The Past Didn't Go Anywhere

"It is true that the parties and governments of the Left very quickly gave us reason to doubt their ability to resolve our problem. Relatively speaking, we had certainly furnished the different parties of the Left with the largest contingent of hard-core militants, but this did not put an end to the hesitations and muddling of the European Left with respect to us. The Left did not defend us against the vile racist aggression with the complete strength and decisiveness which we had a right to expect from it. I have already spoken of the enthusiasm with which many of our youth movements followed the Soviet experience. We often wore Ukrainian-style shirts, and sang in Slavic rhythms (which have contributed much to Israeli folklore). Our expression became almost religious when we said "the country of the workers" or "our comrades in the U.S.S.R." Did all this prevent an anti-Semitic brochure from appearing in Kiev as late as 1964? Did it prevent Russia from feigning ignorance of the kibbutz, the only true collectivist experience in the world? I will never be able to rid myself of a terrible doubt: would the Red Army have stood immobile at the gates of the Warsaw ghetto if it had not contained Jews alone?

[...]

At that time I began to receive a few invitations to salons of the liberal Left, many of which were predominantly Jewish. Far from participating in this convention of selflessness, instead of rushing towards this grandiose horizon, I immediately laid down my cards. In reaction, in an effort to provoke, I spontaneously revealed the Jewish dimension of my motivations. I attempted to explain several political or aesthetic preferences by the Jewishness of the Jews or the racism of the others. I said, for instance, that I was convinced that the failure of Mendès-France was due in part to his origins, that if Léon Blum had been so detested, it was because he was a Jew. I developed the idea that the division of the political chessboard, with the anti-racist Left on one side and the racist Right on the other, was contrary to the facts. The good people, including the proletariat, had never been all goodness for the Jews. The Left also had its racist theorists. And it was strange to observe the absence of Jews in responsible positions of the French Communist party.

The distress, the icy embarrassment which I provoked, taught me that I had committed a terribly tactless faux pas. It was almost obscene to talk so much about Jews and Jewishness. "But you're a Jewish racist!" they told me, only half jesting. "Doesn't anybody interest you but the Jews?" Far from it, I was interested in a lot more than just the Jews; but I did not see why I should be disinterested in them. When the proletariat fights, it fights quite naturally for itself; who would have dreamed of reproaching them for it? One could argue with the colonized concerning the opportuneness of his battle, never about the meaning and the legitimacy of his liberation. If I am a democratic Jew, should I never announce myself as such, or openly put in a claim for myself and my people? Why would I have been of the Left if I myself did not suffer from serious injustices? Certainly other men suffered under diverse oppressions, and I was determined to participate in all these just causes. But was there a more foolish or artificial policy (more non-Marxist in the final analysis) than to ask someone to fight only against an injustice of which he is not a victim?

Here again we are up against a very old and very miserable argument. The Jew-of-the-Left does not deny that the Jew is a victim and that he must also fight for him. But this battle must not be "provocative." His discretion and his silence are tactical measures. Ah! A fine phrase, one that we have found convenient for a long time! It deserves a place of honor among the comic phrases of our time. Anti-Semitism is supposed to be a slander, an aberration of the anti-Semite. The anti-Semite believes, or pretends to believe, in the existence of a repugnant, harmful character, who is the Jew. Must we, they ask, by speaking of it, give substance to this delirium? Aggravate it by heralding it? Isn't it better, tactically speaking, not to discuss it? Moreover, the non-Jewish masses do not understand this particular battle in favor of the Jews: tactically, isn't it perhaps better not to usurp their attention from more decisive battles?

[...]

Tactically it is better for the Jew to fight with a party of the Left. Granted. But then you must admit that the situation was hardly gratifying. I have known many Communist and Socialist Jews, which is not surprising since half the intellectual and bourgeois Jews in Tunisia were either one or the other. Was it this famous tactic which made them appear shamefaced and embarrassed about themselves as soon as they had to deal with the Jewish aspect of their lives? Or was the so-called tactic not just one more expression of the banal self-rejection of every Jew? Whatever the cause, it resulted in their absolute uselessness for everything concerning the affairs of the Jewish community. And as they never had the slightest influence on the other communities, you can measure the amplitude of their success. This was because they were Jews, because of this Jewishness which they pretended to ignore and which the others, those for whom these men of good will and undeniable courage labored, never ceased to consider.

