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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?

With everything going on in the world, it's notable that this article from the upcoming May issue of The Atlantic is featured as the One Story to Read Today. It deserves to be closely studied- not just skimmed and written off as "progressivism gone amok."

Earlier in the thread, @JTarrou theorizes on politics replacing religion:

Given our emerging consensus that politics is replacing religion as the dividing line of society, and taking on many of the same functions, perhaps we should try to formalize it and create an Ecumenical Political Church, espousing a very vague and general set of principles to bound the acceptable limits of politics, that recognizes the fundamental tension of politics and is maximally inclusive.

I'm not shy about being a Holocaust Revisionist, and I'm aware that it seems to be a strange hobby horse to the vast majority of people including most here. Why dedicate so much time and credibility to this issue? It's not profitable, it's extremely low status, there's an extremely low chance of Revisionist criticisms of the narrative breaking through the mainstream in the near future. Ostensibly it's a controversy surrounding history rather than an immediately relevant cultural or technological issue. The reasoning is simple: the Holocaust already is the religion in the West that fulfills the function proposed by JTarrou. Long before I would cite any Revisionist or anti-Semite to make that case, I would plead for anybody who doubts that to closely read this Atlantic piece by Horn.

The Holocaust religion is growing and evolving with technology, and the motives have never been more transparent.

... well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates. Public figures who make anti-Semitic statements are invited to tour Holocaust museums; schools respond to anti-Semitic incidents by hosting Holocaust speakers and implementing Holocaust lesson plans...

If you read the article title maybe hoping for some nuance or self-reflection on the Holocaust Industry, you will be disappointed. According to Horn, Holocaust education is essential, but it doesn't go far enough in developing a positive public perception of Jews, particularly in young children.

One of Horn's chief complaints is that Holocaust education fails to impart on children the uniqueness of Jews. On the one hand, this is a fair criticism of Holocaust curriculum which is rife with the "Jews were completely normal and, one day for no reason at all, everybody hated them." On the other hand, it makes the political motivations of the Holocaust religion more transparent: the uniqueness and particularity of Jews should be explicitly taught and celebrated as curriculum. Jews aren't normal, they are special. If that sounds like an uncharitable interpretation, consider this exchange she had with a Holocaust educator:

“If you teach historical anti-Semitism, you have to teach contemporary anti-Semitism. A lot of teachers are fearful, because if you try to connect it to today, parents are going to call, or administrators are going to call, and say you’re pushing an agenda.”

But weren’t teachers supposed to “push an agenda” to stop hatred? Wasn’t that the entire hope of those survivors who built museums and lobbied for mandates and turned themselves into holograms? ...

I was baffled. Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why?

“Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.”

But Jews don’t do that, I said. Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion like Christianity or Islam; Jews don’t believe that anyone needs to become Jewish in order to be a good person, or to enjoy an afterlife, or to be “saved.” This seemed to be yet another basic fact of Jewish identity that no one had bothered to teach or learn.

Gas Chamber Simulacra

The Dallas Holocaust Museum was opened in 2019 and features prominently in her article: it covers an entire city block in the historical downtown district (Dara complains that it has almost two wings dedicated to the suffering of other minorities in a noble act of self-erasure). If this isn't a proselytizing religion then I do not know what is. Many thousands of children will be herded to these temples of tolerance to Learn their Lessons.

They will be taught the moral thesis of the world, Jews, and the moral antithesis, Hitler. They will sit in the pews learning from the saintly apparition about the Holocaust, using a conversational AI that is no doubt archaic compared to what will soon be displayed in Holocaust museums across the world. They will write down the lessons they have learned and make pledges (i.e. to "welcome and help new immigrants coming into Chicago").

The article covers the ways technology is used to teach the Holocaust to children in the form of holograms, AI, and VR. Dana describes a VR exhibit at one of the museums that takes the viewer on a first-person adventure from a boxcar to inside a gas chamber at Auschwitz.

