Can someone explain to me the reasons behind hating Jews?

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Can someone explain to me the reasons behind hating Jews?

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Addressing the rise in antisemitism [Podcast]
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Protesters marched silently in front of the restaurant Gasthof zur Gemutlichkeit in north Minneapolis in response to a recent World War II reenactment dinner party at the restaurant that featured Nazi flags and men dressed in SS uniforms. This is just one example of an increase of antisemitism county wide and in Minnesota. | Judy Griesedieck for MPR News

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Last year, reports of violence, harassment and vandalism targeting Jewish people reached an all-time high. That’s according to the Anti-Defamation League, which has tracked hate incidents since 1979. And they say they expect to see similar numbers this year.

On Monday, the White House announced that President Joe Biden will create a task force to address antisemitism and other forms of religious bigotry.

This comes after several celebrities, politicians and other public figures have spread anti-Jewish rhetoric.

The rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, praised Adolf Hitler on the podcast InfoWars earlier this year. And he was recently banned from Twitter for inciting violence after he posted an image of the swastika over the Star of David.

Former President Donald Trump also made headlines recently when he had dinner with Ye and Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist internet figure and Holocaust denier.

MPR News host Angela Davis talks with three guests about what is behind the rise in antisemitism and how we can address it.

Guests:
  • Pamela Nadell is a professor of women’s and gender history and the director of the Jewish studies program at American University in Washington D.C. She is currently working on a book about the history of antisemitism.
  • Yair Rosenberg is a writer at The Atlantic. He writes the "Deep Shtetl" newsletter and covers the intersection of politics, culture, and religion.
  • Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman has been senior rabbi at Temple Israel in Minneapolis for 20 years.
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Can someone explain to me the reasons behind hating Jews?

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Whoopi Goldberg renews incendiary assertion that Holocaust wasn’t about race
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This image released by ABC shows co-host Whoopi Goldberg on the set of the daytime talk series "The View." (Jenny Anderson/ABC via AP)

In interview, ‘The View’ host labels Holocaust ‘white on white violence,’ echoing remarks made in January that led to her two-week suspension from US talk show.

US actress and producer Whoopi Goldberg once again claimed on Saturday that the Holocaust was not connected to race, less than a year after similar comments led to her two-week suspension as host of “The View.”

In an interview with The Sunday Times of London, Goldberg said that the Nazi-orchestrated genocide was “white on white” violence, and not about race.

“Remember who they were killing first. They were not killing racial; they were killing physical. They were killing people they considered to be mentally defective. And then they made this decision,” she said.

When the interviewer noted that the Nazis viewed their victims as lesser races, Goldberg replied: “Yes, but that’s the killer, isn’t it?”

“The oppressor is telling you what you are,” she continued.” Why are you believing them? They’re Nazis. Why believe what they’re saying?”

Explaining that Jews are not identifiable as a race, she said: “It doesn’t change the fact that you could not tell a Jew on a street. You could find me. You couldn’t find them. That was the point I was making. But you would have thought that I’d taken a big old stinky dump on the table, butt naked.”

Goldberg was promoting her new film, Till, in which she plays the mother of civil rights activist Mamie Till-Mobley. The movie tells the true story of Till-Mobley’s quest for justice after her son, 14-year-old Emmett Till, was lynched by white supremacists in Mississippi in 1955.

[…]

Goldberg, born Caryn Elaine Johnson, has no Jewish ancestry but adopted her stage name to be deliberately Jewish-sounding, in part because she has said she personally identifies with Judaism. She told a London audience in 2016: “I just know I am Jewish. I practice nothing. I don’t go to temple, but I do remember the holidays.” In 2016, she designed a Hanukkah sweater for Lord & Taylor.
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Post by Holsety »

I don't think what she says is completely right, because the nazis identified jews - AFAIK - based on ancestry. Also, some people could identify jews on the street based on prior association in addition to documentary evidence of their ancestors. Also, I'm under the impression that black people were subjected to the conditions of the Holocaust, so that would be racial, wouldn't it?
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Post by Zarathustra »

What does an amateur political pundit making politically incorrect statements about the political topic of racism have to do with religion and spirituality?

