#a black jew is black until they are jewish

[brainscrems]

When I was still a dude my experience w the left was similar. I never went down the alt-right pipeline, but as I entered left wing spaces I was greeted with hostility for simply being a dude and it’s an attitude I still see often.

As a jew, this is STILL my experience with the left. I stick with the left because I know it’s the right thing to do, because I know the right wants me dead more, and because the center doesn’t give a shit if I live or die. But for my jewish identity? The left doesn’t give a shit if I live or die either, and they’d often prefer I die, if only for convenience. The left refuses to acknowledge its issue with dogmatism. It refuses to unlearn the split black and white thinking that is a heavily influenced cultural christianity of our country. The left will never succeed until it learns to accept imperfect allyship. Until it learns to accept imperfect progress over no progress. Until it learns to reject identity as judgement of character. We need to make a better left. One which stops turning away those who have made mistakes and those who are born a certain way. The left eats itself and creates more on the right every time it does so.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

[squidgirlautism]

okay I don’t mean to be rude but I saw your post about Jewish people being white and I’m confused both by what you said and the fact that the question is being asked. Like surely whether jewish people are white depends on the Jewish person in question, some of whom surely are and some of whom aren’t? Like just going through life I’ve met jewish people who were polish blondes and jewish people who were visibly middle eastern. Who is possibly asking you if white Jewish people exist? And why on earth would the answer be no?

there’s a lot to unpack here but I’m going to start with your last questions. the world and the interweb are vast places and people from all corners of the political spectrum itch to place Jews into boxes and use the (american-centric tbh) framework of race to categorize. since the Jewish people existed before the concept of race, we simply do not fit. we are a West Asian diaspora population that has historically *never* been treated as white, and we are only sometimes white because we are a “model minority” and generally only called white by the left, where white=oppressor. it is also a (poor) attempt to “atone” for the holocaust and all the violence Jews have faced.

with that out of the way, why cant Jews be white? there are pale skinned and blonde Jews after all. while there are Jews who pass as white and many who pass as something entirely different (ie East Asian, Black), the moment they are recognized as a Jew, that is all they are. It does not matter what you look like when you are recognized as Jewish, and all privileges you may have had by not being recognized as one is gone. on top of that, “passing” Jews are often under more scrutiny because they “tricked” others into believing that they were not a Jew. being white passing will not save you from being a Jew and the baggage it comes with.

whiteness is part of assimilation as well, as Irish and Italians and Catholics in America were not white. In Europe, it was/is a similar concept. Once they assimilated into it they could be (ie Kennedy) but Judaism, at its core, does not assimilate. as an ethnic religion (meaning, only the ethnic group can practice the religion (yes converts become ethnic Jews)) originating in the Middle East, with all of our traditions related to the levant specifically, unless you insist that the white appearing Arabs and other SWANA groups are white, calling Jews white is a double standard.

race is more than skin color and it is a social construct that is based on privilege—and Jews are not privileged. Jews have not ever been white until the left needed us to be so we fit their narrative that only whites are oppressors, and the right never has and never will see Jews as white. people like the Syrian Nazi’s use it to deny that Jews are a people that come from the levant, because obviously “white” people can’t be from the Middle East and are liars (if this sounds like a dogwhistle, it’s because it is; replacement theory and Jews being liars)

tldr white Jews can’t exist because the moment they are a Jew, all whiteness they may have had is lost.

[fairuzfan]

The thing that's never made sense to me is the "Holocaust inversion" talking point and the idea that we are "moralizing" the Holocaust as something you're supposed to learn from which like aside from the fact that israel's entire pr is that it needs to exist because of the Holocaust, I really don't understand how feeling empathy based on past experiences is like... a moralizing action?

Even those who don't feel empathy, they still like... have the universal idea that you shouldn't do bad things onto other people. When you consider that yeah, when you live in the world, you experience terrible things and you relate those terrible things to other terrible things happening in the world. That's just what everyone does. Whenever I hear things happening to indigenous Turtle Islanders I always relate it back to Palestine. When I hear about violence happening to Black people, I think "Ah it must be terrifying" and I think back to my own family members and friends who were killed by Israel. When i think of antiBlackness in arab spaces, i relate it back to the occupation and compare myself to the occupation on whether or not im inflicting the same pain i and my family endure onto others. It's just how you experience the world. No one is asking you to "learn" from the Holocaust, people are just asking you to apply empathy.

A universal example is that you don't really understand the grief of losing a loved one until you yourself lose a loved one. And when you encounter a person who lost a loved one as well, you relate to them in a unique way that you wouldn't have without having that experience of grief before. It's not a moralizing experience, it's just... an experience. An awful one but you don't *learn* anything from it.

So it always confounds me that there's such vehement pushback against the idea that what Palestinians are going through is similar to the Holocaust because it's not like we're making light of the Holocaust? It's that we are asking you, a zionist (in this case one who is Jewish specifically), to acknowledge that there are similarities between the way Palestinians are treated and the ways Jews, Roma, and multiple other people were treated during the Holocaust. It's that we're relegated to second class status, we are considered lesser, we are confined to ghettos, we have our livelihoods stolen from us, we have weapons tested on us, we're survielled like we are dangerous monsters and we experience systematic segregation. And now we are experiencing mass slaughter campaigns within our concentration camps. But what's the issue? Are you offended that Palestinians can even remotely understand the terrible violence that Jews experienced in the Holocaust? Or are you denying that Palestinians are experiencing those things??

People always bring up like "Oh you don't understand what exactly happened during the Holocaust, you're just using it as a stand in for "a very bad thing"" and that's like... never made sense either because what does that mean? I'm not... using the Holocaust out of nowhere, I'm using it because Israel tells US, PALESTINIANS, that we need to be kicked out and raped and tortured *because* of the Holocaust. When us, Palestinians, ask you to feel empathy for us based on what you experienced during the Holocaust, we aren't just pulling it out of thin air, we are using a zionist talking point and pointing out the flaws. "Does experiencing a Holocaust allow you to conduct massacres and unbelievable violence onto other people?" and "Why are we paying for the terrible crimes of Europeans? Why is this our fault that we must suffer for it, as you, a zionist, insist we must?"

