#american jews

[unsolicited-opinions]

Leftist antisemitism is a symptom - American Jews and the Illiberal Left

TLDR: I think we would be wise to stop regarding leftist antisemitism only in its own context and habitually recognize it is a part of a larger issue, the rise of the illiberal left.

Why are Jews are the most reliable supporters of Liberal policies and politicians in modern American history?

Haviv Rettig Gur seems to suggest that Jews in the US, recognizing that Liberal values resulted in their (imperfect but historic) emancipation in the US, became perhaps the most Liberal people ever. They understood that US Liberal values were what made Jews relatively safe in the US, and offered them opportunities which had been denied to them everywhere else.

When previously did a head of state speak to Jews the way George Washington did?

Gur suggests that this is why American Jews have historically been so invested in the struggle of black folks in the US. When I say invested, I'm talking about facts like these:

- Henry Moscowitz was one of the founders of the NAACP.

- Kivie Kaplan, a vice-chairman of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now called the Union for Reform Judaism), served as the national president of the NAACP from 1966 to 1975.

- From 1910 to 1940, more than 2,000 primary and secondary schools and 20 Black colleges (including Howard, Dillard and Fisk universities) were established in whole or in part by contributions from Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. At the height of the so-called "Rosenwald schools," nearly 40 percent of Black people in the south were educated at one of these institutions.

- Jews made up half of the young people who participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.

- Leaders of the Reform Movement were arrested with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964 after a challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations.

- Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched arm-in-arm with Dr. King in his 1965 March on Selma.

- The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were drafted in the conference room of Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, under the aegis of the Leadership Conference, which for decades was located in the RAC's building.

When I was a child and asked my mother why Jews seemed overwhelmingly to be Democrats, I was told "because of FDR and the Civil Rights movement." That's not wrong, in Gur's framing, but perhaps a more shallow response than the question deserves.

In Gur's framing, US Jews realized that the promises of Liberalism, over and over, no matter how much they delivered for other peoples, did not deliver for black Americans.

Gur suggests that US Jews worked to see that change for their black co-citizens because if American Liberalism didn't deliver for black Americans what it appeared to promise to all Americans, the sense of safety, security, and belonging which Jews felt in the US was an illusion.

US Jews believed that we had common cause with non-Jewish American Liberals. We thought non-Jewish liberals believed what we believed about universal civil rights, pluralism, enlightenment values and enlightenment reason. When Jews saw the "In this House We Believe" signs on our neighbors' lawns, We felt comforted because those beliefs are also our beliefs.

We thought, for instance, that our non-Jewish friends agreed that Liberal democracies were better for human rights than any form of government in the history of human societies. We thought they agreed that religious, racial, and ethnic intolerance were social ills which needed to be fought with information. We thought they valued data, reason, and reliable sources.

Since 10/7/23, we've been learning that we were mistaken. We've seen gentiles who we thought shared our values seem to discard those values.

We saw college educated friends share antisemitic (and alarmingly familiar) conspiracy theories about Israeli puppetry of US politics and the return of Nazi and Soviet antisemitic slogans/images.

We've seen highly educated "Liberals" preach ahistoric nonsense denying that the Jewish people are from the Levant and willfully ignoring the huge swaths of historical fact which don't support their favored narrative.

We've seen friends rage against "globalists" and "Zionists," when what they mean is 'Jews'.

We've seen people who we thought were allies against all forms of racism justify their racism towards Jews as righteous through specious reasoning like 'I don't hate Jews, just the 97% of Jews who believe that Jews should have self-determination in their homeland.'

We've been told that we cannot ask them to temper their use of antisemitic tropes, because doing so "weaponizes" concerns about antisemitism to obstruct them from their righteous crusade against the most evil nation on earth...which happens to be the only Jewish nation.

Despite this, about 80% of Jewish voters voted for Harris over Trump.

I think US Jews will continue to be Liberals, because Liberal values are dear to us and aligned with our values as Jews, as a historically oppressed minority, and as Americans who see more clearly than some others the gap between the promise of American liberalism and its long-delayed universal delivery.

The problem, I think, is in how many of our former friends simply aren't Liberals any longer.

I think Jews in the US need to spend a good deal more time scrutinizing the illiberal left.