[...]

The Jew-of-the-Left, if he recognizes himself as such, is under the impression that he is playing a game of billiards: he hits one ball in the hope of its hitting another. He hopes for the salvation of the Jews (for in any case he desires the salvation of all men), but he believes it is possible only indirectly; he wants to fight for the revolution and believes that it in turn will save the Jew. Apparently the reasoning is not absurd, but from a practical point of view can we expect our salvation to come from others? What could we expect from the forces of the Left?

I will say it loud and clear: not much. In any case once and for all I convinced myself that an oppressed person must never expect others to hand him his liberation.

[...]

It would be absurd to reproach people with not having been as threatened and unhappy as we. I simply say that, because the stakes were never the same, the Democrat's fight for the Jew always had overtones of "in favor of the Jew." At best, he fights for the Jew because he fights for all the oppressed. But it is always graciousness on his part. The Jew must depend on the good will of the Democrats for his security, his safety. The Jew must hope for his salvation indirectly and the Democrat will give it to him indirectly.

[...]

I maintain that a certain rejection of the Jew, be it clear or confused, is part of the thought of the very great majority of Occidental Socialists. I add that it is not even an aberration or contradictory to revolutionary practice as it has in fact existed in Russia and elsewhere. And I am perfectly aware of the gravity of what I am writing: the failure of the European Left, with regard to the Jewish problem, was no accident.

[...]

Certainly Marx, in his turn, passionately sought, like all of us, a solution to the Jewish drama. But for the sake of convenience, coherence with his own philosophy, and because of his dogmatic approach, he proposed an abstract image of the Jew and of the Jewish fate. Wishing to define the Jew in opposition to his contemporary Bruno Bauer who characterized him by his religion, he reduced him to an economic figure; the Jew became practically synonymous with the bourgeoisie. The Marxist solution is easily derived from this process: the end of the bourgeoisie, in other words, the revolution, will put an end to the Jewish drama through the disappearence of the Jew himself.

[...]

But extending this observation to the absolute, Marx condenses all Jewish existence into its economic aspect.

(In passing, it is interesting to note that the Marxist reduction coincides with the anti-Semitic accusation, which also makes the Jew out to be an absolute economic figure.)

And, most unfortunately, Marx's essay "The Jewish Question," which is his worst sociological work, has become the Marxist Bible for everything concerning the Jews. This has resulted in the immense dilemma of post-Marxist thought on this subject, and a plan of action, or rather non-action, which is perfectly sterile.

If the Jew is an economic figure, synonymous with the middle class, how can we still class him with the oppressed? Why would anyone fight for him? Despite the efforts of a few theorists like A. Léon, for whom the Jewish people are a class-people, or Lenin's late discovery of the Jewish proletariat, this hesitation will never be completely removed. It will torment the Jew-of-the-Left. In fact Marxism proposed to the Jew-of-the-Left an image of himself which at best is doubtful: the Jew-of-the-Left cannot like himself as such. From a practical standpoint, what then can he do? The truth is that he doesn't want to do anything.

Moreover, nothing can be directly done for the Jew since the final goal is his suppression. There can be no particular policy in favor of the Jews, neither before nor after the revolution.

Here is something more serious than the ideological deficiency, and a tragic confirmation of it: Marxist politics, derived from Marx's theses, have failed totally in this sphere. The obstinancy of the Jews in existing did not diminish in the least, even after the revolution. And the anti-Semitism of the non-Jewish masses, even in the Socialist countries, has hardly been reduced. They tried to blame the Jews: they were wrong not to mix more into a society which was no longer hostile to them.

[...]

