#Jewish Irish solidarity

[elder-millennial-of-zion]

🇮🇪❤️🇮🇱

Thank you for this. There’s been a lot of antisemitism coming out of Ireland, which is really a shame because I have close family and friends who Irish and I’ve always thought we had a lot in common. We both have a strong connection and love for a homeland that oppressors and invaders have tried to take away from us. And there are a lot of similarities in the Jewish and Irish immigrant experience in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

[vyorei]

Beautiful display of solidarity ongoing right now from the US calling for a ceasefire in Gaza

Source: @jvplive on Twitter

[pigeons-conversion-sideblog]

I've been seeing a nonzero amount of Jews saying...really sickeningly hibernophobic things in response to Irish individuals being viciously antisemitic.

I've posted about this on my main blog, but it's getting really tiring. Now isn't the time, the potato famine wasn't that bad, the IRA is exactly the same as Hamas, Irish Catholics and Palestinians are the same so Irish Catholics are Scandinavian settler colonists somehow???

It's really making me scared and upset to see people being willing to use collective judgment on Irish people as a whole, to rewrite history to demonize us, to rescind all their viewpoints on how to be decent to marginalized ethnicities as long the ethnicity is Irish Catholic, who rightly point out how fucked up it is that people make exceptions for Jews having human rights...

...and then turn around and make those exact exceptions for Irish people.

This isn't something that needs to be dragged out on posts with people using Irish tragedies to illustrate leftist hipocrisy against Jews, although I do think that rhetorical method is itself hypocritical and it bothers me that anyone anywhere is EVER willing to make exceptions to their principles for ANY ethnicity that exists.

I think that's wrong.

I don't want to take away from anyone's pain. We don't disagree overall. We really don't. I'm infuriated by the "uwu ireland standa with palestine uwu" nonsense too!

I just...I really really hate that the answer seems to be "so we take everything we've been begging people not to do to us and we do it to those filthy micks instead" for an alarming number of people.

I say this here because I think the hamasniks fetishizing Irish history cannot be reached at this point. They need to be fully, formally deradicalized. I'm saying this here because I trust you guys to take me in good faith and actually be open to thinking it through.

I'd like to read some works by Irish Jews, if anyone has any recommendations. I really hope it doesn't need to be said that I would prefer if those works did not also demonize Irish Catholics while uplifting Irish Jews.

[pigeons-conversion-sideblog]

I want to study this cultural intersection as part of my Process.

There's antisemitism everywhere, and unfortunately the assholes tend to yell the loudest. But historically, there has a been a lot of vibrant cultural exchange and collaboration too. That's the legacy I want to honor. The best of us, seeing the humanity in each other.

Humans of Judaism

[235uranium]

being from the midwest is having everyone from basically every part of the us assume there's no culture here and dismiss it as boring

[agentfascinateur]

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#don't stop talking about Gaza

[la-cosmonauta-extraterrestre]

Honestly Ireland being the most pro-Palestine country in Europe is such a betrayal because there used to be so much Irish-Jewish solidarity. During Ireland's infamous famine, Jews from Eastern Europe helped the Irish out (along with indigenous Americans, which is why there's solidarity between the Irish and indigenous Americans that persists to this day). In the nineteenth century, Ireland fought for Jewish emancipation in the UK even though there wasn't much they could do as an occupied territory. In the early twentieth century, Ireland supported the Zionist movement because they recognized that we're both indigenous people fighting for control of our lands (and in those days, fighting against British imperialism).

There are also many similarities between Jewish and Celtic culture that I could write a different post about. Both groups have large diaspora populations in the United States (who generally get along well and have some shared history).

Then in the seventies Ireland had a Mandela effect and entered the alternate reality in which Jews are not indigenous to Israel. They now want to make the Jews go back (to where?) by any means necessary. Yes, I realize that one can be pro-Palestinian without being anti-Israel or antisemitic, but most people supporting the Palestinians today are blatantly antisemitic and in the case of Ireland their support for Palestine is clearly a Mandela effect betrayal of the Jews (and projecting their situation onto one that's a little different).

