda for a while now, and the red paint job in Brooklyn certainly adds to the rising Kristallnacht ambience (as was doubtless intended). It's really the rapes, kidnappings and murder attempts that have been most concerning to me.

The recent story of the 12-year old girl near Paris is one of the most chilling antisemitic attacks I have read in a while.

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/2024-06-19/ty-article/.premium/french-minors-charged-with-antisemitic-gang-rape-of-12-year-old-jewish-girl-near-paris/00000190-30ab-d4fa-ad9d-ffab78500000

https://archive.ph/ILqrV

Just so no one needs "proof":

French daily Le Parisien, which was first to report on the event, quoted the girl as saying that one of the assailants was her former boyfriend. The rape was confirmed through a medical examination of the girl, it reported.

The victim's parents reported the assault to police, who brought the three teens in for questioning on Monday. Testimony by the victim's friend helped to identify and arrest the suspects, as did security cameras in the area of the park.

The 12-year-old reportedly admitted to police that he assaulted the girl out of revenge for not disclosing that she was Jewish. Investigators found antisemitic material and pictures in his phone, as well as a burned Israeli flag. Another one of the alleged attackers told police he hit her because of something the victim allegedly said about Palestine, Le Parisien reported.

My nephew turned 14 this week. He's getting smarter and smarter. I've probably mentioned this before, but he and my sister in law are African-American. She owns a gun, and I know she has been teaching him how to use it for a couple years now. Last time I saw him in February he was talking about learning about genocides in school. Sometimes my brother corrects him on some stuff, I usually jsut let him talk. Wonder if he will bring any of this stuff up about our Jewish ancestry next time I see him.

This whole situation made an interesting microcosm of...something:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/biden-blasts-pro-palestinian-protest-at-los-angeles-adas-torah-synagogue-as-antisemitic-what-we-know-about-the-incident/ar-BB1oOFOo?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=3b0c1e38836e410395229af69f85cee8&ei=9

It seems like this post started things:

https://www.instagram.com/p/C8dActZyjiI/ -- it makes claims about "settler expansion" at a "real estate event to build 'anglo neighborhoods in Palestine.'"

The source of that claim is apparently an ad in a local Jewish publication which states "Come meet representatives of all the best Anglo neighborhoods in Palestine." It should be noted that while this might be an unfortunate word choice, an "Anglo neighborhood" here means a neighborhood with English speakers, it's not a reference to white people. There's also nothing in the ad that suggests settlement expansion - the website appears to be down, but I wayback machined it and most of what came up was existing housing developments in Tel Aviv, Eilat, Jerusalem, etc., and I didn't see anything about settlement expansion. Some commenters also seemingly misconstrued the event to be about building housing *in Gaza,* and whatever you think may be the plan in the future, there is certainly no immediate sale of property in Gaza going on right now.

The event was at a synagogue, and a large protest thus took place while people were also praying inside. Even if the real estate event had not been misconstrued, I think it was a pretty bad idea/bad look to protest at a synagogue.

Ironically, facing the ad was an op-ed titled "Erasing the Very Idea of Antisemitism," which I actually think has some points. It takes as a jumping off point the fact that AOC was flagellated for merely saying that she thought some of the protests outside the Nova exhibit were antisemitic.

I'm not sure what all this adds up to except that I think we simultaneously see a very real misuse of the idea of antisemitism by the pro-Israel wing and also a very real attempt to discredit the idea of antisemitism by some of the anti-Israel wing, and I don't think the former excuses the latter. And stuff like misconstruing a real estate event and then protesting at a synagogue while people are praying gets into a very blurry zone.

The ad and the op-ed:

https://77360759.flowpaper.com/jj240621/#page=6

The increasing violence against Jewish people in this country is absolutely appalling, and there seem to be so many people now who are ok with it.

That combined with the insanity of Trumpism and the increasingly bellicose public disregard for other people, in traffic, on sidewalks, in shared spaces like stores and movie theaters - it seems like a real breakdown of civility.

Come meet representatives of all the best Anglo neighborhoods in Palestine

Okay this is what had me puzzled here - you mean "in Israel", right?

Definitely been following the AOC backlash and the LA incident.

