Jewish Privilege

Antisemitism and Jewishness from the Perspective of Jews

[jewish-privilege]

by Sam Weinberg

(...)  At the time of my visit to [Highland Park], the memorial was 30 feet away from the nearest police tape. It consisted of bouquets and hand-drawn signs addressing gun violence piled deliberately in front of seven white-painted vertical beams, arranged in an inward-facing semicircle. Atop each beam was a single electric tea candle and mounted on each were blue hearts on which victims’ names and brief, heartfelt messages were written in Sharpie. Orange ribbons, a symbol of gun violence prevention advocacy, were tied to nearby trees and bushes.

I initially thought nothing of the display beyond its obvious disconcerting solemnity. It struck me as a typical assemblage of things and people in response to a type of event which also has become all too typical in the United States. But for a notably Jewish suburb (estimates range from 30% to 50%), any evidence of Judaism or Jewish memorial practices was absent.

Not one stone. Not a single “BDE” sign. No printed copies of the Mourner’s Kaddish.

In fact, in front of each of the seven white poles were small wooden model imitations of church facades, each replete with two tiny crosses on miniature spires and an American flag front and center. On each pale-blue heart were vertical ichthys — colloquially known as “Jesus fish.” Amid the heap of flowers, signs, notes, and the occasional stuffed animal were Christian devotional candles, with images of Christ, angels and various saints on the glass cylinders surrounding the candle wax.

Seeing such explicit Christian imagery in a public space in such a Jewish town initially confused me, then annoyed me. Ari Glassenberg, a cousin of one of the victims, Jacki Sundheim, had a similar reaction upon seeing the mini churches and crosses two days after the shooting, when she visited to leave flowers in memory of her relative. “It kind of shocked me,” Glassenberg wrote to me in a text message.

“It made me a little mad that someone who cared enough to make all those little churches didn’t care enough to Google search Jacki’s name and see that she was Jewish.”

(...)  In all, five of the seven people fatally shot on Monday were either married to Jews and the parents of Jews, or Jews themselves.

As Jews living in the United States, we are accustomed to having our traditions and beliefs put in overtly Christocentric terms. It isn’t uncommon to hear Hanukkah referred to as “Jewish Christmas” or bat and bar mitzvahs labeled erroneously as the Jewish version of baptisms or confirmations.

The ubiquity of Christian imagery, ranging from the explicitly religious like crucifixes and Nativity scenes to the more secular like Christmas trees and Easter eggs, is unavoidable to American Jews. These symbols and cultural norms are generally non-threatening, but they still perpetuate a sense of Jewish otherness.

(...)  This persistent and sinister trend represents an uncomfortable and damaging American norm whereby Jews are Christianized even in death — whereby Christianity is at best assumed or at worst forced upon dead Jews. Even in a predominantly Jewish suburb. Even for people with names like Sundheim and Goldstein.

Jews should not have to forcefully assert their Jewishness in order to prevent the erasure of their identities. Though it seems that both in life and even in death, we must do just that.

[jewish-privilege]

Why So Many People Still Don’t Understand Anti-Semitism

(...)

The notion that such a minuscule and unmanageable minority secretly controls the world is comical, which may be why so many responsible people still do not take the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory seriously, or even understand how it works. In the moments after the Texas crisis, the FBI made an official statement declaring that the assailant was “particularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community.” Of course, the gunman did not travel thousands of miles to terrorize some Mormons. He sought out a synagogue and took it hostage over his grievances, believing that Jews alone could resolve them. That’s targeting Jews, and there’s a word for that.

(...)

“Anti-Semitism has real impact beyond just hate crimes,” the civil-rights activist Eric Ward once told me. “It distorts our understanding of how the actual world works. It isolates us. It alienates us from our communities, from our neighbors, and from participating in governance. It kills, but it also kills our society.”

(...)

“Anti-Semitism isn’t just bigotry toward the Jewish community,” Ward explains. “It is actually utilizing bigotry toward the Jewish community in order to deconstruct democratic practices, and it does so by framing democracy as a conspiracy rather than a tool of empowerment or a functional tool of governance.” In other words, the more people buy into anti-Semitism and its understanding of the world, the more they lose faith in democracy.

...

[jewish-privilege]

'I shot hundreds of Jews that day': Babi Yar perpetrators' testimonies revealed

***

[October 6, 2021] - (...) “On that day I may have shot some 150 to 250 Jews. The whole shooting episode went off without a hitch. The Jews surrendered to their fate like sheep to the slaughter,” reads the description of the slaughter by SS man by the name of Viktor Trill. “I saw a huge hole that looked like a riverbed that had dried up. Inside it were layers of bodies. The Jews had to lie down on the bodies and were shot in the neck.”

Trill's testimony was published by the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center now under construction but open to the public in Kyiv. The center has documented the names of 159 SS and Wehrmacht soldiers and police who perpetrated the massacre, which occurred September 29 and 30, 1941, on the eve of Yom Kippur, by the Nazis and their local collaborators, in a valley near the old Jewish cemetery in Kyiv. It took place 10 days after the Germans conquered the city.

Approximately 100,000 people were murdered, one third of them Jews, and the rest Ukrainians, Roma and the disabled. According to the center’s researchers, some 2,000 people took part in the slaughter, most of them Germans between the ages of 20 and 60. The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial says Ukrainian auxiliary units helped the Germans with the killings. Moreover, according to Germans who took part in the massacre, “a great many” Ukrainian civilians “informed on Jews who were in hiding.” The evidence also states that so many Jews were betrayed that “due to lack of manpower they couldn’t deal with them all.”

“The murderers were educated people – professionals, teachers, engineers, salesmen and drivers. Some of them were married and some got married during the war. They wrote letters home, and decades after, in the 1960s, they gave evidence of their participation in the massacre in court,” according to the center.

However, except for senior commanders, most of them were never convicted of a crime. “Although many confessed their involvement in the murder, they lived quiet, normal lives after the war,” says Andrej Umansky, a historian who works at the center.

(...)

