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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.
Would you say this belief is wrong?
I would say that Jews do have a hugely disproportionate amount of power in society, but they are also generally higher IQ and higher achieving than pretty much any other group so I guess I’m OK with it. I mean hell the whole reason America and the West won World War II is because the Jews came over and built super weapons for us.
Speaking as someone who is not Jewish.
The war was won well before the bomb on the back of access to much superior industrial capacity, manpower and oil.
I mean sure the Allies probably would’ve won, but the quality of the victory is important too. Without the bomb I highly doubt we would’ve had 80+ years of the Pax Americana and US hegemony.
The Soviets and British had the bomb a few years after us so i doubt it made much difference.
The Soviets having the bomb soon afterward was also directly due to the efforts of a network of spies that were predominately Jewish.
the rosenbergs were framed
those powerful who framed them is a question steeped in shadow
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