2. General apathy towards and denial of anti-semitism by tumblr’s left despite easy evidence being available (try searching the “Jew” tag for about three minutes and I guarantee you that you will find dozens of heinous examples).
4. The revelation of FBI statistics demonstrating that Jews are the number one target of anti-religious hate crimes in the United States.
I’ve lived as a Jew in the United States for my entire life and I had no idea it was that bad because virtually no one reports on it outside of Jewish sources. There’s a sense that the world wants to “move on” from fighting anti-semitism even though there is no evidence that it has truly abated. It’s no longer publicly acceptable, but that’s true of most forms of racism and discrimination in the US. The people who want to end birthright citizenship claim not to be racist, after all. Opponents of the #BlackLivesMatter movement claim not to be racists while ignoring the message and saying #AllLivesMatter. And anti-semitism? Well, it simply doesn’t exist anymore and any accusations about it must be Zionist hasbara. Even a Pro-Palestinian organization that supports BDS like the Jewish Voice for Peace got accused of being Zionists when they called out Alison Weir for spreading blood libel and associating uncritically with White Supremacists. It’s as if the right for Jews to defend themselves against anti-semitism is negated by default because Zionism exists, even if the people making the accusations are non-Zionist Jews who support the BDS movement.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. The Jews, as a diaspora people, don’t conform to most of the contemporary leftist discourse on Race and Indigineity. Even though we share an origin, a culture and an ethnicity, we don’t all share a race or a nationality. As a result, whatever countries we lived in considered us outsiders, no matter how much we resembled the majority physically and no matter how much we were part of the culture. Jews in Europe, Asia and Africa were treated as outsiders who only lived in these countries because the majority allowed it, often with very strict requirements coded into law. These requirements might have been taxes, or requirements to only live in certain areas or to hold certain occupations. The requirements often led to the more horrific like the destruction of our homes, livelihoods and very lives.
This thought process comes out in a number of different ways. For example, if Ashkenazi Jews are not indigenous to the Levant but are Khazars, as some erroneously argue, why are these fighters for indigenous rights not trying to get the Russians and Turks out of Khazaria and give it back to the Ashkenazim? Or why aren’t they trying to convince Italy to give us a chunk of its territory because the Romans were the ones responsible for the 2000 year diaspora when they destroyed the Temple and forced Jews to assimilate or die? The answer is obvious. Because they’re anti-semites and don’t give a damn about whether Jews have a safe home. All that matters is that they can paint us as liars to feed their hateful confirmation bias.
They don’t care where Jews live. We have to be aliens everywhere with no right to exist anywhere. After all, in the zero-sum Manichaean logic of the anti-semitic anti-zionist, Jews and Palestinians can’t both have roots in the region. It’s one or the other. Jews have no indigineity. If we try to live anywhere we’re landless settler colonialist cosmopolitan arch communist capitalists who control the media and the banks and must be exiled to a homeland that doesn’t exist because we clearly spontaneously came into existence out of nowhere with a documented history including references to our existence from contemporary and hostile cultures like the Romans and Egyptians.
And honestly, at this point, I don’t think all that much has changed on this site or on the left since Miller’s massacre. Anti-semitism is largely ignored outside of issues involving celebrities. Jewish discussion of the Holocaust is constantly policed by goyim who lost no family to the Nazi genocide. If a Jew complains about anti-semitism, their opinion on Zionism must first be determined before allies consider coming to our aid, which they probably won’t. After the Hyper-Cacher murder in a Jewish Grocery with clear anti-semitic motivations #JeSuisJuif never really went viral here compared to whether or not your supported #JeSuisCharlie.
And I’m just exhausted right now. I’m tired. I’m sick of living in the dissonance of the contemporary American left where I know no one will give half a damn if I’m terrified for my people in other parts of the world because no matter how much data, how many news reports, how many photographs, videos, anecdotes, I show them about anti-semitism it will only register if we’re having genocide perpetrated against us and by then it will be far too late. I have nightmares about being a Jew in America in the 1940s like Joe Simon or Jack Kirby, begging people to get involved and fight the Nazis and save our people, knowing that time is running out and getting more and more horrifying reports that are proven to not be exaggerated. But those fears, no matter how frequently proven throughout history, are irrelevant to many on the left now. Because “Jews are White” or “I’m not anti-semitic I’m anti-zionist and I don’t have to critically examine my points of view or my allies or my tactics because I’m on the right side even if I uncritically read and spread Nazi or KKK propaganda and ally with white supremacists,” or “Jews complain too much.”