In the same way they knew neither how to go beyond the Marxist plans for the Jew's assimilation as an economic figure, nor foresee that "the workers' paradise" would remain a country like the others, a nation which would continue to treat the Jew like a bastard, which would feel the same repulsion and prejudice as it would towards an illegitimate child. In reality, the Marxists, after Marx, failed to understand the Jew's real, total and objective situation.

[...]

Sooner or later the Jew-of-the-Left discovers he is faced with the impossibility of two equally disastrous alternatives: frankly accept the complete disappearance of the Jews, or cease to be a Communist. These two solutions were adopted by men I have known and whose sincerity I cannot doubt. For them it was always surgical and dramatic. For some their resignation from the Communist or Socialist party was the most serious act of their life. In one fell swoop they had to break with a philosophical ideal, a social morality, a course of day-to-day behavior, which were painfully, incomprehensibly contradictory to the salvation of their people and themselves. Others, by gritting their teeth, were able to face horrors which to them seemed necessary.

[...]

It was that horrible policy which we call "the omelet," here applied by the Jew-of-the-Left to his own people. Of his own accord the Jew had to accept being among the broken eggs. The Communist writer André Wurmser even dared to write openly that a Jew's only duty was to disappear. From what other people could one ask such saintliness? And, what's more, such perfectly absurd and ineffective saintliness? Why such historical masochism?

I repeat, I continue to think that the Jew, as a threatened minority, cannot allow himself, even today, even in Israel, to break with the forces of the Left. For us, the triumph of democracy, humanitarian and egalitarian ideals in the world, is a question of life or death. But we are here talking about a minimum-a defensive alliance.

At best a powerful Left protects us; it does nothing to advance our cause."

(Selected excerpts from The Liberation of the Jew, Albert Memmi 1966. Emphasis mine)

—Albert Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew

yes I'm using my toolbox as a table what of it

It's that time of year

The debate around Christmas is so weird.

On one side you have atheists saying Christmas is a secular holiday and everyone should celebrate it

On another side you have Christians saying Christmas been too secularized and it needs to be made Christian again

On another side you have antitheists saying Christmas is a Christian holiday and no one should celebrate it because no one should be Christian

On another side you have Christian Evangelicals saying Christmas is a Christian holiday and everyone should celebrate it because everyone should be Christian

And then you have me, a Jew, stuck in the middle like "I don't want any of this"

I've been seeing Fran Drescher get a lot of (well-deserved) love for The Nanny lately, as the show has been having a bit of a fan resurgence on tumblr. So I decided to read up a bit on it and found something that didn't shock me so much as disgust me

Fran Drescher is, obviously, extrenely Jewish, and so is the character Fran Fine. It's one of the things I love about her; her unapologetic nature and her pride in her Jewish identity. But apparently not everyone felt the same way

my heart skipped a beat lmao fuck this AI search shit

Who is the antisemite?

I've made many a post about the nature of antisemitism, and I don't expect I'll ever stop. But I've made relatively few posts about antisemites, who they are, and why they are. I don't mean to make a list of every antisemite in the world; I wouldn't be able to finish it before I died at my keyboard. Instead I want to explore a bit into the nature of antisemitic belief and what draws people to it, in the hopes of helping people recognize their own behaviors. This won't be a thorough taxonomy, but will focus on something I believe is at–or close to–the heart of the issue.

When I tell people antisemitism can have a racial component the response I usually get is, "but Jewish isn't a race so you can't be racist against Jews!" Now it's true that "Jewish" is not (currently) one of the accepted racial categories (up until some time in the 1950s you could list your race on U.S. censi as "Hebrew"), but that's not exactly what I mean. What I mean is that there's a pattern of thought that's part-and-parcel of racism and racist ideas, even if it's not always deployed against what we would consider a race. That pattern is bio-essentialism–the belief that there are certain inherent and largely invariant differences between discrete groups of people. This, for example, explains the significant overlap between racism and transphobia, if not always in practice than in thought. If you believe these differences exist along racial lines, it's simple enough to map them onto sex as well. Bio-essentialism is not the only driving force behind racism, but it is a significant one, and one that can be reasonably used as a predictor of racist thought. In this sense, focusing on phenotypes common among Jews (prominent noses, dark curly hair, olive skin) can have a racial component, and can result in behaviors and attitudes that behave like racism, even if Jews aren't a "race".