It's just so confusing how people would take offense at feeling empathy for Palestinians. We aren't denying the awful, awful genocide of the Holocaust, nor are we "making light of it..." but if you believe that comparing what Palestinians go through is making light of the Holocaust, then you must think that what we are going through is not bad at all.

[jewish-sideblog]

Are you fucking for real with this? Y’all have really been whipped into such an antisemitic frenzy like.

“Members of a non-European ethnic group were displaced from their ancestral land and forced to take European names in Western nations hundreds of years ago. Now they’re changing their names back to names that have historical precedent in their native languages. (Black people)” is universally accepted as a good thing by liberals / leftists / anti-racists. But for some reason

“Members of a non-European ethnic group were displaced from their ancestral land and forced to take European names in Western nations hundreds of years ago. Now they’re changing their names back to names that have historical precedent in their native languages. (Jewish people)” is considered a horrifyingly evil colonial tactic?

Most Jews living in European diaspora didn’t have surnames at all until a handful of centuries ago. Sephardim were forced to take on Spanish surnames to avoid being killed by the Inquisition following the Alhambra Decree in 1492. Ashkenazim were forced to adopt Germanic and Eastern European names in different nations at different times between the 1780s and the 1850s. Both Ben Gurion and Netanyahu’s “white” names were forced upon them by local Prussian, Russian, or Austro-Hungarian officials less than three hundred years ago. Adopting Hebrew-or-Yiddish-derived last names were banned by most of these laws. When Jewish families left the nations that had forced them to adopt white Germanic last names, they adopted indigenous Jewish last names instead.

David Ben Gurion was born David Güre. He literally just added a Hebrew patronymic prefix to his father’s last name. Meanwhile Mohammed Ali was born Cassius Marcellus Clay. Amiri Baraka was born Everett Leroy Jones. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor. When you commend black people for shaking off names that were forced upon them by Europeans three hundred years ago, but vilify Jewish people for doing the exact same thing, you’re antisemitic. There’s no other way around it.

[is-the-thing-actually-jewish]

is Jewish Voice for Peace actually Jewish? I've heard a couple different things about that but no sources

@gryphistheantlerqueen also asked:

Whooo boy. So this has been sitting in the inbox for a few months, I wrote up a draft, and then it just sat... until this past week, when some new JVP BS hit the fan and gave me the kick to finish it.

Sooooo...

Verdict: Not Actually Jewish

(updated verdict after finding out about the “self-managed conversion” and “teacup mikvah”) Jewish, technically, and that "technically" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and is actively debatable without access to a detailed breakdown of JVP’s actual membership rolls. 

In general summation, JVP is a far-left radical antizionist group that is headed by a few visibly antizionist Jews and whose membership rolls are either a strong minority or outright majority of non-Jews, based on variable statistics that they've released. Although they claim that the “majority of their members and staff are Jewish”, this seems to be both statistically unlikely and actively suspicious due to their noted tendency to instruct even non-Jewish members to speak #AsAJew on social media, and their instructions to do “self-managed conversions”.  However, due to their title, they are very popular with people who want a Jewish Stamp Of Approval for demonizing Israelis and Zionist Jews as a result. In effect, they are Jewish in the same way that people like Candace Owens and Hershel Walker are Black—as self-tokenizing minorities who throw the rest of their ethnic group under the bus in exchange for power and political access.

And despite the claims that they are “inspired by Jewish values and traditions” (as put on their website) and “oppose anti-Jewish hatred,” JVP routinely engages in antisemitic rhetoric, up to and including blood libel and antisemitic conspiracy theories, and acts as a shield against non-Jews who also engage in antisemitic rhetoric so long as the non-Jews in question remember to shout "For Palestine!" first. This is not an exaggeration. 

The primary example of their in-house antisemitic rhetoric is their "Deadly Exchange" program, where they explicitly and conspiratorially blame Israel as being responsible for American police brutality and militarization. However, for all of their fearmongering and blame-casting on the subject—as if American cops needed outside help in brutalizing minorities or gaining military-grade handmedowns from the Pentagon, both of which are explicit claims of the "Deadly Exchange" program—they have a hard time actually identifying specific deaths associated with the international training seminars they're holding up as responsible.

One of the the closest they've come to a specific allegation is claiming that "former St. Louis County police chief Timothy Fitch trained with the Israeli military three years before Michael Brown’s killing and the Ferguson uprising." (Note: this was in a video that appears to have since been made private.) But Darren Wilson worked for the Ferguson PD, not the St. Louis PD, and Fitch retired months before the killing. So he was in a completely different police department, and this is the closest JVP comes to pointing to specific deaths or acts of brutality that they blame on Israel. Everything else is literal fearmongering--up to and including the classic conspiratorial tropes of "secretive Jewish governmental influence".

JVP has also happily supported the words of white supremacists like Richard Spencer, taking his “You could say that I’m a white Zionist in the sense that I care about my people," statement at face value, using it as the basis for entire articles where they compared Zionism to White Supremacy as a deliberate misrepresentation of the ideology that is common on the extreme political Left (you can compare that treatment again with how Candace Owens treats the word "Woke" on the Right). Even when the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" march happened, JVP wasted no time in comparing Zionism with the very ideology fueling the people chanting "Jews Will Not Replace Us," saying that Zionism is "Jewish racial supremacy" and calling for a universal condemnation of the ideology as a form of White Supremacy... which was the exact sort of message that many of those same White Supremacists would have happily agreed with.  So JVP is essentially siding with literal White Supremacists,  even as they claim that "Jews are not the primary victims of White Supremacy."

JVP also engages in Holocaust revisionism, such as with this lovely quote from Cecilie Surasky, the deputy director of JVP, “I believe it is critical to situate the genocide of Jews in a broader context, and not as an exceptional, metaphysically unique event. Some 6 million Jews died, but another 5 million people were also targeted for annihilation.”

(another quote, from an article by Surasky, which compares Netanyahu to Hitler.)

This is just straight revisionism of the entire Holocaust and the unique fixation the Nazis had on the Jews. Literally, even when they were losing, they were diverting resources from the war just to kill more Jews. Quote Hitler himself, "Jews must be prevented from intruding themselves among all the other nations as elements of internal disruption, under the mask of honest world-citizens, and thus gaining power over these nations." The very basis of the Nazi ideology paints Jews as an existential threat to the human race's peace and security—a far cry from JVP's claim that the Jewish suffering in the Holocaust wasn't unique or exceptional.

