#modern hebrew is a zionist language

[the-ind1gen0us-jude4n]

Modern Hebrew is a Zionist language

Modern Hebrew is a Zionist language

The Hebrew language was revived by Ben-Yehuda, who was a Zionist who moved to Israel. It was always intended to be the language of the new Jewish state.

If you're an antizionist Jew and you get angry at Zionist Jews speaking Modern Hebrew and accuse them of "appropriating Jewish culture" (which is complete bullshit), you should just stop speaking it then, not us.

[iliveinprocrasti-nationn]

some of y’all are convinced that mocking people’s accents is progressive now if you don’t like the country you hear that accent from

[johannestevans]

had a Great experience the other day where i was at a trans event and started talking to this woman who was also Jewish, and so we were talking about like, Jewish movies and gender roles in different Jewish and Ashkenazi spaces and antisemitism and like, broader philosophical concepts and it was genuinely really nice

and at some point this other girl came over and mentioned wanting to be a cop, and when she was resolutely shut down by everyone else in the social circle, she started dropping "fun facts" about hitler's regime

such as that "hitler didn't really hate jews, his second in command, himmler, did, and he led the whole thing. hitler was just the face of it" and then at some point said something like "you know, people say even churchill was kind of racist"

and i was like. "yeah. churchill did multiple genocides and also hated jewish people."

and she replied, "yeah. makes you think that no one's actually good, doesn't it?"

and i went, "no. that's a very cowardly position to take, i would posit, by someone too lazy or too spineless to make an effort to be "good", as you say."

and that shut her up for a bit

and then the conversation moved on a bit more, and got onto the topic of israel, and she said something vaguely to the effect of like. jewish voices where she - to her credit, i do believe unintentionally - implied that a Jewish group were Zionist when they weren't, they were just Jewish

and i corrected her, and she went "well, yeah. Israelis aren't real Jews anyway"

and i said, "can you tell me what you mean by that?"

and she said, "well, like. loads of jews oppose israel actually being and having a state, right? like that's part of the scripture, and has been for ages. and loads of israelis are just americans and they're just racist"

and so then i like. explained that yes, when it came to the formation of israel, many Jews opposed it because jews aren't meant to have their own state until after the coming of the messiah, and also that yes, a lot of criticism of israel should rightly be made as to the way it's colonial in its nature and its desire to form a white jewish ethnostate

eugenics have always been part of the israeli mentality, not merely in wanting to be like, broadly white, but also in the ideology around israelis being "super Jews", and a large part of this came as israel tried to establish itself as a more positive territory worldwide through the '60s when it was pushing itself as a tourist destination

many orientalist tropes were taken on, the positive ones, israeli women being presented as desirable and exotic, israeli men as strong and lethal; the focus on the IDF and krav maga and the depiction of palestinians and other arabs as monsters they're triumphing over, the push to define israelis as having a "middle easten" identity when the choice was made to take over palestine over various other locations around the world, in part to legitimise the israeli identity by establishing it as a literal homecoming, and attempting to redefine Jews coming to israel as a return to their indigenous roots

but to say that by virtue of being israelis no israeli jew is a "real jew" is a pretty thorny area, because "jewish" has always been a religion and an ethnicity, and a complexedly policed and examined one. israeli jews will often claim that non-israeli jews or particularly anti-Zionist jews aren't real jews, and that kind of attitude of attempting to delegitimise the other group's identity rather than grappling with the actual harms of their politics or identities is not like. valuable

and then i was telling her a little bit about the history of like. not only the constructed israeli identity, but also forms of racism within the jewish communities - pushing forward modern hebrew whilst pushing back yiddish, ladino, and other jewish languages, because languages associated with poverty, the shtetl, the shoah, or with being too brown or too foreign, undercut the "super jew" idea, even without getting into israeli treatment of ethiopian jews and other Black and darker skinned jews

and i was just like. i don't care that you're bored, i don't care that this is more complicated than you cared for, bc like. attitudes that end up dismissing all jews as supporting the state of israel and therefore evil, or like. atttiudes where you end up really racialising and getting into ethnic condemnations of jews without understanding the history or implications of what you're saying are a large thing of what makes leftist and queer spaces feel so unsafe for jewish people across the board

and i was then like. "do you understand that the modern state of israel has always wanted people to believe that nowhere but a state run by jews is safe for the jewish people? that when you make even leftist and anti-zionist jews feel unsafe in leftist spaces, that's what some israelis want, in the hopes that that lonely experience of antisemitism will be harmful enough to have them go to zionist spaces instead?"

and she really did seem to have a moment of. oh.

because like. fucking yeah, babe. obviously.

but it's just so exhausting bc i went from some really fun and exciting conversations about jewish cinema and antisemitism on the screen and like. jewish gender and gender roles and how they relate to diff experiences of being racialised or pushed into an underclass

and then i had to pivot into giving some ABCs of not talking like a fucking nazi to some goyische 4channers

and i know that being pushed out of a space like this is likely to radicalise the nazi cop girl more, that it's better for her to be in a trans space and be told some of her opinions are shitty and harmful than to be like, excluded and then made to seek out even more racist spaces to exist in, but it's just like. shit. it's just really shit

like it's great to care about your leftist politics but sometimes your reading needs to be more than like. your specific hyperfixation/special interest anarchist who took part in fucking pogroms

[argyrocratie]

"In “Memory Voids and Role Reversals,” Palestinian political science professor Dana El Kurd writes of her jarring experience, hearing of the October 7th massacres by Hamas while visiting the Holocaust Tower at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. She notes the historic irony of Holocaust survivors seeking security from future oppression by expelling another people from their homeland by the hundreds of thousands, ghettoizing them in enclaves enforced by military checkpoints, and controlling them with collective punishment.

