#progressive antisemitism

[benevolentbirdgal]

In my experience, liberal/progressive gentiles have begun in the past 3-5 years to understand that antisemitism still exists, but with the caveats that they are unable to see it as coming from anybody but white, cishet, nonimmigrant and otherwise non-marginilized people with conservative politics and they feel the need to regard it as a lesser issue than other forms of bigotry.

It's an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) idea in the Jewish community that, from the perspective of history, we're basically on our own at the end of the day. Though I do believe there are righteous among the nations (so to speak), as a population, social justice people have not dissuaded me of this anxiety - everytime I hear "oh x can't be antisemitic because they're [other marginilized identity]" I note that person has decided to write passes for antisemites. When Jews are told "oh but [other form of bigotry] is the REAL issue" I hear the speaker telling me they can't bear to consider us specifically, as a traumatized community in our own right. If I speak up about how another marginilized person inflicted antisemitic harm onto me, I'm more likely to be chastised for presumed bigotry on my end than for the inflictor of antisemitism to be held accountable (I must reflect my own biases, it's presumed bias to ask the same of goyim). The same people who go "uwu punch Nazis" refuse to examine, even in passing, the blood libel in their midst.

People can be right about one thing and wrong about another. They can be legitimately marginilized in their own right while still using systems of oppression against others. This applies to so many things, and antisemitism is certainly not an exception.

Five years ago, I would have told you that progressives don't believe in antisemitism. Now it's a little different - many, perhaps even a sizable cohort, do understand it didn't end in 1945. But what is fundamentally missing is either the ability, on a population level, to examine the hatred within the movements and among other marginilized people and address it with anything resembling the same vigor they do other issues.

[weaponized-kindness]

Remember, not all antisemites are nazies.

[al-kol-eleh]

In my years teaching English literature I had frequent recourse to DH Lawrence’s dictum, “Never trust the teller, trust the tale.” That Dickens was a bad husband, I was forever telling my students, no more made him a bad novelist than beating her dog made Emily Brontë a bad novelist. We will no more fathom the nexus between art and moral intelligence, than that between a normal family life and savagery. Jonathan Glazer made an ambitious, important film. I salute the artist. But his abject mea culpa debases him as a man.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

Antisemitism, in the form of anti-Zionism on the progressive left, is not an issue exclusive to college campuses. It is a common feature of progressive spaces: Pro-Israel students, activists, and staff at progressive organizations are forced to make a false choice between their Zionism and their progressivism in order to be included in movements meant to create a better world. I’ve seen and experienced this dynamic play out firsthand in over a decade of work in various progressive organizations. In today’s American progressive movement, Zionism, a progressive victory of self-determination for the Jewish people, has come to represent the antithesis of progressive values.

Why are we so afraid to delve into the problem of antisemitism on the political left? Of the exclusion of Jewish students on campus when they identify as proud Zionists, the rejection of Jewish participation in a marches meant to celebrate diversity and acceptance, the unwillingness to address the progressive movement’s most pressing issues side by side with Jewish organizations, the complete erasure of the Jewish connection to their indigenous homeland in Israel, and the idea that denying the legitimacy of the Jewish state is anything short of clear and blatant antisemitism? Why can’t we talk about it — all of it?

Is it because antisemitism on the political right is an existential threat to the Jewish people? There’s no argument that antisemitism on the right deserves our urgent attention. Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL compared it, in a 2021 Washington Post op-ed and again in the CNN special report, to the tornado that unceremoniously torches your community. But the antisemitism on the left — the kind Greenblatt compared to the slowly emerging threat of climate change — influences how society understands and engages with our community. We need not create a hierarchy of threats — we must name each one plainly, and address each in turn.

The causes of the progressive movement — protecting and expanding reproductive rights, addressing the existential threat of climate change and so many others — are so urgent and critical. Do we feel that diverting our attention from them for even a moment to take a step back and question our approach is irresponsible? I would argue that addressing this insidious element of the progressive movement is also urgent. A progressive movement can never have its intended impact on the world while it fails to live up to its own values, values represented by celebrating Jewish liberation and self-determination in our homeland.