I think it's useful in this moment to look at history if you are not sure what this adds up to.

In April 2023, David Nirenberg, a professor of medieval historian at University of Chicago, gave a lecture called "How can History Help Us?" Transcript and video are here:

https://www.cornell.edu/video/how-can-history-help-the-example-of-anti-semitism

(keep in mind this lecture was on April 10, 2023, months before 10/7 or the invasion of Gaza):

But in fact, many people have imagined that attitudes towards Jews in their own time and place have nothing to do with antisemitism in previous times and places. So many people have denied that history can help us at all. Today for example, there are many who argue that anti-Jewish sentiment in the present is not due to any history of antisemitism, but entirely to the present-day actions of, in this case, the State of Israel, often. So for the most extreme of those critics, attention to past antisemitism is not only irrelevant to the present, it's a red herring, designed to excuse or distract from the crimes of the Israeli state in the here and now. . .

He skips ahead to the 1920s and 1930s:

Well, from our point of view today, the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust show that those who had concerns, who did think that this was an anti-Semitic wave that owed something to the past, were probably right, maybe obviously right. But we tend to forget that there were lots of people, plenty of people, who claimed then that the problem wasn't antisemitism, but the actions of the Jews themselves. It was their wealth that was the problem or their poverty. It was too-successful assimilation or their lack of assimilation. It was one of many contradictory reasons.

Those were the real issues, many people argued in the 1920s and '30s, not antisemitism, which many argued was merely an accusation that Jews used to silence criticism and squash free speech. So during his rise to power, Hitler brought libel lawsuits against newspapers that accused him of antisemitism. And he won.

He concludes that even starting with intelligent people sincerely thinking they are striving to do good in the world, the study of historical prejudice can nonetheless provide humility and perspective to navigate the constant danger of slippage into lethal patterns:

I'm not going to talk about the controversy except to say that once again, we all seem to find ourselves, as critical thinkers of goodwill, whether left, right, or center, trying to distinguish between reality and anti-Jewish prejudice, between legitimate criticism of Jews or of Israel, between seeing the Jews as privileged agents of power in a world of inequality on the one hand, and unacceptable antisemitism on the other.

And in the process, none of us seem to be able to recognize or to really address, directly, the growing power of anti Judaism. Or if we do recognize it, we see it only in the discourse of the other group. So the left sees it in the right. The right sees it in the left. But we never see it in our own attempts to explain the world.

So one way of putting the danger-- in the first half of the 20th century, the reality of economic inequality and stark differentials of power between capital and labor made it impossible to perceive the grotesque power of antisemitism at work in European society. Are the realities of inequality and stark differentials of power in our own day having a similar effect, making it impossible to see the growing power that anti Judaism may be acquiring in our own place and time?

I don't mean to-- well, I do mean to depress you. So let me leave you with a positive side of my message. One thing that the history of antisemitism's past can offer is an awareness that reality and anti-Jewish prejudice are not independent of each other, that it's easy to slip from one to the other without noticing, even when we're focused on our highest ideals, precisely because those ideals have often been built through a long history of thinking about the dangers of Judaism.

The slippage between reality and anti-Semitic ideas has proven very hard to detect for even the subtlest lovers of knowledge. Developing an awareness of the terrifying work that slippage has achieved at various points in the past is one of the best ways to cultivate a sensitivity to the danger today. And it's one of the gifts, if you can call it a gift, that the history of antisemitism can offer to the present.

Now I know historians hope that prejudices will become less compelling if people only understood how well-worn they are, how many times they failed to bring about the better future that they promised their adherence, those hopes are often well, disappointed.

History is not a magic amulet that we can rub to protect us from danger as we make our way through a changing world. But it is a powerful reminder of how previous generations struggled with problems similar to ours and the precious gift of humility to our own age, which is so full of passionate conviction. So when it comes to confronting prejudices, I think we need all the help that good history can offer.

This reminds me of a twist I saw a few months ago on the George Santayana quote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". The twist was "Those who seek to prevent the study of history intend to repeat it."

Not sure if I feel as pessimistic as that but it stayed with me.

xp thank you Dan S. I've noticed your posts on this and appreciate them.

thank you too, felicity, I've learned a lot from reading your posts ❤️