Why is Wos the only person on the Watch allowed to post about politics?
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Can someone explain to me the reasons behind hating Jews?

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Holsety wrote:I don't think what she says is completely right, because the nazis identified jews - AFAIK - based on ancestry. Also, some people could identify jews on the street based on prior association in addition to documentary evidence of their ancestors. Also, I'm under the impression that black people were subjected to the conditions of the Holocaust, so that would be racial, wouldn't it?
Here's something Yair Rosenberg wrote in his newsletter last January, when Whoopi made her first [or at least, first widely-reported] misstep regarding Jewry. (Whether or not Yair would still maintain she's not an Antisemite, I do not know.)

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Are Jews a Race? [Explainer, Analysis]
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(Credit: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)

Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust comments reflect how Jews don’t fit into Western boxes.

Yesterday [Jan 31, 2022], celebrated actor and TV host Whoopi Goldberg caused a minor meltdown on ABC’s The View when she asserted that the Holocaust “isn’t about race.” Later that day, she joined The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and expanded on these remarks in an uncomfortable exchange, insisting that “the Nazis were white people, and most of the people they were attacking were white people.”

As countless commentators pointed out, this line of thinking is profoundly mistaken. The Nazis were obsessed with race and defined the Jews as their racial inferiors, which is how they justified exterminating them. This is why the Nazis targeted anyone with a Jewish grandparent, regardless of whether the person identified as Jewish or not. Nazism was a blood-based doctrine of racial supremacy, and its consequence was the genocide of the Jews. The very term anti-Semitism, which casts Jews in racial terms, was popularized by a German anti-Jewish activist who wanted to give his hatred a scientific sheen. Race is a social construct, and this is how it was constructed in Nazi Germany and much of Europe.

[…]

How Do You Define Jews?

Goldberg is not an anti-Semite, but she was confused — and understandably so. In my experience, mistakes like hers often happen because well-meaning people have trouble fitting Jews into their usual boxes. They don’t know how to define Jews, and so they resort to their own frames of reference, like “race” or “religion,” and project them onto the Jewish experience. But Jewish identity doesn’t conform to Western categories, despite centuries of attempts by society to shoehorn it in. This makes sense, because Judaism predates Western categories. It’s not quite a religion, because one can be Jewish regardless of observance or specific belief. (Einstein, for example, was proudly Jewish but not religiously observant.) But it’s also not quite a race, because people can convert in! It’s not merely a culture or an ethnicity, because that leaves out all the religious components. And it’s not simply a nationality, because although Jews do have a homeland and many identify as part of a nation, others do not.

Instead, Judaism is an amalgam of all these things — more like a family (into which one can be adopted) than a sectarian Western faith tradition — and so there’s no great way to classify it in English. A lot of confusion results from attempts to reduce this complexity to something more palatable for contemporary conceptions.

This is just my off-the-cuff explanation. One could write a book about this topic — scholars have — and still not exhaust its nuances. Over the years, smart people have used terms like “civilization” or “peoplehood” or “tribe” to describe the Jewish collective, but because those words are not as straightforward to the average person, I prefer “family.” Whichever label one employs, I hope that the above explanation provides a starting point for those trying to understand the nature of Jewish identity, and helps them avoid the trap of imposing outside ideas on it.

[…]
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Can someone explain to me the reasons behind hating Jews?

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Survey finds ‘classical fascist’ antisemitic views widespread in U.S.
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A woman leaves a candle in front of the Tree of Life synagogue after 11 people were killed during a 2018 shooting in Pittsburgh. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

At points in the past half-century, many U.S. antisemitism experts thought this country could be aging out of it, that hostility and prejudice against Jews were fading in part because younger Americans held more accepting views than did older ones.