[eretzyisrael]

By NAYA LEKHET

Other strategies to combat anti-Zionism include demonstrating that Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel, thus opposing the claim that Zionism is a form of settler-colonialism. The logic here being, a group of people who are indigenous cannot be colonists. While this is true, that is, that Jews are very much the indigenous people of Israel, it reinforces the progressive framework that power equals guilt. 

A third dominant strategy is to influence Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs in universities, hoping that in the mandated anti-racism and anti-discrimination trainings, DEI officers would include the long-suffering Jews. But as Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, founder of AMCHA recently writes, “it turns out there are numerous problems involved in trying to address antisemitism within a DEI framework... as a practical matter, DEI programs limit their ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion’ efforts to certain identity groups, which rarely include Jews.”

Focusing predominately on marginalized groups, DEI programs are not equipped to deal with the fact that for American Jews, “this is no longer the case.” DEI frameworks necessitate a worldview in which only marginalized people matter. By extension, Zionists, who are Jews with power, not only do not matter but must be dealt with opprobrium. This is not an opinion. It is a fact. In December 2021, the Heritage Foundation published a troublesome finding in which DEI staff harbor antisemitic views toward Israel and Zionism.

What, then, is the solution? At the forefront of this battle is the Institute for Jewish Liberal Values, founded by David Bernstein, whose 2022 book Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews documents how the sweeping ideology of progressivism has given fertile ground for contemporary Jew-hatred, anti-Zionism, to flourish. Identifying a correlation between progressive ideology and antisemitism, Bernstein’s important work sheds light on how and why Zionism is perceived to be racism as progressive ideologues espouse the notion that people with power can be racists.

Naturally, the solution would be to disprove that Jews are privileged, or rather prove that they are beleaguered. But we are not. In numbers alone, we are, indeed, a minority. But we are successful; moreover, Zionism is the realization of the Jewish people’s will to take its rightful place among the nations: to establish secure political borders under the aegis of self-determination.

As Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Revisionist Zionist leader and military commander of the Irgun, said in 1937, “Tell them [the Jewish People] three things in my name, and not two: they must get iron [i.e. weapons]; they must choose a king; and they must learn to laugh.” We are to read this statement as an extension of self-determination. This is Zionism: the Jew with the weapon who is a sovereign. This, however, is also entirely unpalatable to progressivism.

[reasonsforhope]

Where can I find Free Palestine protests and Ceasefire protests?

A super international and continually updated list of actions can be found at Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network's:

Calendar of Resistance for Palestine 2024

They list events by date, then alphabetically by country, then by city - and it's common for them to have dozens of actions listed for a single date, especially on the weekends.

The United States especially often has 40+ events on a single day, especially on the weekends.

Events are posted with links to the event info posted by whoever's hosting the vast majority of the time.

Look blow the read-more for a list of many of the countries that have been on this protest calendar, in alphabetical order, since I know so many websites/lists of actions are country-specific

*Obviously this isn't the only good source of listings for protest events - there are many others. This is by far the biggest/most international roundup I've found, though, so I started with this. If you know another good place for finding ceasefire protests/events, please feel free to add it in the notes, bc I'm planning to put a bigger roundup together once I find enough other sites

Countries that Samidoun has listed/does list protests for include (in alphabetical order):

North America:

United States

Canada

Mexico

Puerto Rico (listed separately in anti-colonial solidarity)

Hawai'i (listed separately in anti-colonial solidarity)

Europe:

Austria

Belgium

Bulgaria

Denmark

England

Finland

France

Germany

Greece

Hungary

Iceland

Ireland

Italy

Netherlands

Norway

Portugal

Romania

Scotland

Serbia

Spain

Sweden

Switzerland

Wales

SWANA Region (Southwest Asia/North Africa)*:

Bahrain

Iraq

Jordan

Kuwait

Lebanon

Palestine

Tunisia

Turkiye (Turkey)

*Samidoun notes that "We know that these events are mainly international and that the Arab people are marching everywhere for Palestine – we will be honored to add more Arab events whenever we are informed!"