A way Forward

Still, according to Dara, this doesn't achieve the primary objective of fighting anti-Semitism, which she dubs as a "Western mind virus" in the vein of the critical theorists, psychoanalysts, and anthropologists who preceded Holocaust remembrance in diagnosing the Gentile authoritarian personality. Dara emphasizes:

The study’s most disturbing finding was that even among those who studied the Holocaust, there was “a very common struggle among many students to credibly explain why Jews were targeted” in the Holocaust—that is, to cite anti-Semitism.

Dara's idea of a credible explanation for why Jews were targeted is revealed near the conclusion:

“If you don’t explain the ism,” she cautioned the teachers in the room, “you will need to explain to the kids ‘Why the Jews?’ Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”

She asked the teachers, “What’s the first example of the persecution of the Jews in history?” ...

More blank stares. Finally, one woman said, “Are you talking about the Old Testament?”

“Think ancient Egypt,” Decoster said. “Does this sound familiar to any of you?”

“They’re enslaved by the Egyptian pharaoh,” a teacher said.

I wasn’t sure that the biblical Exodus narrative exactly qualified as “history,” but it quickly became clear that wasn’t Decoster’s point. “Why does the pharaoh pick on the Jews?” she asked. “Because they had one God.”

I was stunned. Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.

“The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.”

This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.

I wonder what Safe AI-powered simulacra will be used on my children when they become of age, scientifically optimized to train their perception of Jews - and their own identity. Horn has no shortage of ideas:

Back at home, I thought again about the Holocaust holograms and the Auschwitz VR, and realized what I wanted. I want a VR experience of the Strashun Library in Vilna, the now-destroyed research center full of Yiddish writers and historians documenting centuries of Jewish life. I want a VR of a night at the Yiddish theater in Warsaw—and a VR of a Yiddish theater in New York. I want holograms of the modern writers and scholars who revived the Hebrew language from the dead—and I definitely want an AI component, so I can ask them how they did it. I want a VR of the writing of a Torah scroll in 2023, and then of people chanting aloud from it through the year, until the year is out and it’s read all over again—because the book never changes, but its readers do. I want a VR about Jewish literacy: the letters, the languages, the paradoxical stories, the methods of education, the encouragement of questions. I want a VR tour of Jerusalem, and another of Tel Aviv. I want holograms of Hebrew poets and Ladino singers and Israeli artists and American Jewish chefs. I want a VR for the conclusion of Daf Yomi, the massive worldwide celebration for those who study a page a day of the Talmud and finally finish it after seven and a half years. I want a VR of Sabbath dinners. I want a VR...

I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews does. There is .. no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor.

I think this is true about a lot of identity and critical study subjects. I find myself liking gays and trans less (as a group, not as individuals) simply because of how often in every nook and cranny of culture, I’m told I must accept and celebrate it all. And every cultural mouthpiece must celebrate the first trans whatever-the-heck, no matter how incipient the accomplishment might actually be. The first trans pickleball champion will get a plaque in every gym in America even if the sport itself is for grannies.

I'm not shy about being a Holocaust Revisionist, and I'm aware that it seems to be a strange hobby horse to the vast majority of people including most here.

I'm not sure "strange hobby horse" is the appropriate term here. Denying an exhaustively documented genocide and then hiding behind forum decorum and wordsposting to make it palatable is . . . well, the appropriate term would probably get me more in trouble here than advocating for barely-disguised fascist positions.

A major problem this forum has is a certain lack of a type of social acumen. The mottizen can not for the life of her believe that someone would lie to her face. You see, the average Mottizen is like a quokka . . .

  • -19

SecureSignals doesn't get the kind of response you want for a few reasons.

  1. Themotte hates people who do that sort of thing.

  2. People are not necessarily convinced when he says those things. I've seen dozens of posts since the birth of this place about how Jews are faking the Holocaust or running society or preventing white people from forming a racial consciousness. None of them have convinced me in the least, but refuting them would take more effort than I want to expend. I see similar pushback on those posts. Nor am I convinced that all these posters are acting in good faith. SecureSignals, maybe.

The thing is it isn't, the evidence is entirely based on witness testimony and the witnesses say so many contradicting things that choosing the ones to build a narrative becomes absurd. There are supposedly hundreds of thousands of murders based on often a small number of witnesses with no physical evidence that there was something beyond a labour camp.