But a survey released Thursday shows how widely held such beliefs are in the United States today, including among younger Americans. The research by the Anti-Defamation League includes rare detail about the particular nature of antisemitism, how it centers on tropes of Jews as clannish, conspiratorial and holders of power.

The survey shows “antisemitism in its classical fascist form is emerging again in American society, where Jews are too secretive and powerful, working against interests of others, not sharing values, exploiting — the classic conspiratorial tropes,” Matt Williams, vice president of the ADL’s year-old Center for Antisemitism Research, told The Washington Post.

The study uses a new version of surveys the ADL has been doing in America since the 1960s in order to get at the specific nature of antisemitism, and what makes it different from other types of hate. Its new metric is centered on affirming or rejecting 14 statements, including whether Jews: “have too much control and influence on Wall Street,” “are more willing than others to use shady practices to get what they want,” or are “so shrewd that other people do not have a fair chance.”

The ADL’s center was created in response to a spike in the past few years of reported incidents of antisemitic violence and harassment, as well as a rise in antisemitic rhetoric from high-profile public figures.

[…]

It is difficult to assess whether antisemitic views have increased over time, given changes in the survey’s response options as well as how respondents were sampled. The survey was conducted in September and October among a national sample of 4,007 adults online through AmeriSpeak, a randomly sampled panel of U.S. households maintained by NORC at the University of Chicago.

Williams and some experts who helped review the study noted that it shows the views of Americans under 30 and those of Americans over 30 are very similar. Of Americans ages 18 to 30, 18 percent said six or more of the statements were true, while among those 31 and older, 20 percent did. Of younger Americans, 39 percent believed two to five statements, while among the older group, 41 percent did.

“It used to be that older Americans harbored more antisemitic views. The hypothesis was that antisemitism declined in the 1990s, the 2000s, because there was this new generation of more tolerant people. It shows younger people are much closer now to what older people think. My hypothesis is there is a cultural shift, fed maybe by technology and social media. The gap is disappearing,” said Ilana Horwitz, one of the survey’s reviewers, and an assistant professor of Jewish studies at Tulane University.

The “pervasiveness” of antisemitic tropes the study shows is what’s most interesting, Horwitz said. Even the fact that 3 percent of Americans say all of the original statements are “mostly or somewhat true” is alarming, she said.

[…]

The new research also delved into the differences between believing anti-Jewish tropes and negative sentiment toward Israel and its supporters.

“One of the findings of this report is that antisemitism in that classic, conspiratorial sense is far more widespread than anti-Israel sentiment,” Williams said.

The report highlighted that 90 percent of Americans agreed Israel “has a right to defend itself against those who want to destroy it” and that 79 percent agreed Israel is a “strong U.S. ally in the Middle East.” However, 40 percent at least slightly agreed that Israel “treats Palestinians like Nazis treated the Jews,” and 17 percent disagreed with the statement “I am comfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel.”

[…]
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Antisemitism / Fascism

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European Jewish Congress Shocked and Appalled by Russian FM’s Holocaust Reference
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(Source: EJC)


(Wednesday, January 18th, 2023) — The European Jewish Congress has expressed its shock and concern following comments today by Russian Federation Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov comparing Western governments’ support for Ukraine to Hitler’s Final Solution which resulted in the murder of six million Jews in the Shoah.

Lavrov claimed on Wednesday that the United States had put together a coalition of European states to solve the “Russian question� in the same way that Hitler had organised a Final Solution for Europe’s Jews.

“We are shocked and appalled by this shameful comparison drawn by Minister Lavrov between the actions of a coalition of democratic countries and Hitler’s persecution and murder of six million Jews in the Shoah,� EJC President Ariel Muzicant said.

“This is Holocaust distortion at its most basic level and we call on Mr. Lavrov to unequivocably apologise and withdraw these comments,� he added.

Mr. Lavrov claimed the West is “waging war against our country with the same task: the “Final Solution� of the Russian question.

