Jews Have a Right to Exist

you literally cannot talk about any problem without them going "oh but that's nothing compared to how awful america is". my reaction is apropos of lurking on a discussion on the fucking Spanish Inquisition and seeing some americans go "yeah no matter how bad that looks what's happening in the US right now is worse" and fucking excuse me??? that's not what we were talking about??? this isn't a competition! and it's not just historical atrocities you can't talk about anything bad happening anywhere but americans won't try to to make it about the US! can't talk about china, or russia, or iran or anywhere but americans won't change the subject to how much they hate america.

and before anyone says, it's NOT just leftists that do this. not by a long shot, i've been in a front row seat to watching certain people get radicalised on the right, and they hate the US if anything even more. they see it as an Israeli puppet state, for one thing. if you try to bring up something shitty Iran does they'll start describing America in terms of Islamist talking points even if they are radical Christians. hm, i wonder if there's a lesson there?

the leftists at least should know better, though, they should have SOME kind of idea of international solidarity. they should understand that sometimes justice means listening to other people and taking in new information, not just forcing the conversation to be about their own issues!

it really IS just American Exceptionalism in reverse. it's not healthy self-criticism, it's self-obsession. it's not caring about justice and "being better", it's taking all the breathing space away from anyone anywhere outside the US-- which yes, guys, is most of the world!!!-- who is facing any kind of hardship. it's making historical discussion impossible when you treat living as a gentile in fucking modern Springfield, Massachusetts like living as a jew in the 15th century a cell in the Castillo de San Jorge! IT'S A MASSIVE INSULT TO EVERYONE THE INQUISITION TORTURED AND MURDERED.

i say that as if i don't understand why they're downplaying the atrocities... Notice that however much they yap about their own bullshit, they don't actually try to make it better! most of the loudest "america is the most evil place on earth and throughout time" voices are middle-class white people, both left and right! AND YAPPING ABOUT THEIR OWN BULLSHIT DOESN'T HELP ANYONE ELSE.

justice isn't about self-hatred! it never was! why can't they just let other people talk about something other than america?

Westerners: THAT'S APARTHEID

Palestine: (doesn't allow Jews into Palestine at all)

Egypt: (doesn't allow Palestinians in unless they have thousands of dollars)

Jordan: (doesn't allow Palestinians in)

gentiles on this website: “You can’t be an atheist and religious!” actual Jews in my synagogue yesterday: “I’m just not buying any of this. I was born during the Holocaust and I could never wrap my mind around this omnipotent all-seeing God, and usually I’m a little moved by this, I try to be hopeful, but when I look around the world now, I just don’t buy it! If I really believed there was a God, I would resent him.” [still wears a prayer shawl and attends synagogue regularly]

No one should have to adhere to certain beliefs or opinions in order to be afforded basic dignity and rights, I'm 100% fully on board with that.

"There's nothing inherently less respectable about someone with 'Death to America' as a watchword as 'God bless America'" -No. Absolutely not. You have completely lost me here. Proudly and publicly calling for the death of an entire country and everyone who lives there is inherently less respectable actually and it fucking should be.

Melanie Phillips reports on how so many popular, yet mendacious, accusations against Israel have collapsed.

Including:

1- Net population growth in Gaza of around 50 000, and over 600 000 polio vaccine shots administered by Israel, because Hamas, despite having a so-called "health" ministry, didn't see fit to take care of Arab citizens.

2- Lower child malnutrition in Gaza than in Jordan and Egypt (!!)-- so the UN adviser that claimed that tens of thousands of children could die in 48 hours was talking utter rubbish. This never happened, by the way. Nor did the shapeshifting threats of famine.

3- Numerous Arab "journalists" in Gaza quietly removed from international databases as evidence showed they were terrorists from Hamas and from Islamic Jihad. The terrorist organisations have publicly identified their own members, but of course, international organisations so desperately wanted to accuse Israel of murder.

Little by little, the waters of truth are seeping into a desert of make-believe, bigotry, and hysteria.

They play lots of Israeli music, and the main guy working there sings along loudly in Hebrew.

There are lots of local restaurants that have similar dishes on their menus: Palestinian, Lebanese, Turkish, even Greek. No one has a monopoly on hummus, pita, or falafel. Each culture approaches these foods a little differently, which is where the magic really lies. All of these food traditions can and must coexist, and one culture doesn't negate any other.

The existence of an Israeli food culture doesn't negate the Palestinian one, and vice versa. For those of us who still believe there could be a peaceful future for Israelis and Palestinians (and in the region as a whole), keeping both cultures alive and celebrated is so important. Because one culture subsuming the other is what the extremists want. And we don't capitulate to extremists.

A bill facing a pivotal committee vote this week would require state agencies to include an optional box for Jewish ethnicity on all demographic data forms, from college applications to public assistance programs. Its passage would make California the first state to officially treat Jewishness as something more than a religion in this fashion — a shift more significant than it might seem.