Father Patrick Desbois, of the center, who researches mass graves in Eastern Europe, explained that the testimonies reveal the pattern of action. “Firing squads [were] working in shifts throughout the day, from morning until 5 P.M., and in the evening there were drinking parties, including women, whose role was to make the murderers forget what had happened,” he explained. According to Desbois, in some cases there are even descriptions of murder squads who were sent to “relax” in a spa town before returning to complete the massacre.,

“The Jews lay close to each other, so that the whole bottom was filled. Then the same thing began again. Some had to lie on the bodies of Jews who had already died. In two days, there were six or seven layers,” SS officer August Hafner, testified.

“Some had wheelbarrows, baby carriages and a great deal of luggage with them. Their clothes and luggage piled up as high as the treetops. They were told that their luggage would arrive after them by train,” policeman Anton Lauer said in his testimony. “Afterward, they were brought to the edge of the valley, where they were told to strip. After that, group after group was led to the edge of the pit .... The Jews were told to go down into the pit and lie on top of Jews who had already been shot, like sardines.”

(...)

[jewish-privilege]

The Holocaust That Never Happened

by Izabella Tabarovsky

[September 27, 2021] - In the run-up to the 80th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre, we asked several young Russian-speaking North American Jews to interview Holocaust survivors from the Soviet Union.

The stories they brought back are unlike most of what American Jews’ collective memory of the Holocaust contains. Most take place in the summer and fall of 1941—the chaotic first months of the German-Soviet war and occupation, and the early stage of the Jewish genocide. The Holocaust at this point is far from the well-oiled machine we remember it as. At this point, the most high-tech solution to the “Jewish problem” is still Einsatzgruppen commander Friedrich Jeckeln’s “sardine method” of packing people as tightly as possible in the shooting pits before murdering them.

The absence of streamlined mass murder solutions, however, did not prevent the Germans, their allies, and local collaborators from murdering 2.7 million Jews in these territories. Fewer than 120,000 Jews are estimated to have survived the genocide here.

(...)

Some 250,000 Jews were murdered [in Transnistria, an administrative entity established by the Romanians in southeastern Ukraine] by starvation, brutal forced marches, disease, forced labor, and mass executions. And yet, this horrific place offered an ever-so-slightly higher chance of survival if one was, perhaps, a bit stronger and healthier, a bit more resourceful, and much, much luckier than most. By contrast, virtually no one survived mass shooting events such as Babi Yar in the German-occupied Soviet territories.

(...)

[Efraim Donitz] was only 3 when his family moved to a ghetto in Transnistria some 80 years ago. I doubted he would remember much. But I was wrong. “I remember everything,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

Despite his vivid memories, he spoke of the period like he was giving a history lecture, rather than relaying personal experience. But there were brief moments in which Efraim was overcome with emotion. They happened most frequently when he spoke about how the world remembers—or, rather, doesn’t remember—those events rather than the events themselves.

A few years ago, he and his wife embarked on a pilgrimage through the sites of the occupation. He wanted to show these places to his children and grandchildren because he had been there: “I lost my mother there, and I lost my sister. It’s a part of my life.”

When they were looking for Babi Yar in Kyiv, their tour guide took them to the wrong memorial. For a long time, they couldn’t find a driver who would be willing to take them to the actual site of the massacres. When they finally got there, they found it desecrated. Later, they were told that their tour guide and the drivers likely knew exactly where Babi Yar was, but refused to take them. It made them angry.

Back home in Los Angeles, Efraim tried to get others to hear about it. “I’ve tried everywhere, nobody wants to listen,” he said. He volunteered to teach at the Holocaust museum, and though the museum’s donors appeared very enthusiastic about the idea, he never got a call back.

“I’m just disappointed in the whole thing.” This time, the crack in his demeanor was almost a sob.

Most of the world didn’t have an obligation to remember Babi Yar, he said. But Jews do.

“That is why this is the Holocaust that never happened.”

(...)

[jewish-privilege]

by Adam R. Shapiro

Amid all this anxiety and uncertainty surrounding Covid, I’ve found it incredibly difficult to get into the High Holiday spirit. In a season in which we’re supposed to be atoning for our sins and apologizing for ways we might have wronged others, I’ve found that I just can’t forgive the anti-vaxxers, the anti-maskers, the people who decided that they didn’t need to quarantine or get tested. The people who demanded that everything reopen, resume, who so wanted to get back to life as usual that they didn’t care how many lives were lost. It’s the season of teshuvah, of repentance, of trying to wipe the slate clean for a new year. But it’s not that easy when I need to stay home with my kids and stream services online — again — because it isn’t safe for them to be back with their community.

(...)

This is a season of forgiveness, but also of self-evaluation and trying to become better in the new year. And it’s really hard to do that, to teach my children to do that, when so many people flaunt their selfish behavior by refusing to wear masks or get vaccinated, revel in the freedom to put others at risk and receive praise for their defiance.

Most of all, I can’t forgive people who don’t seem to be in the least bit sorry. Or if they are, it’s only to regret what’s happened to them or their loved ones. And even if there was some remorse, I can’t feel like it’s my place to forgive on behalf of those who are  most hurt by their actions. After all, as an adult, I was able to get vaccinated. I know that doesn’t mean that I’m 100% safe from getting Covid — as long as this virus is allowed to hang around in a large enough unvaccinated population, it’ll generate new variants. Rather, it’s my pre-vaccinated children whose lives are interrupted every day. They are the ones who are unable to visit family and friends. They are relying on other parents to do the right thing and not send their maybe-sick-but-I-have no-child-care student to sit next to them at school. They’re the ones hoping school administrators will care more about keeping them safe than about their own PR, or appeasing the political theater that’s once again turned children’s safety into a plot line.

(...)

[jewish-privilege]

(...) [Trudy] didn’t like Anne Frank. At first I couldn’t absorb the sentiment, couldn’t really believe my ears. It was like hearing a Catholic say she wasn’t fond of the Virgin Mary, that she was sick of all her tiresome bragging. Virgin birth – big deal. But then I realized that Trudy’s distaste for Anne Frank the person – whatever girlhood tiff set it off – returned the Holocaust to where it belongs, in prosaic human history. It’s not a myth, or a sacred narrative, with demigods and martyrs and supernatural heroines. It’s not a biblical story, a tragic moment pointing to redemption. It’s a story of girls and boys, Annes and Trudys, and their brothers and sisters and parents, murdered and tortured the way humans have murdered and tortured since time immemorial.