The irony of a state formed as the “antithesis” to the ghetto using ghettoization as a strategy of control is not lost on Palestinians. This infrastructure of coercion went hand in hand, of course, with ever-present physical violence — imprisonment, home demolitions, air strikes and more.

She quotes Aristide Zolberg’s observation that “formation of a new state can be a ‘refugee-generating process.’”

This is not only true of Palestinians. The Westphalian nation-state, which has been the normative component of the international system since the Treaty of Westphalia, necessarily entails (especially since the post-1789 identification of nationalism with the nation-state) the suppression of ethnic identity to a far greater extent than the expression of any such identity. Every constructed national identity associated with a “State of the X People” has necessarily involved the suppression and homogenization of countless ethnicities present in the territory claimed by that state. At the time of the French Revolution, barely half the “French” population spoke any of the many langue d’oil dialects of northern France, let alone the dialect of the Ile de France (the basis for the official “French” language). The rest spoke Occitan dialects like Provençal, or non-Romance languages like Breton (whose closest living relative is Welsh). The same is true of Catalan, Aragonese, Basque, and Galician in Spain, the low-German languages and now-extinct Wendish in Germany, the non-Javanese ethnicities of Indonesia, and so on. Heads of state issue sonorous pronouncements concerning the “Nigerian People” or “Zimbabwean People,” in reference to multi-ethnic populations whose entire “identity” centers on lines drawn on a map at the Berlin Conference.

When I say official national languages were established through the suppression of their rivals, I mean things like the residential schools of the United States and Canada punishing Native children for using their own languages. Or schools around the world shaming students with signs reading “I Spoke Welsh (or Breton, or Provencal, or Catalan, or Basque, or Ainu, or an African vernacular instead of the English, French, etc., lingua franca). And so on.

And when we consider the range of artificial national identities that were constructed by suppressing other real ethnicities, we can’t forget the “Jewish People” of Israel. Its construction occurred part and parcel with the suppression of diasporic Jewish ethnic identities all over Europe and the Middle East. The “New Jewish” identity constructed by modern Zionism was associated with the artificial revival of Hebrew, which had been almost entirely a liturgical language for 2300 years, as an official national language. And this, in turn, was associated with the suppression — both official and unofficial — of the actually existing Jewish ethnicities associated with the Yiddish, Ladino, and Arabic languages.

The centuries-old languages and cultures of actual Jewish ethnicities throughout Europe were treated as shameful relics of the past, to be submerged and amalgamated into a new artificially constructed Jewish identity centered on the Hebrew language. 

Yiddish, the language spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe — derived from an archaic German dialect and written in the Hebrew alphabet — was stigmatized by Zionist leaders in Palestine and by the early Israeli government. According to Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language, the “very making of Hebrew into a spoken language derives from the will to separate from the Diaspora.” Diasporic Jewish identities, as viewed by Zionist settlers, were “a cultural morass to be purged.” The “New Jew” was an idealized superhuman construct, almost completely divorced from centuries worth of culture and traditions of actual Jews: “Yiddish began to represent diaspora and feebleness, said linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann. ‘And Zionists wanted to be Dionysian: wild, strong, muscular and independent.’” 

This “contempt for the Diaspora” was “manifested . . .  in the fierce campaign against Yiddish in Palestine, which led not only to the banning of Yiddish newspapers and theaters but even to physical attacks against Yiddish speakers.” From the 1920s on, anyone in Palestine with the temerity to publish in Yiddish risked having their printing press destroyed by organizations with names like the “Battalion of the Defenders of the Hebrew Language,” “Organization for the Enforcement of Hebrew,” and “Central Council for the Enforcement of Hebrew.” The showing of the Yiddish-language film Mayn Yidishe Mame (“My Yiddish Mama”), in Tel Aviv in 1930, provoked a riot led by the above-mentioned Battalion. After the foundation of Israel, “every immigrant was required to study Hebrew and often to adopt a Hebrew surname.” In its early days Israel legally prohibited plays and periodicals in the Yiddish language. A recent defender of the early suppression of Yiddish, in the Jerusalem Post, argued that Diasporic languages threatened to “undermine the Zionist project”; in other words, an admission that actually existing ethnic identities threatened an identity manufactured by a nationalist ideology.