Additionally, JVP ignores or re-envisions Mizrachi Jewish history. They call the very term Mizrachi “Zionist rhetoric,” and refer to Mizrachi “immigrants,” (“Deadly Exchange,” pg. 16-17), and claim “the Israeli government facilitated a mass immigration of Mizrahim” (“Our Approach to Zionism”) as though those weren’t the direct result of the mass expulsion of and violence against Jews in MENA countries. These weren’t immigrants, these were refugees. 

And as for the question of “Are they Jewish?”, well...

Statistically, they are not representative of the Jewish population as a whole, 90% of whom identify as some degree of Zionist in the sense of “Supporting Jewish self-determination.”  One does not need to be Jewish to join JVP, as they proudly state on their website. Their membership rolls are also extremely obfuscated, and the fact that they encourage their followers, whether Jewish or not, to post and speak “as Jews” on social media makes it even more difficult to figure out what percentage of their membership is actually Jewish.  Furthermore, they have instructions for their members to engage in “self-conversions” that are not acceptable to Jewish law or tradition, and misuse/appropriate other sacred Jewish traditions to the point that “blasphemy” is an accurate description, with their instructions on the mikvah (a sacred bath) being outright offensive.  

(note that one has to be completely nude and bare of any adornment or makeup to use the mikvah, which is a pure pool of collected rainwater to be immersed in, for context on the above... misuse.  Trying to claim this as being “in line with sacred Jewish tradition” is like trying to claim to be Catholic while also saying that the Pope is the Antichrist and that using beer and a doughnut for the Eucharist is acceptable. For more information on mikveh, see: The Jewish Virtual Library, Aish, myjewishlearning, or Chabad.

There's also no altar.

The irony of asking people not to appropriate while doing this is astonishing.)

It’s also telling that they straight up say they are “claiming” the practice as their own.

Furthermore, JVP has hosted panels on “antisemitism” in the past... headed by people who are not only not Jewish, but who have been credibly accused of antisemitism in the past.  

JVP has also endorsed The Mapping Project Boston, which was a Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) subsidiary, listing every “Zionist” organization in Boston, Mass. This included Jewish schools, elder homes, community centers, disability centers, and more; all of them painted with scary and misleading “links” to non-Jewish organizations to insinuate Jewish control of the state and city governments, invoking age-old antisemitic tropes of a conspiracy of Jews as they did so:

(first image is the Mapping Project, the second is a 1938 Nazi political cartoon)

The Mapping Project also, and this is my personal favorite, accused Harvard University of doing “racist science” for engaging in archeological and genetic studies of Jews and Jewish history.  Tellingly, BDS actually disavowed The Mapping Project (albeit for bad optics, not for the rank antisemitism they were promoting)... but JVP has not, even though the Mapping Project’s entry for the ADL reads as follows:

Masquerading as a “civil rights” group, the ADL is a counterinsurgency and espionage organization whose mission is to protect the mutual interests of the US and Israeli governments, and to eliminate solidarity among oppressed peoples, especially concerning Palestine. The ADL spies on and criminalizes activists (using its connections to governments, police, schools, and corporations) while undermining their work by pushing its own state-sanctioned, pro-“Israel” agenda. And while the ADL claims to represent Jews and to fight “antisemitism” on their behalf, the organization has supported anti-Jewish state violence and sanitized Nazis. The ADL cannot be reformed: it must be dismantled and whatever resources it has should go towards repairing the many harms it has done. (Emphasis added.)

Of course, JVP has also engaged in similar conspiracy-toned antisemitic dogwhistles, such as this fun bit from their first Deadly Exchange video:

So clearly (to me at least), they have no problems with The Mapping Project’s tone and presentation.  

And this isn’t even going into JVP’s routine promotion of blood libel, their egregious double standards, their approving of pogroms, their active support for Hamas terrorists and demonization of Hamas’ victims, their attempted revisionism of Jewish history, their abject rejection of Jewish culture, and their other actions that show not just bias, but outright hatred for 90% of the world’s Jews.  

As one commentator put it, JVP as an organization is very much like Autism Speaks is to Autistic people--a thinly disguised hate group that views the people they’re supposedly speaking for as the problem, and themselves as promoting the Solution.  To this moderator, they’re the equivalent of the Association of German National Jews, who were also known as the Jews for Hitler; they wanted to abandon Judaism and embrace Naziism... and they got sent to the gas chambers anyway.  

Mod Joseph

Sources:

www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/jewish-voice-peace

www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Mikveh-Guide-for-Jewish-Voice-for-Peace-Outlined.pdf

(and also just... a general experience/exposure to them on social media, where even the most progressive actions taken by Israel, such as the recent ruling regarding queer Palestinians being able to claim sanctuary in Israel, being labeled as “pinkwashing”)

[a-very-tired-jew]

Sad Realization and Confirmation - we're in hiding

I was coming home from work last night and had the realization that I had not seen any of the Chabad students walking across campus as I normally do until that moment. The student was not even dressed in the regular attire of a Chabad member, but in "normal" clothing. Their yamulke had been replaced by a baseball hat and they were wearing a Hawaiian shirt and jeans. Gone was the white button down and black slacks, let alone the tallit being worn underneath. It then hit me that I hadn't seen any of them since about late October / early November and that they likely had all switched to wearing less obviously Jew identifying clothing. I am a secular Jew that grew up in the Reconstructionist movement. While I don't wear anything that makes me stand out as a Jew, nor do I have much of my identity wrapped around clothing associated with my ethnicity, I do get recognized as one for my phenotypic expression. For the Chabad students the clothing is part of who they are. They are hiding it now because it's simply not safe. The fact that this echoes what I have seen across the internet about Jews hiding to be safe hit me like a ton of bricks. This isn't something we should have to do in 2024, but here we are. I went to the FB page of our local group as well and noticed that the attire had even changed in the safety of their own facility. So yeah...that's what we've come to. Jewish students who can't be outwardly Jewish because anti-Zionism is just a dogwhistle to go after us. It does not matter if you are not going after Jews, there is such a significant amount of threatening rhetoric that we as a people are going back to our old survival methods.