But the next day, at lunch, I discovered that Trudy’s Anne Frank induced scowl wasn’t merely personal (it was mostly personal).  “Of course, she was a mean girl – like you see today in the movies, yes?” Trudy said.  “A mean girl. That was Anne. But that wasn’t really her fault. It was her father, you see, who spoiled her, and, well, never mind, I’ve said too much. But to me, what became insufferable was her optimism. ‘I know in my heart that people are good.’ That was from her diary, yes? People are good? Do you think she believed that in Bergen-Belsen?”

I’m not sure she realized it — she didn’t follow Jewish intellectual arguments — but Trudy had stumbled onto one of the key controversies surrounding Anne Frank’s diary: its supposed optimism. It was actually the hit Broadway play that highlighted Anne’s line about the essential goodness of the human heart; both the play and the movie end with the quote. The diary itself includes the line, but also Anne’s observation that the world would be better off without any people. Critics of the play, including Cynthia Ozick in an influential Commentary piece where she half-wishes the diary had never been found, accuse the playwrights and their supporters of using the diary – and therefore the Shoah – to promote an anti-Zionist, anodyne universalism that negates Jewish national concerns.

But Trudy wasn’t responding to the diary’s politics, or to the political uses others made of the book or the play or the movie. She was just pissed off at Anne Frank because, in her opinion, Anne got it wrong: People aren’t basically good. For Trudy, the Shoah was never a rhetorical weapon or a political tool – it wasn’t up for grabs to the loudest shouter. It was her personal story. To me, it felt like Trudy longed for Anne to have survived, just so that Trudy could have told her off, survivor to survivor, person to person.

I cried a little the day Trudy’s daughter emailed me that her mother had died; she was a friend, and I will always miss her. But a deeper gloom hit me the next day, when I realized that as the last of the survivors pass away, the Holocaust is truly up for grabs. Without the grounding of Trudy and her contemporaries, we’re free to hurl the term “kapo” at whoever doesn’t share our politics, free to spin the Auschwitz narrative whichever way suits our ideology, free to twist and bend and stretch the Shoah so that it speaks to whatever issue is on our mind. Trudy is gone, so there’s no one to shame us into stopping.

This is genuinely one of the most well-written things I’ve ever read about Anne Frank and the universalization and dehumanization of the Holocaust and its victims.

[jewish-privilege]

'Good Jewish boy' or chief 'infiltrator'? NJ man spent years as fake rabbi in Israel, groups say

A self-professed "good Jewish boy from New Jersey," Rabbi Michael Elkohen had come a long way.

In the ultra-Orthodox enclave in Jerusalem where Elkohen now lives, he was often called on to perform marriages, circumcisions and other sacred Jewish rituals. He was even hired to write Torah scrolls, handwritten copies of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, in a task typically reserved for the most devout and highly trained scribes.

But for 15 years, Elkohen was apparently living a lie. The father of five with the black hat, beard and side curls was fluent in Judaic texts and traditions but living a double life: Born Michael Elk in Salem County, he was actually a Christian missionary sent to the Holy Land to convert Jews, according to two anti-missionary groups whose accusations have captivated Israelis in recent days.

Elk's tale has grabbed headlines across the Jewish state, where religious leaders see a growing trend of covert missionary work by evangelical Christians.

(...)

Elk "was a clearinghouse for missionary activity," [Rabbi Tovia Singer, director of Outreach Judaism, a counter-missionary group in Jerusalem. ] said in an interview. "He was able to guide missionaries on where to go in Israel. The idea of these messianic groups is to blur distinctions in order to lure Jews who would otherwise resist the Christian message."

(...)

The revelations have also raised questions about Elk's late wife, Amanda, who claimed to be the daughter of Holocaust survivors and died of cancer in February. Her ties to the faith also appear to have been faked, meaning her Orthodox funeral in a Jewish cemetery would defy religious law.

Michael and Amanda Elk emigrated to Israel using forged documents and with the help of South Carolina-based Morningstar Missions, according to Beyneynu and Outreach Judaism.

(...)

Elk's path to missionary work isn't completely clear, but he appears to have served as a minister for a time in Olympia, Washington, according to Alan Brill, a professor of Jewish-Christian Studies at Seton Hall University. He published an online interview with Elk in 2012.

(...)

Michael Elk eventually ran a yeshiva for Messianic Jews and sought to raise his prominence in the Jewish community, said Beyneynu founder Shannon Nuszen. His five children attended ultra-Orthodox schools, and Elk worked as a scribe, rabbi and mohel, performing circumcisions. He claimed to be a "kohen," a descendant of Aaron, the biblical high priest.  

All the while, he was working to coordinate missionary work in Israel, according to the watchdog groups. While living as a rabbi, Elk authored a book and anonymous blog posts about his work as an undercover evangelist, according to the Jerusalem Post.

(...)

"He's the leader of this new variety of infiltrators who portray themselves perfectly as very religious Jews," Nuszen said. "He teaches them everything from how to pronounce things correctly, how to dress, to the intricacies of Jewish law .... Michael has students and online followers all over."

She estimates that there are about 30,000 missionaries in Israel, 300 organizations focused on evangelizing Jews and 200 websites dedicated to converting them.

Elk authored a book under the pseudonym "Orthodox Jewish Rabbi" for Morningstar Ministries, based in Fort Mill, South Carolina. In an interview, the group's founder, Rick Joyner, recalled Elk attending Morningstar conferences and praised his "remarkable" religious knowledge.

"When people hear the word 'missionary,' they often think it means someone who is trying to convert them to Christianity, but that was not Michael's intent," Joyner said. "He was in Israel to help and to learn." [Alexis’s note: That’s because that’s LITERALLY the definition of missionary.]

(...)

The controversy is likely to set back efforts to build bridges among Jews and Christians in Israel, said Jonathan Feldstein, a former Teaneck resident whose Jerusalem-based Genesis 123 Foundation focuses on such work.

