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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   35563 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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I'm not sure even sure if that's miles away from Ignatiev's actual position, if you strip away Protestant Christianity or going to Israel and th elike. I was prompted by this whole discussion to go search for his actual comments on the issue and found easily a series of blog texts called "Memoir of an ex-Jew", where he suggests that one of the big problems with Zionism is precisely that it prevented Jewish assimilation:

What is the relation between Zionism and Jewishness? Within Palestine, Jewishness is the problem—not the Judaic religion or the Hebrew language or the commemoration of Jewish holidays, but Jewishness as an institution, an officially recognized identity carrying privileges enforced by the state. The aim of Zionism was to establish a regime of Jewish privilege. It succeeded, so that within the Zionist entity there is no legal distinction between Zionist and Jew. People seeking to establish residency there based on the Law of Return are subject not to a political but to a “blood” test: are they descended from Jews through the maternal line? No matter that the test merely pushes the issue back a generation or more, thereby failing Simone Weil’s logical objection: it works to maintain internal cohesion, and that is enough.

In Palestine the task is to abolish the “Jew” as a public identity. What about outside of Palestine?

As the apartheid regime in South Africa became isolated worldwide, public opinion in Holland was as unanimous as elsewhere, and it never occurred to most Dutch that they owed anything to their Afrikaaner cousins. (Like European Jews, Afrikaaners have their own tales of past persecution: the first concentration camps were set up during the Boer Wars.) No similar rupture between the “Jewish” settlers in Palestine and world Jewry has occurred; in fact, most Jews worldwide continue to identify with “Israel” in spite of all the United Nations resolutions condemning it.

...

So secular Jews fall back on “Hitler” and “Israel” to renew their Jewishness.[4] (“Hitler” and “Israel” are in quotation marks because in this context they do not represent actual determinations but are sacralized.) The Talmud gives way to a secular religion, making Jews the main base for a lobby that provides unconditional support to a regime which but for them would be universally quarantined, a lobby beating the drums for the most reactionary, chauvinistic and imperialistic policies of the world’s only superpower.[5]

Their reward is membership in a global fraternity, an exclusive club that allows them to hug their alienation to their breasts and paralyze all critics by waving the “Holocaust” in their faces. The founders of the Zionist movement advocated a Jewish homeland as a response to what they viewed as the rejection of Jews by the majority everywhere, which, according to them, made their assimilation impossible. As it turns out, assimilation has proven to be not only possible but a cause of alarm to Zionists, who see it as a grave threat, far greater than the threat posed by Judeophobes, to the survival of “the Jewish people.” Zionism is the remedy, the final solution to the “problem” of Jewish assimilation.[6]

The entire series is likewise an extended attack on Jewish identitarianism in multiple forms.

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