[scramratz]

So, I tried reading some articles but really feel like I'm not getting the full/real story. But why is being a hotep a bad thing? It seems like excessive pride in one's unknown/imagined origins but I could be really missing what's between the lines here.

On paper, it's fine, but in practice, hotep ideology promotes a lot of conspiracy thinking, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and often antisemitism. These are just a few things I've heard or been told by hoteps

"It's unnatural for black women to have periods. Black women didn't have periods until they started eating pork"

Being gay isn't natural for black people. It's a white concept that's used to emasculate black men

There's a hollywood conspiracy to put black men in drag as a form of degradation ritual

The media and the banks are controlled by Jewish people

That just off the top of my head. My mom was just straight-up racist towards Asians, didn't "believe" there were Natives Americans (natives are also African in her world, which if you wanna be pedantic isn't technically false), jews have never be persecuted, Egypt was a homogeneous culture with no connection to other countries like Greece, interracial dating and marrage is bad, and being gay/trans is white people shit. Also she'd call me melanin deficient (which is hilarious in a vacuum) despite being the reason I'm mixed

[icyfox62]

​

i feel like such a bitch for it but its honestly felt so vindicating to have the pro-pal crowd called out with how theyre calling for everyone to give up their gddamn human rights """for palestine"""

i feel awful for saying it but. in the usa at least, since thats all i can speak for, it feels like theres a real problem among arab communities where there's absolutely no recognition of their history of imperialism/colonizer bs, their history of slavery, and yknow, their entire history with jews + theyre coddled in their beliefs if not outright praised by usually rich white goyische kids. im not saying other communities dont have similar issues, but obviously this is the one having the bigger impact rn (imho) and its a double whammy for how it's happening

it almost feels like some kind of rebellion/backlash against the post-9/11 mindset & racism, but like, in that way that bratty kids rebel where they have no clue what any of the actual original protesting meant, if that makes any sense? like they've heard ppl talk about how shit was fucked in the aftermath but instead of taking in anything, they just wanna be white saviors of the poor, helpless brown ppl being genocided by those eeevvviiilll jews!

also since i mentioned that... how much would you bet all those little dumbass "osama bin laden was right" white kids are full pro-hamas weirdos now lmao

you’re right! tbh the circle jerk between entitled leftist arabs and entitled leftist european white people is just that. colonizer recognizes colonizer.

fun fact my friend: they ARE pro hamas. the black non jews who said osama was right are too lmao. you had the right instinct!!

and the thing is: we warned non arab people about this, especially black non jews, and they didnt care or listen. (i am pointing out leftist black non jews btw, we do have a lot of amazing allies). the antisemitism and history of colonization of other groups didnt matter to them. the prejudice matters now that it’s effecting them directly.

it’s been clear for years now, YEARS, that jews do not matter to ultra leftist black goyim. we are not human to them—we are scapegoats for their problems. the group they can shit on and exclude, which is why we are not included in dei or ethnic studies. but they expect our allyship and unquestioning support. they erase our history, gaslight us, and side with oppressors, but cannot be called out.

idk, the entitlement is truly something. it’s a lot.

at this point, i think “white saviorism” is ingrained in most americans no matter their background. it’s more like “american saviorism” tbh. the american desire to infantilize and step in is strong lol. and it needs to be talked about and worked through by every american no matter their skin color. this american entitlement is also why people view conflicts outside of america through an american lens. it’s a problem in so many ways.

and one of the reasons the ultra left hates israel is because we don’t fit into this narrative anymore. the left actually liked israel until the yom kippur war. once we kept winning and didn’t need to be saved, we were dropped.

sad.

also leftist black non jews (and arabs) are attacking pro palestine jews rn and accusing them of theft and shit on other platforms. i’ll try to do some kind of update at some point. it’s been a whole entire mess.

[the-ind1gen0us-jude4n]

We must start to hold people and nations to account. Nations who "stand with Palestine" yet have a history of antisemitism and Jew hate.

Spain, Portugal, and Ireland are very good examples of this.

Spain and Portugal expelled their Jews, and forced other Jews to either convert or die. These policies wouldn't be relaxed until the 1800s.

Ireland had pogroms, and the nationalist party Sinn Fein had newspapers who accused Jews many antisemitic stereotypes.

By far the biggest one however is Russia. Russia not only has ties to Hamas and the IRGC, but has a deep antisemitic history. Pogroms, the pale of settlement, the cantonist system, the black hundreds, antisemitic legislation etc.

There are several other nations who haven't owned up to their antisemitic past, and still don't support Israel's right to exist as a nation and the home of the Jewish people.

Sorry if this hurts your feelings, but it has to be said. There's a clear pattern between nations who support Israel and owned up to their past, and those who don't and haven't owned up.

[elliescoolerwife]

Nazi dumbfuck

Being against murder and genocide is not a nazi ideology but go off I guess.

If anyone is nazi, it’s zionists.

Lets take a look:

In particular, the Nazis embraced the false idea that Jews were a separate and inferior race. - Israeli politicians have called palestinian children the “children off darkness” and israelis “the children of light”. Also, they’ve called Palestinians animals and not humans and therefore should be treated as such.

the Nazis referred to Jews as a “parasitic race.” - there is posters around Israel and on the internet created by Israelis where they compare palestinians to parasites - saying that they’re parasites to the israeli soil and needs to be removed.

Nazis wanted to separate Jews and Aryan Germans. They tried to force Jews to leave Germany. Not only do Israelis see Palestinians as animals, they’ve displaced 2 million Palestinians. Do you have any idea of what’s going on in Rafah rn?

Those whom the Nazis identified as non-Aryans (including Jews) were persecuted and discriminated against. Israelis have murdered 700.000 palestinians and removed their access to water, food and medical care. Israelis have been protesting by sitting in front of vehicles with medical equipment so gazans don’t get help. Israel have been dropping white phosphorus for 10 years so Palestinians either 1. Get burned. 2. Get killed by the water they drink that contains that white phosphorus. PS! White phosphorus is illegal but not when israelis do it🤡

the Nazis carried out forced sterilizations of certain groups whom they considered inferior.. lets swich our focus from Palestinians and lets take a look at the black people in Israel, lot of them ethiopians, that have been forced to sterilize themselves because israelis don’t want “black” in their jewish line. They want to keep it “clean” and not let black genes, especially not when those black people have converted and aren’t “real” jews. Do you remember who also wanted to keep their race clean? Does it sound familiar?