“The deceit of a Christian family living literally in disguise as Orthodox Jews will only serve to highlight the long and sadly very bad history of Christians persecuting and forcefully converting Jews," he said.

[jewish-privilege]

Police Investigate Smashed Windows At Bronx Synagogues And Jewish Center As Hate Crime

Police are investigating six different vandalism incidents targeting Jewish institutions in the Bronx.

The NYPD's Hate Crime Task Force is investigating six different incidents in which a suspect threw rocks at windows and doors, shattering them, at four different Jewish institutions in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx.

Sometime after midnight on April 23rd [2021], a man threw two rocks at the front door, shattering the glass, at the Riverdale Jewish Center on Independence Avenue, according to an NYPD spokesperson, Officer Arthur Tsui.

Around the same time that night, a man threw two rocks at the center's synagogue nearby on West 246th Street, the Chabad Lubavitch of Riverdale. Both of the Riverdale buildings were damaged again on Saturday night after 11 p.m., according to the police spokesperson.

The windows at the Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale (CSAIR) were also smashed that Saturday night. In a sixth incident, someone broke the windows at the Young Israel of Riverdale on Henry Hudson Parkway, though it is not clear when exactly it occurred.

The Riverdale Jewish Center's Senior Rabbi Dovid Zirkind and president Marc Spear said nobody was hurt in either incident at the center.

"The fact that someone would specifically and repeatedly target houses of worship is of great distress to us all," they said in an email. "An act of hate such as this is simply unacceptable."

They are working with the police department to find the individual who smashed the windows.

(...)

"Fortunately, no one was in the building at the time," the spokesman said. "We greatly appreciate the response of the NYPD to protect our community from further acts of senseless hatred. Our local Jewish community, interfaith partners, and elected officials are a source of strength. We stand against hate of any kind and will continue to celebrate being Jewish and supporting one another."  

Other synagogues targeted did not immediately respond to emails.

(...)

Governor Andrew Cuomo has directed the state police's hate crimes unit to offer assistance to the city's investigation, similar to the governor's announcement regarding the beating of an older Asian man in East Harlem this weekend.

(...)

[jewish-privilege]

צדק צדק תרדף.

Justice, justice you shall pursue. This wasn't quite justice but this is the beginning of accountability.

May George Floyd's memory be a blessing.

[tamamita]

People ask why pork is non-kosher/haram... isn't it obvious?

It's cause pigs are sus.

[didyoumeanxianity]

Tonight begins Yom HaShoah.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is the day the international community remembers the horrific atrocities, the world’s indifference, and the victims of the Holocaust. Ideally, anyway, but that’s a conversation for another time.

This is not that. This is the day Jews around the world mourn our 6,000,000+ dead. Two-thirds of European Jews. One-third of the world’s Jewish population.

Our population still has not recovered.

Those are big numbers. So let me bring them home to smaller ones. My grandmother (z”l) was born into a family of eight (she made the ninth). My grandmother and four others survived the Shoah. Four perished. Two in KZ Ravensbrück. Two more at the hands of the SS Politzei. May their memories be for a blessing.

The survivors? Two hidden children. A young seamstress that survived brutal work camps. A boy told to ride his bike as far away as he could that found a way onto a kindertransport. A young woman who’d been on a teen trip to the British Mandate who heeded her parents warnings not to go back home. Two of them are still alive today, and the rest lived to ripe old age and saw their lineages pass down to children, grandchildren, and, in my grandmother’s case, a great-grandchild.

They were the lucky ones, but what they survived left permanent marks. They cannot forget the Shoah and neither shall I.

There are only two of them left, and their biggest fear is that the Shoah and its tragedies and lessons will be forgotten.

Remember them. Remember their family. Remember the Shoah.

Remember.

Never forget. Never again.

May the names of the millions be for a blessing.

[hachama]

My grandmother was born in Germany.  She was a twin.

She survived firebombings, and being turned in.  She survived the work camps, even when the rest of her group was sent to Auschwitz.  She was sick with lead poisoning, so the Nazis didn’t bother sending her.  She was already dying, after all.

Then liberation came.  My grandfather was an American Army admin officer.  They were married in Berlin and moved back to the United States after the war.  Bubbe had a bad back for the rest of her life, and developed cancer.  Her twin also made it out (I don’t know the details) and never had cancer.

My Bubbe died of metastatic cancer in 1985.  In the 40 years she lived post-Shoah, she had two children and saw three of her grandchildren born and named as Jews.  She was married to a man who thought the sun rose and set in her eyes.  She made art, travelled, loved and was loved in return.  

I never got to know my Bubbe, she died when I was too young to remember her.  But I should have had that chance.  The Shoah took her from her family too soon, and she was one of the survivors.

[phoukanamedpookie]

Preserving a rare piece of family history, I ask my mom about what her father (my grandfather) witnessed at a concentration camp he helped liberate in WW2.

If you’ve got about 15 minutes, please listen and share.

I know it’s tough material, but this is a history that will be lost if it’s not preserved and shared.

EDIT: I’m emphatically not a professional, and I recorded these a few years ago, so apologies for rookie mistakes.

[phoukanamedpookie]

Today is Yom HaShoah, when we commemorate the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

[jewish-privilege]

Starting this evening, May 1, 2019, and lasting through tomorrow, May 2, 2019, is Yom haShoah. Today we remember the six million Jewish people who had their rights of citizenship taken were, who were ghettoized and segregated, who were forced to choose who would live or die, who were marched or sent via train to be gassed in showers and burned to ash or buried by other Jews forced to dig their graves.

Today, after yet another shooting against Jews for being Jews where Lori Kaye, Z’’L, was murdered, many of us who are familiar with the refrain “Never Again” are instead saying “It keeps happening.” It happened in Pittsburgh last October. It happened last January with the murder of Blaze Bernstein, Z’’L. It happened during the Unite the Right rally in August of 2017 when white supremacists marched past a synagogue, shouted “Jews will not replace us,” and ended with the assault of DeAndre Harris (by anti-Black, white supremacists) and the murder of Heather Heyer, Z’’L. It happened in 2014 with the shooting at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City and Village Shalom, which ended with the deaths of three people. It keeps happening, and none of us feels safe. None of us feels safe because it feels like we have to prove our pain to everyone else to be taken seriously. Our pain and deaths and experiences are not enough in and of themselves. And even then, the validation is fleeting and temporal at best.

