Tag: antisemitism

fromchaostocosmos:

Things I Wish Goyim Would Stop Doing:

  1. Stealing our culutre, sayings, philosophy, religion, stories, folklore, etc basically stop doing culture appropriation
  2. Saying terms like Judeo-Christian or Judeo-something 
  3. Casting non-Jewish actors for Jewish roles in plays, shows, musicals, movies, etc
  4. Deciding that you get to determine what is and is not antisemitism
  5. Lumping us with white people and our heritage, history, people hood,

    culture

    , philosophy, and such under the umbrella of white

  6. Speaking over us
  7. Ignoring the fact that we too struggle with harmful shit from white societies that we internalized like for example white euro-centric beauty standards
  8. Ignoring just how much we have to hide and cut off if we want to even a little bit fit in with white society things like plastic surgery, long term harmful hair treatments to make our hair straight, changing our names, just a few examples
  9. Saying Jews instead of Jewish people 
  10. Claiming we are in any way European or originally come from Europe
  11. Pretending that what little so called Jewish representation in media/pop culture isn’t heavily whitewashed and grossly antisemitic with almost nothing for Jewish women, disabled Jewish people, queer Jewish people, and Jewish people of color.
  12. Making fun of our languages and the way we talk/how we talk
  13. Acting like many of us don’t deal with antisemitism on a daily basis
  14. Acting like antisemitism is hatred and discrimination on religious level only and ignoring the fact that is more commonly on hatred and discrimination on a racial level.
  15. Letting antisemitism slide
  16. Creating stories where “what if the nazi won” bullshit
  17. Comparing everything and anything under the sun to the Holocaust and Nazis
  18. Telling us we should take it as a complement when you use stereotypes about us that have been used to kill us ex. Jews are rich bullshit
  19. Acting like all Jewish people are super duper rich when in reality most of us are really very much not, a very large amount of the Jewish population are actually very poor, and for pretty much our entire history Jewish people becoming super duper rich was like really really fucking rare 
  20. Secret lizard people jokes
  21. Jewish people control the world secretly, ZOG, and other antisemitic untrue conspiracy theories
  22. Acting like we have a lot more power then we actual do
  23. Pretending there are a lot more Jewish people then there actually are we only make up .2% of the world population currently only 14 million Jewish people world wide
  24. Making “Jews are crazy” jokes when we are really dealing inter-generational trauma some which from trauma that has occurred centuries ago
  25. Acting like we wanted to be in Diaspora and choose this 
  26. Saying x group “is the new Jews”
  27. Painting all of us with broad strokes and using the worst examples as to be fully and wholly representative of all Jewish people
  28. Holding up certain Jewish people to “prove” that antisemitic stereotypes are true 

I agree with most of these, with the following exceptions/caveats:

(1) is such a lost cause. The entirety of Christianity is a massive appropriation of our religion, scripture, history, identity… but of course that had a different significance at the time. I encountered some pretty cringey things while singing in my university chapel choir, the worst being that they do Communion using challah on Maundy Thursday. Which is supposed to commemorate a Passover seder. Yeah, let that sink in. We also sang Kurt Weill’s setting of the Kiddush during Communion one Sunday morning. Yeah, the prayer that thanks God for setting us apart from the nations and giving us the Sabbath, and which we recite at the beginning of the Sabbath on Friday evening. I’m ambivalent about the widespread use of “kosher” to mean “acceptable,” which is especially common in analytic philosophy… but in that case I’m pretty sure it was actual Jews who started it, so I can’t really complain.

(2) is sometimes a problem and sometimes not. The Abrahamic religions do share some basic moral perspectives, including the importance of helping outsiders and the poor… But although Judaism does encourage chastity before marriage and emphasize human finitude and frailty as against God’s power and fidelity, it doesn’t share the metaphysical asceticism of Christianity and Islam: we don’t condemn sexuality or corporeality wholesale or consider human beings hopeless sinners. So don’t put that on us.

(3) doesn’t bother me that much, except to the extent that casting non-Jewish white people as Ashkenazi Jews encourages non-Jews in the view that Jews are straightforwardly white. I don’t mind at all when non-Jewish Middle Easterners like Tony Shalhoub are cast as Jewish characters; that actually acknowledges the genetic and historical kinship. I think it’s kind of funny that Italian actors like Al Pacino and Stanley Tucci get cast as Ashkenazi Jewish characters… there is definitely a Mediterranean look.