[porcelain-rob0t]

the antisemitism in Ireland and anti-Irish sentiment among Jews (especially in Israel) is so shocking because there is so much overlap in Jewish (especially Ashkenazi) culture and Irish culture. there should be more solidarity, as an Irish-American Jew we are more alike than we arent

[kaizey]

The yankees seeing irish reaction and sentiment to the ongoing genocide in Palestine really warranting a fucking history lesson, yet again, to dispel their ignorance because they think that we either jumped onto the bandwagon for clout or think "irish problems have nothing to do with Palestine???"

A primer, for ye fucks

Since apparentl a tonne dont bother looking into the depths of the Sykes-Picot agreement and Balfour Decleration and how the enactment of these two things was done literally during the irish war of Independance and architechetured by the same people constantly trying to shoot and beat us into not existing as a people anymore.

How many of ye would have known that Ronald Storrs literally described the intent for the creation of a Zionist state as a "little loyal jewish Ulster" as a ethnonationalist loyalist outpost in the middle east for Britain to use as a source of support and force to leech resources out of the local populus. They literally modelled their plans of the plantation of Ulster where they effectively tried to exterminate irish people in the North and was the foundation for 500 years of nonstop coloniser oppression

Or worse. How following the war of Independance, the brits sent the literal Black and Tans, Churchills own personal pet project designed to let pscopathic lunativs roam Ireland freely with the only mission being to beat, burn, murder and terrorist civilians. Not the IRA. Civilians. They were enlisted right out of the RIC and Auxs and transferred right into Palestine to do the exact same thing to native palestinian communities

This solidarity between us isnt some new shit. We were the brits fucking petri dish to experiment and run all their initial colonial methods on that they then suplanted into the middle east and were then inherited by the planter state bombing civilians and treating palestinians like cattle now

So if I hear another american say some stupid shit about how theres no paralleles between us or reason for us to feel such a deep empathy for whats happening, Im going to punch a hole in a brick wall

[vyorei]

FUCK YEAH

[a-queer-seminarian]

Puerto Rican Jewish poet & activist Aurora Levins Morales speaks on solidarity & the history of antisemitism

From her poem "Red Sea":

...We cannot cross until we carry each other, all of us refugees, all of us prophets. No more taking turns on history's wheel, trying to collect old debts no-one can pay. The sea will not open that way.  This time that country is what we promise each other, our rage pressed cheek to cheek until tears flood the space between, until there are no enemies left, because this time no one will be left to drown and all of us must be chosen.  This time it's all of us or none.

I was deeply moved by an article on Levins Morales' website in which she examines modern-day Israel through a zoomed-out lens of millennia of antisemitism:

‘Long before that state was founded out of the ashes of genocide and at the expense of a colonized Arab people, Jews were the shock absorbers of Europe's class societies, "Middle Agents" drafted into being the local representatives of distant and definitely Christian ruling classes who alternately exploited and persecuted them while squeezing the life blood out of Europe's peasants and workers.'

People are often confused by anti-Semitism. They see many US Jews accumulating wealth, moving up, gaining positions of influence, and they say, "What oppression?"... 

The whole point of anti-Semitism has been to create a vulnerable buffer group that can be bribed with some privileges into managing the exploitation of others, and then, when social pressure builds, be blamed and scapegoated, distracting those at the bottom from the crimes of those at the top. Peasants who go on pogrom against their Jewish neighbors won't make it to the nobleman's palace to burn him out and seize the fields. This was the role of Jews in Europe. This has been the role of Jews in the United States, and this is the role of Jews in the Middle East…’

Levins Morales explains those “buffer” roles in detail, describes how Latin@s are often put in these roles as well, and then brings up an author who said of Israelis, “given all they’ve endured, they should know better.” She responds to this with this insight:

‘Trauma doesn't make people into better human beings. Most of the time, trauma just makes people terrified and easier to manipulate. It makes starving Irish tenants fleeing a devastating famine willing to own slaves or homestead Native American land or police the ghettos they used to live in. It makes the formerly kidnapped and enslaved willing to set up shop in Liberia and hold their African kin in contempt. It makes the survivors of Hitler's Final Solution be willing to become harsh colonial masters, agents of US oil greed and militarism, to bulldoze the villages of Palestinians to make Jewish settlements, torture and kill those who resist, and still insist they are the victims here. People who have faced destruction don't necessarily know better.’