“This is not the first time the minister has used Holocaust equivalence and Hitler references,� Musicant pointed out. “This must stop. As we mark in the coming days International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the day that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, the memory of Holocaust victims must never be used in such an appalling manner.�


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Post by High Lord Tolkien »

Zarathustra wrote:What does an amateur political pundit making politically incorrect statements about the political topic of racism have to do with religion and spirituality?

Why is Wos the only person on the Watch allowed to post about politics?
Agreed.

All Wos does is posts links without making comments. Is he/she trying to make a point in some direction? No clue. I don't even read it. I don't come here to read links. This is a discussion forum. :lol:
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High Lord Tolkien wrote:[…]

All Wos does is posts links … I don't even read it. … :lol:
Hey now. I remember ya read — and even seemed to appreciate — my post re: Marquette U's Tolkien Archives.

;)


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Wosbald wrote:+JMJ+
High Lord Tolkien wrote:[…]

All Wos does is posts links … I don't even read it. … :lol:
Hey now. I remember ya read — and even seemed to appreciate — my post re: Marquette U's Tolkien Archives.

;)
Ok, once every three years I read a link. :lol:
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Post by Fist and Faith »

I don't usually read Wos' screenshots. I usually read the link to title. If it smacks of politics, I read the screenshot.

Racism is certainly used by politicians. But it is, by no stretch of the imagination, an exclusively political topic.

I'm not sure discussions of the Nazis are political discussions. They were the government of Germany at the time, so, yes, in a very broad sense. But not in the sense that there will be Dems or Reps arguing for them, and the other arguing against.
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Post by Zarathustra »

When the issue was discussed previously, it was in the Racism thread of the Tank. In what sense is discussion of current events that are racially charged philosophy or spirituality?

Can I start a thread about global warming in the Loresraat? That should be nothing more than a scientific issue. What if I mentioned Al Gore’s recent unscientific claim about the oceans boiling?

Maybe I’ll do just that …. but if Wayfriend chimes in again with an unfounded accusation of someone holding a scientific belief for “weird personal reasons,� as he did recently, I hope the mods here will enforce the civility that they pretend is so damn important. He couldn’t have made a more blatant personal attack if he’d come out and said, “I personally attack thee.�
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Post by Fist and Faith »

I don't know what post of wayfriend's you're talking about.

Racism is, first and foremost, a moral issue. It's an issue about whether or not it's acceptable to treat people differently based solely on their race. Of course, it can be uses for political purposes. Not many things can't. But there's no reason it can't be discussed without political overtones.

Global Warming is, first and foremost, a scientific issue. Is the earth warning up because of things humans have done? Why not a thread for it?
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Can someone explain to me the reasons behind hating Jews?

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+JMJ+

While Racism would seem to be an undoubtedly apt Close topic — questions of Identity & Difference having, in addition to the moral aspect F&F mentioned, fundamental Philosophical import for both Metaphysics and Ontology (not to mention Theological import) — the laser-focus of this thread appears to be Jewish identity. An identity which is irreducible to Race. In fact, a post above directly addressed said irreducibility.

The Money-Quote:
Wosbald wrote: […]

… Jewish identity doesn’t conform to Western categories, despite centuries of attempts by society to shoehorn it in. This makes sense, because Judaism predates Western categories. It’s not quite a religion, because one can be Jewish regardless of observance or specific belief. (Einstein, for example, was proudly Jewish but not religiously observant.) But it’s also not quite a race, because people can convert in! It’s not merely a culture or an ethnicity, because that leaves out all the religious components. And it’s not simply a nationality, because although Jews do have a homeland and many identify as part of a nation, others do not.

Instead, Judaism is an amalgam of all these things — more like a family (into which one can be adopted) than a sectarian Western faith tradition — and so there’s no great way to classify it in English. A lot of confusion results from attempts to reduce this complexity to something more palatable for contemporary conceptions.

[…]
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Antisemitism

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This looks to be interesting. Just a heads-up.