The Nazis believed that races were destined to wage war against each other. For them, war was a way for the Aryan race to gain land and resources. Specifically, the Nazis wanted to conquer territory in eastern Europe. They planned to remove, dominate, or murder the people who lived there. They believed that Aryan Germans should control this land because they were the supposed master race. Israelis believe that they are Gods chosen people and therefore owns that land. They have removed, dominated and murderer Palestinians who live there to take that land from them, claiming they are the superior race because God chose them. Therefore, they have every right to take that territory from the indigenous people.

Nazis also falsely claimed that all Jews were an existential threat to Germany and that they had to be destroyed. Israelis claim that this “war” will not be over until total victory - meaning until every Palestinian is dead or removed. They celebrated when north gaza looked like a desert, because the “parasites” who was a threath to Israel is now gone. And now Netanyahu is telling these parasites to leave Rafah, the claimed “safe space” or else they get murdered there too. And lets remember that Israelis don’t discriminate. They murder all Palestinians! Muslims, Christians, jews. All of them. And anyone who supports them.

And don’t even dare to say the Hamas because Israel never cared about Hamas nor did Hamas exist when this started. They have claimed that they need to murder children in order to prevent them from growing up and joining hamas. Children. Women. Elderly.

Bold of you to ask this anonymously, though.

[edenfenixblogs]

Some Excerpts As I Read

Reader Note: I have read The Color Purple and would never dismiss the importance of Alice Walker’s work. However, let’s not pretend that she’s too sacred to critique and treat like any other artist who does something racist. Her work to combat anti-black racism and highlight Black American struggles do not permit or excuse when she engages in other forms of bigotry.

I have never seen someone make a public stink about the extraordinarily racist poem, of which the section quoted above is only the tip of that particular racist iceberg.

In fact, I did not even know that Walker had written this horrible “poem” (if you can call an antisemitic diatribe with weird spacing a poem) —despite being very active in leftist spaces for my whole adult AND adolescent life and being an avid reader or both novels and poetry until 2023.

It was brought to my attention when she caught flak for being a TERF, as an incidental aside to prove that she was actually bigoted in several ways. A trait she ALSO shares with JK Rowling.

Look at these headlines. This is what comes up when I search “Alice walker transphobia.” They clearly label her as a TERF. But they do not make the same claim about her identity as BEING an antisemite. It is removed from her. Antisemitism is clearly not the focus here, which is fine. It is older news. These stories are reporting on her more recent bigotry. Cool.

These are the first results that come up when I search “alice walker antisemitism.”

The first result is from The Times of Israel, which makes sense, because that’s a place where a lot of Jews live and a lot of Jews will be upset by the things she wrote. But it also doesn’t make sense, because Walker is American. Why is the FIRST result about her antisemitism from an international newspaper that happens to have a large Jewish readership?

Why is the NYT headline about how Walker feels about her own bigotry, instead of how her Jewish readers feel?

The New York Magazine Article looked interesting so I clicked it. It was interesting. You should read it. It is an Op-Ed written by a Black, Jewish woman named Nylah Burton. Kudos to her. It was important. And non-Jews need to read it. It was written in 2018.

The Atlantic is next and primarily takes on the work of critiquing a different article in the New Yorker which also minimized the importance and harmful impact of antisemitism.

And then things get interesting. Still, on the first page of results, is this juxtaposition.

Among the many striking things here is the fact that the Jerusalem Post is writing from 2023. Al Jazeera is writing from 2019.

If you’ve read any of the above links or text you will note that yes, Alice Walker’s “offense” is indeed antisemitism. It’s not really debatable. She’s done many, many horrifically antisemitic things.

And yet, Al Jazeera jumps in, unprompted, to defend a known antisemite? Why?????? Oh, because she supports Palestine.

Well…perhaps…just maybe…supporters of Palestine shouldn’t want to leap to the defense of antisemites who spout blatant misinformation about the I/P conflict, demonize the Jews they know personally, and trade in antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Unless of course…they don’t care that they are pushing pro-Palestine Jews out of leftist spaces in the first place.

When did it become acceptable for leftists to excuse someone’s bigotry as long as the bigot agrees with you on other stuff?

[doberbutts]

I’m wondering if you have thoughts on James Baldwin’s “open letter to the born again”? I’m struggling a bit with what his point is in that piece; it feels kinda dismissive on Jewish zionists agency in creation of Israel? But I may be missing parts or not getting things

The text in question.

And the segment I think anon is struggling with:

I know what I am talking about: my grandfather never got the promised “forty acres, and a mule,” the Indians who survived that holocaust are either on reservations or dying in the streets, and not a single treaty between the United States and the Indian was ever honored. That is quite a record.

Jews and Palestinians know of broken promises. From the time of the Balfour Declaration (during World War I) Palestine was under five British mandates, and England promised the land back and forth to the Arabs or the Jews, depending on which horse seemed to be in the lead. The Zionists—as distinguished from the people known as Jews—using, as someone put it, the “available political machinery,’’ i.e., colonialism, e.g., the British Empire—promised the British that, if the territory were given to them, the British Empire would be safe forever.

But absolutely no one cared about the Jews, and it is worth observing that non-Jewish Zionists are very frequently anti-Semitic. The white Americans responsible for sending black slaves to Liberia (where they are still slaving for the Firestone Rubber Plantation) did not do this to set them free. They despised them, and they wanted to get rid of them. Lincoln’s intention was not to “free” the slaves but to “destabilize” the Confederate Government by giving their slaves reason to “defect.” The Emancipation Proclamation freed, precisely, those slaves who were not under the authority of the President of what could not yet be insured as a Union.