Nine days after the attacks of 10/7/23, Jonathan Chait wrote:

Writers like Michelle Goldberg, Julia Ioffe, and my colleague Eric Levitz, all of whom rank among the writers I most admire, have written anguished columns about the alienation of Jewish progressives from the far left. I think all their points are totally correct. But I find the frame of their response too narrow. They are treating apologias for Hamas as a factually or logically flawed application of left-wing ideals. I believe, to the contrary, that Hamas defenders are applying their own principles correctly. The problem is the principles themselves.

...

Liberals believe political rights are universal. Basic principles like democracy, free speech, and human rights apply equally to all people, without regard to the content of their political values. (This of course very much includes Palestinians, who deserve the same rights as Jews or any other people, and whose humanity is habitually ignored by Israeli conservatives and their American allies.) A liberal would abhor the use of political violence or repression, however evil the targets.

...

The illiberal left believes treating everybody equally, when the power is so unequal, merely serves to maintain existing structures of power. It follows from their critique that the legitimacy of a tactic can only be assessed with reference to whether it is being used by the oppressor or the oppressed. Is it okay for, say, a mob of protesters to shout down a lecture? Liberals would say no. Illiberal leftists would need to know who was the speaker and who was the mob before they could answer.

...

One observation I’ve shared with many analysts well to my left is that the debate over this illiberalism and the social norms it has spawned — demands for deference in the name of allyship, describing opposing ideas as a form of harm, and so on — has tracked an older debate within the left over communism. Communism provided real-world evidence of how an ideology that denies political rights to anybody deemed to be the oppressor laid the theoretical groundwork for repression and murder.

There have been conscious echoes of this old divide in the current dispute over Hamas. The left-wing historian Gabriel Winant has a column in Dissent urging progressives not to mourn dead Israeli civilians because that sentiment will be used to advance the Zionist project. Winant sounds eerily like an old communist fellow traveler explaining that the murders of the kulaks or the Hungarian nationalists are the necessary price of defending the revolution. “The impulse, repeatedly called ‘humane’ over the past week, to find peace by acknowledging equally the losses on all sides rests on a fantasy that mourning can be depoliticized,” he argues, calling such soft-minded sentiment “a new Red Scare.” Making the perfect omelette always requires some broken eggs in the form of innocent people who made the historical error of belonging to, or perhaps being born into, an enemy class.

But more than three decades have passed since the Soviet Union existed or China’s government was recognizably Marxist. And so the liberal warning about the threat of left-wing illiberalism seemed abstract and bloodless. On October 7, it suddenly became bloody and concrete. It didn’t happen here, of course. The shock of it was that many leftists revealed just how far they would be willing to follow their principles. “People have repeated over and over again over the last few days that you ‘cannot tell Palestinians how to resist,’” notes (without contradicting the sentiment) Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of the left-wing Jewish Currents. Concepts like this, treating the self-appointed representative of any oppressed group as beyond criticism, are banal on the left. Yet for some progressive Jews, it is shocking to see it extended to the slaughter of babies, even though that is its logical endpoint. The radical rhetoric of decolonization, with its glaring absence of any limiting principles, was not just a rhetorical cover to bully some hapless school administrator into changing the curriculum. Phrases like “by any means necessary” were not just figures of speech. Any means included any means, very much including murder.

Both Julia Ioffe and Eric Levitz have pointed out that decolonization logic ignores the fact that half of Israel’s Jewish population does not have European origins and came to Israel after suffering the same ethnic cleansing as the Palestinians. This is correct. But what if it weren’t? If every Israeli Jew descended from Ashkenazi stock, would it be okay to shoot their babies?

The problem is much greater than leftist antisemitism. The illiberal left has become nearly as great a threat to Liberalism as the far right.

It is often the case that a movement’s treatment of Jews serves as a broader indicator of its health. It’s not an accident that the Republican Party has become more attractive to antisemites as it has grown more paranoid and authoritarian. What the far left revealed about its disposition toward Jews is not just a warning for the Jews but a warning for all progressives who care about democracy and humanity. The pro-Hamas left is not merely indicating an indifference toward Jews. It is revealing the illiberal left’s inherent cruelty, repression, and inhumanity.

I'm annoyed that it is has taken me so long to catch on and alarmed by the implications.

