#university antisemitism

[mylight-png]

The reality of being a Jewish student right now, a moment from my life:

I was walking through campus, as one does, when I came across a flyer for some sort of pro-Palestine (although pro-Hamas is more accurate, I'll elaborate later) teach-in for tomorrow. I take a photo and sent it to a Jewish group chat I'm in, asking if anyone knows what was going on with that.

After a bit of research, I found the promotional material on the Instagram page of a student organization on my campus. In that material they explain that the teach-in is a result of their dissatisfaction with another student organization being suspended by administration. Why was that organization suspended, you may wonder?

Well, they made a post a few months back in which they proudly refused to condemn Hamas and Oct 7th. (Hence why I said pro-Hamas would be more appropriate terminology for them.) In addition, they called for the death of Zionists in that post.

As I continued to look through the promotional material I came across the same call to action.

Taking all of this information into account, I asked the aforementioned group chat which areas of campus to avoid.

The answer?

Basically most of campus.

It's an all-day event.

Jewish students will have to feel unsafe and be on high alert for an entire school day because their peers are throwing a tantrum over not being allowed to celebrate terrorist groups and murder.

This isn't a fictional dystopia or a theoretical situation. This is the reality of being a Jewish college student.

Campus security has been made aware and I hope the event is cancelled, but I have doubts. Plus, if it's cancelled, there will only be further backlash and rage to deal with.

[starlight-edith]

Like if you hate your UC school so much, pick a different school!! It is a PRIVILEGE to go to such a prestigious network of universities!

As someone who spent a long time in California, including my entire high school career, I planned to go to UC Riverside. All my high school friends are going to UC schools as we speak.

That is a PRIVILEGE, and if you actually cared, you’d acknowledge that.

If you care so much for Gaza, go to a university there — and don’t tell me you can’t! There are several!

I know that these people think they’re making change by harassing Jewish students, but it is doing NOTHING.

ALL they achieve by this is harassment.

Universities never listen to their students, especially not on politics.

How do I know?

My university wont give into the protestors’ demands even after the president was harassed and followed around being filmed! Even after they practically destroyed the most important building on campus requiring it to be shut down for TWO DAYS and to my knowledge they still haven’t repaired the damage.

But they also refuse to take any actions AGAINST the protestors! They do nothing to protect Jewish students. We’ve been in talks with them for MONTHS and nothing has changed outside of a letter saying “we respect free speech but please stop disrupting classes” and that’s IT.

Universities are not on your side, they’re not on my side, they are on their OWN side.

So maybe stop insisting that UC schools (and all other colleges/ universities) are Zionist, because they are not. They are on their side and their side alone.

They don’t care about me, they don’t care about you, they care about money.

Realize that, and stop harassing innocent people, or continue only for nothing to change aside from Jewish students never feeling safe around you again. It’s YOUR CHOICE.

Cutting ties with Hillel so Jewish students can’t have Shabbos dinner or holiday services?

Don’t tell me it’s about protesting civilian casualties in Gaza.

[whydidisavethistomyphone]

Peaceful anti war/pro Palestine protestors are being beaten and attacked by police with snipers on rooftops. Hundreds of Jewish students and faculty members being arrested.

Vs

Actual Nazis on the columbia university campus protesting.

If you’re Jewish in America this should be pretty terrifying. America protects its fascist that includes Zionists.

[the-eyespy]

🇺🇸🇵🇸 NYPD reportedly resorts to brutal force, arresting pro-Palestine demonstrators outside Columbia University. The protesters, advocating for a Gaza ceasefire, were engaging in peaceful demonstrations.

[eretzyisrael]

[lem0nademouth]

if Jews don’t feel safe in the environment you’ve created, you’ve created an antisemitic environment. i don’t get why that’s a hard concept to internalize and comprehend.

[tomi4i]

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

[snowviolettwhite]

Marvel and the comic book industry was invented and built off the hard work of Jewish Americans and Jewish Immigrants in the 1930s as a response to antisemitism and the holocaust. There are explicit Jewish characters in the comics but were erased when they turned into live-action films.

The MCU has erased the Jewish aspects in the their films and have had little to no Jewish people involved, and one of the first times the hire a Jewish actor to play a Jewish character who does not have their identity erased you want to boycott it.

(We love Andrew Garfield in this house. He is a Jewish person, but Peter Parker/Spider-Man's Jewish identity was still erased in his films.)