It has always astounded me that no one appears to be able to make the connection between Franco’s Spain, for example, and the Spanish Inquisition; the role of the Christian church or—to be brutally precise, the Catholic Church—in the history of Europe, and the fate of the Jews; and the role of the Jews in Christendom and the discovery of America. For the discovery of America coincided with the Inquisition, and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Does no one see the connection between The Merchant of Venice and The Pawnbroker? In both of these works, as though no time had passed, the Jew is portrayed as doing the Christian’s usurious dirty work. The first white man I ever saw was the Jewish manager who arrived to collect the rent, and he collected the rent because he did not own the building. I never, in fact, saw any of the people who owned any of the buildings in which we scrubbed and suffered for so long, until I was a grown man and famous. None of them were Jews.

And I was not stupid: the grocer and the druggist were Jews, for example, and they were very very nice to me, and to us. The cops were white. The city was white. The threat was white, and God was white, Not for even a single split second in my life did the despicable, utterly cowardly accusation that “the Jews killed Christ’’ reverberate. I knew a murderer when I saw one, and the people who were trying to kilI me were not Jews.

But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.

Finally: there is absolutely—repeat: absolutely—no hope of establishing peace in what Europe so arrogantly calls the Middle East (how in the world would Europe know? having so dismally failed to find a passage to India) without dealing with the Palestinians. The collapse of the Shah of Iran not only revealed the depth of the pious Carter’s concern for “human rights,” it also revealed who supplied oil to Israel, and to whom Israel supplied arms. It happened to be, to spell it out, white South Africa.

Well. The Jew, in America, is a white man. He has to be, since I am a black man, and, as he supposes, his only protection against the fate which drove him to America. But he is still doing the Christian’s dirty work, and black men know it.

My friend, Mr. Andrew Young, out of tremendous love and courage, and with a silent, irreproachable, indescribable nobility, has attempted to ward off a holocaust, and I proclaim him a hero, betrayed by cowards.

For context: Andrew Young, considered the right hand of MLK Jr, had a longstanding and occasionally fraught relationship with the Jewish community. He stepped down from Congress shortly after being forced to choose between voicing support for Palestine and continuing to work towards black-jewish interests by his constituents and fellow politicians, as he felt very strongly about supporting both. This was a fairly unpopular move. While I don't believe he ever called himself Jewish by the strictest sense, he was actively involved in Jewish communities and the known "white" ancestry within him is a Polish Jew in his great grandparents.

To be honest, I don't really see much a problem with this as I think it fairly closely matches up not only with my understanding of the history of this problem but also my own country's part in it as well as my personal feelings on it decades later. It pretty blatantly says that Zionism is utilizing a machination of white supremist colonism due to the extensive history of antisemitism and having had the ancestral land dangled in front of them like bait on a hook from the British Empire, which owned Palestine at the time. It also goes on to say that many Zionists aren't even Jewish and are antisemitic in nature, but are Christians happy to get rid of as many Jews as possible and how that tracks due to the Christian church's millennia-deep history of antisemitism.

I don't think it lets anyone off the hook. I think it pretty much flat out says this is a problem caused first and foremost by white Christians who hate Jews and Arabs alike and have a vested interest in getting the two populations to fight because it'll be easier to kill off just the one group instead of both of them, if one ends up eradicating the other. It even talks about the friction between the black community and the Jewish community, what caused it, what drives it, how that friction in itself is a tool of white supremacy to hurt us both.

[jewish-sideblog]

I think the important thing to note vis-a-vis Jews and whiteness is that white privilege is limited to white passing. I am far less likely to get pulled over by a white supremacist cop than a black person is. And if I do get pulled over, I am far less likely to be publically brutalized or killed.

But if a white supremacist cop catches me on a day I'm wearing a tichel or a kippah? Or if he spots the Tefilat Haderech charm on my dashboard? Or if he, you know, looks at my driver's licence and sees my name? You're kidding yourself if you think he'd let me off as easily as somebody he actually considers "white". There won't be a verbal warning. He'd throw any and every infraction he could at me.

There are Jews and people with Jewish ancestry who experience full and complete white privilege. But that requires leaving your Judaism behind. That requires a fair skin tone, a goyishe name, and often a culturally christian upbringing. It leaves no room for anybody who takes time off for Jewish holidays or refuses to work on Shabbat. It leaves no room for anybody who openly discusses their culture, faith, or ancestry.

White privilege for Jews only works until people find out we're Jewish. Often, what that means is that white privilege only works for pale-skinned Jews who have distanced themselves from being Jewish.

[spacelazarwolf]

shakshuka - maghrebi

cookbook: jewish flavors of italy

total time from start to finish: 50 minutes

rating system

difficulty: 2 this recipe required chopped veggies and some sautéing, and it does require a couple of different timed steps (like watching the eggs to make sure they don’t overcook... oops...), but overall it wasn't difficult to make. the recipe did call for harissa, which i found (hechschered) at my local international market, or felfel u ciuma. you can make the harissa yourself, it just takes some extra time. i don't know if you can find the felfel u ciuma in any international markets.

rating: 5 absolutely fucking delicious. 100/10.

this particular recipe comes from the libyan jews of rome. there is a substantial population of libyan jews in rome because of the increasing levels of persecution faced by the jewish community in libya in the 20th century, culminating in violence and pogroms during and after the six day war, until around 6000 libyan jews were airlifted out of libya to rome by the italian navy in 1967. the refugees were forced to leave their homes, their businesses, and most of their possessions behind, but despite these hardships, libyan jews have become an integral part of the roman jewish community.

and i can’t mention libyan jews without mentioning david gerbi, a libyan jew who has spent years trying to restore synagogues and cemeteries in libya and hopes to eventually make libya safe enough for libyan jews to return. so far his attempts have been met with a lot of violent pushback, but b”h someday they will get their home back.

recipe:

shakshuka:

preparation: 15 minutes cooking: 50-55 minutes serves 2-4

ingredients:

3-4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

3-4 garlic cloves, crushed

2 tsp ground cumin or caraway (i used cumin, which is most commonly used, but the author of the cookbook likes to use caraway)

1 tsp paprika

1 tsp felfel u ciuma or harissa

3 red, yellow, or orange peppers; stems, seeds, and white membranes removed, and flesh cut into 5mm (1/4 in)-thick strips