I am, however, very proud of my 14yo, who sums up her experience trying to respectfully disagree with leftists this way:

"They're allergic to nuance."

[elder-millennial-of-zion]

I know it’s only been a day, but so far the US is showing the world that a terrorist organisation can kidnap an American citizen, hold them hostage for a year, execute them, and face no consequences.

Either that, or they’re showing that to be the case for Jewish American citizens specifically. They are showing American Jews like me that in the end, our American citizenship means nothing, that we are just expendable Jews. I always learned that cautionary tale as a history lesson, but it feels too real now.

There is no difference between me and Hersh Goldberg-Polin. I know now that if I’m ever in his place, my country would leave me to rot.

[gotohellfuckingyankees]

[angrybell]

If they had let a dedicated anti-Muslim teach the basic course on Islam… would that be allowed to happen? Or maybe a KKK member teaching the history of Civil Rights?

But Columbia sees no problem with allowing a dedicated antisemite and avowed enemy of Israel to teach the intro course on Zionism.

Thanks Chuck. Your help will be remembered,

[mysharona1987]

Thankfully we *totally* trust Germans on the issue of genocide and how murdering civilians and burning children alive is fine.

They have always been notoriously trustworthy on that particular issue.

[chanaleah]

[eretzyisrael]

Source

[hero-israel]

Breathe.

It is normal to feel pain, alarm, and sorrow, as we see what our world has turned into, as we hear what so many want to do to us. It wouldn't be human to feel any other way. I've been deeply involved in this issue for many years and truly did not expect so much of the goyische world to immediately go full werewolf on the thrill of seeing Jews tortured and massacred in high-res. Many of them are lost to us, and as far as I am concerned, there is nothing they could ever, ever do to regain my trust. They would never even think to give an apology, and even if they did, I would never accept it.

It makes matters all the worse that Israel - this age's morph of the reason to hate us - has for the last ~16 months been run by objectively evil and horrible people. A few of them have talked publicly about "encouraging voluntary resettlement" or claim to have held negotiations with African states. In all cases, less vile people from the same government have immediately denied those stories and said there is no such policy, no such talks, it is all just suggestions. When you have a government run by Internet trolls, criminals, and terrorist sympathizers, that is how they talk. There is no imaginable mechanism for any of this - it is impossible to believe any country would go along with it, or that it is taken seriously by anyone beyond whichever racist asshole is thinking out loud next to a reporter at that time. But even as idle blather, it is immensely dangerous. It represents a threshold we cannot cross. We cannot - as you said - "make that look good." The best we can do is recognize that this particular evil racist doesn't actually have the authority or method for doing it, he's just jerking off, the Attorney-General told them to shut up and stop advocating crimes.

There have been so many times when the world went utterly batshit about Israeli actions that were totally innocuous, about rumors that never even happened. I talk about it here all the time. Part of me is hoping that is an element of this case, even as I'm afraid, this time, it might not be.

And as I'm also afraid that things will get even worse for us if, as looks very likely, Trump wins next time.

So it is okay to feel utterly terrible about things.

And yet, we still have to breathe.

We are alive because Jewish people got through much worse times than these, with far fewer resources and allies than we have today. Everything we know, everything we worry about now, exists because even though They Tried To Kill Us, We Survived.

Confront reality - without despair. We are facing bad times and they may get worse, but we will get through them.

[troythecatfish]

[nonjewishzionist]

In an alternative reality, more adequate to the views of antizionist people:

* 07.10.2023 happens *

IDF: hey, Hamas, can you like give our people back?

Hamas: nah, im cool

IDF: but Hamas, then I have to go there and get the people myself, I have a bunch of families here and they want their relatives back

Hamas: whatever, im not letting them go

IDF: um coming to release my people

* IDF arrived in Gaza *

Hamas: wtf dude, what are you doing here? Go back to where you came from and stop genocide us!

IDF: yeah, no, I left in 2005 with the promise of peace and that never happen, so now I’m here to get my people back to their homes

Hamas: I give you like 10 if you stop the invasion

IDF: are you insane? You took over 200 not to mention the ones you killed!

Hamas: yeah that’s what you get for invading

IDF: what? Have you been drinking? I’m only here to take my people back home, give me my people back and I go. If you hadn’t taken my people I would not be here in the first place.