(9), saying “Jews,” is acceptable from non-Jews whom I know and trust. It saves 3 syllables.

tikkunolamorgtfo:

lavvyan:

skybear59:

liberalsarecool:

allthingsgerman:

The cover of the next Stern, a German news magazine.

The title Sein Kampf (transl. his struggle) is a play on the title of Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf (transl. my struggle).

The full translation of the cover would be

HIS STRUGGLE

Neonazis, Ku-Klux-Klan, Racism:

How Donald Trump is stirring up hatred in America

When Germans call you a Nazi….

I see so much commentary in the tags about how Trump can’t be a Nazi because he’s pro-Israel, and I’m sitting here like, guys. Children. Nazi doesn’t mean “kills Jews.” That was the horrible outcome. The ideology itself was putting one’s own nation above all else (ring a bell?) while undermining democratic values (RING A BELL?) and being blatantly racist (RING A… you know what, forget it, you’re not listening to me anyway). 

Instead of anti-communism you now have fierce pro-capitalism and instead of Jewish people being called animals you now have immigrants facing the same hatred. You already have the denunciations and people walking from door to door trying to root out “illegals.”

Current US politics may not involve any gas chambers, but Hitler didn’t burst on the political scene with “Let’s kill all the Jews!” either. If you honestly think US policies won’t escalate further, especially if Trump gets a second term, you’re standing chin-deep in denial.

This addendum from @lavvyan makes me want to gouge my fucking eyes out with a spoon, I don’t even know where to begin with debunking this mess.

1. Nazi doesn’t mean “kills Jews.” That was the horrible outcome. The ideology itself was putting one’s own nation above all else while undermining democratic values.

This is patently false. The Nazi ideology is an ideology firmly rooted in anti-Jewish and anti-Romani racism. To quote Dr David Silberklang, the Senior Historian at the International Institute for Holocaust Research: 

“At its core, the Nazi world view was racist and biological, positing that the so-called “Aryan” race – primarily the North Europeans – was the superior race of human beings. Their superiority granted the Aryans the right and obligation to rule over other races and peoples, for the benefit of humankind. The Jews, in complete contrast, were seen as a kind of “anti-race”, dangerous inhuman beings in seemingly human form. They were viewed alternatively as microbes and parasites, or as devils, that is, inhuman creatures with superhuman power.”

Nazism is an expression of fascism and nationalism, but one that is inherently based on a vision of racial purity that cannot be realised without removal of Roma and Jews. That’s literally the cornerstone of the Nazi ideology. To say that The Shoah was just a byproduct of Nazism is inaccurate, dangerous, and thoroughly insulting to the people victimised by Hitler’s reign. 

2. Instead of Jewish people being called animals you now have immigrants facing the same hatred.

Actually, alt-righters still hate Jews—a lot. They definitely also hate (and are cruelly punishing) Latinx immigrants, but it’s not an “instead of” situation. The alt-righters in Charlottesville were shouting “Jews will not divide us.” If you watch Vice’s Charlottesville: Race and Terror video you’ll see that these guys are ranting about Jews pretty much all the damn time. Trump backers have been attacking Jewish journalists and threatening them with violence since before the election. Antisemitic incidents have surged to their highest rate in 20 years. 

There is no “instead” here. Jewish people are still being called animals. It’s just that non-Jewish immigrants are too. This is not over for us, it’s still going on. 

3. Hitler didn’t burst on the political scene with “Let’s kill all the Jews!” 

Um…yes he did? He wrote an entire goddamn book about how the Jews were responsible for the world’s evils, which was published in 1925, a good 8 years before he was ever elected chancellor. Have you honestly not heard of Mein Kampf? If not, allow me to highlight some gems from this bestselling text for your reading pleasure: 

“Without the clearest knowledge of the racial problem and hence of the Jewish problem there will never be a resurrection of the German nation.”

“The nationalisation of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners [the Jews] are exterminated”

“If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas, such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.”

Like, that’s a pretty resounding “Hey, let’s kill all the Jews” if I ever heard one. 