So we have racial antisemitism, and from here we can sit around and postulate on other alchemical combinations; the intersection of antisemitism and sexism, for example, resulting in stereotypes about nagging Jewish wives, overbearing Jewish mothers, and the Jewish American Princess. The intersection of antisemitism and patriarchy, creating anxieties about weak or effeminate Jewish men. Antisemitism and classism; antisemitism and homophobia; antisemitism and anti-theism; and on and on. But what about anti-Jewish antisemitism? What do we find that makes people hate Jews for being Jews?

I'm going to lean fairly heavily on Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by intellectual historian David Nirenberg. It's a fantastic albeit excruciating read, and I highly recommend everyone–Jewish and not–pick it up from their local library.

Much like the habits of bio-essentialism characterize much of racism, obsession with blame is (I believe) the core driver of anti-Jewish antisemitism. Specifically blame of the other, although that's generally merely step two in the process. Jews occupy a fairly unique position in the world in that in the vast majority of places where we live we don't really belong. We're treated as guests, reliant on the grace and magnanimity of our hosts to ensure our protection and survival. Part of this is our own doing; throughout the Diaspora our struggle to cohere to our identity has set us apart from everyone else. We don't like to assimilate any more than we have to. But it would be wrong to place the blame for our status entirely on our shoulders, so I will not do so. For the purposes of this post let us take it prima facie that Jews maintain a role of perpetual outsiders–among the nations of the world but not of them.

Throughout history this status has allowed our hosts to define themselves in opposition to us. Jews, who never really belonged, became emblematic of whatever ill the current society, religion, or philosophy decided was most pressing. We gave people opportunity to externalize their own faults, to shift blame from themselves and their comrades to nefarious interlopers. To recontextualize their responsibility to themselves into a Manichaean (I use the word deliberately) struggle between darkness and light. If the anxieties of the day centered around hypocrisy, Jewish Rabbis were the hypocrites you should strive to be unlike. If it was infidelity, it was the Jewess temptresses who were to blame. If it was greed, it was certainly the Jewish bankers who were at fault.

Perhaps my use of past-tense verbs is misleading; this is still the nature of antisemitism today. But this is certainly also how it began. The urge to excise culpability is a fairly common one. It crosses cultural boundaries and expresses itself in toddlers the world around. And so whither the Jews went, childish vindictiveness followed.

When we understand how antisemitism is used as a tool, we can begin to understand the work it does for those who use it. Antisemitism is the antidote to critical thought, to skepticism and self-reflection. It creates a "them", not in reality but in the mind. It explains failure not through any self-conscious rumination, but in the creation of vagrants, infiltrators, and saboteurs.

It now becomes clear why nearly every conspiracy theory is antisemitic, or rapidly hurtling in that direction. One of the cornerstones of conspiratorial thought (as expounded by Michael Barkun in A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America) is the belief that the conspiracies are composed out outside forces. When neo-Nazis compose their "Every Aspect of _____ is Jewish" flyers, they can hardly focus on the fact that the vast majority of the people they blame are American. Americans are the in-group and as such cannot be at fault. Jews are an easily accessible out-group, in part because Jewishness is so "sneaky" (you can be Jewish and not even know it! Even Wikipedia can't seem to decide when someone is Jewish or not!). When people believe that the CIA was responsible for assassinating John F. Kennedy, it's never in their capacity as red-blooded patriotic Americans; it's always the result of insiders from Russia, China, and ultimately, Jews. Even conspiracy theories that don't explicitly name Jews are engaged in antisemitic thought, so long as they seek to pin events on the actions of "them". There's a reason "they" has become memetic in neo-Nazi circles; those who are "them" are most assuredly not "us".