If this is true of Yiddish — the native language of the Ashkenazi Jews who dominated the Zionist settlement of Palestine — it’s even more so of the suppression of Jewish ethnic identities outside the dominant Sephardic minority. Golda Meir once dismissed Jews of non-Ashkenazi or non-Yiddish descent as “not Jews.” 

Consider the roughly half of the Israeli population comprised of Mizrahi Jews from Middle Eastern communities (including those living in Palestine itself before European settlement). Although the Mizrahim are trotted out as worthy victims when they are convenient for purposes of Israeli propaganda — the majority of them were expelled from Arab countries like Iraq after 1948, in what was an undeniable atrocity — they are treated the rest of the time as an embarrassment or a joke, and have been heavily discriminated against, by the descendants of Ashkenazi settlers. For example former Prime Minister David Ben Gurion described Mizrahim 

as lacking even “the most elementary knowledge” and “without a trace of Jewish or human education.” Ben Gurion repeatedly expressed contempt for the culture of the Oriental Jews: “We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the Diaspora.”

Current Prime Minister Netanyahu once joked about a “Mizrahi gene” as his excuse for tardiness. And an Israeli realtor ran a commercial appealing to “there goes the neighborhood” sentiments by depicting a light-skinned family having their Passover celebration disrupted by uncouth Mizrahi neighbors.

Nationalism and the nation-state are the enemies of true ethnicity and culture, and built on their graves. There’s no better illustration of this principle than the Zionist project itself."

-Kevin Carson, "Zionism and the Nation-State: Palestinians Are Not the Only Victims"

[traumaticemphaticfantastic]

These are four portraits/caricatures I did, back in May and June, of four key figures in the founding of the Reform Jewish movement.

Two of them are from Germany (Geiger and Holdheim) and two of them are from the USA (Mayer-Wise and Einhorn). Reform has its roots in the German enlightenment era, when the German government sought to grant Jews equal rights, and largely succeeded for a time. One of the products of what would come to be known as “The Emancipation” was the birth of a new class of Jewish intellectual, coming out of the darkness of the ghetto and into the enlightenment era, many Jews felt that their tradition was becoming quite archaic and outdated, and sought to update their practices to better fit into the changing world.

However, some of the decisions made by early reformers, particularly the more radical subset, greatly disturbed the more traditionally-minded. Radical early reformers were very concerned with assimilation over the more multicultural inclusion mindset that the movement is known for today, in the beginning a lot of Reform Temples felt more like Christian Churches because they had removed so much that made the Jewish people so distinct from the Christian majority that surrounded them. No head coverings, no tallit, no davening, no Hebrew, it was all in an effort to further emancipate Jewish people into mainstream goyish culture, it seems as though for a lot of radical reformers the key to stopping antisemitism for good was to simply stop being so unique.

This led to a lot of tensions within the growing movement, and it all came to a head in the USA after the infamous Trefa Banquet, where almost every dish served violated Kosher law, several Rabbis walked out, and thus the Conservative movement was born.

As for Reform itself, many Ashkenazi reformers ended up in the USA (Such as Isaac Mayer-Wise), they saw in the growing nation a world devoid of the centuries-old, set-in-stone Jewish law that largely held them back in Europe. Today, Reform Judaism holds its largest communities in the USA and parts of Canada, though there are remaining pockets all around the world. And as for their more assimilationist policies, Reform has largely revoked much of their previous bans in favour of a more personalized and optional approach, many Reform Temples have racks of tallit for those who wish to use them, give the option of head-covering such as kippahs to all regardless of gender, and most Temples recite their prayers in Hebrew, and sometimes the dominant language of the region. In the modern time, Reform Judaism largely prioritizes the individual journeys of its adherence, rather than on telling people what to think and feel (In most cases there are limits of course).

There is also the issue of Zionism, which I will touch upon briefly before ending this post: Early Reform Jews were very strictly anti-Zionist. Abraham Geiger, for example, removed the prayers for the return to Zion completely from his services. This was because of, again, The Emancipation. The Reform Jews in their respective countries firmly believed that Jews were equal citizens of their countries and for a group of people from one country, who insist that they are part of that country, to pray every Friday/Sunday for a mass exodus and return to another nation, well that doesn’t seem very “Patriotic” as it were, does it? And so the Jewish Reformers of old declared that they were no longer a nation, but instead a religious group, completely denouncing the wish of returning to Zion. And so it was, but unfortunately, this decree would not survive the Holocaust, when the world that the early Reformers so strongly desired to be a part of changed irreversibly or, in some cases, ceased existence entirely. It is, in my opinion, one of the many great tragedies of the 20th century.

Sorry it got a bit sad at the end there, I hope you enjoyed learning a bit about Reform Judaism with me today. That will be all, be well.

[perrysoup]

Jewish State Ideas BEFORE Palestine

CRITICAL PREAMBLE: It is important to keep in mind that the idea of building a Jewish State is Zionist. It does not reflect the views of Judaism as a whole, and any antisemetic actions will result in blocking and banning. It is critical now more than ever that we recognize that there is a different. Your issues in Palestine are with ZIONISM, not Judaism. Do NOT associate them as the same. Doing so is a common Zionist tactic to make comments or opinions against Israel be rebutted that it is antisemetic purely because it comments on actions by Israel and their Zionist government and military.