It should be enough for us to tell you about our pain. It should be enough to see us killed for being Jewish. It should be enough to remind people that the Shoah happened within living memory. It should be enough for us to tell you that something is antisemitic. But it never is. It never is for us, and it never is for other minorities, and it never is for those of us who hold multiple identities.

Today we mourn for the six million (at least) of us who were murdered because they were Jewish and therefore judged as not worthy of dignity, humanity, or compassion. Today we mourn while knowing that antisemitism and white supremacy are not relics of the past, but are living ideologies that continue to hurt, oppress, and kill us.

Today I can’t say “never again,” but I can say something different. I can say we’re still here. I can say that while we remember what Amalek continues to do to us, we have still survived. I can say Hitler is dead and we’re still here. I can say Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish people lives.

!עם ישראל חי

[jewish-privilege]

Yom HaShoah starts this evening (April 20, 2020) lasting until tomorrow evening (April 21, 2020).

[jewish-privilege]

Yom HaShoah started last evening (April 7, 2021) and lasts through this evening (April 8, 2021).

[jewish-privilege]

A Fierce, Brief Book About the Holocaust

Wendy Lower’s ‘The Ravine’ looks at a photograph that many refuse to face

One day in 2009, Wendy Lower, historian of Nazism and the Shoah, was hard at work in the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Museum when a librarian handed her a photograph dated Oct. 13, 1941, depicting the deaths of Jews in Miropol, Ukraine, a shtetl near Kiev.

The photo Lower saw that day is shocking. A woman in a polka dot dress is leaning over from the waist, her head wreathed in smoke from the rifle blasts that are killing her. She is holding the hand of a small boy, who leans backward, his face turned slightly away from her, as if he can’t bear to look into her dying face. The woman grasps his hand tightly. She cannot calm his terror, but she won’t ever let go of him. She is pulling the boy forward with her into the mass grave, along with another child hidden in her lap.

We may feel guilty about looking at an image like this, worried that our gaze strips the victims of their humanity. But we are not guilty: It is our duty to look. The photograph that spurred Lower’s search is not mere “atrocity porn,” satisfying an appetite for horrors. Instead, such a photograph wants us to be troubled by the terror it depicts, and to inquire further. The crumpled bodies bend away from the viewer, their pain hidden along with their faces.

The shooters in the photo are a German and a Ukrainian—we can see this from their uniforms—and the Ukrainian’s rifle is just a few inches from the woman’s head. Another Ukrainian in the foreground has a rifle in his hands, and there is another German in the back. There is someone else too. “A civilian onlooker in a wool cap stands alert, ready to assist,” Lower notes in The Ravine, the book she has written about the photo and her efforts to find the story behind it.

Lower writes that during each interview she conducted with Miropol’s elderly Ukrainian citizens she showed them Škrovina’s photograph of the mother being shot. Did they recognize anyone? Every time, she says, when she “presented the photograph at the end of an interview, the subject looked and, with a shake of the head, turned away.”

The photograph depicts only the instant of death. Soon neighbors will come to strip the corpses, carrying away clothes, gold teeth, and other valuables. They will cart away furniture from the Jews’ houses. Some will remember how the Germans came looking for Ukrainian volunteers; how the Jews screamed when they were marched off to the killing site; how the shots rang out for hours. Others will pretend that the Jews simply disappeared one day, and that the lives and deaths of Jews and Ukrainians had nothing at all to do with each other...

[Read David Mikics’s full review of Wendy Lower’s ‘The Ravine’ at Tablet]

[jewish-privilege]

A House aide spotted a copy of the Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion on a table inside an entrance of the Longworth Ho

U.S. Capitol Police suspended an officer Monday after a copy of an infamous antisemitic tract was found near a Capitol Hill security post Sunday, alarming a congressional aide who viewed the document in plain sight at the checkpoint.

Photographs provided to The Washington Post show a printed copy of the Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion on a table inside an entrance to the Longworth House Office Building.

(...)

“We take all allegations of inappropriate behavior seriously,” [acting Capitol Police chief Yogananda D. Pittman] said in the statement. “Once this matter was brought to my attention, I immediately ordered the officer to be suspended until the Office of Professional Responsibility can thoroughly investigate.”

A House staff member spotted and photographed the document around 7 p.m. Sunday while leaving the South Capitol Street entrance to the Longworth Building, one of the few 24-hour entrances on the House side of the Capitol campus.

It is unclear from the photographs who was in possession of the document, which was held together by a binder clip with its pages tattered and stained. A date stamp indicated it was printed in January 2019.

The staff member who spotted the document, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to a fear of potential abuse or reprisal, described being “extremely rattled” by the content, particularly in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Rioters were spotted that day wearing antisemitic garb, including one person photographed wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” shirt.

(...)

Videos from that day showed some officers taking selfies with rioters and allowing them to bypass security in some places as they descended on the Capitol. One officer allegedly shook hands with rioters and told them, “It’s your house now,” as they rushed the Capitol building, according to court documents.

The department said last month that it was investigating 35 officers for their actions during the insurrection, with six of those officers placed on paid suspension pending the outcome of the internal probe.

The tract, also known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is a virulent fable with a century-long provenance that purports to be the account of a meeting where Jewish masters concoct a plan for world domination. The “protocols” they discuss reflect a variety of ancient antisemitic tropes, with a shadowy cabal orchestrating control of the banking system, the media and government in service of their own sinister ends.

The Anti-Defamation League calls it “a classic in paranoid, racist literature,” and scholars have traced its origin to late imperial Russia, where security forces eventually circulated the tale to sow suspicion about revolutionaries challenging the czarist regime.

It has since been translated into multiple languages, fomenting antisemitic sentiment around the world — including in Germany ahead of the Nazi genocide and more recently in majority-Muslim countries. One version was published in 1920 in a U.S. newspaper owned by auto magnate Henry Ford, and it has since become a staple text of white-supremacist groups.

(...)

[jewish-privilege]

by Matthew Rozsa

(...)

