#Year 5784 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

pargolettasworld · 2 months

Text

So, because I am incurably, morbidly curious, I watched Jessie Gender's four-hour-and-seventeen-minute-long video on . . . well, the title suggests "Zionism, Antisemitism, and the Left." To her credit, Gender does touch on all three of these topics, though not with the same degree of skill, graciousness, or understanding of the topics at hand. I've just had a very nice dinner, and I'm feeling generous, so let's see how this video stacks up. Strap in. This is going to get long.

I should admit right off the bat that I'm only a casual, occasional watcher of Jessie Gender. I'm not a deep fan, and I'm sure there is Jessie Gender Lore™ out there that I'm not aware of, but I think I've seen enough of her videos to get a general sense of her house style. This video hits a lot of the hallmarks of her style. She speaks very fast and very passionately, occasionally trips over her own words (something that I've done many a time, so I really do feel that), and is inordinately fond of nominalizations. She's especially fond of the word "ostracization," for some reason, which drives me nuts because "ostracism" is right there. So, in style, it appears to hew to the Jessie Gender House Style pretty well.

On to the video itself. The first thing I will observe about it is that it is in every possible way a meeting that could have been an email. There was no need for this to be the same length as the Extended Edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). There's a lot of padding, significant digressions, and a certain degree of repetition. It's easy to forget the beginning of the video by the time you're an hour into the thing.

The major question that hangs over this opus is: Why, and for whom, was it made? I'm honestly not sure who the intended audience for this thing is, nor why Gender felt that she had to make it. She alludes in the first half hour to feeling like she's lost the trust and support of some of her Jewish fans/friends/acquaintances/Patreon patrons, and she chalks it up to a previous video that she made (which I have not seen, and which I am not inclined to seek out). But neither the structure nor the thesis nor the conclusion of the video seem like they would win back any of these folks.

I don't think that Jewish viewers are her intended audience -- certainly not with the way she talks about Jews throughout the video. I'm also having a hard time believing that really committed leftists are her audience, either, since I don't think she's really saying much that leftists haven't already heard, or offering new perspectives on her topic(s). And anyone who has made it this far into the year of 5784 and is still undecided about the contemporary iteration of The Jewish Question is probably not going to be interested in sitting through nearly four and a half hours of relentless lecture. So I'm still left wondering why, and for whom, did Jessie Gender make this video?

Gender assures us, her viewers, of several things that are meant to be reassuring. She's done lots and lots of research, for one thing. And she's asked some-of-her-best-friends-who-are-Jewish to be sensitivity readers. We're given to understand that we are hearing the nitpicked, edited, and polished version of the script. I'd hate to see what the first draft looked like . . .

She also tells us that there are going to be lots of Foreign Words And Names, and that she and her mouth-hole have A Hard Time pronouncing Foreign Words And Names. Her loyal staff have made her a pronunciation guide -- which appears to have been used perhaps as a drinks coaster, since there are some howlers here. The Jews originating from the MENA regions are the "Misrai" (Mizrahi) Jews, the first Prime Minister of Israel was "David Ben-Gron" (David Ben-Gurion), the Revisionist Zionist leader was "Zeeeeeeeeev Zarbinsky" (Ze'ev Jabotinsky), and the Palestinian uprisings of 1987 - 1993 and 2000 - 2005 go by the name "Infitada" (Intifada).

You know that phrase "If white people can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Schwarzenegger, they can learn to say [your name from an African or Asian language]?" I agree completely with the conclusion, but I question the premise. Jessie Gender makes me question the premise harder. If she had any real interest in the topic, she would have practiced those names, but I don't think she does, so she didn't.

Moving on to the actual content of the video. It's . . . weird. Jessie Gender begins the video believing that Zionism is an evil force for colonialism, White supremacy, oppression, and genocide. She ends the video believing that Zionism is an evil force for colonialism, White supremacy, oppression, and genocide. But along the way, she's confronted with quite a lot of inconvenient facts that threaten to complicate this perspective.

Gender devotes roughly two hours and fifteen minutes of her video, a smidge over half of the runtime, on three segments that offer a history of Zionism, the iterations of Zionism as a political ideology, and what she calls "Zionism as emotion," which is a condescending way to refer to the importance of Zionism to Jews. I'd guess that her research for these segments might have surprised her. It turns out, per Jessie Gender, that there is both a reason behind and a context for nineteenth-century Zionism, quite a lot of logic behind why the Jews wanted to go to Israel, and ample evidence that a majority of Jews have some kind of stake in both Israel and some variation of Zionism.