Again, Zionism and Judaism are NOT one in the same, and should not be treated that way.

Anywho, timeline time!

1820 - Ararat City - Grand Island Niagara River in Western New York. Considered a precursor to Zionism as known today.

1902 - Leaugue of Eastern European States - "would entail the establishment of a buffer state (Pufferstaat) within the Jewish Pale of Settlement of Russia, composed of the former Polish provinces annexed by Russia."

Date Unsure - Herzl Plan - "The Jews who wish for a State will have it. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes." His proposed location? Cyprus 1903 - British Uganda Program - Rejected after (shocker) there were lions in Africa. Also "it was populated by a large number of Maasai people, who did not seem at all amenable to an influx of people coming from Europe." fuckin wonder why. Note that some Zionists were concerned it would "make it more difficult to establish a Jewish state in Palestine in Ottoman Syria, particularly the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem" 1928 - Jewish Autonomous Oblast in USSR - Proposed by Russia specifcally to prevent a State of Israel AND done because it viewed Judaism as a threat to the state. "In that sense, it was also a response to two supposed threats to the Soviet state: Judaism, which ran counter to official state policy of atheism; and Zionism, the creation of the modern State of Israel, which countered Soviet views of nationalism. Yiddish, rather than Hebrew, would be the national language, and a new socialist literature and arts would replace religion as the primary expression of culture." Also included the idea of a JSR in Crimea or "part of Ukraine, however these were rejected because of fears of antagonizing non-Jews in those regions."

1940 - British Guiana - "the British Government decided that "the problem is at present too problematical to admit of the adoption of a definite policy and must be left for the decision of some future Government in years to come""

The Madagascar Plan and the Italian East Africa plans were both efforts by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to "solve Jewish problem" (YES THIS IS BAD). "Jews from Europe and Palestine would be resettled to the north-west Ethiopian districts of Gojjam and Begemder, along with the Beta Israel community."

1989 - Plans for the West Bank - Contemplation of a Second Jewish State - "Israeli settlers in the West Bank have mulled declaring independence as the State of Judea should Israel ever withdraw from the West Bank. In January 1989, several hundred activists met and announced their intention to create such a state in the event of Israeli withdrawal."

So yea, don't tell me about "homeland" when there were a shit ton of other ideas accepted within the Zionist ideal prior to SETTLING on Palestine. It's "homeland" cause that's where the British Empire could throw Israel. Not because they though it was the "right thing to do" or whatever thing Zionists claim now a days.

[edenfenixblogs]

For some reason this one really wrecked me, more than most. What a complete disregard for culture and peace.

Yiddish is a language of diaspora Jews desperately clinging to a shred of their heritage while being oppressed in Western Europe. It is the language of European Jews forced to live in shtetls. It is a language that predates modern Israel and the resurrection of Hebrew. It is the language of the diaspora in which antisemites and anti-zionists so desperately want Jews to remain. It is a language of the oppressed. It is a language of loss. It is a language of exclusion. It is a language of community. Of Jews finding each other and building community in the face of oppression.

Sholem Aleichem was a Yiddish author and playwright. His works inspired Fiddler on the Roof, a musical about literal Jewish expulsion from Russia after continued violent assault.

Additionally, the related Hebrew greeting (Shalom aleichem) means, “peace be upon you”)

Also, it nearly exact to the traditional Arabic greeting “As-salamu alaykum” which means the exact same thing. And is used by Muslims as well as Arab Jews who were expelled by Muslim countries between 1948 and 1972.

Finally, shalom aleichem is a Jewish liturgical song—one of my favorites—and it explicitly calls on G-d and angels to bring peace.

It’s used to ring in Shabbat

I cannot put into words how deeply offensive this is to me personally. I am so wounded by this.

[fallingsatellive]

Need everyone to understand something:

Yiddish and Ladino are older languages than Hebrew. There are centuries more culture, history, and identity associated with Yiddish and Ladino than there are with Hebrew.

Why? Because I'm not talking about biblical Hebrew. I'm talking about the Hebrew you will find on Google translate, and Duolingo, and road signs in Israel. When you try to learn Hebrew, this is what is taught. It is a modern invention. It was created in the early 20th century as a vehicle for zionist ideology and Jewish nationalism. Zionists wanted a unifying language that all Israeli Jews would speak to bolster a sense of national identity.

By the way, zionists fucking hated Yiddish in the 20th century. It was heavily suppressed in Israel and they sought to completely eradicate it. Yiddish was seen as an inherently diasporic language for a dispersed people, while Modern Hebrew in contrast was Strong and Good. It was officially discouraged by the government and banned in many places.

My choice to learn Yiddish is not just about de-assimilation and reconnecting with heritage. Yiddish is an endangered language, and it's not just because of the Shoah. Since 1948 Israel has been the #1 primary factor in driving Yiddish to extinction.