I was a 12 years old when I was attacked by a mob of children and called "Christ killer" — the same age Jesus was, according to the Gospel of Luke, when he lingered in the Temple of Jerusalem and impressed the elders with his intellect — so this issue is undeniably personal. That wasn't the first or last time I was bullied for being Jewish, but it was the only time I nearly died because of it: Those kids held my head underwater, chanting, "Drown the Jew!"

This incident sprang back to mind  this month as Republicans tried to figure out what to do about Greene, a particularly obnoxious Christian right-winger who has suggested that a "space laser" affiliated with Jewish banking families caused the 2018 Camp Fire in California, expressed sympathy for the anti-Semitic QAnon fantasies, promoted a video that claimed Jews are trying to destroy Europe, posed for a picture with a Ku Klux Klan leader and liked a tweet linking Israel to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

(...)

None of this is surprising for anyone who is familiar with the history of American anti-Semitism. Greene is not an aberration, some inexplicable pimple of hatred that blemishes the American right's otherwise Jew-friendly visage. The American right has long had an anti-Semitism problem, and she's just the latest symptom.

This history of hatred "tells us much more about the anti-Semite than it tells us about Jews," Dr. Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, told Salon. After citing an Israeli historian who refers to anti-Semitism as a "cultural code," Sarna explained that beliefs that vilify Jews as malevolent plotters who secretly control the world have a long history in American political life. "These ideas, which I think many on the left frankly had thought were done and over with, we suddenly see them full blown," he said

Before the 19th century, Sarna explained Jews were stereotypically depicted as being cursed: They were "wandering Jews" for their supposed role in killing Jesus Christ. In the modern era, however, the stereotype emerged that Jews secretly controlled the world and were responsible for everything that a given anti-Semite might regard as sinister. During the Civil War, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant blamed the Jews for cotton smuggling and expelled the entire Jewish community from areas he controlled in Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi. When the populist movement arose to address agrarian economic concerns in the 1890s, Jewish bankers like the Rothschilds were a frequent target among ideological leaders like William Hope "Coin" Harvey.

(...)

There's a direct line between those conspiratorial fantasies ideas from previous decades and the anti-Semitic attacks of the 21st century. "Conspiratorial thinking, by its nature, argues that everything is connected," Sarna explained. "There are no coincidences and it eschews complexity. It believes there are simple explanations based on sinister individuals who are manipulating the universe. Unsurprisingly, in a Christian setting, those are Jews."

Those ideas can evolve — Sarna pointed out that the QAnon belief in a giant child abuse ring run by Jews is analogous to the "blood libel," the medieval myth that Jews used the blood of Christian children for rituals — but the underlying assumptions have been consistent. It just so happens that, in the modern right-wing incarnation, Donald Trump's cult-like following believes that "all the enemies of Mr. Trump are now child molesters."

(...)

[Jewish comedian Larry Charles] brought up community organizer and political theorist Saul Alinsky, a favorite target of the right. "He is almost like the devil in a way," Charles observed. "He's like this radical leftist Jew, he fits all the categories. He checks all the boxes."

"Shooting some of these movies, we would see reasonable people who have this blind spot," Charles said. "They have this crazy belief, and there were all different applications and manifestations of it, that the Jews control everything. That is like a mantra amongst a certain segment of the population."

(...)

With the election of Trump in 2016, those ingrained belief systems — which for many years had been kept outside the American political mainstream — became more prominent, and their adherents more emboldened. David Weissman, a military veteran and former conservative Republican who stopped being a self-described "Trump troll" after a 2018 conversation with comedian Sarah Silverman, told Salon about his encounters with anti-Semitism on the right.

Back when he still supported Trump, Weissman recalled, he got into a "little spat" with an alt-right commentator who calls himself Baked Alaska, who was recently arrested after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Ultimately they moved past it, Weissman said: "We both realized we were Trump supporters" who believed "Democrats were the bad guys." Once he left MAGA world, however, Weissman said "the anti-Semitism definitely escalated" in interactions with his former allies.

"When I became a Democrat, I was called 'the k-word'" and targeted by "anti-Semitic slurs and tropes," Weissman said. Trump supporters sent "memes of me being Jewish in the oven," and "put my name in parentheses," a common tactic used by the far right to target someone for being Jewish.

(...)

"Anti-Semitism certainly did not start with Marjorie Taylor Greene, nor did it start with Donald Trump, but we have seen an exponential increase in violent anti-Semitic incidents during Donald Trump's presidency," Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told Salon. "That is no doubt related to the fact that he emboldened and aligned himself with white nationalism." She mentioned Trump equating the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville with the peaceful protesters by "commenting that there were very fine people on both sides," refusing to denounce white nationalism and telling the right-wing Proud Boys during one of the campaign debates to "stand back and stand by."

"White nationalism had existed in our country prior to that, and anti-Semitism as an element of it, but white nationalists had never had an ally in the White House until Donald Trump," Soifer said.

(...)

Donald Trump's supposed pro-Israel policies were closely aligned with those of Benjamin Netanyahu, and did nothing to correct for Trump's history of anti-Semitic words and actions. He accused Jewish Democrats of "great disloyalty" toward Israel (feeding into the stereotype that Jews have dual loyalties), removed any specific reference to Jews from a 2017 State Department statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day and has frequently used anti-Semitic dogwhistle terms by opposing "globalists" and describing himself as a "nationalist." When I interviewed Charlotte Pence, the daughter of former Vice President Mike Pence, she talked about her family's love of Israel but refused to answer a question about whether she believes Jews are going to hell — or discuss the creepy messianic theories underpinning the Christian right's support for Israel.

When I asked Larry Charles whether, based on his experiences, there's an opportunity to build bridges with anti-Semites, he was skeptical. "I have not seen a lot of opportunities for bridge building in the situations that I've been in," Charles explained. "The people that I've met through Sacha [Baron Cohen] were very rigid and dogmatic in their prejudices. There was no crossing that gulf with them. There might be tolerance, temporarily. There might be patience, temporarily. But there's no changing that belief."