While naming that trauma doesn’t make people “better,” just leaves them terrified and grasping at any sense of security they can, Levins Morales is also sure to note how Jews have always been “disproportionately present in movements for social justice wherever [they] have landed.” To her, fighting antisemitism means supporting Jewish integrity, the Jewish commitment to justice and compassion. 

Furthermore, solidarity with the people of Israel and Palestine alike depends on our clear stand against antisemitism in our own communities, because, she says, 

'The central justification for Israeli militarism and the subjugation of Palestinians is the belief that Jews are alone in the world, that no-one will fight for us, that the next time Jews are blamed and attacked, most of the world's people will stand by and watch.'

Only through all of us standing up to antisemitism and standing side by side with our Jewish neighbors, she says, can Jews feel secure enough to “abandon the middle agent role and get the backs of other peoples, knowing that they also have ours."

It is this vision of interdependence and mutual aid that Levins Morales brings into her poem “Red Sea," which imagines the kind of liberation when Moses parted the Red Sea happening today — but only if we support one another.

[bookgeekgrrl]

My media this week (7-13 Apr 2024)

📚 STUFF I READ 📚

🥰 If This Is As Far As We Go (BeauRadley) - 124K, stucky no-powers AU - after a year of being phenomenal hookup buddies, bucky ends their arrangement & throws steve into a tailspin - slow burn, angsty, oblivious steve slowly realizing his true feelings, good supporting cast

😊 Bunt! Striking Out on Financial Aid (Ngozi Ukazu & Mad Rupert) - cute graphic novel about art students forming a softball team to exploit a financial aid loophole

😍 Death in the Spires (KJ Charles, author; Tom Lawrence, narrator) - historical murder mystery set in 1905 Oxford - another KJC absolute banger: incredible sense of place, fantastic characters, perfectly done 'whodunnit' tension and a HIGHLY SATISFACTORY resolution. Loved every word

💖💖 +76K of shorter fic so shout out to these I really loved 💖💖

The Man, the Myth, the Legend (sparklyslug) - Check Please!: gen, 2.9K - Holster's beatboxing skills brings all the a capella groups to the Haus - a short, fun, funny, outsider POV fic

Say it louder for the people in the back (redhook) - MCU: shrinkyclinks, 14K - reread, forever fave - sometimes you just get a yearning to reread the best glory hole fic ever written

In Focus (sparklyslug) - Check Please!: zimbits, 6K - Jack's photography eye knows what's up before his conscious brain does

Entering Orbit (museaway) - Star Trek AOS: spirk, 30K - good post-AOS canon-divergent fic where Jim goes home to Iowa to escape the press & Spock joins him

📺 STUFF I WATCHED 📺

Hot Ones - Conan O'Brien

QI - series S, ep 13

Game Changer - s6, e5 {Bingoception}

Um, Actually - s9, e4

D20: Fantasy High: Junior Year - "Dawn of Justice" (s21, e14)

D20: Adventuring Party - "We're Running on 200%" (s16, e14)

Death In Paradise - s11, e4-8; s12 e0-8, s13 e0-8

🎧 PODCASTS 🎧

Working - How to Be Both a Critic and a Creator

Worlds Beyond Number - WWW #10: Of the Reaching Green

Worlds Beyond Number: Fireside - Fireside Chat for WWW ep10 "Of the Reaching Green"

Short Wave - How Climate Change And Physics Affect Baseball

Consider This from NPR - Bad Omens Or The Cycle of Nature? How The Ancient World Viewed Eclipses

⭐ Armchair Expert - Anna Kendrick [Rerelease from 1/9/23]

Today, Explained - Is college still worth it?

