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Notes -
The strange place of Jewishness in the culture war
I find that Jewishness has a very strange place in the culture war, and I think it merits examination. I welcome people trying to help me make sense of it and figure out exactly where the battle lines lay. Both left and right fancy themselves champions of Jewishness, and paint the other side as antisemitic. It's very strange how it breaks down, and I don't fully understand why and along which lines.
On the left, they're very eager to portray the other side as fascists, holocaust deniers, and old-fashioned anti semites. We can see this in cases like Kyrie Irving mentioned below, and Kanye West, where if anyone says anything bordering on Jew-illuminati conspiracy theory, they are pounced on and labeled as fascist and far right. I particularly disliked the handling of Marjorie Taylor Greene last year, where she said something (which admittedly did sound stupid and crazy to me) about Rothschild, and immediately, I was hearing about "jewish space lasers" from every jewish acquaintance I know. While I do agree that Greene sounded crazy, I think there was a few steps and a lot of filling in the blanks between what she said and something that's legit antisemitic.
On the right, everyone I know is very eager to say that the left hates Jews. These people are fans of people like Bari Weiss. I'm less clear right now on exactly what delineates the claim that the left hates Jews, maybe because we've had a run over the past month of a number of cases of the left supposedly championing Jews (like in the Kanye situation). I know that one such thing that people on the right take issue with is the left being very anti-Israel. Though really, I think it does make sense that being anti-Israel isn't the same as being antisemitic.
This state of affairs makes it difficult for me to predict how my Jewish acquaintances will react to any culture warring. I've found that sometimes, the very same people are eager to claim that liberal American institutions hate Jews due to their stances on Israel, but then will also turnaround and claim that Trump was about to start shipping Jews out to the camps for the 2nd holocaust. It sort of seems to me that most of them are so eager to see oppression everywhere, they're like a leaf blowing in the wind, following whatever the current is, claiming that anyone and everyone is out to get them. Instead, to me, it seems more like (almost) no one is out to get them, and instead everyone wants to claim that their tribe is the only REAL supporters of the Jews.
I find the position strange because cursory research shows a clear over-representation of Jews in key areas of society, yet you have Jewish advocacy groups whose aim seems to be to replace any thought of this with the propaganda that “white people” are over-represented, which most people do not interpret as “mostly Jews”. The sheer chutzpah of this group to go after rappers because they “spoke truth to power” inarticulately is staggering, because their crime is not misinformation — saying it about white would get a pat on the back —but naming a group a little too accurately. Since when do we expect rappers to be articulate, anyway? When Lebron James, king of the first page of books, says that every day black people are hunted by white people, was he called out or was he praised?
So I think this is the strange place of “organized activist jewry”, or whatever you want to call the alliance of Jewish-identifying advocacy groups and journalists. You have a wealthy, influential cabal, united by a belief in the superiority of their bloodline, and they’re pushing a little too much and the curtain is started to tear. While of course I hope that every Jewish life is safe in America, the blacklash seems utterly natural, and I’m not going to catastrophize the words they pick when they speak truth to power. As organized Jewry is pretty much against my interests, I hope awareness continues to spread, and this awareness will of course be deemed anti-Semitic.
If you think that that is what "the chosen people" means, you are quite mistaken.
Imagine I told someone that God has singled white people out for special responsibilities and wants me to keep the bloodline pure, that my worship must be led by those of special German descent, and that God has made special promises with rewards to my European ancestry, including a carve out of land in, hm, Uzbekistan. They will obviously think I am crazy, because such ideas are crazy, but they would also come away with the idea that I am a white supremacist and an extremely dangerous person.
Well, it depends. Did you also say, "According to the [leaders of the white people], [whites] has not been chosen as the people of the Law on account of its racial superiority.'? or that ""A [non-white] who consecrates his life to the study and observance of the Law ranks as high as the high priest"? Or that "Poverty is the quality most befitting [whites] as the chosen people"? Or that "Only on account [their] good works [are whites] among the nations "as the lily among thorns" ? Then, no, I would not draw that inference.
And if I said “God has chosen us and sanctified us out of all the nations”, “[europeans] only have I singled out of all the families of the earth”, and “[europeans will] be a peculiar treasure unto God from all the peoples”?
We can try to lighten the statements however we want, but this is what is believed. For those versed in the Talmud it’s no problem to say “Jews were not chosen from racial superiority”, because this is true in their legalese, as God is said to have chosen Jews on His own accord thereby making them superior. Such a statement does not answer whether Jews functionally believe that they are superior.
The Talmud rolls back Meir’s assertions, with
And in some cases prescribes the death penalty for a gentile who studies the Torah
I'm curious what your qualifications are to say "what is believed." And,re who gets rewards, if you are not familiar with the Jewish concept that any righteousness person gets said rewards,regardless of faithm, you don't know much
I think it's as simple as Jews say [positive statements about themselves] and that if a group of white people ever said [positive statements about themselves] on account of being white then they'd get called Supremists. Not because they actually think they are supreme, just, calling a group of white people White Supremists is just a Thing You Do to boo them. See also: conflation of White Separatists/Nationalists with supremists.
This angle fits the rest of the post, which was about overrepresentation, which is true but unacceptable to mention about Jews, but is acceptable to mention about whites. See also: the way to get the ADL to defend Ethnonationalism is to mention Israel.
I don't know what that has to do with the statement that I took issue with, which was that Jews are "united by a belief in the superiority of their bloodline." That is a very different claim than "Jews can get away with saying positive statements about themselves but whites can't,' which I don't take issue with as a factual claim.
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