So with that being said,

פֿון טײַך ביזן ים, װעט פּאַלעסטינע פֿרײַ זײַן. זיי וועלן נישט גאַנווענען דעם קולטור. דייטשלאנד האט שוין געפרואווט. זיי הא��ן נישט געקענט. ישר��ל איז טריינג. זיי וועלן נישט. לעבן צו דער אַרבעט בונד!

[apollos-olives]

antizionist jew here. i saw an answered ask of yours while looking through palestine tag, and wanted to share something in good faith, because it's a misconception about us that a lot of people are having right now.

so... antisemitism as a word was created to mean hatred against jews. i know it has the suffix semite, but its etymology is already pretty shoddy because an 1800's-era german guy that was into eugenics created it. when creating this word, he relied on the concept of hebrew as a semitic language and judaism having been born in the levant. he did this to turn the old word judenhass (which signified a more "medieval" and religion based hatred) into a concept which defined jews as an inferior race in the modern day, for modern day sensibilities. in general, the whole idea of semites as a race (rather than semitism referring solely to languages) leads back to eugenics. this is why the term is obsolete.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-semitism-or-antisemitism

yes, most antizionism is not antisemitism. but every so often it can be, whether that be due to a white supremacist co-opting the movement or a leftist genuinely having unexamined antisemitic biases. and when that happens, arguing about the etymology of antisemitim as a word will only serve to shut down antizionist jews who are rightfully concerned, rather than the people who are actually propagating hate.

and allowing rhetoric like that in the movement plays right into the hands of christian zionist and white supremacist jerks, the kind that want to abuse the exact trauma-driven jewish fear that they helped to create, this idea that "nowhere is safe," in order to purify their own countries of us, turn a profit and keep the war machine fed with colonized bodies, ultimately leading to the erasure of the palestinian people and their own "perfect" imperial outpost. they don't actually care about either of us. but we have to be caring about how we talk to each other.

please take this as an opportunity to learn. not calling you out but calling you in, as they say. thanks for reading this.

oh this was very informative to me, thank you! i haven't been really big on the argument that "palestinians are semite" (because yes it does have flaws), though occasionally i mention it because a lot of people's perception of "antisemitism" is skewed. there's a whole thing with how zionists use the "antisemitism" argument to call out "fake" antisemitism, and that not a lot of people are aware of what REAL antisemitism is because of how much zionists skewed the definition of what antisemitism is. this makes it more dangerous for actual jews who face antisemitism in real life, because the type of antisemitism that they are facing is different and much more real than the type of "antisemitism" that zionists claim they're facing.

i think that when we talk about how "palestinians are semite" in the argument against "antisemitism", we're specifically attacking that fake, skewed perception of what zionists consider "antisemitism" and not the real forms of antisemitism against jews that actually happen in the world. because of this wrong perception of what "antisemitism" actually is, it makes the life of semites and jews much more difficult.

sorry if this was hard to understand, i hope you get what i mean though. but thank you for telling me more!!

[eretzyisrael]

It’s worth noting that Yiddish has been maligned by gentiles and Jews alike. Antisemites considered it the parlance of vermin, while the rabbinical elite deemed it unworthy of serious Talmudic discussion. 

Really? The "rabbinical elite" were anti-Yiddish? What planet does he live on?  Yiddish was the lingua franca of all the major European yeshivas, even after they were transplanted to America or Israel after the Holocaust. The roshei Yeshiva (yeshiva heads) from Europe gave their lessons in Yiddish as long as their students understood it, well into the 1960s and 1970s. Today's American "yeshivish" language includes biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and plenty of Yiddish along with English. And some of the "yeshivish" Yiddish has become part of modern Israeli Hebrew - such as "shkoyach" meaning "good job, itself a Yiddishization of a Hebrew term. 

But the article really descends into modern antisemitism/anti-Zionism here:

Another enemy of Yiddish was Zionism. In the late 19th century, as the hope for a Jewish state found its ground, it was portrayed as jargon spoken by the diaspora — the language of homelessness, without a true national voice. To combat this deficit, Hebrew needed to be revived. Soon the myth sprung of the Hebrew pioneer, in sharp contrast with the large-nosed, hunchbacked Jew that Zionists themselves vilified. Hebrew, which officially became the national language of the state of Israel in 1948, is spoken by about nine million people around the world. For some, the language symbolizes far-right Israeli militarism.

So according to Stavans, Zionists are antisemites who regard diaspora Jews the same way that neo-Nazis do, while modern Hebrew is the language of oppression. 

This is a sick slander.

In fact, the people who initially embraced Hebrew as a modern language outside the religious context, and who rejected Yiddish, were the exact type of people that have embraced Yiddish today: the anti-religious, supposedly enlightened Jews. 

[hero-israel]

Hebrew is not a colonial language, it never was, never will be, cannot be by definition. Yiddish is Old High German with Jewish flair. It has a unique history and literature and is intrinsically valuable, as all languages are. But it is the colonial language, or as close as we can get to one in the case of diaspora.