A major problem this forum has is a certain lack of a type of social acumen. The mottizen can not for the life of her believe that someone would lie to her face. You see, the average Mottizen is like a quokka . . .

I'm not sure why you think this. We know what @SecureSignals is. I don't think he's lying about what he believes.

Since we live in a "fractured and siloed America," we must teach the children to love their neighbors with... VR? You can't love your neighbor unless you know them, and you can't know your neighbor by VRing a reproduction of a Yiddish theater.

All of the compulsory use of AI-optimized VR imagery to find love makes more sense when you think of this sort of love:

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

[edited this comment significantly to clarify + to remove unnecessary boo outgroup]

Re: “Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion”, it should be noted that Judaism is an ethno-religion. An ethno-religion that doesn’t convert also runs into some moral quandaries. There’s a big movement in the Jewish World based around Chabad, and according to the foundational text of Chabad, the Tanya, gentiles have a naturally more evil soul and Jews have a soul with a “divine spark”. This is a mainstream lesson at Chabad-friendly synagogues. The religion of Judaism in its more conservative variants is extremist in this sense. “Praying three times a day that apostates have no hope” is also normative, which can be contrasted to the Christian prayer of praying for conversion and enlightenment.

This is nutpicking. I am not a Jewish theologian and I am pretty confident you aren't either, but selectively pulling excerpts from Jewish texts to "prove" that Jews all secretly believe that gentiles are animals and also believe in lying and stoning people is the same sort of thing you can do with any holy texts. We know this because people play the same game with Christians and Muslims. Shall we play a game of "What Christians actually believe according to the Bible"? We'd get plenty of Christians stepping up to explain how that's being taken out of context, and whether or not it is, it is certainly not what mainstream Christians believe.

Statements like this:

It cannot exist amicably with any other religion.

Are inflammatory enough to require a lot more evidence than just "Some Jewish texts can be interpreted in crazy ways." If you want to paint Jews as a secret conspiracy to enslave all the goyim.... well, don't. Try actually engaging honestly with Jews say they believe in their own words. (And if you're going to stick with "But they're lying because their religion tells them to lie to us," well, you haven't presented nearly enough evidence of such a conspiracy.)

"Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion” because Judaism is an ethno-religion

No, Judaism is not a proselytizing religion because Judaism holds that all righteous persons, regardless of religion, are rewarded after death. In contrast, Christianity teaches that only Christians are rewarded, so of course it is a proselytizing religion; if you believe that, you have a moral duty to convert others. Adherents of Judaism or religions with similar beliefs have no such moral duty.

Does your «Judaism» teach that all branches and forms of Judaism, from endogamous neo-archaic dynasties like Satmar to mainline Orthodoxy to the most progressive Reform synagogue ordaining intersex mixed-race converts as Rebes, are more similar in their teaching than all denominations of Christianity? Is there perhaps some Jewish equivalent of the Holy See, with a legible publicly available teaching which all Jews are doctrine-bound to comply with?

In my understanding, the opposite is the case, and you are suffering from the outgroup homogenity bias here, while disingenuously asserting homogeneity in your own camp. But also, your interpretation is objectively… non-traditional.

And the issue of promised postmortem reward is debatable even for Jews, nevermind Gentiles.

You seem to be assuming that the person you are replying to is Jewish, which their comment doesn't say.

To be fair: yes, contra @Ioper I happen to assume @Gdanning is probably ethnically Jewish (of secular or semi-secular persuasion), although I might be totally wrong and have never cared much or looked into this; he has interesting things to say about law and that's where my engagement for the most part ends.

This, however, is based on a multi-year history of reading him and has almost nothing to do with my response to that particular comment. My phrase your «Judaism» is supposed to mean «your notion of Judaism, as you define it here» or perhaps «Judaism in the sense as it's described by you in this chain and others in similar contexts you seem to refer to», and does not depend on any particular belief about Gdanning's own allegiance and object-level religious attitude.

No, he assumes that Jews are his ingroup. Progressives treat trans-people as their ingroup, that doesn't mean they're trans.

