Anti-semitism thread: onwards from 2023

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 ❤️