You should not get to enjoy any art and media made by Jewish people. Part of the reason why so many Jewish people work in arts is because up until recently the entertainment industry was considered a joke. Jewish people were excluded from many other professions.

[explorations-in-judaism]

"If only you weren't such bad jews we wouldn't have had to genocide you!"

[alexistalkscomics]

Why Is The Jewish “Representation” In Agatha All Along So Problematic???

When it was first confirmed that Joe Locke was going to have a role in Agatha All Along, most fans quickly came to the conclusion that he would be portraying Billy Kaplan AKA Wiccan which unfortunately ended up being correct.

The problem with that casting you ask?

Joe Locke isn’t Jewish and he is playing one of Marvel’s most prominent Jewish characters. Whilst many goyim (non-Jewish people) often inaccurately perceive Jewishness to solely be a religious identity which is a massive oversimplification of what it means to be a Jew, Jewish people are actually an ethnoreligious community which means that we’re our own distinct ethnic group and culture that have a traditional religion that is intrinsically tied to our identity and culture regardless of individual Jewish people’s levels of observance.

And because we are an ethnoreligious group, that makes the casting of Joe Locke, who is not ethnically or religiously Jewish, inherently problematic to say the least, especially when placed into the wider context of Jewish representation in the MCU.

Marvel Studios has previously been criticised for the way that it’s approached adaptations of Jewish characters for the MCU with the two main examples being casting Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff, who is Romani and Jewish in the comics, and Oscar Isaac as the Ashkenazi Jewish Marc Spector in the Moon Knight streaming series and in both cases, the heritage of the characters were either downplayed or just outright erased. So for anyone who understands the issue, it should be clear that the MCU has a poor track record when it comes to representing Jewish characters and that Agatha All Along’s adaptation of Billy Maximoff/Kaplan is just another addition to the list of disrespectful adaptations of Jewish characters.

What is the specific problem with how Billy has been adapted in the MCU?

Well, in order to answer that question, the answer has to effectively be split into two parts:

In the most recent episode of Agatha All Along, we finally learn the backstory of Billy (who had previously only been referred as “Teen” due to a spell that prevented his identity from being found out) and as part of that, we are shown a flashback to the day of Billy KAPLAN’s (the capitalisation will make sense in a bit), Bar Mitzvah, a sacred Jewish ritual that marks the transition into adulthood and the responsibilities that comes with being a Jewish adult. In this flashback, Billy (who if you’ve payed attention, is being played by a non-Jew) is shown wearing traditional religious garments and handling what is potentially an actual Torah scroll.

Within Judaism and Jewish culture in general, handling a Torah and then reading from it is seen as both a great honour and responsibility for any Jew who is called for an Aliyah so seeing a non-Jewish actor who has no experience as a Jewish person and in interviews, has mocked fans who criticised his role in the show, wearing my culture and religion as a costume to advance his career just felt wrong to me. I love Marvel and I take great pride in superhero comics being an art form that was created by Jewish immigrants so seeing one of the biggest franchises in history cast a non-Jewish actor to appropriate Jewish culture just felt disgusting to me. At least with Moon Knight, all we got was the smallest references to his Jewish heritage rather than being subjected to seeing the christian Oscar Isaac partake in sacred closed rituals.

And now, moving onto the second part of the answer to the above question, after we see Billy reading from the Torah and are then shown the party following the ceremony, we learn that the flashback takes place concurrently with the final episode of WandaVision. Because of that, the party has to end early so that guest can evacuate and soon, Billy and his parents are in a car accident where Billy dies…

…until his body is quickly revived after the soul of Wanda and Vision’s artificially constructed son, Billy MAXIMOFF possesses and takes control of Billy Kaplan’s body whilst erasing everything that made Billy Kaplan who he was. The reason why this is especially problematic is because of the great importance of the soul within Judiaism. According to Jewish laws, one of the most important things that distinguishes Jewish people from goyim is a Jewish soul and in Agatha All Along, one of the main protagonist who is an adaption of a Jewish character who was created by a Jewish writer is reimagined as a non-Jewish soul that hijacks the corpse of a Jewish teenager to use as a meat puppet. It becomes even worse when later on in the episode, “Billy” is shown rejecting his identity as Billy Kaplan which effectively takes the undertones of ethnic erasure and cultural appropriation of Joe Locke’s casting and makes it an essential part of the characterisation for this incarnation of Billy.

In Conclusion?