[edited this comment to remove unnecessary boo outgroup]

Judaism is (paradoxically) proselytizing for born-Jews who don’t practice, often trying to bring them into practicing the ethnoreligion again. Israel spends funds on this, as do numerous Jewish groups, not to mention Birth Right and Right of Return. Some Conservative Chabad Jews in Israel are so perturbed by Christians that just this year two Knesset members drafted a law to make Christian proselytizing illegal. Israel of course also forbids Kohen-ethnicity Jews from marrying Christians — does this sound like a belief system that primarily values righteousness and believe the righteous are equally rewarded? I would say no. They believe Israel (the people) have a special place, given a special spiritually-infused soul which God favors via communication and spiritual privileges. Judaism also has a mild caste system within the religion: Kohen and Levite descended bloodlines have special treatments and obligations in Temples, and laws are written in Israel to protect these bloodlines.

While it is true that Judaism believes that jews and non-jews have souls of different types, the characterization of that belief as "only a Jew can be a full-formed person" is inaccurate. The "animal soul" that you speak of is common to both jews and non-jews, and is more properly rendered as "the animating spirit." In addition, the word which you translate as "apostates," is more properly translated as "informers."

The kelipah is the source of both the Jewish and gentile soul “animal” soul, but the “kelipah nogah“ is unique to Jews, while all gentile souls come from lesser kelipot. This is found in chapter 1 of the Tanya which you can find on chabad.org.

He [[in the Tanya]] explains that a Jew has two souls – a Godly soul, which partakes in some fashion in the actual substance of God Himself, and an animalistic soul, which descends from klipat noga, the evil that contains within it an admixture of divine light. Therefore, he explains, any good character trait found in a Jew reflects the essential goodness found in his soul. The soul of a gentile, however, according to the Tanya, is purely animalistic and not Godly. It descends from the evil forces that have no potential for goodness in them whatsoever. Therefore, any good deeds performed by gentiles are done for ulterior motives and cannot possibly reflect essential goodness.

According to this philosophy, a gentile is not merely a lower form of life, but is essentially and irredeemably evil; his substance derives from the sitra achra, the evil forces that threaten all goodness and purity in the world

the Tanya

Googling while wondering if you misspelled Talmud ... this is a religious philosophy book published in 1796, whose general philosophy is subscribed to by nearly 0.7% of Jewish people? The Book of Mormon is nearly as old, and represents approximately the same fraction of followers of Jesus. That doesn't prove you wrong (hey, there are tons of Book of Mormon verses that most non-Mormon Christians would agree with, too, even if they think the reason was just "Joseph Smith wrote Bible fan-fiction"), but supporting a broad claim would require citing a broader source.

If you're not making a broad claim, that's fine too, but "extremists of X can't coexist with non-X" is a depressingly broad claim in another way: you can't say it's anything special about Judaism. Muslims who think apostasy should be a capital crime are currently supermajorities in whole countries. Modern Christians are mostly better, but that seems to be a result of exhausting the alternatives first (the European Wars of Religion killed millions; some German states would have seen less population loss if they'd had another Black Plague instead) and remembering their problems (they now know that the next step beyond "we all have to be Christian" is "yeah, friend? which kind?"...). There are some religions that specifically disclaim violent and extremist ... wait, no, not Buddhists too? If you step away from religion completely, it's true that atheists have needed to find some other holy sacred all-important cause to kill millions of people for, and this seems like an improvement because then the cause at least isn't directly tied to the atheism, but it does make me fear that there's some nearly-inextricable tie to human psychology.

I take issue with your 0.7 percent figure. While it may be accurate in the context of all jews, it is unhelpful here, where the topic is orthodox or ultra-orthodox Jewry, of whom Chabad is a far larger percentage. Tanya is not only the foundational text of Chabad, but is also studied by many non-Chabad Jews interested in Hasidic thought. In that sense it is worth far more than 'fanfiction', it is one of the main theological works of Hasidism, even if it is not the foundational text of any sect other than Chabad. I do, however agree that it is insufficient as a source from which to make broader generalizations about jews. My earlier reply to Coffee Enjoyer was based on the Nefesh Hachaim, which is a work written against Tanya. I should not have made that point in the form of "Judaism believes."