The Sporkful - Jewish Food Is More Than Matzoh Balls

WikiHole - BEYONCÉ (with Zoë Chao, Nat Faxon and Poppy Liu)

⭐ All Songs Considered - Songs to make you laugh, with 'Weird Al' Yankovic

In Defense of Fandom - Season 2 Episode 2: Putting my theory to the test

Dinner’s on Me - Orville Peck

⭐ Switched on Pop - Chasing old sounds: Djo's "End of Beginning" with Joe Keery

⭐ 99% Invisible #577 - The Society of Ambiance Makers and Elegant Persons

⭐ Vibe Check - A Special Conversation with Ada Limón

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - Brown Mountain Lights

Short Wave - The Order Your Siblings Were Born in May Play a Role in Identity and Sexuality

⭐ Code Switch - How Frederick Douglass launched generations of Black and Irish solidarity

⭐ Decoder Ring - Can the “Bookazine” Save Magazines?

⭐ Imaginary Worlds - African Sci-Fi Looks to a Future Climate

Worlds Beyond Number - WWW #11: Promises Promises

Worlds Beyond Number: Fireside - Fireside Chat for WWW ep11 "Promises Promises"

What Next: TBD - Does Google Suck Now?

Short Wave - What To Know About The New EPA Rule Limiting 'Forever Chemicals' In Tap Water

Code Switch - Reflecting on the legacy of O.J. Simpson

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - Atlas Obscura Live: Two Places And A Lie

Dear Prudence - I Lost a Lot of Weight and Now I Enjoy Being a Mean Girl. Help!

It's Been a Minute - The car culture wars; plus, the problem with child stars

Endless Thread - RIP Lil Miquela

Shedunnit - You Probably Imagined It!

Armchair Expert - John Cena

Worlds Beyond Number: Fireside - [One Shot] A County Affair: Prologue

🎶 MUSIC 🎶

Presenting Bonnie Raitt

Lowrider Oldies

Huge House Anthems

Djo

Classic Soul BBQ

A LA SALA [Khruangbin] {2024}

Presenting Khruangbin

Happy Beats

'80s One-Hit Wonders

Feel-Good Classic Rock

[frida-kahl-of-the-rocky-horror]

I am very pro-Palestine (as someone who grew up in the Middle East) and while I think there are valid criticisms of how large movie studios are treating actors like Jenna Ortega who speak out in solidarity with Palestine, what is not cool or valid are people saying this is proof that “Jews run Hollywood”

Now let me be clear, this is mostly white Leftists who have no direct connection to this conflict saying this

But let me explain why Jewish Americans have such a prevalence in Hollywood

1. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, prior to the rise of the Nazis, antisemitism was still prevalent, particularly in France, Germany, and the Austro Hungarian empire. Jewish people in many places were barred from traditional jobs, with one job they were allowed to do being banking (since in the Bible, it says Christians couldn’t loan money to other Christians but it didn’t say anything about Jews loaning money and hey people need to borrow money. A similar thing happened in majority muslim countries with Christians). Because when filmmaking when to Europe after being pioneered in USA it was an unregulated market, many Jewish Austro Hungarians or Jewish Germans worked in this industry because hey, being an accountant FUCKING SUCKS AND NOT EVERYONE WANTS TO DO IT

2. As restrictions both on cinema as well as antisemitic laws became more prevalent in Europe, many of these Jewish filmmakers immigrated to the nation of immigrants USA, and, due to how immigration flows from Europe transpired, they landed in the Northeast of the USA, where the American filmmaking market was headquartered and thus were able to quickly continue their craft, especially as filmmaking was still seen as a underclass job

3. Funny Gene

4. If you aren’t a WASP in the USA, that is to say, you aren’t privileged, you’re more likely to have a drive do better and actually create talent. This extends to all minorities including Jews. And because Hollywood was still racist, minorities who were white passing enough — like Jews, the Irish, and Italians (think about how many Italian directors and actors you know of) — inevitably rose to the top

I think this scene from South Park says it all:

Kyle: My message is, we can't control what people say, so we have to be smart about what we choose to believe. If one idiot says that a certain group "runs Hollywood", look into it. With very minimal effort, you will find that "Hollywood" is a multi-tiered industry run by tens of thousands of people from all over the world. In the past, Jews were shut out of most professions, so they came to dominate vaudeville, which back then was considered too low-brow for good Christians. Those Jews eventually moved West and started the first movie studios when movies were also considered work for the underclass, and their descendents are now a decent percentage of the thousands of people of all races that make Hollywood run.

