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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28548 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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(Sorry in advance for double posting)

But we’ve made an idol out of self-pity. Being a Jew means being a victim. All histories contain suffering—but haven’t the Jews suffered most of all? In every century? In every country we’ve ever inhabited? Aren’t we the weak, the poor, the persecuted, and the despised? Weren’t we bullied at school, for our high intellects and our limp lokshen arms? Don’t other people have an obligation to feel bad for us? Even Jews who, like me, have never once been a victim of antisemitism—we’re still victims by descent. As a Jew, I’m not more likely to be impoverished, uneducated, or imprisoned than my gentile peers; in fact, precisely the opposite. But the victimhood remains. The one legacy of oppression I can never hope to escape. Like black tar on my skin. On Christmas Day last year, while the bombs continued to fall, the smug fucking face of smug Stephen Fry took over British TV to demand that the public do more to cherish and pity the Jews. Anything unpleasant—the taunts of some ordinary bigot, or the resistance of a people violently dispossessed for seventy-five years—gets folded into the vast archive of Jewish suffering, from Tiglath-Pileser to the death camps.

I really do agree with Kriss here. As a Jew I find Jewish self-pity nauseating and embarrassing, but even more than that I find it kind of humiliating. But it’s important to note that many Israelis would agree with him too.

Israel was not borne of Jewish self-pity. Crying about how the goyim are oppressing us is, after all, probably the oldest diaspora Jewish pastime. You can find thousands of examples of it over the centuries, from medieval England to 17th century Iran, from the Old Testament to the shtetl. Diasporic Jewish writing for much of the last millennium, in both the Middle East and Europe, often accepted gentile torment as either just punishment by God, or just as an unfortunate reality of the test imposed by God on earth in anticipation of the world to come. Efforts to actually end that victimhood were limited to individual community success stories in some countries at some times, but little else.

Israel was a response to that, an effort to break free of it, to not be victims again and forevermore.

Sure, it is true that some of Israel’s supporters use the ‘historical oppression’ angle to justify Zionism. Personally I find that distasteful, though I understand that in the modern western progressive milieu an oppressed victimhood framework is pretty much the only acceptable one. But the actual core of the idea is quite different. It’s a commitment against self-pity, an acknowledgment of the hard ways of the world, an acceptance that while spiritual salvation and religious purity have their value, they are insufficient when it comes to survival in our earthly lives.

Yes, I agree completely. I'm on a mailing list for Jews at my company and the neurosis makes me sick to my stomach sometimes. People talking about the latest microaggression, dredging up old trauma, people talking about where to move if/wheb the US gets uninhabitable for Jews - it's ridiculous. The USA remains a great place to be Jewish, the place that seems most likely to remain so, and if it doesn't, there comes a time to plant your feet in your homeland and make a stand.

Our one was very inactive, a few people posting about challah baking, some orthodox people who work in back office trade functions in NYC/NJ posting Torah readings or rebbe quotes, and Israelis in the engineering team posting about Israeli EDM/techno/whatever. Political discussion is discouraged but unfortunately ours has just become “hope you guys are feeling safe, here are some mental health resources” concernposting since October 7th.

Israel was not borne of Jewish self-pity.

Surely as a well read Jew, what did the Zionist think was going to happen to the Palestinians living on and around the lands they were buying and settling on ?

Because to me the whole idea of 'Israel' placed in the historical region seems extremely stupid. Surely in the 19th century, you could have foreseen that the same factors that caused population explosion in Europe - sanitation, medicine, better agriculture - would eventually spread to the mid East.

You also had a rich history of nationalist strife in Europe at the time. So settling a land in a situation that was virtually guaranteed to end up with a worse version of the Czech / German issue was just nuts. And we all know how Czech / German relations in Bohemia were eventually settled.

In the 19th century kicking savages off their land to set up settler colonies was less condemned.

It was pretty clear which way the wind was blowing by 1910s.

Churchill’s infamous quote about settler colonialism (“I do not admit that a great wrong”) was made in 1937.

Was he pandering to the clueless masses or expressing elite opinion of the day?

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It seems it was in a parliamentary panel on Palestine where this exact comparison was raised. In any case, he was a lifelong imperialist, which for much of the period was as much a liberal position as a conservative one. The liberals were more mercenary, and were divided over Empire, but there was a strong imperialist tendency in the liberal party early in the 20th century (referred to in contemporary politics as th gulf between the new idealists, moderates, liberal imperialists and - on the anti-empire side - little englanders). The early 20th century from around 1901 to 1935, despite the fact that Britain had already began its terminal decline and was already poorer than the US in absolute and per capita terms, was in fact the height of imperialist sentiment.

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