I hope that Charles is wrong but suspect he is right, which raises the question of how American Jews should react to the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world. For want of a better alternative, I think the only solution is to be intolerant toward intolerance. House Democrats were right to strip Greene of her committee assignments, but that is not nearly enough. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter need to do more to limit hate speech, even if conservatives cry foul in bad faith (the First Amendment only protects people from government censorship, not consequences from private corporations). Right-wing politicians who attack prominent Jews in ways that can be plausibly construed as anti-Semitic, or by denouncing "globalists," need to lose their funding. People who oppose anti-Semitism must lead boycotts against right-wing media figures who cover for people like Greene, such as Fox News' Sean Hannity.

On a broader level, critics of anti-Semitism must recognize that this form of bigotry is part of America's long history of hate — a history which holds that only white, straight Christian "manly" men have a right to rule — and recognize our responsibility to be allies to African Americans and the Latinx community, Muslims and the LGBT community, women suffering under the patriarchy and the poor struggling to make ends meet. If we limit our empathy merely to other Jews, the implicit message is not that systemic oppression is wrong, but only that we happen to dislike it when our group is targeted. The Jewish tradition at its best instills a moral responsibility to see all the layers of oppression, and align ourselves with its victims.

[Read Matthew Rozsa’s full piece in Salon]

[didyoumeanxianity]

If you are a Christian that wants to host a Passover seder this year:

1) Don’t. It’s appropriative and gross.

2) Still don’t.

3) Jesus never participated in the type of seder that Jews have today. He lived (if he existed as described in your Christian holy books) during the Second Temple Era of Judaism, when worship was Temple-focused and ritual sacrifice was a key facet of the holiday. The modern seder takes most of its traditions from rabbinic Judaism, which was not the Judaism of Jesus.

4) Don’t do it. Don’t. No, there is no good reason for you to do it.

5) Given the Christian antisemitic violence traditionally inflicted on the Jews during this time of year (the lead up to Easter), it is EXTRA awful for Christians to try and appropriate our traditions related to Passover.

6) Don’t. Pesach is our holiday, and our religion is a semi-closed practice. Don’t appropriate our stuff. Don’t make our stuff about Jesus.

7) There are no exceptions to the rule that Christians should not host Passover seders.

Hope this helps.

[progressivejudaism]

Yep

[oisinslament-deactivated2025020]

Unless your religion keeps its secrets then there’s no “closed” or “semi-closed” about it. The traditions of every religion are usually built upon some other tradition. What if kosher practices turn out to save lives and increase healthfulness? There’s nothing wrong with people adopting those same practices—even if they shroud it in ceremony or religious garb.

The religion you practice is the religion you practice with those you directly practice it. What the goyim do with it isn’t going to hurt that if you have religious discipline. This is especially true if the goyim are just trying to learn more about your people.

That said, it is objectionable when people mock religious practices. It is objectionable when they try to warp the thing to take on different meaning that detracts in a broad, general public kind of way from the more original meaning. That’s a valid complaint. But as soon as you start using the term “appropriation” like it’s a dirty word, then you’ve morphed into gatekeeper mode that lessens or eliminates your position.

[didyoumeanxianity]

I love the Christian hegemony in this response. Really leaps off the page. You can almost taste it. Kinda tastes like jarred gefilte fish in jelly. (Which is to say, the worst kind of gefilte fish.)

Judaism is a semi-closed religion. We accept converts, but we do not seek them out or otherwise proselytize. We limit inclusion to those that are Jewish under the prevailing laws and norms of our own community. We don’t have to be a secret mystical sect to limit our inclusion to people that are Jews. Limiting Judaism to Jews is how our religion works.

What the goyim do with our religion, when they take it and twist and turn it into something it’s not, can absolutely hurt us. In fact, there’s over 1000 years of history that prove that point. It has nothing to do with Jews “religious discipline” (what does that even mean?). It has everything to do with Christian hegemony, appropriation, and antisemitic oppression.

If goyim want to learn about us because they are interested in who we are, great. I’m here for it. If they want to steal traditions from us that they’ve spent a thousand years murdering us for? They can go fuck themselves.

So your goyische opinion has been noted, but ultimately I fear it is both irrelevant and wrong.

I am a gatekeeper. And I will bar the gate against Xians that want to take and twist my religion for their own purposes.

[oisinslament-deactivated2025020]

I’m not a Christian and could give a flying fuck about them over any other group of people, so I don’t see how “Christian Hegemony” comes into play here. The point is that it is the best parts of human nature that take the good others have discovered and try to incorporate that good into their way of life. Nobody should be trying to stop that.

That the Jews have been historically persecuted makes the gatekeeping understandable but it doesn’t make it a best practice or even a good idea. And while the religious leaders in the Jewish community get to decide whether or not I am accepted into a congregational fold, if I wanted to I could decide to be Jewish without their (and your) blessing. That’s reality. You can whine about it and try to persecute people despite it if you want. But You don’t own ideas. It’s not YOUR religion to gatekeep. It’s a faith you’ve chosen, but you don’t get to control the religious choices of others.

[didyoumeanxianity]

Christian hegemony - the societal structure that privileges Xianity, Xians, and Xian culture in the west. It is relevant because, as someone in the west, your worldview and understanding of various concepts (such as religion) are steeped in Xianity. It doesn’t matter what your personal beliefs are, vis-a-vis Xian theology, if you grew up in the west you either benefit from or are injured by Xian hegemony.

That’s not a personal failing, by the by, just a feature of living in a Xian-dominant society.

Incorporating “good things other people came up with” is fine. No one is saying we have to give up using Arabic numerals or something. But that’s not what’s being discussed here. What’s being discussed is “can someone from a privileged group take religious rituals from a group they’ve spent a millennium, up to today, oppressing?” And the answer is they can, there’s no law against it, we can’t physically stop them, but doing so is inappropriate and wrong.

And, point in fact, you can’t just decide for yourself you’re a Jew. Just like I can’t decide I’m an Indiginous American. You can’t, on your own, opt into an ethnic group you aren’t part of. Judaism is an ethnoreligion, and our religion is not severable from our ethnicity/culture/peoplehood.