Chabad is a wildly influential center of Jewish culture in America. There are Chabad houses on many major college campuses and they influence Jewish culture at large. There are 2900 Chabad “houses” of influence in America. Their official membership is not the extent of their influence. This is something I ought to have clarified in my comment, which is my mistake. Just quoting from the Wikipedia, which you are free to disagree with but hopefully for a reason,

Unlike most Haredi groups, which are self-segregating, Chabad operates mainly in the wider world and caters to secularized Jews.

The number of those who sporadically or regularly attend Chabad events is far larger; in 2005 the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs reported that up to one million Jews attend Chabad services at least once a year.[9][10][11] In a 2020 study, the Pew Research Center found that 16% of American Jews attend Chabad services regularly or semi-regularly

In recent years, Chabad has greatly expanded its outreach on university and college campuses. Chabad Student Centers are active on over 100 campuses, and Chabad offers varied activities at an additional 150 universities worldwide.[124][failed verification] Professor Alan Dershowitz has said "Chabad's presence on college campuses today is absolutely crucial," and "we cannot rest until Chabad is on every major college campus in the world

Yes, that Alan Dershowitz. We’re not talking about a few devout Amish-like Jews. Chabad has huge, growing influence on the Jewish world.

Chabad has set up an extensive network of camps around the world, most using the name Gan Israel, a name chosen by Schneerson although the first overnight camp was the girls division called Camp Emunah. There are 1,200 sites serving 210,000 children – most of whom do not come from Orthodox homes.

Further reading

Does Chabad influence Jewish beliefs about Gentile souls? That purported inherent Jewish contempt for Gentile souls was the bailey, right? I thought "You can find such awful beliefs in one subsect's founder's centuries-old book" was a small motte to retreat to, but "The sect gives Jewish college kids community centers and only 84% of Jews aren't 'semi-regular' service attendees" is a motte so tightly walled in I can't even find a window from which to see out. Wait until you hear about the Salvation Army.

Even the "network of camps" stuff needs fleshing out. I went to (Christian) religious summer camp at one point as a kid. We never got an "unbaptized babies end up in hell" lesson there, though, despite it being fairly fundamental to the denomination's roots. Do Chabad camp attendees get the adults' "Gentile souls are crummy" lessons, or is "eh, gloss over the creepy stuff in front of the kids" a common trait?

We did get the "Abraham was great for being willing to kill his son when the voices only he could hear told him to" lesson occasionally in (again, Christian) church. Likewise for Noah's Ark and non-Noahs' Watery Graves, though that was treated as more parable than literal. I also reached the "Moses getting chided by God for not quite being genocidal enough" parts when reading the Bible by myself. There is indeed lots of really awful stuff in actual Jewish scripture! The catch is that it got eagerly adopted by billions of Christians, too, because "form moral judgments independently" and "treat all human life as equally sacred, yes even some of those outsiders" haven't been very popular among any groups. That Chabad book actually predates the last time some Christian authorities hanged a man for heresy! ("according to Ripoll, it was not necessary to hear Mass in order to save one's soul from damnation"? String him up, for that?) The claim that Judaism has "moral quandaries" is impossible to argue against, but suggesting that it's somehow special in this respect can't be done without ignoring all other human ideology, and then picking out one subsect to speak for a whole is like a willful rejection of all the tragicomedy of religious belief, Jewish belief in particular.

Please note that the Talmud is a record of historical debates, and therefore includes records of many positions which are advanced, considered, and then rejected. In ths case, Sanhedrin 59 is the section concerning Torah study and Gentiles, and the view that Gentiles should not study Torah is contested and rebutted - it goes on to say that "even a gentile who engages in Torah study is considered like a High Priest".

On a purely anecdotal level this has tracked with my experience with Jewish communities and synagogues - I mention the above passage in particular because I once discussed some of these questions (specifically the relation of Gentiles to Torah) with a few rabbis, brought up this dispute in the Talmud, and the response I got was a smiling rabbi saying, "Like you." I ended up attending a Torah study for a while and being part of a beit midrash.

Obviously synagogues vary widely in their level of welcome, but I bring this up just to have a contrary example present as well. There is tremendous internal debate within Judaism - even the link you provided above points to a record of debates about the status of Gentiles, and cites the very Gemara passage I mentioned above.