Like honestly, how fucking dare you stand here and try to downplay how absolutely integral antisemitism and anti-Romani racism was to the Nazi ideology. How fucking dare you try to pass it off as just a generic form of nationalism that wasn’t specifically designed from its inception to wipe our peoples off the face of the earth. You owe all Jewish and Romani people a fucking apology for this horrible, ill-informed take of yours, and for the record to everyone else: This is why I’m fucking sick of Holocaust comparisons. Because y’all cannot be trusted not to erase Jewish and Romani people from our own goddamn genocide. Either learn our history or keep our tragedies out of your fucking mouths. 

And you know what else? You can be both antisemitic and pro-Israel. Remember Robert Jeffress and John C. Hagee, the evangelical pastors who led the prayers at the dedication of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem? Here’s what the New York Times reported about them:

“A Dallas evangelical pastor who once said that Jewish people are going to hell and a megachurch televangelist who claimed that Hitler was part of God’s plan to return Jews to Israel both played prominent roles on Monday in the opening ceremony of the new American Embassy in Jerusalem. … 

Despite their comments about Jewish people, the two pastors are among the leading pro-Israel voices in the evangelical Christian world. Some evangelicals believe that American foreign policy should support Israel to help fulfill biblical prophecies about the second coming of Christ.”

All right, you might say, but that’s religious anti-Judaism, not the kind of racial antisemitism that characterized Nazism. Can you be racially antisemitic and pro-Israel? Well… yes, because you might want all the Jews to leave your country and Go Somewhere Else, even if you stop short of literal genocide. This was an attitude quite a few 19th-century Americans took toward Black people in America. Even some abolitionists who recognized that slavery was an evil thought it would be best for everyone if the emancipated slaves went back to Africa; Liberia was founded as a colony for freed American slaves. For most of his career, Lincoln favored colonization (either in Africa or the Caribbean) for freedmen because he thought Black people were inherently inferior and could never achieve social equality. Some of the people who supported colonization wanted free Blacks to be forcibly deported.

Belgian rapper with anti-Semitic lyrics shut down during public radio appearance

littlegoythings:

A Belgian public radio station ejected a rapper from its studio who on the air inveighed against Israel and “Zionists” while introducing a song with lyrics about “money-loving Jews running after each cent.”

The incident occurred last month at the Antwerp studio of a department of the VRT broadcaster during an interview with Bissy Owa, an up-and-coming performer who is Muslim, about his recently released song titled “Money till the Death,” the Joods Actueel news website reported Wednesday.

The VRT studio muted Owa’s microphone after he said during a live interview: “F*** the Zionists, revolution, Israel must go, free Palestine.”

The song, which begins with the expletive about Zionists, shows Owa dancing while wearing a black hat and fake sidelocks and singing about Jewish greed. He also says “I can’t hang with a Jew.”

After Owa’s interviewers muted his microphone, he secretly filmed himself having a heated argument with them before they closed the studio door on him and his two friends.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” one interviewer, Astrid Demeure, told him. Another, Brahim, said: “I have every respect for you, but some things you can’t say on national radio. This is dangerous – for us.”

Owa responded by shouting: “This is nothing, you haven’t seen anything yet! There will be worse coming, much worse!” as he walks away from the closing door. Owa uploaded the secret filming on Wednesday to YouTube.

Before the confrontation, he said the song he presented was written “in reaction to the situation in Gaza.”

Philippe De Backer, a Cabinet minister in the government of the Flemish Region – the Belgian state whose capital is Antwerp — told Joods Actueel that politicians need to speak out against the content disseminated by Owa.

“We cannot allow the Jewish community to be threatened and stigmatized like that in our open society,” De Backer said. “Also not in the context of anti-Zionism.”

A video featuring Owa’s clip about Jews has been removed from YouTube after registering more than 100,000 views. But another copy is available on the same video platform.

André Gantman, a lawmaker on the municipal council of Antwerp, called on authorities to initiate a criminal investigation against Owa for incitement to violence or hatred.

Belgian rapper with anti-Semitic lyrics shut down during public radio appearance

Opinion | Memo To Shaun King From A Black Jew: Stop Dividing Our Communities

tikkunolamorgtfo:

littlegoythings:

Maybe you don’t realize this, but by conflating the criticism of you and Mallory with racism, you are suggesting that Jews who worry about anti-Semitism — most Jews, actually — are somehow racist. That’s not just borderline racist itself. But it erases tons of people like me, Black Jews and other Jews of Color, forcing us to pick a side. You’ve created a false binary that puts Black Jews like me in danger, and isolates us. Either we stand with you, against “Jewish folk,” or we stand with racists.