Criticize Israel. Be for a one state solution. Those aren’t the issues. The issue is the dehumanization of Jewish people. The issue is the erasure of our history. The issue is pretending that the majority of Jews who live in Israel aren’t there because they were fleeing persecution be it from the Nazis, MENA countries, the Soviet Union or the Ethiopian government and Israel was the only place that was guaranteed to take them in. Treating refugees as the equivalent of Imperialist profiteers makes me angry because it has no sympathy for those circumstances. And when I see people who still live in countries like Poland or Algeria or Russia act like the Jews decided to leave those countries because they were “tricked” by Zionists instead of fleeing from violent oppression, it makes me want to punch a hand through the wall. If you don’t make your countries safe for Jews, what right to do you have to complain about where they go? What kind of hypocrisy is it to victimize a people and then demonizing them for doing what was necessary to stay alive?
Do I hold non-Palestinians to a different level than other goyim when it comes to anti-semitism? You bet your ass I do. Because their righteousness is the false righteousness of a judge who forces innocent people to engage in trial by combat because he didn’t like having them in his neighborhood. Does that mean that these people shouldn’t criticize Israel? No. Does it mean that they can be both anti-zionist and anti-semitic and they’d better watch themselves? Yes. It’s so easy to play judge when its not your own peoples’ lives on the line.
But the problem here is people drawing lines in the sand. The idea that anti-semitism doesn’t need to be fought because the Palestinian situation in Israel/Palestine is more desperate than that of the Jews is incredibly wrongheaded. Zionism is a direct response to anti-semitism. Without a viable alternative, Jews will do what they have to to survive. And if Israeli Jews are treated with classical anti-semitic tropes by “anti-zionists” who live in the countries that oppressed, murdered, exiled and dehumanized them for centuries do you really expect them to be drawing lines for them between anti-zionism and anti-semitism and giving them the benefit of the doubt?
But people are averse to complexity. They want to take sides and get drunk on confirmation bias. It’s fun and fulfilling to be filled with righteous anger. But if you are not concerned with the fact that being Pro-Palestinian does not free you from your responsibility to recognize and fight anti-semitism within your movement, you are not engaging in an act of justice, you are taking sides in a tribal conflict that is not yours but is one that you have helped cause and then exacerbated. Whatever your motives, you are working in favor of conflict and against co-existence, no matter what form of co-existence you prefer.
If you want the Jews out of Israel, how safe is your country, really? And if you want them to stay in a one-state solution, how are you supposed to be a reliable partner for peace if you freely quote from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion without even having the self-awareness that you are doing so?
When I see non-Palestinian goyim treating Israeli Jews more harshly than they would treat the people of countries like the USA, UK, France, China, Russia, Germany, Spain, Turkey, Japan and Belgium, countries that have engaged in violent slaughter and imperialist conquest on a scale far beyond Israel, that sets off alarms. If my grandparents fled to Israel after the Holocaust instead of the United States, would I be evil by default as well? Even though I’m living as a citizen of a colonizing power to which I have no indigenous connection?
People who don’t fight for the safety of the Jews in their own countries and don’t want Jews to live in Israel don’t believe that Jews have a right to safety anywhere.
I’m not asking for anyone to suddenly shift their priorities and make the fight against anti-semitism the core of their activism. But don’t be silent about it. Don’t do half-assed research about it then talk over Jews. Don’t make assumptions of bad faith from Jews who call people out on it. Don’t ally with people who are anti-semitic or think that the fight against anti-semitism is irrelevant to your cause. It’s not.
The Left is becoming hostile territory for far too many Jews and it’s not because we don’t want to be there. What astonishes me is that we’ve put up with so much of it and the majority of American Jews still lean that way. It speaks to the core of who we are as a people. I want to feel safe on the Left again. But I don’t. And it’s going to take more than what I’ve seen these past two years to change that, and Jews aren’t going to be able to make those changes on our own. There aren’t enough of us, and too many people believe our voices don’t matter.
Death By Catchphrase 