2 ripe vine tomatoes, diced, or 10 cherry tomatoes, halved (optional) (i used 2 cans of diced tomatoes)

500g (1lb 2oz/generous 2 cups) passata (an italian tomato puree, you can use pureed tomatoes but passata is a bit thicker)

1 tbsp finely chopped fresh italian parsley

4 eggs

sea salt and black pepper to taste

bread to serve

many middle eastern cuisines claim this dish as their own. libyan jews are no exception, and those who migrated to italy took it with them. shakshuka has become popular all around the world and today, many of rome's kosher restaurants have it on their menus, reflecting not just the city's large libyan jewish population but also the food of israel, where shakshuka is very well known.

put the oil, garlic, 1 tsp of cumin or caraway, paprika, and felfel u ciuma or harissa (i used harissa and added an extra tsp) in a large, non-stick frying pan, stir and cook over a low heat for 5 minutes. (before this, i sautéed some yellow onions)

add the peppers to the pan, stir, add a pinch each of salt and pepper and cook, covered, over a low to medium heat for about 15 minutes until the peppers start to soften.

add the tomatoes (if using) and toss for 5 minutes, then add the passata with a pinch each of salt and pepper and cook for another 20-25 minutes, covered, and stirring occasionally. remove the lid, add half the parsley, and the second tsp of cumin or caraway, stir and taste for seasoning. you can cook the eggs in the mixture straight away, or make the recipe up to this point and keep the sauce ready in the fridge for up to 3 days.

when you're ready to cook the eggs, make four dips in the sauce (reheating the sauce if you've made it ahead of time) with the back of a spoon and gently break an egg into each one. cover and simmer over a low to medium heat for 6-8 minutes until the egg whites are just set but the yolks are still runny (oops...)

sprinkle with the remaining parsley and, if you like, a little more cumin or caraway. serve hot, ideally with bread.

harissa (from saffron shores):

4 large red bell peppers or pimientos, seeded, deribbed, and cut into pieces

3 large cloves garlic, minced

1 tbsp ground coriander

1 tbsp caraway seeds, toasted and ground

1.5 to 2 tsp cayenne pepper

1 tsp salt

extra virgin olive oil as needed

in a meat grinder, food processor, or blender (you could probably also use mortar and pestle, it would just take longer), grind or puree the bell peppers or pimientos. strain, pressing on the solids with the back of a large spoon. you should have about 3/4 cup puree. stir in the garlic, spices, and salt. add oil for spoonability.

alternate harissa (also from saffron shores):

3 dried ancho chili peppers, soaked in hot water for 1 hour

3 garlic cloves, minced

2 tsp cumin seeds, toasted and ground

1 tsp caraway seeds, toasted and ground (optional)

1 tsp salt

cayenne pepper to taste

extra virgin olive oil for filming

drain the peppers. in a blender, combine the peppers, garlic, and seasonings, puree to a paste (could probably do in a mortar and pestle). pack in a hot sterilized jar and film the top with olive oil. seal and refrigerate for up to 6 weeks.

felfel u ciuma (from jewish flavors of italy):

6 garlic cloves, crushed

1/2 tsp chilli powder

1 tbsp paprika

1/2 tsp sea salt

juice of 1/2 lemon

1/2 tsp ground caraway (optional)

2 tbsp water

simply combine all ingredients in a small bowl and stir well to create a paste.

[hero-israel]

As a black person I actually find the logic of many Zionists to be audacious.

My people were sold and kidnapped. We were enslaved for hundreds of years. We had the most despicable things happen to us. I’m sure you may relate, we were put into breeding camps, they used our parts to make clothes and furniture, allegedly they ate us, they tortured us, etc.

There is more than enough proof I am indigenous to Africa hell I found and reconnected with the family one of my ancestors was taken from. I am very lucky.

At no point have I ever thought about going to West Africa and taking the land back, stealing property, imprisoning, and murdering people who’ve lived there for centuries and still live there today. Even though there’s a possibility that they’ve participated in the selling of at least one of my ancestors.

Just because I can trace my heritage there doesn’t suddenly mean I have a claim on the land. I have heard so many Zionist say they belong there more than Palestinians, that there claim on the land is stronger. Maybe it’s not all of them but it is enough to be concerning.

Also bring up Liberia if you want. We didn’t ask for that.

This is a fair critique and it brings up one of the most important aspects of Zionism, and of all Jewish life in the modern era and from now on: that Zionism was always morally RIGHT, but it did not have to be morally NECESSARY.

For decades there was a raging, controversial, legitimately two-sided intracommunity debate over Zionism, like nothing you see among Jews today, memorably portrayed in Chaim Potok's novel "The Chosen" (and subsequent film version). The Reform Jewish Movement, our largest denomination, was governed by an explicitly anti-Zionist platform for over 50 years..... until they changed their minds in 1937. The Jewish people always trace their heritage to Eretz Yisrael, always could claim a rightful place there - but things should never have been allowed to get bad enough, fast enough, that in the truest sense their only choice was to create a state of Israel or die.

As early as 1920, Hitler said his goal was total extermination of the Jews. Nobody cared. America sealed its gates to Jewish immigrants in 1924. Germany began visibly prepping for genocide around 1935, again nobody cared. At Evian 1938 - "the great betrayal" - pretty much every powerful state in the world acknowledged that the Jews were about to be wiped out, and knowing that, refused to allow refugees to enter (except for the Dominican Republic, the mensches). England bowed to Arab terrorism and sealed off immigration to Mandate Palestine - which was a violation of international law under the League of Nations but, again, nobody cared. Nobody, not one single country, fought to protect the Jews or to help them escape. The Allies couldn't be bothered to bomb the tracks into Auschwitz, but they would heroically sink refugee ships. After the war, 250,000 Jews lingered miserably in displaced persons camps for YEARS, with not one single country being willing to admit them, and in nearly all cases there being nothing to return to anyway. There were still Jews kept in Dachau, guarded by Germans, until 1951.

From a 1945 report to Truman: "Many Jewish displaced persons … are living under guard behind barbed-wire fences … including some of the most notorious concentration camps … had no clothing other than their concentration camp garb…. Most of them have been separated three, four or five years and they cannot understand why the liberators should not have undertaken immediately the organized effort to re-unite family groups…. Many of the buildings … are clearly unfit for winter…. [Author contrasted these conditions with the relative normal life led by the nearby German populations and wondered at the contrast] ...We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy...."