And Yiddish was already endangered. Imagine the optics of Israel existing as it does, but instead of reviving Hebrew the Zionists started imposing German on the Levant. Are these people crazy? So much of jumblr has already talked about why Hebrew was always the best option and the most authentic option. The Diaspora still exists and should always exist. The Jewish world has the room and probably the need for Israel and the Diaspora together. Yiddish has the space it needs to exist and hopefully grow instead of diminish. That space does exist in Israel, but what are people in the Diaspora doing to make space for it there too?

And if these anti-Zionist self haters cared about the fragile nature of language communities, they should know that the activists and speakers of endangered and moribund languages, and the revivalists of extinct languages the world over, look upon Ivrit and seethe with respectful envy. Irish language activists do not tearfully think "But what will happen to Hiberno English?" Indigenous peoples in America will think the sacrifice of their unique dialects of English will be worth it if they can revive or protect their native languages. It's the same everywhere. But Jews continue to Suffer from Success it seems.

Would losing Yiddish or Ladino be a blow to the Jewish community? Absolutely. Is this the fault of Hebrew? Absolutely not. And it's not supremacist or whatever buzzword you want to call it to think that Hebrew just might take priority. Hebrew is the indigenous language, and it's back as a modern vernacular of a people living in their homeland. People can find pottery or coins or ancient graffiti and they can probably understand most of it with no effort. Because they are reading their own language. Think of how miraculous that is. But these self loathing types can only see it as a flaw and a tragedy and now a tool of fucking "genocide".

Yiddish isn't colonialist by any fair definition, but it is by far the better match within the made-up frame that DSA types use.

[sethshead]

It has become fashionable for anti-Zionist Yiddishists to take credit for all Jewish resistance to Germans during the Holocaust, for all resilience in camps and ghettos. This is a narrative propagated by the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc partners like Poland, who systematically erased from history the Zionist Bunds and organizations that did so much to battle Nazis in the streets (like the ŻZW during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) and smuggle Jews to safety (even as anti-Zionists were urging Jews to remain in Europe).

Ukolébavka is an example of the unbroken connection between the Jews facing liquidation in Europe and their brethren in Mandatory Palestine. A wordless Hasidic niggun, a repetitive, ecstatic chant (not unlike Shaker songs) was given Hebrew Zionist lyrics by Emmanuel Harussi and premiered on stage in Tel Aviv. From there it entered anthologies familiar to German-speaking Jews and ultimately adapted and harmonized by Gideon Klein in Theresienstadt. Hebrew was to the Jews at Theresienstadt no dead language. There was familiarity with spoken Modern Hebrew among the Prague Jewish intelligentsia. There was no stark split between the Jews of diaspora and the olim. Zionism influenced Jews in diaspora; the transmission was not just from the outside in.

The Holocaust does not "justify" Israel. Jewish peoplehood, our right to self-determination, and our persistent presence in Eretz Yisrael suffice for that. Nevertheless, the hope (literally, "hatikva") of liberation related equally to deliverance from the camps and ghettos, and the deliverance of Jews worldwide from subjugation and persecution.

[i-am-aprl]

Even the hebrew language, and the fact that they use it as a national language, is engineered and manufactured....

this is a *VERY simplified* overview of a history that spans centuries, even millennia, and of language which is by nature fluid and complex. so take it with a grain of salt and do your own reading. but i first heard the idea of "Jews didn't have a common language" from Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro. i realize the video might make it sound like this revival solely had a sinister intent behind it. i don't think it did. it seems to be more accurate to say that the revival of the language as a literary and spoken language was taking place organically in places. while the language was also used historically as a kind of simple common language between different communities when interacting whose native tongues were different, so for example during trade and so on. but the revival really began in the late 19th century, and then the idea was also taken on board by nationalists/zionists, who really pushed for a full modern spoken hebrew to create a common mother tongue in israel for the various communities whose native languages were different. my point i guess - though i'm not sure it translates in the video - is not so much about the revival itself, but of how it was institutionalized for nationalistic aims because this basic feature of nativism and national identity just wasn't there. but, again, this is a simplified look at how things developed over time.

[beardedmrbean]

[Huey Zoomer Anon]

I’m not exactly shocked by the rise of antisemitism because they like marginalized people to have a certain VICTIM image and the Israeli Jews break

Though you do NOT want to hear the rather nasty comments I hear progressives say about Gal Gadot

But alright everyone, can anyone explain why the about 70% of the artists community on tumblr and twitter and about 60% of the most popular fandoms online are pro Palestine?

I remember how they preach on and on about their knew everything about antisemitism and made a living hell for anyone with how you consume your media

But after the whole oct 7 mess, they showcase their lack of knowledge about Jewish disporia and Islam imperialism

And a lot of these people are in their 20’s-40’s

I thought they would connect the dots why their so many “white Jews” via history and why modern Israeli militarize themselves? I been doing it over a year and going “ooooh!” on stuff that confuse me

Now tbf I saw a popular belief online that Mary had Jesus at 14…even though historically wise Mary and Joseph would have the standard age gap for the Judaea Jews couples had at the time.

Also anyone figure out why the Hebrews started to use the term Jews? Kinda confusing me, a language mistranslation that just stayed?

