I’m on the outside too but I never felt a second of hesitation about being pro-Palestinian and against the Israeli occupation. Maybe it’s easier for me because here in the US we have the clear example of whacko Christian Zionists who are basically everything any moral person DOESN’T want to be: they’re pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic and anti-semitic and anti-Christian (because Palestinian Christians are on their shit list too).
So I believe criticizing the Israeli occupation of Palestine is a moral imperative for US citizens (since so much of our money goes to Israel’s military), and is not in itself anti-semitic. Many Jewish Israeli citizens have harsh criticisms of the occupation too! That being said, a lot of people use Palestinians as an excuse to be anti-semitic and equate all Jewish people with the actions of the Israeli government. Conversely, a lot of people also use Israel as an excuse in order to hate on Palestinians and all Muslims in general. And some far right people even do both of those things at the same time. There’s massive amounts of disinformation going around.
But even if there wasn’t such a ton of disinformation, the conflict still wouldn’t fall under a neat “oppressor-victim dynamic” because a neat oppressor-victim dynamic only exists in textbooks and abstract models, not in the real world. Yeah, it’s complicated, but all large-scale geopolitical conflicts are complicated.
I think what makes it especially complicated is that Middle Eastern countries have expelled their own Jewish citizens to Israel numerous times, essentially making most Jews of MENA descent in Israel also refugees or descendants of refugees. In their case it was “go to Israel or die.” The Holocaust survivors essentially became stateless refugees also and many were massacred when they tried to return to their home villages. “for many Israel is the only place they could be safe” has quite a bit of truth to it. But I think there’s a difference between a people living someplace and them occupying another people’s place and controlling their way of life. I get Zionists telling me “aha you think Israelis should have a place to live that means you are one of us!” which kind of reminds me of when people used to say “feminism is equality between men and women therefore anyone who thinks women and men are equal is a feminist.” It’s a tactic movements use to try to broaden their appeal but it runs up against reality and when I say…pretty much anything else about the occupation, Zionists don’t like it.
For ppl asking why she’s an anti black, anti Semite. She has used the n word and compared her depression to the holocaust
Even not counting her poetry her private journals are full of disgusting, overblown antisemitism. She didn’t just use Jewish people for her metaphors, she outright hated them irl and yet decided to use their suffering for her own gain
okay, I’m Jewish and I appreciate this sentiment. and if someone wants to cut out Sylvia Plath, go for it, I get it.
But. by this logic we’d also need to stop reblogging TS Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Shakespeare quotes. Virginia Woolf wrote anti-semetic things in her private journals, too. If you only want to read classic poets who liked Jews and black people, that’s fine, but like. good luck? Sylvia Plath isn’t an exception.
idk. Tumblr’s attitude of “consume nothing problematic” just doesn’t work if you’re part of a group that most culture-creators over the last few centuries have hated by default. For people actually in those groups, it’s not like the only two choices are 1) worship authors who hate you or 2) completely cut the majority of literature out of your life. You learn to read critically and acknowledge flaws where you find them.
anyway, as a Jewish woman, I would much rather see a version of this post that said “please read Sylvia Plath poetry critically because she’s anti black and antisemetic” than just “stop reblogging Sylvia Plath poetry.”
IMO, reblog Sylvia Plath all you want, just not unthinkingly.
As another Jewish person, can I just add that the question I find it useful to ask is, “How antisemitic were they FOR THEIR TIME?” That’s why, eg, Shakespeare gets a pass from me, but I find it almost impossible to enjoy Roald Dahl’s work knowing that he once said, “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity… Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
Personally speaking, I think the modernists are scattered either side of the borderline. Casual antisemitism was common but the virulence of Ezra Pound’s strain was unusual even back then.
Tomorrow (Wednesday, March 28th) a march is being organized in memory of Mireille Knoll, starting at 6.30pm place de la Nation in Paris. This is not a demonstration but a way to honour her memory as well as the memories of all victims of antisemitism in France. I don’t know if the march will be wheelchair-accessible; the itinerary is about 700m long. Non-Jews, if you can attend, please come march with us. If you can’t, please spread the word.
Fliers posted on the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota blamed Jewish politicians for gun control efforts.
Headlined “Why Are Jews After Our Guns,” the fliers blamed Jewish politicians for attacks on “our beloved 2nd Amendment,” the Minnesota Star Tribune reported.
The fliers listed Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, and Chuck Schumer, D-New York, and other prominent Jewish politicians. It also showed images of the yellow stars that Jews were forced to wear in the Nazi concentration camps as well as caricatures of hook-nosed men with long beards.
The fliers said they were “brought to you” by the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.
70’s feminists: let’s celebrate our natural body hair! wahoo!
terfs, circa 2018: actually fuck hairy women no matter if they’re cis or trans as long as i can use body hair as an argument to insult trans women…. uhm what’s the racialization of ethnic traits to deny womanhood to woc and/or jewish women?
From @schraubd, who I strongly recommend following.
On another level, however, the claimed befuddlement as to why Jews care about leftists – out-of-power, comparatively marginal – praising Farrakhan is sadly revealing regarding how some on the left conceptualize Jews. For there is an obvious reason why Jews might take it extra hard when persons on the left endorse the rank bigotry of Louis Farrakhan.
It’s because most of us are of the left too. And there’s nothing strange about feeling extra hurt when members of your own community are the one’s causing the wound.
This reason is so obvious that it’s worth dwelling on why it is so often overlooked. And here we begin to see the real stakes of the controversy: whether Jews are indeed recognized as members of this left-liberal community.
While both left- and right-wing anti-Semitism matter to Jews, they affect us along very different vectors.
Put bluntly, in the United States the anti-Semitism that is most likely to put a bullet in my brain emanates from the right. That matters, and nobody should be in denial about that raw and sobering fact.
But on a day-to-day basis, left-wing anti-Semitism is far more likely to obstruct Jews from joining movements we want to join, or force us out of communities and spaces which are very much ours.
Deeply embedded in the puzzlement over Jewish concern in cases like this is the assumption that the left is not our home; that Jews come to this controversy as strangers. The Jewish presence on the left is always at best probationary, and so any time Jews criticize the left we prove we are unworthy of membership. Those who would self-identify as left are denied that label. We are infiltrators, rabble-rousers, coming in under false pretenses.
…
The only reason it’s hard to understand why Jews care about left-wing anti-Semitism is if one implicitly doesn’t believe Jews should care about the goings on of the left, because one does not see Jews as fundamentally part of the left.
But many – most – of us are. So when I watch conservatives play footsie with Holocaust deniers and alt-right neo-Nazis it is simultaneously more worrisome, because conservatives currently control the levers of American power, and less worrisome because I’m not a conservative. I have no ties to them. I have no expectations from them. And I certainly have no desire to become one.
When the left partakes in anti-Semitism, by contrast, it is infecting the political community and project that embody my hopes for the future. I have every right to care about that. I have every right to stake my claim to this space, to participate in the development of this project as an equal member. I do not come to this cause as a stranger.
Which should I care more about: that the powerful people I consider my adversaries hate me, or that the people who are alongside me organizing the resistance to that power don’t care about me?
It is a question that only makes sense if one thinks Jews don’t already come with political attachments that matter to us. It is a question that, upon being asked, answers why even Jews on the left know they will never be acknowledged to be at home on the left.
As a rule, I only post excerpts of articles to protect writers who depend upon clicks for their livelihoods, so please read the entire article on Ha’aretz.
Rush's tumblr archive 