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Yair Rosenberg @Yair_Rosenberg | Twitter
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Antisemitism

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Can someone explain to me the reasons behind hating Jews?

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The Invisible Victims of American Anti-Semitism [Analysis, Opinion]
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(Credit: Spencer Platt / Getty)

If a hateful act doesn’t fit a preset political narrative, the public rarely notices it.

Last week, a gunman shot two Jews at close range as they departed morning prayer services in Los Angeles. The first victim was shot in the back on Wednesday. The second was shot multiple times in the arm on Thursday, less than 24 hours later. The attacks sent fear pulsing through the Jewish community of Los Angeles, as members wondered if their own place of worship would be targeted next. On Thursday evening, the alleged assailant was apprehended. Prosecutors say the 28-year-old Asian American man had a history of making anti-Semitic threats and possessed both a .380-caliber handgun and an AK-style rifle. It was a harrowing ordeal for America’s second-largest Jewish population. And yet, outside the Los Angeles Times and Jewish media outlets, the story went largely undiscussed on national front pages and cable news networks. The attacks never trended on social media. Which is why you might well be hearing about them now for the first time.

This is not an uncommon occurrence when it comes to American anti-Semitism. Here’s another disturbing story that has garnered little national attention: Over the past several years, local elected officials in New York and New Jersey have systematically worked to pass and impose laws with a single purpose — to keep Orthodox Jews out of their communities. The conduct of those officials was so egregious that the states’ attorneys general, Democrats Letitia James and Gurbir Grewal, respectively, pursued civil-rights lawsuits, alleging deliberate anti-Jewish discrimination.

In the case of Jackson Township, New Jersey, Grewal accused the local authorities of an array of abuses. These included “targeted and discriminatory surveillance of the homes of Orthodox Jews suspected of hosting communal prayer gatherings,” “enacting zoning ordinances in 2017 that essentially banned the establishment of yeshivas and dormitories,” and “discriminatory application of land use laws to inhibit the erection of sukkahs by the Township’s Jewish residents,” referring to the temporary huts built by religious Jews on their property to observe the holiday of Sukkot.

[…]

The story of New York’s Orange County follows the same sorry playbook. The region’s town of Chester is reputed to be the birthplace of Philadelphia Cream Cheese. But when Orthodox Jews began moving to the area, the residents saw not potential fellow enthusiasts, but a threat. In May 2020, James joined a lawsuit against local officials and accused them of “a concerted and systematic effort to prevent Hasidic Jewish families from moving to Chester.” In June 2021, Orange County and Chester settled with James and agreed to comply with the Fair Housing Act. “The discriminatory and illegal actions perpetrated by Orange County and the Town of Chester are blatantly antisemitic, and go against the diversity, inclusivity, and tolerance that New York prides itself on,” James said in her release announcing the settlement.

These long-running systemic efforts to outlaw Jewish life drew local news coverage, but scant notice in our national media and politics. For years, the same was true of the ongoing assaults on visibly religious Jews in the streets of Brooklyn, with some notable exceptions.

Why do some anti-Semitic incidents capture broad attention, while others languish in relative obscurity? What distinguishes comments made by leaders of the Women’s March from the actions of New York–township officials, or a synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh from one in Los Angeles?

In my decade reporting on such stories, I’ve come across many answers. Only one has consistently held true: Anti-Semitism is acknowledged when it conforms to one of two overarching partisan narratives that many journalists know how to tell and the public knows how to digest. On the one hand, there is the anti-Jewish bigotry that stems from white supremacists and neo-Nazis. This prejudice is right-coded, and typically attributed to conservatives. On the other, there is the anti-Jewish animus that results when anti-Zionism strays into anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel turns into vilification of Jews. This prejudice is left-coded, and typically attributed to progressives. Although these stories are simplifications, they should sound familiar because debates over them dominate our public discourse, not just in the press, but in the halls of Congress and the hothouse of social media.