Though you do NOT want to hear the rather nasty comments I hear progressives say about Gal Gadot

When she was announced as Wonder Woman certain corners of the internet collectively shit themselves, some were happy and some were calling her a murderer who had notches in the butt of her rifle as a count of all the innocent palestenians she'd brutally murdered, during her time as a fitness instructor for the IDF who was never in combat while serving her mandatory tour of duty.

Can't locate it, blog it would be on isn't letting me search anything, but there was a whole poem a Jewish blogger I used to follow did about the Zionist demon Gal Gadot, it was funny as Sheol.

But alright everyone, can anyone explain why the about 70% of the artists community on tumblr and twitter and about 60% of the most popular fandoms online are pro Palestine? I remember how they preach on and on about their knew everything about antisemitism and made a living hell for anyone with how you consume your media

I think it a thing like survivorship bias, except in this case it's the posts you see vs the ones you don't.

A picture of a bunch of dead Syrian children that Assad murdered with poisoned gas labeled as dead palestenian arab children brutally killed by the IDF in a totally unprovoked attack will get 50,000 notes in 2 days 49,500 of them will be ignoring the correction in the notes pointing out that they're Kurdish children killed by Syria.

Good news and corrections never make it as far as the bad news and lies do.

But after the whole oct 7 mess, they showcase their lack of knowledge about Jewish disporia and Islam imperialism

Startlingly susceptible to propaganda there, especially when it's wrapped up in the current year convoluted wording of things.

Doesn't help that it's been startlingly easy to do this when it comes to the Jewish people at least since the Romans renamed the area and actually even before if we look at the books of Esther and Daniel.

Very easy to scapegoat the people that worship just the one God and have all these different foreign rules about how that goes and also refuse to acknowledge the divinity of whomever is the king at the time.

I thought they would connect the dots why their so many “white Jews” via history and why modern Israeli militarize themselves? I been doing it over a year and going “ooooh!” on stuff that confuse me

They did the whole military thing since on day one 5 whole ass countries tried to genocide every Jew in the area, I don't believe any of the conflicts they've been in have been started by them someone else starts shooting first.

Pushing Egypt out of the Sinai peninsula and occupying it had to be a massive embarrassment for the arab league, managed to get recognition and a treaty with Egypt in exchange for returning the territory.

Lot of money goes through the Suez Canal.

Now tbf I saw a popular belief online that Mary had Jesus at 14…even though historically wise Mary and Joseph would have the standard age gap for the Judaea Jews couples had at the time.

I don't think anyone actually knows, but you look at what the average age for marriage was in the region at that time and you can guess it's going to be something like that.

A lot of that was common globally, same age range that is.

Also anyone figure out why the Hebrews started to use the term Jews? Kinda confusing me, a language mistranslation that just stayed?

Kurds are from Kurdistan, Turkmen are from Turkmenistan, Russians are from Russia, Arabs are from Arabia, Samaritans are from Samaria (and nearly extinct), and Jews are from Judea.

It's an ethnic identity and a religion.

Coptic and Maronite Christians are also ethnoreligous groups in the MENA region and that particular identity would follow them regardless of where they go

[david-goldrock]

what’s the difference between Hebrew and Yiddish?

Hebrew is the acient lang of our people, it's thousands of years old, and is the sacred lang of the bible. It has been revived by the Zionist movement in the early 20th century, and is spoken all throught Israel. Modern Hebrew includes not only the words of the old times, but also has loanwords and new words for concepts that didn't exist in the times of the bible, like doll, ice cream, and electricity

Yiddish is a dialect of many Jews in Europe, based on German and Hebrew, it is a vivid language that while is less precise than its Germanic cousins, it is more emotional. It is known as "the language never spoken by men in power"

Both use the Hebrew alphabet, but in different ways: for example, in Yiddish, this letter: ע means an "e" sound, but in Hebrew, it is a glottal stop

[determinate-negation]

Iaşi– town in Moldavia (northeastern Romania) on the Bahlui River; an important trading center with links to Bucovina, Bessarabia, Ukraine, and Russia; capital of the former principality of Moldavia (1565–1862). The largest and most important Jewish community of Moldavia lived in Iaşi. The presence of Jews was first documented in the late sixteenth century when Sephardic Jews arrived accompanying the new rulers appointed by the Turkish sultan. The oldest tomb inscription in the local cemetery probably dates to 1610.

[...]

The number of Jews in Iaşi increased in the second half of the nineteenth century, reaching 39,441 (50.8% of the town’s population) in 1899. This growth was due both to natural increase and to the arrival of Jews who had been expelled from surrounding villages. In the early twentieth century, the number of Jews fell as a result of economic crisis, discriminatory laws, and emigration. In 1910, there were about 35,000 Jews living in Iaşi.

In the late nineteenth century, Jews were active in small industry and crafts, local and international trade, finance, and liberal and intellectual professions (they were doctors, teachers, writers, journalists, bookshop keepers, editors, public servants, and musicians). They also contributed to the setting up of steam mills and mechanical workshops, as well as to organizing freight. In 1890–1892, there were 3,048 Jewish artisans and 3,404 Jewish merchants. By 1909, Jews accounted for 77 percent of the craftsmen in Iaşi.