Nylah Burton is a goddess of the written word.

Opinion | Memo To Shaun King From A Black Jew: Stop Dividing Our Communities

Israeli reserve officer disciplined for sign at Auschwitz blaming Poles for complicity with Nazis

littlegoythings:

An Israeli reserve officer visiting Poland with the Israel Defense Forces will be disciplined for holding up a sign at the Nazi Auschwitz camp that read “You too played a part.”

The incident occurred on Thursday, according to reports.

The officer was participating in the military’s “Witnesses in Uniform” project.

The sign was written in Polish. It was in protest of controversial legislation passed in February by the Polish Parliament which criminalizes blaming the Polish nation for Nazi crimes.

IDF officials with the group of officers at the site took the sign away and told the Polish security guards that they would handle the incident internally. The soldier was not immediately returned to Israel, arriving home with the rest of the delegation. He is scheduled to be disciplined in the coming days, despite Israel’s objection to the law.

The passage of the law has created tension and disagreement between Poland and Israel. The law is under review in Constitutional Court before it can take effect. Poland’s attorney general said in a nonbinding opinion that the court should shelve the parts of the law that have drawn criticism.

Israeli government officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and others have harshly criticized the law, which could lead to a prison sentence of up to three years, because, they claim, while it ostensibly targets those who say Poles collectively were responsible for the Holocaust, it could also be interpreted as criminalizing any reporting of Polish anti-Semitism during the period around the Holocaust, and any reporting of Poles who collaborated with Nazis.

Israeli reserve officer disciplined for sign at Auschwitz blaming Poles for complicity with Nazis

thebaconsandwichofregret:

thecoppercow:

coneshotline:

wow looking forward to the #discourse next year

It’s already started! Not 5 minutes after she won, the usual antisemitic (mainly leftwing corbynite, some rightwing fash-y, ofc, in case you wondered) types have come crawling out of the woodwork to cry about how “Israel shouldn’t exist as a country, yadda yadda, surely this is the one country to have ever had a fractious domestic political system, how could the european public vote to crown a …you know. You know what she is. Jewish– no wait I meant Zionist. That’ll cover it. I’m totally motivated by care for random Palestinians and not because I’m a giant piece of trash. Israel’s not even in Europe* anyway.”

If I wasn’t already supporting her because of her song, I’d be supporting her out of spite because it’s upset the racists…

*(The answer to the last question is – because if you knew your Eurovision history you’d know it was because Israel is a founder member of the EBU, you fake Eurovision fans.)

I literally just saw someone say that they objected to Israel “as a concept” when Israel “as a concept” is literally the least objectionable version of Israel. The concept of Israel is “we have a minority that has been subjected to centuries of violence and oppression and less than 5 years ago was very nearly wiped out in Europe so let’s give them some land in their historic homeland and let them take control of their own lives”.

That is the concept of Israel. Sure there’s a lot of stuff you can say about the reality of Israel but the CONCEPT of Israel surely is debate free?

But no. “I object to the concept of Israel”. Well sorry love you’re just a straight up anti-Semite. There’s no other way to say it.

At least if they’re saying that outright, they do in fact know what “anti-Zionist” means. Many of the people who call themselves that and claim it acquits them of antisemitism don’t seem to know.

A notorious pogrom spawned some long-running myths. This historian is dispelling them.

littlegoythings:

There was a time when “Kishinev” was all you had to say. The three days of brutal anti-Jewish violence in 1903 in the capital city of present-day Moldova introduced the world to a new word — pogrom — and for years afterward colored the way Jews and others viewed Jewish life in the Russian empire. 

Through dedicated research in several countries and as many languages, including a fortuitous gift of astonishing handwritten documents from the most notorious anti-Semite in late tsarist-era Kishinev, the Stanford University historian has shown us an early example of the power of the press, brought to light the story of a San Francisco Jewish woman instrumental in forming the NAACP, built an ironclad case for the true authorship of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and explained how the fallout from this tragic tale gave rise to the myth of the weak Diaspora Jew that persists to this day.

Oh hey, I took a class on modern Jewish history from Steve Zipperstein.

A notorious pogrom spawned some long-running myths. This historian is dispelling them.