What you’ll also notice is that all of the very real instances of anti-Semitism discussed above don’t fall into either of these baskets. Well-off neighborhoods passing bespoke ordinances to keep out Jews is neither white supremacy nor anti-Israel advocacy gone awry. Nor can Jews being shot and beaten up in the streets of their Brooklyn or Los Angeles neighborhoods by largely nonwhite assailants be blamed on the usual partisan bogeymen.

That’s why you might not have heard about these anti-Semitic acts. It’s not that politicians or journalists haven’t addressed them; in some cases, they have. It’s that these anti-Jewish incidents don’t fit into the usual stories we tell about anti-Semitism, so they don’t register, and are quickly forgotten if they are acknowledged at all.

In December 2019, two gunmen shot up a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, killing four people and injuring three. In the aftermath of the attack, Representative Rashida Tlaib posted a tweet alongside a picture of one of the Jewish victims, declaring simply, “This is heartbreaking. White supremacy kills.” When it became clear that the culprits were, in fact, tied to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, the lawmaker deleted the tweet, and did not post a replacement. In this, Tlaib is not exceptional but representative. When Americans do not have a convenient partisan frame through which to process an anti-Semitic act, it is often met with silence or soon dropped from the agenda. We understand events by fitting them into established patterns, and without them, we can’t even see the event.

To be sure, anti-Semitic incidents elude our attention for other reasons as well. If an anti-Jewish attack leaves its victims bloodied but breathing, as happened in Los Angeles, it is less likely to make headlines. What’s more, if there is no explicit violence at all, as in the townships of New York and New Jersey, there is often no news. Without a body on the pavement to illustrate the impact, such discrimination remains abstract. There is also the uncomfortable question of the perpetrator’s identity. When the victimizer comes from a victimized community, like the Asian American assailant in Los Angeles or Black attackers in Brooklyn, many observers lack the vocabulary to address the complexity and opt to avoid the conversation entirely. Likewise, when the victims are visibly different, like Orthodox Jews, some have trouble identifying with them. On the flip side, the involvement of a celebrity — such as Kanye West and Mel Gibson — can lend a story greater popular appeal.

But although these considerations have some explanatory capacity, they cannot match the power of partisanship, which regularly enables some acts of anti-Semitism to achieve escape velocity, even as others do not. After all, nothing is able to elevate even the most abstruse anti-Semitism to our attention like a Trump tweet about Jews.

Partisan pull explains how Americans process the problem of anti-Semitism. It is also part of the problem. As long as the frames through which we view anti-Jewish prejudice are narrow and politicized, we will tend to misapprehend its nature and overlook incidents we should not. This has real-world consequences. Just because something goes unremarked doesn’t mean it doesn’t leave a mark. When we lack the language to discuss an anti-Semitic act, we cannot develop a strategy to counter it or find a way to protect and comfort its victims.

Anti-Jewish prejudice is as old as Judaism itself and predates our modern political categories and ideologies. Before there were Republicans and Democrats, progressives and conservatives, there were anti-Jewish bigots. Our response to the problem should acknowledge this fact, and make manifest the victims who have been rendered invisible by our own blinkered biases.
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Post by SerScot »

There is a Synagogue less than a quarter mile from my house. We were their several times last week because a Rabbi we are friends with passed away. We went to his memorial service on Sunday morning and two Shiva services last week. At every service there was an armed guard outside the Synagogue. Two for the memorial service.

I am ashamed this is what we have come to in the US. People peaceful practicing their faith need an armed guard to feel safe because of the hatred and violence offered to Jews.

I am ashamed.
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Can someone explain to me the reasons behind hating Jews?

Post by Skyweir »

yeah that’s quite the indictment against many western societies.

The divisive nature of discriminatory narratives and behaviours aimed at any minority group ~ whether it be jews, muslims, lgbt, immigrants …
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Can someone explain to me the reasons behind hating Jews?

Post by Skyweir »

oh and racism might be an ethical issue but it’s definitely part of various political narratives.
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