The reason I think that this research might have surprised her is that she ends each of these segments with a small diatribe about the evil colonialist, capitalist, oppressive, genocidal force that is Zionism, even as the segments suggest nuance, logic, and reason behind the philosophy. We can't have that on a good lefty video, though, can we? The more Gender confronts evidence that there is more to Zionism than meets her eyes, the more she doubles down, digs in her heels, and refuses to accept even the barest shreds of non-negativity about Zionism. Every now and then, she comes up with a lovely sentence or two that shows some understanding of a Jewish perspective on the world, but then furiously backpedals -- we mustn't forget that this Jewish perspective of oppression, mass murder, and international blame has only led to the Evil Of Zionism, after all.

What's really fascinating is how hard she works to avoid blaming actual Jews for all of this evil. I think she's doing this with the best of intentions. A for effort. C for effect. She wants to make a distinction between "Zionism" and "Judaism," in the sense of "Zionism does not equate to Judaism, so being antisemitic to Judaism because you hate Zionism is bad." She tries so hard that she loses sight of the actual people involved. There are a lot of places where she talks about "Judaism" where what she actually means is "the Jews." Or, as she calls us, "Jewish people." Which isn't bad, and it isn't really wrong, but it doesn't quite communicate the sense of Am Yisrael that is at the heart of Zionism.

In fact, she's so desperate to separate Zionism from Jewish people that she starts to talk about it almost as an individual character in the story, with agency, desires, wishes, and goals of its own, totally disconnected from the people who created it. Zionism demands the genocide of Palestinians, Zionism needs colonialism, Zionism has a nice lunch date with neoliberalism and spends the afternoon browsing department stores with capitalism. In effect, Zionism becomes the dragon, and Gender really wishes that the passive, easily-led Jewish people would unite behind some White Knight and slay the dragon so everyone could be happy and free and leftist. Despite the two hours she spent on her deep dive into the history and meaning of Zionism, she cannot fathom why the Jewish people don't just do this.

I said earlier that quite a lot of this video consists of padding. Gender identifies herself as a lefty anarchist, opposed to nation-states, capitalism, neoliberalism, the United States, the British Empire, Israel, Joe Biden, "Ka-MAH-la" Harris, transphobia in Western societies . . . the usual suspects. Frequently, especially in the back half of the video, she'll wander off into long fantasias about the crimes against liberty perpetrated by the West at large, as well as their character Capitalism, and then remember that this is supposed to be a video about Zionism, and then finish with the equivalent of "Peter Rabbit did sort of that kind of thing, too."

One of the alleged purposes of this video is to discuss Antisemitism On The Left, but Gender . . . pretty much elides doing that. She gets close a couple of times, and she does grudgingly admit that some leftists coming from some branches of leftism might sometimes say things that might be antisemitic, and that's Bad, and it makes Jewish people feel Unsafe and Not Inclined To Agree With Leftists that The Dragon Known As Zionism Must Be Slain Heroically. But don't stress about it. The important thing is that Israel Must Stop Its Genocide and Palestinians Should Have Self-Determination (which is only withheld from them by Israel -- excuse me, by Zionism -- and certainly not by those eminently-justified-if-a-little-uncouth plucky fighters, Hamas.

There are quite a lot of lengthy quotes from Sources, read by guest stars, which is a nice touch to break up the video. The vast majority of these Sources -- especially the ones in the "history of Zionism" segment -- are not actually written by Zionists. You get a lot of academic pontificating about the failures, shortcomings, and nefarious activities of Zionism, but you hear almost nothing from actual Zionists, especially contemporary Zionists. This does not look nearly as good or as well-researched as it's meant to look.

So what do we get in the end, after four hours and seventeen minutes of watching this? Honestly . . . not much. Gender gives enough background on the history of Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish attitudes toward Israel that hardcore leftists watching will be more annoyed than convinced. She condescends to both Jews and Arabs, mentioning repeatedly that she, as a White Gentile, really doesn't have any business butting in on these complex questions -- but that's not going to stop her from butting in like the lefty shiksa she is! She's too mealy-mouthed to come right out and say anything blatantly antisemitic, but disdain for Jewish concepts of homeland, belonging, origin, and self-determination pervade the whole thing.

I don't think that Jessie Gender is an idiot -- she seems to be pretty smart, and has both a firm sense of her own political philosophy and the stick-to-it-ive-ness to do far more research into things like the development of Zionism and the history of antisemitism than one might expect. But the video really is, to bring up a playwright from the hated West, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

#antisemitism #politics #history #jumblr

447 notes · View notes