In eastern Europe, when Nazis killed Jews, a ‘carnival atmosphere’ prevailed

aftselakhis-shaladin:

philosopherking1887:

So the Polish nation bears no responsibility for what happened during the Holocaust, hmm?

For Holocaust, no, just as the German nation is not responsible for Holocaust. What we should talk about is the fact that several people decided that it is a perfect time for another pogrom. We need to talk about historical atrocities, but not blame whole groups of people. Nobody blames “the American nation” for Native American genocide.

I honestly believe that this return to group responsibility is a second wave of Russian psyops. Posts very similar in thinking frame are propagated on Polish-language twitter… about Ukrainians, by Russian bots.

Huh? My comment was in reference to something very specific, namely, a law that was recently passed in Poland that “makes it illegal to attribute responsibility for or complicity during the Holocaust to the Polish nation or state.” That description is from this Politifact article, which provides a helpful explanation of what the law is ostensibly intended to do – to outlaw imputations of crimes during the Holocaust to the Polish state, which (as the article points out) had no independent existence during the Nazi occupation – and what the likely effect and, very probably (considering the right-wing nationalists who are in power right now), the real intention behind the law is: the suppression of research into the extent to which Polish nationals cooperated in the massacre of Jews.

Here are some telling claims from Polish officials and from scholars of the Holocaust:

“The legislation concerns only accusations of collective responsibility by the Polish Nation or Polish State for German Nazi Crimes,” said spokeswoman Małgorzata Safianik of the Polish embassy in Washington. “It does not seek to deny nor does it apply towards charges of individual collaboration by Polish nationals during World War II.”

“No serious historian would say the Polish people as a whole is responsible for anything,” Buchen, the Dresden historian, told us. “It’s rather the suspicion the law is a bit vague in order to allow any kinds of investigation that would shut down writers or people who deal with these issues.”

According to the Polish Minister of Justice, “There will be no punishment for witnesses of history, scholars or journalists who quote painful facts from our history.”

“In theory professors are exempt, researchers are exempt, playwrights are exempt,” Kassow said. “But in fact when you’re saying the Polish state and the Polish nation, what does that really mean? What is the Polish nation? If you’re a famous historian or a famous artist you might be safe from being prosecuted. But if you’re a high school teacher or untenured faculty member or a graduate student doing research on the Holocaust, this law could have a chilling effect.”

But regarding your argument… actually, yeah, a lot of people would say the American nation is responsible for the Native American genocide. That’s partly because it was a concerted effort by the U.S. government and military in cooperation with white American settlers; and it’s partly because, in virtue of living on lands that were stolen from Native Americans, other Americans find ourselves in the deeply uncomfortable position of benefiting indirectly from the dispossession and even murder of Native Americans.

But there’s a difference between calling for collective reckoning and collective punishment; “collective responsibility” is ambiguous between them. It is utterly selfish and irresponsible for white Americans to say “I didn’t own Black slaves or murder Native Americans, therefore I owe nothing to their descendants.” National reckoning means doing the painful work of confronting the extent to which ordinary citizens of the nation, including one’s own ancestors, were complicit in crimes that may have been directly committed by others, by remaining silent, by not condemning them, by maintaining friendly relationships with those who committed the crimes, and by accepting benefits resulting from those crimes: in the case of American slavery, cheap sugar, tobacco, and cotton textiles; in the case of the Native American genocide, land available for settlement; in the case of the murder of Jews in Eastern Europe, their homes and possessions, which were looted and auctioned off by the Gentiles who had lived alongside them.

As the article notes, Poland, unlike Germany, has gone through no such national reckoning. The narrative that has been presented by the Soviet government and now by the right-wing nationalist government is that Poles were victimized to the same extent as Jews, that they collaborated with Nazis only out of fear for their lives (and, apparently, that Zionists were the real collaborators… charming). More recent historical research indicates that many Poles (and Ukrainians, and Latvians, etc.) eagerly followed the Nazis’ orders and watched the murders with the same glee as white American southerners at a lynching. So I hope you can see why historians, and Jews, are suspicious about both the intent and the probable effect of the law. Unless you think the research itself has been fabricated by Russian psyops, in which case I can’t help you… and unfollow me now, please.

In eastern Europe, when Nazis killed Jews, a ‘carnival atmosphere’ prevailed