Hamas: yeah no.

IDF: ok, now I have to deploy aggressive means to find them, rescue them and bring them back home

*Hamas puts, guns, ammunition, control centers and hostages in the middle of civilian population *

IDF: wtf dude!

Hamas: try to get them now bitch

IDF: I did came here to get my people back but if that envolves having to kill YOUR civilians, that YOU PUT ON THE LINE OF FIRE ON PURPOSE, I guess I’m coming home then, who needs family anyway….

Hamas: by the way gtfo of Palestine! If you don’t I’m taking more hostages until you Israeli are all dead

IDF: wtf? Are you high? Jews have been living here for like 5000 years, you guys arrived much later, I don’t mind sharing and all but like I’m not leaving

Hamas: Fuck sharing I want it all for me, Palestine has been here since 1964, you came and stole MY land, I want it back and you people all dead

IDF: Israel has been here since 5000 or so years, and our new Israel has been around since 1948, so longer than you. You are not making any sense, I’m calling a doctor to have you evaluated

Hamas: yeah but it’s not fair because I say so and I want you land and all of you dead.

IDF: k fine I’m going away, I already started to look for some land to build a jew country

Hamas: nah I want all dead, no Jews only extremist Muslims. And by the way, the land you left here is crap how were you living so well here? I wanted to live like you and now you left and now the land is only sand!

IDF: yeah that’s because instead of developing it you only create terrorism there

Hamas: get you ass back here, make the land right like it was before and be my slaves

IDF: so now you want to share?

Hamas: nah, I want you to be my slaves

IDF: nah thanks, I’m good, 400 years of slavery in Egypt were enough, but thanks for the offer anyway

Hamas: you genocidal, my people are starving because of you!

IDF: we literally left like you wanted us to, how in the hell are we responsible for what happens to YOUR people, in YOUR land?

Hamas: you don’t want to give is technology and don’t want to be slaves for us, that’s mean…

** to be continued **

[tervencherries]

i’m going to expand on this later but i just want to remind everyone that this election was scarily similar to the german 1932 election (this is the one where hitler won).

we’ve got the unstable economy and high inflation rates, we’ve just gotten out of a war in the last decade which has made foreigners hate us, we have high levels of racism, misogyny, homophobia, antisemitism, and xenophobia (all of which are what made this president win!).

remember that it wasn’t immediate with hitler. it took 6 years after the election before Kristallnacht happened. “never again” is right now. it could be anyone, but it’ll likely be jews, black people, and/or gay people.

do what you need to in order to make your local government hear you. coordinate protests with other towns in order to make your state listen. coordinate with other states to force the federal government to see what’s happening.

remember that we don’t have to agree on everything in order to come together. the american people’s safety comes before any ideology.

[cavalierzee]

"Bring Them Home"

Europe Wants Their Immigrants Back!

[onelastchanc]

Wait, this may be a little silly but I’m being so serious…

Are moose associated with Hanukkah??? I see them everywhere in the states

[gotohellfuckingyankees]

[angrybell]

Posted @withregram • @tessaveksler What starts with the Jewish people, never ends with the Jewish people. My parents fled the former Soviet Union, where they were discriminated against because of their Jewish identities. They came to the U.S. in search for a society in which they could live freely from antisemitism. A generation later, the same hate has reared its head. But I am not afraid, and I am not going anywhere. #endjewhatred #jewishandproud

—(end original caption)—

This is happening at UCSB. They will not tolerate a Jew unless that Jew twists themselves inside out to conform to the Leftist ideal of what a Jew should be. Hope she has some support there.

[stupidjewishwhiteboy]

Assuming it’s actually true that only 56% of Jews voted for Kamala this time, it feels like a real oversight that non-Jewish media sources never seemed to ask whether a seeming indifference to antisemitism within the Democratic Party and/or suggestions about stopping aid to Israel might alienate Jewish voters in swing states, in the way that a similar question was asked about Muslim/Arab voters constantly. To be clear, any Jews who voted for Trump should be ashamed of themselves and I feel they’ve almost certainly shot Jewish rights in the foot for the next 2-4 years, but I feel like rumblings of this happening have been talked about in Jewish spaces for a while and apparently the Gentiles didn’t notice