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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.
So much has been said on this topic over the centuries, it's tedious.
The long and short of it is that Jews truly have «systemic power» that the left accuses White-cishet-male-etc. outgroup of having; perhaps this accusation is better understood as a deflection. They are overrepresented in positions of power, they are substantially coordinated specifically as Jews, including in those positions of power, via a rich and dense network of Jewish organizations focusing on outreach to/bargaining with/pressuring people in power – well, this «they» necessarily excluding those who neglect their ethnic identity or its illegible political terms (e.g. Greenwald), and the fruit of in-group preference that those factors provide, but in terms of total influence this isn't a noteworthy caveat – and their coordinating structures are dedicated to maintaining and furthering this power, first of all by means of promoting the doctrine of Jewish victimhood (to the point of it having become a kneejerk quasi-religious dogma, with Hitler impersonation being about as taboo as Devil worshipping was in the Middle Ages – at least the medievals could have their Festivals!), and secondly by eroding the capacity of other peoples to coordinate, except to again erode the bigger and stronger group's capacity. So we have Civil Rights support and assorted pro-Black activism including BLM, but the moment Blacks begin to build their identity on the Black Hebrew Israelite/Nation of Islam ideology (admittedly a complete schizo clown show), Jews pull the plug and we see those performative lustrations.
This isn't new. I think the difference this time is that Western elites are progressively becoming, well, less Western, and more tolerant of explicit ethnic casteism, especially when powered by genuine differences in capability: for a good illustration, see @BurdensomeCount here. Due to all people nominally having the same rights and obligations, there is no notion of noblesse oblige either, the useful bits of Western egalitarianism being combined with useful bits of Eastern might-makes-right logic.
I think in my lifetime, even with moderately pessimistic estimates (i.e. the next 15 years) I'll see the flip-flop on this topic, a sharp transition to normalization of the belief that Jews, as a politically represented ethnic fraction, are just inherently better and have more rights than Gentiles. Those demands of admitting the advantage, with the promise of recognizing it as valid, are not as clever as people like Roko may imagine.
This is why Conservatives should have encouraged the parallel Black Egyptian Hypothesis movement, also known as Hotep culture. It preserves Jewish/Hebrew identity for Jews of all colors while still encouraging Black men to regard themselves as heir of a great legacy and thus above the petty spites and feuds of street crime culture.
Hoteps are also usually nuts.
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