I think there's a tendency you get in many external critiques of religion that simply read a given sacred text, draw a lot of surface-level assumptions from it, and therefore conclude that either the religion is painfully anti-human and cruel, or that almost all practitioners of the religion are hypocrites. I'd suggest that it's often better to pay more attention to what is actually practiced - not that sacred texts don't matter, but those texts are held as part of interpretive communities. The history of the text's reception and interpretation, and then the way it is applied communally, are inseparable from its meaning.

What's the difference with the other monotheistic religions? Thinking others are destined to hell is worse than believing them to be less than a fully formed person. In any case it doesn't matter what people believe, only their actions matter.

The certainty all non-believers go to hell is not mainstream Christian belief. It was debated in the first century, and Catholics (eg) believe righteous non-believers may go to Heaven (yet the Church is the only certain, ordained, and expedient way of salvation). But it’s also different for another reason. A hypothetically hegemonic Catholicism allows anyone to be 100% Christian and 100% loved by God. A hypothetically hegemonic conservative Judaism excludes much of the world from ever being 100% loved by God, or Jewish in the eyes of religious authorities. So you’re cutting people off, excluding them purely based on DNA. That’s a huge zero day bug in the religion’s code that demands criticism and condemnation. How, in 2023, do we have a religion where the most important criterion is not what you do, or even what you believe, but your DNA? How can you really have a religion that says a child immediately adopted by a Jewish woman will never be loved by God?

The certainty all non-believers go to hell is not mainstream Christian belief.

Yes it is. It may not be fashionable in the biggest denominations today, but it is both the historic teaching of the Catholic Church and the current belief of many influential denominations.

"Urged by faith, we are obliged to believe and to maintain that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and also apostolic. We believe in her firmly and we confess with simplicity that outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins" - Unam Sanctam: Bull of Pope Boniface VIII promulgated November 18, 1302

This statement meets all of the criteria outlined in The First Vatican Council for an ex-cathedra infallible teaching. The idea that, "righteous non-believers may go to Heaven (yet the Church is the only certain, ordained, and expedient way of salvation)," is modernist bullshit. Any orthodox Catholic prior to 1800 would have immediately recognized that proposition as heretical.

Someone who dies and is buried in a graveyard goes to the grave. But christians also say that he goes to heaven or hell. As far as I understand it, its impossible to go to two different places at the same time, so what gives? If that phrase is not to be taken literally, then they should start using a more sincere phrase to describe that notion, maybe like 'a copy of him is created in heaven/hell', or 'recreated in heaven/hell'.

Really?

Baptism of desire isn't something new or even controversial I assumed?

And yet, Protestants.

I'll add that, in my experience, I've heard this as a common Islamic criticism of Judaism as well. Islam is very clear that everybody is made good and beloved by God and is of equal intrinsic worth. God sent prophets to every nation, and everyone regardless of ethnicity or race or culture can become a Muslim and be saved. That door is always open, and sometimes I talk to Muslims about how they could never sympathise with Judaism because it excludes so much of humanity. Jews are no better and no worse than anyone else.

It makes for an interesting contrast with Christianity. In Islam, the history of Israel is in a sense unimportant. God sent prophets to all peoples to teach them his ways, and eventually summed up and collected them all in the Final Prophet. Israel is a historically relevant case of this happening, because it influenced so much of the rest of the Middle East, and provided cultural context for the final revelation, but it isn't theologically relevant, in any deep sense. We know the prophets of Israel well because they're described in detail in the Tanakh, but the prophets of Israel are not intrinsically any better than any other prophets.

For Christians, on the other hand, the history of Israel specifically does matter - Jesus is the messiah and king of Israel, the summation of that nation's history, but in a way that somehow 'breaks out' and expands to the entire world. The New Testament is full of quite painful wrestling with what this means, and how you get from Israel to the New Creation in which all are one in Christ. So Christianity still has to reckon with Israel in a way that Islam doesn't.

most of the stories in islam are plagiarized from judaism and most of the prophets mentioned in them are jewish prophets. for example, islam claims that the kibla shrine in mecca (holiest place in islam) was built by abraham, the father of the jewish people, even thought this is false and mohamed said this just to legitimize the place that was previously a pagan shrine.