Scholars of Jewish identity say that it has long posed challenges to American law and public discourse, because Jews have never fit into contemporary conceptual categories. In fact, the challenges — and misconceptions — go back centuries.

“When Jews received the rights of citizenship in European nation states, Jews were forced to think of themselves as a religion,” said Leora Batnitzky, professor of religion at Princeton University and author of “How Judaism Became a Religion.” “But this was always contested from an internal Jewish point of view.”

Plenty of proudly identified Jews do not attend synagogue or even believe in God — and Jewish tradition considers them to be Jews just the same. Jewish identity, like ethnic identity, is generally passed through parentage. But while outsiders cannot convert to another race or ethnicity, they can convert to Judaism. In 2021, the Pew Research Center found that only 11 percent of American Jews said that “being Jewish is mainly about religion,” with most preferring some combination of religion, ancestry and culture.

For its proponents in California, the bill, S.B. 1387, is an attempt to counter this confusion by making clear that “Jewish” means more than religion. Practically speaking, the bill aims to help the state quantify its Jewish population and to enable better data collection for hate crimes tracking and public health purposes — for example, by determining where to promote genetic screenings for diseases common in Jewish communities, or ensuring that antisemitic attacks are not misclassified on reporting forms.

But beyond these concrete impacts, the bill’s backers intend it to accomplish something less tangible: a first step toward acknowledging and demystifying the multifaceted nature of Jewish identity. The purpose of adding the Jewish ethnicity checkbox, they argue, is to break Jews out of the box.

The bill is a proposed — and disputed — solution to a very real problem. The complex nature of Jewishness has perplexed the courts, the culture and even the White House. In 2022, Whoopi Goldberg was suspended for two weeks as host of ABC’s “The View” and apologized after she said that the Holocaust was “not about race.” Her statement reflected a popular misconception that Jews have been persecuted in purely religious terms, when in fact, antisemites have long painted Jews as an inferior race.

And it’s not just celebrities who have been flummoxed by Jewish identity. It took until 1987 for American law to determine that Jews might be attacked on nonreligious grounds.

In 1982, a Maryland synagogue was vandalized by white supremacists. In response, the congregation sued the perpetrators under federal civil rights law. Its claims were initially dismissed by the lower courts. But in 1987, in Shaare Tefila v. Cobb, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed those decisions and ruled that Jewish people had the right to sue on grounds of racial discrimination.

Recent presidential administrations have also attempted to thread this needle. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws discrimination in federally funded programs on the basis of race, color or national origin — but not religion.

In 2010, however, the Obama administration interpreted the law as applying to discrimination against Jews and members of other religious groups such as Muslims and Sikhs “when that discrimination is based on the group’s actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics, rather than its members’ religious practice.” In other words, what matters for the purposes of protection is not just how the victims see themselves but how a bigot sees them.

“You don’t have to prove that you look fundamentally different or have some fundamentally different physical characteristic in order to establish that you were subjected to racial discrimination,” explained Matthew Segal, a political science professor at Tufts University and co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s State Supreme Court Initiative.

“It is enough — whether you’re Jewish or Arab or anything else — to show that you were treated differently because someone looked at you that way.”

In 2019, the first Trump administration sought to build on this interpretation with an executive order that defined Jews as a nationality purely for the purposes of applying anti-discrimination protections to them. At the time, it caused some consternation among some observers who worried — before the full text of the order was released — that it would define Jews themselves as a nation. (Many Jews, particularly those in Israel, consider themselves part of a Jewish nation; others, including some staunch anti-Zionists, reject this framing.)

The California bill was conceived in response to this turbulent context. The bill’s author, State Senator Henry Stern, a Democrat, was motivated by personal experience. He grew up in an engaged Jewish home, but one that was not particularly religious. His father, the actor Daniel Stern, added the improvised line, “Happy Hanukkah, Marv,” in the otherwise Christmas-themed hit “Home Alone 2.”

Later in life, the younger Mr. Stern adopted more traditional Jewish practices, including wearing a yarmulke and observing the sabbath. As he tells it, he knows firsthand that Jewishness is more than religious observance.

“I got picked on in school as a Jew even though I didn’t wear a kipa, I didn’t have a Star of David. But they figured out I was a Jew and they wrote a swastika on the back of my backpack,” he recalled. “I wasn’t a white guy to them. I was a Jew to them.”

The bill has the backing of Jewish California, a large coalition of Jewish groups, as well as the California Federation of Teachers. But not everyone is on board; some progressive Jewish organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace, have opposed it on various fiscal and ideological grounds.

At the same time, some of the Jewish groups that have lobbied against the bill have acknowledged the complexities it is meant to address, while disagreeing that this bill is the proper vehicle for doing so.