Asia:

Bangladesh

India

Indonesia

Japan

Malaysia

Maldives

Pakistan

South Korea

Africa:

Kenya

Mauritius

Nigeria

South Africa

Tanzania

Tunisia

*Duplicating North African countries (well, Tunisia) here from the SWANA list btw

South America:

Brazil

Colombia

Chile

Peru

Venezuela

Australia and Oceania:

Aotearoa (New Zealand)

Australia

[kosmic-apothecary]

None of the civilian deaths have been accidental.

[jewreallythinkthat]

Something I really don't understand is this obsession the anti-Israel crowd (in the West) have with death and martyrdom. All they care about is dying, and often killing for their cause; I see nothing about building a better future that isn't based on the murder of 9 million Israelis.

It's easy to die for a cause. The challenge is living to make a better tomorrow.

[politijohn]

Source

[trashpoppaea]

A friend of mine whose husband survived the Shoah said to me the other day, "The historical and logical endgame of antisemitism is ritual murder. Most recently, on an industrial scale. It is historically acceptable and has sometimes been considered praiseworthy to kill Jewish people for the last two thousand years. That’s the underpinning of the thing. You can't have casual antisemitism, really. It's a repeat offender on a gigantic scale."

I've been thinking about her words a lot lately.

[nonbinary-vents]

There’s been a distinct shift in how leftist Jew haters are starting to express their Jew hatred and it’s… very back to the old days, to put it lightly. It’s two specific things that I’ve seen. The more moderate stance of ‘it’s so terrible that the bad Jews are playing into Jew hating canards, how dare they!!’ which, just… ugh. And then you have the extremes, the ones who say ‘yeah, I hate Jews, but it’s their fault because of them being the scum of humanity’, it’s the ‘Hitler hated Jews for shit they didn’t do but I hate Jews for shit they did do!’ (a direct quote taken from someone who I can only describe as completely deranged)

And, honestly, seeing this shift has kind of broken me

At this point, there is no denial left. There is no going back. The pretences are starting to be dropped, people are becoming more and more comfortable with their Jew hatred being about Jews, and they’ve realised that it’s acceptable to say that out loud. All they need to do is say it’s our fault, and they get a free pass. We are fully back in the nineteenth century, all we’re missing is the ‘no dogs, no Jews’ signs (oh wait— what’s that about a bar in America banning all (((Zionists)))?) and the pogroms that go with it (oh no, what’s that about Russia, Dagestan, an airport, and a hotel?). We’re back in mid twentieth century Iran, where Jews are stuck between a country not yet legally aggressive to us, and all of the people in said country who want us dead

I don’t think things in the west are at the level of nineteenth century Europe yet, just in the style. But I’m also smart, I’m also connected to my history. My safta left Iran in 1951, at the age of ten, because her family saw what was happening. Ninety thousand other Jews in Iran saw it too. They caught on and they left. And then two decades later the revolution happened, and now our family can’t even visit without being executed. Many Jews have convinced themselves that we’ve assimilated, that were just like everyone else, that were safe. But we’re not safe. We are a people who have been persecuted and expelled and massacred for over two thousand years, it’s not going to suddenly stop now. And now that the people who are supposed to be fighting to keep us safe have started killing us, we have nobody but each other

I don’t think everyone should pack up and leave their countries right now. But I do think you should have a suitcase ready

[benevolentbirdgal]

interact with this post if you want to talk about complaints I have about specific works I have to read for grad school right now

[check the tags for triggers]

[bill-the-dog-for-the-check]

"I can't believe Jews are genociding the Palestinians! I was so sad when I realized they didn't learn their lessons about genocide and oppression from the Holocaust--"

Excuse me? Lessons? Tell me, what lessons were we meant to derive from the death camps and human experimentation? I wasn't aware the Holocaust was meant to be an educational seminar

[gay-otlc]

Sure you hate nazis but do you, like, actually respect Jews?

[caitlinjohns77]

you are actually trash

[sunbeamedskies]

It is a PRIVILEGE to be able to say that the entire population of a country or region are inherently guilty and deserving of death. It is also exactly the same shit the alt right does.

I've seen people do this to both Palestine and Israel. If you honestly celebrate the murder of Palestinians or Israelis and try to justify it, you are no better than an alt right cult member.

Real people are dying and suffering while you pretend this is a video game.