Fuck Antisemitism. Free Palestine

[keshetchai]

Hi! I read your replies about ethnicity and I hadn't realized it was defined so broadly. In your readings, would all religious groups be considered ethnicities? Example, I'm ex-Catholic but still consider myself "culturally Catholic" since I was brought up in that environment.

Well, no. Not just "Catholic" alone.

I mean, put it this way: in North America, Catholics specifically syncretized catholicism into existing ethnic identities (ex: mexican-catholic is different from Metis Catholic, and the ethnic identities began to incorporate unique folk catholicism that is specific to these ethnic groups, not universally Catholic. As in, it's all Catholic, but not "catholic.")

OR groups developed ethnic enclaves wherein catholicism was part of their shared identity. (Ex: Italian or Polish neighborhoods in the US tended to emphasize their identity and connections to other Italians and Poles on their basis of their being Catholic. They tended to exclude/other Jews with the same national origins (which is what happened in the "old country" as well, so...this didn't suddenly change).

basically people didn't stop marginalizing people they used to marginalize back home. So a historical neighborhood of Polish Jews was/is often viewed as a Jewish neighborhood, an Ashkenazi Jewish neighborhood, etc, but if you just look for a "polish neighborhood" then the majority of the people there will be polish Catholics and catholicism will play a larger role in the shared polish identity, even though not all Poles are Catholic.

Like if I look up polish neighborhoods and find Chicago's massive polish downtown neighborhood on Wikipedia, it says this:

"this district was not exclusively Polish," and "Italians, Ukrainians, and Jews each possessed their own enclaves within the area."

Which might sound fine but also is revealing of the fact that say, the majority of poles (who were/are a majority Catholic!) didn't see Polish Jews as identical to other Poles. Further, it's very vague — there are Polish, Ukrainian, and Italian Jews. But the ethnic identity of being Polish, Ukrainian, or Italian immigrants in the US wasn't solely defined by country of origin.

So. Could I say that "Polish Catholic" is an ethnic group? I think it's context dependent in some ways: if someone American tells me their family is descended from Italian, or Polish, or Irish immigrants I can usually assume they mean their ancestors were catholic++

and they usually don't identify with being a polish or italian national — instead, they're identifying with the history of x nationals immigrating and developing ethnic enclaves/assimilating or not/and the culture they brought with them as an ethnic group/identity. An Italian American usually identifies as proudly Italian in the sense of a solidarity based on an ethnic identity within the US context, theyre usually not like, identifying with being an Italian national.

But in Italy, surrounded by Italians, the ethnic grouping of "Italian" is pretty unspecific. Are they Latin? Sicilian? Sardinian? (There are roughly 30 languages native to Italy, so it's not like we can go off of "they speak Italian"!)

++ in my singular individual experience: most Jews don't phrase it like this without first establishing some baseline understanding of aforementioned ancestors being jews. by this I mean when I go to the Jewish museum and folks start talking about where their family left in order to come to the US, they might say "my ancestors fled Russia." Or "they came from Ukraine and Lithuania." Because in context it's clear already this is in relation to the Jewish experience. But if you were talking with a group of people who may not all be other Jews or who don't necessarily know you're Jewish, I find people usually don't just say: "My family's polish," they usually instead say "oh my grandparents are Polish Jews," or "my great-grandparents were Jews who left/fled Poland."