It also becomes clear how and why antisemitism traverses political boundaries, and infects discourse left, right, and center. The extremes–the far-right and far-left (for all the usefulness of the political spectrum, which is not much)–are more prone to antisemitic thought precisely because they are so far from the norm. The more you see wrong with society the more you seek those who are responsible. (Again it's important to note that "antisemitic thought" in this context refers to the habit of looking for outsiders to blame, and does not always map perfectly onto open bigotry toward "real Jews".) When England is close to being a perfect country, it is only through the actions of the Jews that it is prevented from becoming so. When Sovyet communism begins to collapse in on itself, it is certainly the Jews who are accused. It is never "us" or "we"; it is always "they" and "them". And in a fit of cruel irony, when antisemitism becomes un-fashionable, the "no-true-scotsman" fallacy is often deployed, assigning the use of conspiratorial bigotry to impersonators and pretenders.

So what can we do? What can we learn, and how can we change? We can start by resolving to think critically, to not take the easy answers. We can look inward, not outward, and find things to improve in ourselves, rather than assuming that our faults are not our fault. We can be skeptical of conspiracy theories, of people who want to direct our anger in ways that serve their own goals. As always, we can protect and uplift Jews and Jewish communities worldwide. We can orient ourselves toward finding solutions, instead of finding reasons for why we can't. We can unlearn the thought patterns, cliches, and habits of antisemitic thought, or that lead to antisemitic thought. We can stop trying to look for the bad people, and start trying to be the good people.

Just a quick vid but I adore Rabbi Lord Sacks' speeches. Hopefully this Tisha B'Av we can truly take his words to heart and grow stronger together

...And here we come upon a problem as basic as the nature of knowledge itself: all of our prodigious cognitive and computational abilities are inadequate to a full comprehension of our complex world. As humans, we remain heavily dependent on certain tools of perception and conception that our cultural and biological heritages have taught us are useful. These tools–such as language, causal logic, religion, mathematics–are indeed powerful, but they are powerful precisely because they reduce complexity to intelligibility by projecting our mental concepts onto the world. One consequence of this is that our recognition of significance is always what some philosophers call "theory laden," meaning that it is shaped by what our theoretical framework and cognitive tools encourage us to recognize as meaningful. Anti-Judaism, as I have argued throughout this book, is precisely this: a powerful theoretical framework for making sense of the world.

...

After all, no matter how overrepresented the Jews may have been among the European "bourgeoisie," they remained a tiny minority of that class. How could that tiny minority convincingly come to represent for so many the evolving evils of the capitalist world order? More broadly, how could untold millions of Europeans (and not only Germans) come to believe–or act as if they believed–the claims of the Nazis (and not only the Nazis) that Jews and their conspiracies so threatened the security of the world that they needed to be excluded, expelled, or exterminated? According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the liquidation of the Jews of Europe was not grounded in "reality." It took place in the vast gap between and explanatory framework ("anti-Semitism") that made satisfying sense of the world to a significant portion of its citizens, and the complexity of the world itself.

They set out to explore that gap in a philosophical history of modern thought they drafted in 1944 and later published as Dialectics of Enlightenment. Their final chapter, "Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment," suggested that what gave anti-Semitic ideas their power was not so much their relation to reality, but rather their exemption from reality checks–that is, from the critical testing to which so many other concepts were subjected. "What is pathological about anti-Semitism is not projective behavior as such, but the absence of reflection in it." In their terms, the problem is a heightened resistance to reflection about the gap between our ideas about Jews, Judaism, or Jewishness, and the complexity of the world. From their point of view, anti-Semitism provides adherents with a cognitive comfort: the fantasy that the gap between our understanding of the cosmos and its fearful complexity does not exist.

...