In the Marvel Comics, Billy Kaplan is a proud queer Jewish man who was partially based on the lived experiences of his creator who is also a gay Jewish man. Becuase of that, he holds a special place in the hearts of many fans who see a piece of ourselves in him and we deserved to see the really Billy Kaplan be brought to life in a way that would honour the source material that we love and introduce mainstream audiences to a really cool and fascinating Jewish superhero who can open up so many possibilities for the more supernatural side of the Marvel Universe to be explored in further MCU instalments.

But instead, we got the bare minimum of Jewish representation followed by the complete erasure of that “representation” with the ultimate end product being a show riddled with the underlying rot of antisemitism.

[troybarnesbucky]

i know we keep saying “for us jews it’s still october 7th” but from the bottom of my heart i cannot process the fact that it’s been more than 8 months. literally my brain has blocked out all of it. i know logically so much of my life has changed in these 8 months but every single change, every good or bad experience, has been tainted with the massacre and the war since. i cannot feel normal, i can’t even process time normally. and i am a jew in the Diaspora. i can’t even imagine what it’s like for israelis, jewish or otherwise. geez.

[newnitz]

Ashkenormativity

Ashkenormativity is the assumption that the default Jew is the Ashkenazi one. It is a term coined by Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews to explain our alienation from the rest of the Jewish community, from my lived experience specifically from the Diaspora Jewish community.

I'm half-Ashkenazi, but that half is pretty secular. When it comes to major Jewish holidays, I've always done them with my maternal grandparents, who, despite being secularized, still respect their cantor roots to the point of not wanting to skip on a holiday or even shorten the Seder(until one hilariously bad one). So the only minhag I've known was the Sephardi one.

In Israel, this was a non-issue.

The most I heard about differences is how Sephardim and Mizrahim emphasize table manners because unlike Ashkenazim, they actually eat on the table.

When I left Israel and moved to a place hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest Jewish community, I finally realized how much I need our community. So like everyone on lockdown, I sought it online, where Jewish cultures is bagels and casual use of Yiddish, two things completely foreign to me. I mean we have bagels in Israel, but they're not the meme they are among US Jews. They're nowhere near as popular as a pita. So when I had to look up what "davening", "shul" and "shanda" meant, I first got the sense I don't actually belong.

But the people using those terms as a day to day weren't the ones who actively made me feel unwelcome. In fact, those were more likely to acknowledge my confusion and explain. The ones who alienated me are the antizionist Jews from the Anglosphere, who ignore and revise non-Ashkenazi history and even history of Ashkenazim outside the Global North, who blame modern Hebrew for the decline of Yiddish which they frame as the traditional Jewish language, ignoring how that pushes down communities that traditionally spoke Ladino, Juddeo-Arabic, Amharic and more, and overall infantilize and dismiss families like mine who built a good life for ourselves in Israel and rose to the position to actively combat Ashkenazi hegemony, and remove the agency of my former classmates who take a stand against it, all in favor of superimposing the race politics of the Anglosphere onto Israel.

So the Columbia university definition of singling out "white Jews" is quite inaccurate. Under ashkenormativity, an Ashkenazi JoC would find themselves better represented than the white-presenting members of my Sephardi(or raised according to that half) family. It's another reductivist attempt to superimpose European guilt onto Jews by erasing half of us. Specifically, the half that lives in Israel.

Goyim, ashkenormativity doesn't belong to you. Stop using it as a shield to be antisemitic. Stop using it as anything regarding inter-community issues, it's our term to use within our community.

[the-eyespy]

🇵🇸🇺🇸 In an interview in the early 1980s, the legendary Palestinian Columbia University Professor Edward Said expressed his pride in his campus. Today, he would likely be even prouder of the strides made.

🇵🇸🇺🇸 في مقابلة أجريت معه في أوائل الثمانينات، أعرب الأستاذ الفلسطيني الأسطوري في جامعة كولومبيا إدوارد سعيد عن اعتزازه ب��رمه الجامعي. واليوم، من المرجح أن يكون أكثر فخراً بالخطوات التي حققها.

[dchan87]

https://x.com/TommyInPA/status/1831098322016461089

Black working class people yet again forced to clean up the messes left behind by a bunch of rich white and Arab brats. We need to one day address how the Free Palestine movement - at least in America - is not only antisemitic and racist, but also classist. It's already been proven that the vast majority of people involved in these protests are at least upper middle class, if not straight-up trust fund kids.

Figures.

[eretzyisrael]