Most rabbis in Iaşi in 1859 to 1919 were Hasidim. They included Shemu’el Shmelke Taubes (in Iaşi 1852–1865); his son, Uri Shraga Feivel Taubes; Yeshayahu (Isaia) Shor, an adept of strict Orthodoxy (1854–1879); Dov Ber Rabinovici, also called the Folticener Rebbe (d. 1865); Ḥayim Landau (d. 1908), rabbi of the town, an adept of strict orthodoxy; Yisra’el Gutman (1820–1894), and his son, Shalom Gutman. In 1865, the banker Jacob of Neuschatz established the moderate reform temple that carried his name, Bet Ya‘akov. The preachers in this temple included Antoine Levy of Alsace and eventually Matityahu Simḥah Rabener. Later (from 1897), this position was filled by Iacob Isac Niemirower, who subsequently became the chief rabbi of Romania. Another modern rabbi in Iaşi (in 1915) was Meyer Thenen. A Jewish secondary school was also set up in the early twentieth century.

In 1872, Matityahu Simḥah Rabener published the Hebrew literary–cultural review Zimrat ha-arets. Although only two issues were published, it managed to bring together Hebrew writers from Iaşi with others, especially from Bucovina and Galicia. In 1878, a group of maskilim in Iaşi established the cultural association Ohale Shem, whose purpose was to develop the Hebrew language and spread Jewish culture. Hebrew writers involved in the association included Beniamin Schwarzfeld (1822–1897), Naḥman Fraenkel, Menaḥem Mendel Braunstein (1858–1944, known as Mibashan), and the physician Karpel Lippe (1830–1915). The journalist Eli‘ezer Rokeaḥ (1854–1914) lived for a while in Iaşi, where he published the Hebrew newspaper Yisra’el in 1881, as did the poet Naftali Herz Imber (1856–1909), author of “Hatikvah,” which eventually became the anthem of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel.

In 1876, the first performance of the Yiddish theater, established by Avrom Goldfadn, was given in Iaşi. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Iaşi became a center of Yiddish literature. In 1896, the socialist weekly Der veker (edited by Max Wexler [1870–1917], Litman Ghelerter [1873–1945], and Leon Gheler) was issued in Iaşi; it was published again in 1916, edited by Isac Moscovici. In 1899, the Zionist weekly in Yiddish (with a German title) Die Jüdische Zukunft was published in Iaşi; it was a cultural and general Jewish-interest magazine. Between December 1914 and September 1915, the first literary review in Yiddish in Romania, Likht, was issued in Iaşi; it was edited by a group called by the same name, with Efraim Waldman as editor, and Iacob Botoshanski (1892–1964), Iacob Groper, Lascar Şaraga (Lazar Samson; 1892–1968), Moti Rabinovici, and Arn Matisyahu Friedman as contributors. Several Jewish periodicals in Romanian were also issued in Iaşi. One of them, Vocea apărătorului (The Voice of the Defender; 1872–1873), was edited by Marcu Feldman and Marcu Rosenfeld, and advocated Jewish emancipation and tried to fight against the anti-Jewish attacks in the local Romanian press. The Revista Israelită (The Israelite Magazine), edited by Elias Schwarzfeld, was issued in 1874. Other periodicals issued in Romanian in Iaşi before World War I included Lumina (The Light, 1887) a socialist weekly, edited by Ştefan Stâncă; Propăşirea (The Thriving, 1889–1891), edited by Max Caufman; and Răsăritul (The Sunrise, 1899–1901).

In Iaşi, Jewish writers and journalists writing in Romanian before World War I included Adolf-Avram Steuerman-Rodion (1872–1918), Horia Carp, Enric Furtună, A. Axelrod, the brothers Joseph and Marco Brociner (the former an essayist and historian, the latter a novelist in Romanian and German), the epigrammatist Bernard Goldner (Giordano), the poet Adrian Verea, the journalists Jean Hefter, Alfred Hefter, Carol Schoenfeld (C. Săteanu), Clement Blumenfeld-Scrutator, and A. Glicksman (“Dr. Y”).

Jewish musicians in Iaşi played an important role as preservers of Yiddish folklore, as performers and composers. The most prominent musicians were the Lemes family, Avram Bughici, Berl Segal, and Haim Israel Bernstein. In 1906, a group of maskilim, including Niemirower, Iacob Nacht, Abraham Leib Zissu, Iacob Groper, Iacob Botoşanski and others, founded the Toynbee Hall Association, which was a sort of Jewish popular athenaeum, and organized public lectures on Jewish and general topics in Romanian and Yiddish. Among the lecturers who appeared in Iaşi were Sholem Aleichem, Bernard Lazare, Franz Oppenheimer, and Naḥum Sokolow. The first local committee of the Yishuv Erets Yisra’el organization was elected in February 1882; Karpel Lippe became its president. He eventually participated in the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.