You think you can just opt-in because you think all religions operate like Xianity - that it is predominantly a question of faith or belief - which is why I pointed out your post was and is steeped in Xian hegemony. Many religions, Judaism included, don’t work like that. You could start believing in Hashem tomorrow and undertake each of our commandments all you wanted, and it would not make you a Jew. And if you called yourself a Jew, you’d be wrong. Because your belief, at the end of the day, doesn’t matter.

It is not your place, or at all appropriate, to tell Jews how our community structure and laws should work. First, because you fundamentally don’t understand us. Second, because you clearly are uninterested in understanding us. And third, because you aren’t one of us.

Gatekeeping is built into our religion. That’s a feature, not a bug. It helps prevent total assimilation into the dominant culture, which here in the west is Xianity. It keeps our culture alive.

You’re right, I can’t stop you from doing something appropriative, antisemitic, and awful. But I will call it what it is: wrong.

[oisinslament-deactivated2025020]

I’m always saddened when good ideas get conflated with and used as foundational support for bad ideas—as it appears has happened here. I get the distinct impression that the OP is a good and thoughtful person. But that doesn’t mean the conclusions that are being drawn are correct or right.

There’s a giant difference between being an active oppressor (in word, deed, and outlook) and living in the world where the oppressor’s ancestry and systems still dominate. Anybody who is a white American benefits from the advantages—privileges—of white Americans—in this way. That includes all the white Jews in America. That white Jews are part of an oppressor system doesn’t make them oppressors. This is a thing that all the “privilege” talk gets wrong. Some of us old white dudes actively try to push away from the thinking that allows for those wrongs. Hence my spending time arguing that not everyone who tries to learn through even limited practice a religious observance is going wrong.

It’s not Christian hegemony. Freedom of religion is actually a secular concept that—despite your argument—makes the practice of religion and spirituality a protected thing. It’s one of the things that has helped support the existence of a Jewish state even. Yes, it is my place to say that secular concepts of religious freedom trump your actual religious beliefs or worldview. You seem to think that your religion exists easily without that fundamental, bedrock assumption. It doesn’t.

You can’t create ethnicity. So if your religion is—by design—limited by some ethnicity then you couldn’t actually allow converts. Yet the leadership of organized Jewish religion adopts people into it all the time. True that you can’t just say you’re an indigenous person. Even if they adopt you then you still wouldn’t be. Except they would consider you as such. So it looks like ethnicity in those respects is more like tribalism and less about genealogy. The whole of identity bumps into this issue.

If leaders of organized religion can adopt others into the religion then the basis for “belonging” to it isn’t really ethnically based. Please stop lying to yourself and everyone else about that.

Anyway, you have an opinion that it’s just plain wrong. I suspect that there are a lot of examples where the thing that got done (“appropriated”) was ugly in its execution. But from a wider perspective (the one you think is the privilege) it’s not only not “wrong” it’s a good thing. It’s that freedom that helps protect and insulate your freedom. Again, your religious discipline helps to ensure a practice is not diluted by anyone who sees things or practices things differently.

Are you suggesting that there aren’t different sects of Judaism? Obviously, the purity of practice varies so much that one should even wonder what actual purity there really is. So much so that your gate keeping seems a bit silly when taken to it’s logical conclusion.

I’m not “one of you.” If you think that means I’m somehow less-than in any discussion then it highlights your actual ignorance and tribalistic mentality. You may believe that mentality to be correct and justified. But it’s the same logical underpinnings of white supremacists and Nazis.

You actually suggested that I’m anti-Semitic too. Smh. If your worldview is so weak that you have to make it personal then maybe you should revisit your rhetoric and your position.

You do not have the moral high ground you think you do—even if you’re motivation is well-intended. Please think about it.

[the-library-alcove]

This is one of the finest examples of leftist antisemitism I’ve seen recently.  Really, this person should be proud of how bigoted they are.  I haven’t seen anything this antisemitic since Marjorie Taylor Greene posted about Jewish Space Lasers.  

We have, just from a skim: Dictating to Jews what we’re allowed to do with our own culture. Rationalizing support for cultural appropriation. Denying their own antisemitism. Comparing our cultural identity’s semi-closed existence to white supremacists and Nazis. Saying that other people stealing Jewish culture is the price of freedom, if I’m reading that right.   Making an all-or-nothing and incredibly ignorant argument that the existence of Jewish sects means that the semi-closed nature of the culture and religion is “a bit silly” Oh, and generally speaking up in defense of Christians appropriating the Jewish seder. And I’m sure there’s more in there, but that’s all I could stomach.

Just wow.  You should be proud. 10/10.  Take the super-bigot badge.  

[hachama]

Our communities are closed.  Conversion is a mutual adoption, not a random whim.  It takes a long time and it’s deliberately difficult.  Our traditions are not free to a good home.  They’re ours.  It is as appropriate to take the Passover Seder out of its Jewish context as it would be to steal my cat and claim that he’s happier with you.  And only Jews get to decide where the line is.  Not goyim.  

[jewish-privilege]

Some handy-dandy tips to make sure you don’t come across as an entitled ignorant know-it-all like @oisinslament!

Look up what you’re about to claim about a culture, group, religion, or (yes!) an ethnicity to make sure you're correct! If you don’t, you may (you will) come across as entitled and stubborn.

Jews are an ethnoreligious group[32] including those born Jewish, in addition to converts to Judaism. (Judaism entry on Wikipedia)

When someone tells you you’re wrong about something you don’t know anything about, don’t double down! Don't allege they're making something up! You’ll look completely obstinate! When yet another person tells you you’re wrong, sit back and try to imagine that you may be wrong about something! Try to imagine that someone within a group may know more about that group than you, a person who is not part of that group.

And guess what! It’s okay to be wrong! I'm wrong all the time! But it’s not okay to make a nuisance of yourself because the very idea that you’d have to apologize is more abhorrent than the idea of learning something new.

A world in which you have to say, “Sorry! That’s on me! I’ll do better next time!” is a much better world than one where it strikes you as appropriate to tell a bunch of Jews attempting to teach you about our culture that they're somehow following "the same logical underpinnings of white supremacists and Nazis" because you'd rather be stewing in your willful ignorance than admit you were wrong and need to learn more.