“Many American Jews, and probably even more in California, are mostly secular, not religiously observant,” the Sacramento chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace wrote in a statement. “If asked offhand, many of us might say we identify as culturally and/or ethnically Jewish. But we vehemently oppose SB 1387 for its wrong-headed oversimplification of identity, one that could well exacerbate antisemitism, among other unintended consequences.”

The bill, the group contends, risks flattening rather than broadening public understanding of Jewishness by compressing Jews into a single ethnicity. (Supporters counter that the box is voluntary and can be checked in conjunction with any other identity boxes.)

“I consider myself a Jew ethnically, but there are many different ethnicities,” David Mandel of Jewish Voice for Peace told the California assembly’s judiciary committee on June 9. “This ill-considered bill, very expensive bill, will not add any useful information for the state and would end up costing millions.”

Mr. Stern is comfortable with the opposition. “That’s what it is to be a Jew, in some ways,” he said. “Being really comfortable with tension, and being comfortable with paradoxes, and understanding that we’re a people, we’re a nation, we’re an ethnicity, we are a religion, too. We don’t fit naturally. And that’s why we’re such a pain.”

On the other hand I wouldn't want to openly disclose my ethnicity to a govt database these days. I'm frustrated that I have had to do so in the past. Especially given the this:

a lot of the current rhetoric around gender reminds me of that anecdote. a lot of people are willing to go "transgender people are oppressed for their gender presentation, therefore if you're not oppressed for your gender presentation, you're not trans." but i don't think we should be defining ourselves by our suffering and oppression. what will we do, in a few years, in a few decades, as there start to be, say, adults who were supported in their transition as children? what will we do when a stereotypical trans person can genuinely say they didn't suffer hardship for being trans?

i'm afraid i know the answer. i'm afraid that people are going to close ranks as they've already started closing ranks against intersex people, against nonbinary people, against double binary people, against closeted people. as some people have started closing ranks against people who transitioned in the opposite direction from them. as many people have closed ranks against people with edge case gender experiences. "i don't consider you to be oppressed, therefore you are not welcome to share in this community you might otherwise belong in."

nyishaloraine:

A few housekeeping notes before the comments arrive:

No need to announce your departure. This isn’t an airport. ✌🏾

An insult in place of an argument is an ad hominem. Look that up while you’re looking up actual history.

Being gullible isn’t a flex.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s father acquired a textbook publisher in 1988. Holocaust evidence was presented at Nuremberg more than 40 years earlier. Chronology matters.

Israel is criticized every day. Stop saying it’s not allowed 😂🤦🏾‍♀️

Research requires testing your belief against contradictory evidence. Automatically declaring every document, witness, historian, and institution part of the conspiracy creates a closed loop where your belief can never be disproven. That’s called intellectual insulation.

And please retire “Enjoy your $7K, goy.” It’s played out. I wish someone would pay me $7K to share basic common sense.

Jewish people are human beings. Turning them into a shadowy explanation for everything you dislike is ancient scapegoating repackaged as independent thought. We can do better.

(sorry that somehow these didn’t come out uniform in size!)

what’s really remarkable is her combatting it. most don’t do that, which is entirely understandable. Jews on social media aren’t even expending the energy to respond to hate like this anymore (also understandable, I don’t either, you really can’t reason with people like this), it is exhausting, but it still means a lot to see someone be brave and try. 🤍

https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/canada-holocaust/antisemitism/campus-antisemitism-student-experiences.html

Highlights, all direct quotes unless noted (my comments are bolded; things in quotes are from students quoted in the report), below the cut. Warnings for. A lot. And apologies to any Canadian Jews. Stay safe!

I'm not Jewish. I say that because unfortunately it feels like that needs to be clarified - and not in a "so I can't speak directly to the impact of this because it's not my story so you should listen to those who are being affected" (that's still true and you should do it) but because part of the antisemitism is dismissing Jewish people when they bring it up.

And I imagine this post will get me a lot of messages/responses about freeing Palestine - and I agree, lots of horrible things are happening to Palestinians. But this post is about the horrible things that are happening to Jewish people.

I'm Canadian. The things I read about antisemitic hate crimes have nothing to do with helping Palestinians. How does damaging property in Canada or attacking a person in Canada help?

I don't want to hear about the mental gymnastics or outright hateful logic you use to make it ok to attack a marginalized community. Instead, just go head and block me. Stop following. We don't need to interact with each other.

The harm that is being done toward Jewish communities and individuals over the world is heartbreaking. The lack of support/outrage/solidarity that is being shown to those individuals and communities is shameful for the rest of us. Call it out. Stand up. Correct information that is harmful. Listen and read and learn and try to understand instead of scratching your head and finding reasons for why this kind of aggression and discrimination is ok actually.