Certainly Islam is very strongly influenced by Judaism and Christianity. The Qur'an is full of stories and references from the Hebrew scriptures.

What I want to argue is that as a theological category, Israel doesn't cause the sort of problems for Islam that it does for Christianity. Israel is relevant for Muhammad and early Islamic Arabia in a contingent, historical sense, but only in a contingent sense. God's covenant with Israel matters because it happens to have been a very influential one in the region, but that's all. The Final Revelation to Muhammad isn't dependent on the covenant with Israel.

That is, Israel is not special in Islam. It had a covenant with God and prophets sent from God, but so did every nation - see Qur'an 16:36 and 40:78.

This is not really the case in Judaism or in Christianity. In both of those traditions, you sometimes get the idea that God might have spoken or sent prophets to other nations to warn them, but this is relatively radical. Rather, both seem to take the view that God revealed himself only to Israel. That's why in Romans 1:18-21 Paul need to present an argument as to why the Gentiles are at fault for failing to recognise God. Likewise in the sermon in Acts 17, he invokes 'the times of human ignorance', suggesting that there was some period in which God was not known to the Gentiles, which might be a mitigating factor for their ignorance.

So Israel retains a central significance for them. For better or for worse, it was the place where God first made himself known to mankind, and everything proceeds from there.

That said, both Judaism and Christianity have the idea that in some sense Israel is supposed to illustrate or reveal God to the nations. As I understand it ancient Judaism was somewhat more 'evangelical' than modern Judaism, and allowed for actively going out and attempting to convince Gentiles to worship the God of Abraham, but even in modern Judaism, there is the idea that because of Israel's faithfulness all the nations will come to recognise and worship God. They will not become Jews, but they will know God.

Exactly how this will happen has been disputed. There are passages that you can read as implying a sort of empire, e.g. Deuteronomy 15:6, but that is not a common understanding now, and I believe now it's usually thought to be a sort of global moral influence, as in e.g. Exodus 19:6, with Israel as a 'kingdom of priests'. At any rate, there's the idea of Israel as a light on a hill - God using Israel as a vehicle for the salvation of the world.

What that would look like is, again, unclear, and sometimes it might be something left for the messiah, so all Jews need to do now is follow the mitzvot and live righteous lives, as good examples to the world. Sometimes I believe very liberal Jewish teachers have suggested that Jesus or Muhammad might have been means by which God made himself known beyond the Jewish people. That doesn't mean endorsing everything in Christianity or Islam, but prophets to the Gentiles, so to speak. That said that is a very liberal move. At any rate, I think the exact way it will work continues to be a matter of reasonable debate among Jews.

Christianity, at any rate, does think it knows how God used Israel for the salvation of the world. For Christians, Israel becomes a sort of prelude to Christ - it was, like John the Baptist, there to make straight the way. This does not indicate any special righteousness on behalf of the Jewish people, for all have sinned equally and fallen short of God's glory, but merely that this was the history that led up to Christ. Israel's relevance is subsumed within Christ's relevance. The old covenant with Israel is not negated - on the contrary, it is fulfilled - but it becomes part of the new covenant in Christ's body, which is for all people.

There's still massive debate within Christianity as to exactly how this works, and I won't rehearse arguments over supersessionism or dual covenant theology or anything else, but I think pretty much all Christians would hold that Jesus in some way fulfils the covenant with Israel or is the culmination of Israel's history, and inaugurates a new creation in which all people are saved.

So to broadly summarise:

Judaism: Israel is the community of the covenant, a people that God has chosen and reserved to himself out of all the world. We are those people and we must follow his commandments.

Christianity: Israel was a theologically important nation, the product of a covenant which led up to and was completed in Jesus, God's only Son. In Jesus all divisions between peoples and nations have been abolished. We are born to new life in Jesus and must carry this gospel to the nations.