...[A]cross several thousand years, myriad lands, and many different spheres of human activity, people have used ideas about Jews and Judaism to fashion the tools with which they construct the reality of their world. The goal of my project, like Horkeheimer and Adorno's, is to encourage reflection about our "projective behavior," that is, about the ways in which our deployment of concepts into and onto the world might generate "pathological" fantasies of Judaism. And my choice of method owes something to Auerbach's conviction that the study of a given moment, problem, or even a single word in the distant past can teach us something about a much longer history, extending even to our own.

Selected excerpts from Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013 Nirenberg, David)

#postalproud

Noah's Spring Jewish Book Review

this isn't gonna become a regular thing, don't worry. I just need to gush some about these books. I'm gonna keep the reviews short too because who's got that kind of time!

So far I've read 4 Jewish novels this spring and I'm working on a fifth. We'll go in chronological order

1. Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott

~ Two estranged siblings, Isaac and Bellatine Yaga—the grandchildren of the famous Baba Yaga—inherit their ancestor's chicken-footed house. They travel the country putting on puppet shows and exploring their own mysterious abilities, all the while trying to escape from a threatening figure known only as the Longshadow Man, as well as their own pasts. History relives itself in a book filled with magic and mystery ~

This book was so damn good. Every other sentence is tattoo-worthy and hits you like a sack of bricks. The characters feel so real and raw while also managing to fill out their respective roles with a sense of poetry. The book has a supporting cast of memorable characters and a sense of real danger throughout. Every so often the house will interject in a way that reminds me so much of my bubbe (עליה השלום). I've read reviews that said it dragged on a bit in the second act but I was enraptured the entire way through. It's also pretty gay, which I always appreciate. 10/10

2. When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb

~ An angle and a demon—best friends for 200 years—set out from their tiny Pale shtetl to America in search of a girl who hasn't been heard from. They're accompanied by Rosie, a spunky and fire-spirited girl from their shtetl desperate to get away and have an adventure in the far-off West ~

No book has made me feel quite so seen as this one. As someone who grew up Orthodox there's virtually no representation for people like me. The majority of Orthodox characters in media are trying to get away. None of them love it quite so much as I do, as much as the characters in this book do. From Little Ash tucking his peyot behind his ears like my older brothers used to to the angel waking up to daven shacharit. Sacha Lamb takes the brave stance of "what if Jewish theology is real, actually" and it shines on every page. The writing effortlessly intertwines spirituality and reverence with a classic Yiddish folktale. It's also pretty gay. 10/10

3. From Dust, a Flame by Rebecca Podos

Hannah, the descendant of the famed Rabbi Yehuda Loew, wakes up one morning to find herself transformed, her eyes turning to yellow slits. Her mother seems to blame herself without explaining why, and soon after disappears. After receiving a mysterious letter, Hannah and her adopted brother Gabe travel to upstate New York to meet their mother's family, to learn the secrets of her past, and of their own lineage ~

I'll start off by saying I'm not sure if I was the target audience for this book. It was good, don't get me wrong, but the writing wasn't to my taste. It was a little... blatant, where I prefer prose to be a bit more subtle. Again, nothing wrong with it, just not my particular thing. I definitely relate to Hannah and Gabe a lot, each in their own way. A lot of the book felt very comforting and familiar to me. The book is equal parts supernatural action and intriguing mystery, and keeps you engrossed til the end. It's also Extremely Gay 7/10

4. The Way Out by Gavriel Savit

~ Yehuda Leib and Bluma set out from their tiny Pale shtetl, each on a mission of the utmost importance. Yehuda Leib is looking for his lost father, and Bluma is running from Death. Navigating the Far Country full of demons, goblins, and angels, the pair fight their way through history and mystery alike, and prepare to make war on Death himself ~

This book. Oh boy this book. Where do I start? This book made me cry several times, which hasn't happened in over 15 years. This book said everything about death I've been feeling since my bubbe passed away (עליה השלום). This book genuinely made me re-think how I view G-d? All that and more in less than 400 pages. This book harmonized with my soul. This book changed who I am as a person. This book made me crumble to dust and then built me back up from scratch. 10/10

extremely useful meme format