Those who attempted to return to their former communities were routinely murdered (seen at the end of "Maus"). There was a massacre of Holocaust survivors in Kiev, Ukraine in September 1945, another in Kielce, Poland in July 1946.

The Jews saw Palestine as their only hope, because it was. And when they saw their enemies there were led by actual red-handed Nazi war criminals, and heard that the stakes were once again their total genocide? Well, that's when you fight.... damn hard... to build the state and the military that will, FOR ONCE, protect you.

You talk about "At no point in my life have I considered claiming a part of Africa and fighting the people who I find there". Well - what if it was extremely obviously that or death?

A popular saying among Jews: "Israel was not created because there was a Holocaust. The Holocaust was created because there was no Israel." It's true - but it should not have been necessary to have an Israel to prevent the Holocaust. The rest of the world should have done that, and they didn't so much fail in preventing it as much as they succeeded in enabling it. You are correct to say that African-Americans did not ask for Liberia. The concept was made up by white people to try to get blacks out of America (though it gained popularity with black people after "milestones" of new cruelty such as the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, and I believe Marcus Garvey is well-liked to this day). Well, Jews did not ask to have no government in the world grant us equality or defend us from genocide. We did not ask to have no choice. And we do not ask for our response to the latest attempted genocide to be condemned by the same nations that enabled the last several.

Today about 90% of Jews are Zionists. Not just out of the everlasting moral principle, but because of the life-or-death reality that when we needed ANY OTHER OPTION TO WORK, NOTHING DID. And since then, there has been even clearer demonstration of the tenuousness of Jewish survival and the depths of inhuman hatred we face from our enemies, as the 3,000-year-old Mizrahi Jewish civilization was successfully uprooted and purged from dozens of countries (which had already been oppressing and massacring them long before Zionism) as collective racial revenge against Israel. The mere fact that that was logistically possible - that it could be done, quickly and repeatedly - speaks worlds about the normalized culture of eliminationism surrounding us. What do you really think are the chances that African-Americans could be altogether physically purged from the USA or some of its states? Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, and Eritrea finished their Jews within the last 5 years.

As "critics of Israel" have made it extremely clear that all Jews worldwide remain legitimate targets, that all "colonizers" (unquestionably including Americans like me) "deserve it" ("it" to include infanticide, rape, kidnapping, and mass murder), and as America visibly decays into algorithmic racist authoritarianism and climatic desperation.... you should not expect that 90% to change.

[thewinter22]

hi, since you asked genuine questions here's a few explanations:

on oct 7th, hamas broke into israel and murdered, tortured, raped, and kidnapped over a thousand people. it wasn't just a little event. it was the largest slaughter of jews since the holocaust. and it wasn't just jews that were killed, it was arab israelis and bedouins. if you want to learn more, I recommend watching "screams before silence" it's free on youtube BUT huge trigger warning for graphic descriptions of rape and torture. there aren't actual pictures/videos of the rapes in the documentary but there are many eyewitnesses and victims who share their stories.

https://www.screamsbeforesilence.com/

secondly, the term "zionism" doesn't mean what most non-jews think it means. it is a movement started by and for jews, and it is the belief that jews should have a nation in their ancestral homeland (israel). it doesn't mean that all palestinians should die, it doesn't mean that israel needs to solely be jewish (ethnostate). israel is extremely diverse with many different religions and ethnicities, it just has over 50% jews making it a jewish state in the same way that most countries are christian or muslim etc.

gaza, in contrast, has 0 jews since 2005 when israel left gaza.

hamas is a terrorist organization and has a very strict "education" system mostly consisting of teaching children how to become martyrs and shoot guns. palestinians learn from birth to hate jews and israel. hamas's entire ideology is built on jew hatred. for that reason, it is extremely hard to get a ceasefire because hamas keeps rejecting it. bibi netanyahu, who I don't personally like, has agreed to most ceasefire deals, but hamas hasn't. that's why the war is still going on. and let's not forget, hamas still holds many israeli hostages captive.

the reason jews don't feel safe in queer spaces is because currently leftist queers do not acknowledge these facts. they create "anti-zionist spaces" on campuses and in their own communities. 90% of jews are zionists, so when you're anti-zionist, you are inherently antisemitic. anti-zionists have vandalized synagogues, attacked synagogues, raped jews "for justice in palestine", stabbed random jews, and worse. people shout "globalize the intifada" which really just means "globalize genocide of jews".

the fact that so many queer people refuse to believe us when we say we are in danger, say we deserve it even, is why jews don't feel safe in queer spaces. most of us are fine with a state of palestine, but we don't want hamas as their leader because they are a terrorist organization with a goal of killing jews. jews have been a part of so many liberal movements (a black jew founded blm, many jews stood up for gays during the aids crisis, etc) and are still rejected because of backwards misinformation. our problem isn't with palestine or palestinians, our problem is with ignorance and hate that so many leftist spaces are now full of.

if you want to help jews feel safe in queer spaces, acknowledge their pain, acknowledge that hamas is bad, listen to jews when they talk about this conflict. so many queer and leftist ppl treat this conflict like a fandom, it's crazy and disgusting. most of them only learned about this conflict through social media a year ago. listen to jews and don't exclude us from your spaces just because you are too arrogant to look at the other side. that's literally all we're asking.

some instances of anti-zionism being violent and antisemitic:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67145473

https://www.france24.com/en/france/20240619-french-teens-charged-with-anti-semitic-rape-in-attack-condemned-by-political-leaders

https://www.jns.org/anti-zionism-is-just-antisemitism-misspelled/

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/10/antisemitic-incidents-hamas-israel-attack-2023-adl

thank you for asking, and thank you for reading.

Thank you for the answers. I was worried people were going to call me ignorant, which I admit I am up until now, and is exactly why I want to learn more about something I never really looked into more deeply because of the various opinions on all sides making it hard to decypher anything objective. It's hard to believe how terribly queer spaces are treating jewish people. Which is not to say I don't believe you. Quite the opposite. I am just shocked. Thank you again