...anyways anon I suspect your ex-catholicness has some kind of regional identity beyond that which is a part of your ethnic identity (shared culture, including religion!) but no, being Catholic is not the ethnic identity itself. Especially since catholicism as a religion has a few millennia of espousing universalism beyond ethnic identity and in the earliest church outright rejecting the notion of ethnic belonging to the Jewish people. To the point where a lot of the Greek biblical uses of "ethnos" specifically meant "people who are not-catholic —meaning the heathens and Jews."

So the religion itself is pretty anti-being an ethnic identity but I would say can be a fundamentally big point of community commonality in existing ethnic groups.

[theoretically-questionable]

My family has been completely cut off from our Jewish and cultural history for a few generations for Holodomor- and Being-Jewish-in-Austria-related reasons. you can fill in the blanks.

As you can imagine, it's been a rough few years for us to try and. Connect any of those historical dots. Reconnect with heritage. Particularly given the last few months.

And I haven't... taken the stance a lot of more-culturally-rooted Jewish friends and aquaintances expected. As a firmly anti-colinialist socialist, and as a (completely culturally disconnected) nominally jewish person... maybe I'm just too totally disconnected from our history of persecution to understand how any of us feel justified in the current state or actions of Israel.

Like. I've been burying myself in reading. I started out years ago, wanting to understand what my family experienced - and that included the founding of Israel, the history of the entire region. And the more I've learned, the more uncomfortable I've become (and the more I've reaffirmed my loathing for the English, jfc).

at the end of the day, regardless of lost ties, I know where I stand. the land I live on is occupied land. the nation I used to live in actively occupies territory the world over. there is nothing anyone could say to me to persuade me that this anti-Palestinian violence is different enough to be any more justified.

this is not safety. this is not a reclamation of heratige or history. this is the same violence that was visited upon us. the same violence that separated generations of us from our history, our families, our homes, our lives. i fail to see how this seething, self-righteous conquest does anything except to perpetuate a cycle of grotesque pain and suffering.

the solidarity between ordinary people yoked under bloody-handed governments, and those ties between all occupied peoples? these are the ties that bind stronger than any others. I thought we understood this. do we not have solidarity with the Armenians, the Irish, the First Nations people of Australia, the Native Americans in the north and south Americas? Should it not, at the least, say something that these groups... extend their solidarity to Palestine?

maybe that makes me a "bad jew". maybe I just don't count as jewish. maybe I'm just too out of touch with my heratige to understand. who know?

[carletes]

Do you have any good resources to point us towards to read up on the historic origins of this conflict to understand how we got here?

absoLUTELY i do! i first want to highlight that Haymarket Books has three ebooks on Palestine available to download for free. Of course, all Haymarket Books are from a specific perspective (one that I share), so be mindful of that. I'm going to try to share sources from a variety of perspectives:

A History of Modern Palestine by Ilan Pappé (and generally anything by Pappé) is a great book that does a lot to debunk the idea that the conflict is somehow something ~primordial or ancient

UN history of the "Question of Palestine." Obviously for the sake of digestibility, they skip over some details. But it's a good primer to avoid being overwhelmed. Somewhat related to this, I'd look at the Wikipedia article for Theodor Herzl to learn more about the Zionist movement and the lack of inevitability of a Jewish state in Palestine.

I'd also, uh, learn about the Irgun party which was founded by Menachem Begin who later became the prime minister of Israel...just to really reconsider whether those calls for non-violence are in good faith.

The UN has a Special Rapporteur on Palestine, who releases TONS AND TONS of information, including historical information.

And this Al Jazeera guide, which includes a video, is really great for a historical perspective too!

In terms of sources to follow what's happening, I would say Haaretz (the Israeli paper of record) and Al Jazeera (note: funded by the Qatari government, but I'd say one of the more level state-funded news sources) are especially great. You can always trust the Irish to be nuanced (and also in solidarity, but that's a separate matter lmao).

I will also note: the conflict isn't more or less complex than other conflicts. What makes it uncomfortable is, in the words of my undergraduate professor, the remarkable amounts of trauma on both sides. This is also a conflict that implicates issues of race and power. What it is not, despite everyone in the world telling you otherwise, is a purely religious conflict.

I hope this really helps, anon!