Islam: Israel was a historically important nation, and one whose prophets are known particularly well to us and are especially dear to us. However, all nations received prophets, for God neglected none of his people. All revelations to all nations have been collected up and completed in the revelation to the final prophet, however, and it is this revelation that all people must now follow. We are the people of this final revelation and must issue this call to all people.

I think it can backfire because it's not like Jews today are in any way oppressed, and Jewish Americans are hugely successful by pretty much every single metric of achievement (except pro sports, I suppose...but who cares when you own the teams). No one can point to any lasting legacy of antisemitism or the Holocaust, whereas low Black achievement can still be blamed on slavery, Jim Crow, etc. and people can still be convinced.

Your thesis is quite coherent if one believes, as you do, that the Holocaust is a hoax and Jews are waging a shadow-war against Western civilization.

If one doesn't believe that, well, you still make a convincing argument that the Holocaust is overemphasized in American education and that Jews still suffer from a neurotic fear of persecution that is dramatically disproportionate to the actual level of threat offered to them. (I actually do believe this.) But if one supposes, just for the sake of argument, that there really was a concerted effort to exterminate them within living memory, one can surely see a motive for feeling this way that is not mere zeal to convert the heathens, no?

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When you go from 'racism is a property of uniquely evil people called nazis' + 'evil nazis want to kill Jews because they are the good guys' to

'racism is your uniquely original sin and there is nothing you can do to wash it away' + 'somehow this does not apply to similar-looking people called Jews because it just doesn't'.

At some point the people targeted by #2 are going to wonder about #1 and how and why the uniquely evil nazis that they are made to identify with felt about the suspiciously similar but immune people.

Something's gotta give.

The only way to stop antisemitism is identical to the only way to stop racism, for Jews to assimilate. Unlike various races that have been more than happy to blend in together, the current Jews are descended from people that ferociously refused to.

While Jews enjoy a pretty comfortable situation at the top of American society, from an economic, social, prestige pov, they are not satisfied until the goyim grovel and endlessly apologize, even if they are billionaires, even if they are minorities, even if they are beloved, high status entertainment figures.

That's not sustainable.

The only way to stop antisemitism is identical to the only way to stop racism, for Jews to assimilate.

Jews have assimilated pretty well in the US. Unless you mean they should literally stop being Jews?

While Jews enjoy a pretty comfortable situation at the top of American society, from an economic, social, prestige pov, they are not satisfied until the goyim grovel and endlessly apologize

This is just vilifying your outgroup without evidence. (Not modhatted, because I'm in the conversation, but you should know better.)

Unless you mean they should literally stop being Jews?

If by 'being Jews' you refer to '(1)only allowing blood-related people into your religion, claiming that only blood-relation can make you Jewish and (2) the whole other host of beliefs associated with the Holocaust/progressive worldview related to white people and institutions they like being intrinsically racist'.

(2) being most obviously exemplified by the memetic double claim 'fellow white people now is time to end racism/whiteness etc' + 'I'm not white I'm Jewish' when time comes to explain why affirmative action somehow does not apply to Jewish-heavy institutions.

Then yes.

But guess what, that is implicitly and sometimes explicitly what is demanded of white people. 'stop supporting whiteness'.

'stop surrounding yourself with other white people' / 'stop excluding non-whites' / 'stop taking non-whites' space [in formerly white-built institutions]

Why wouldn't it be more inclusive to have every synagogue open to worship Mohammed or even Hitler?

This is just vilifying your outgroup without evidence.

Well then not all Jews (NAJ).

Just the handful of ones that hold such power that they can get a beloved entertainment billionaire African-American to lose a money-printing contract with a sports clothing company.

[ADL & co / Kanye West / Adidas]

But uh oh isn't that an antisemitic trope to claim that a handful of Jews have disproportionate power?!

If by 'being Jews' you refer to '(1)only allowing blood-related people into your religion, claiming that only blood-relation can make you Jewish

This is not a requirement to be Jewish. They do not go looking for converts, but it is possible to convert into Judaism.

and (2) the whole other host of beliefs associated with the Holocaust/progressive worldview related to white people and institutions they like being intrinsically racist'.

This isn't a component of Judaism, and while it may be a fair description of many (not all) socially liberal Jews, it's not a defining characteristic of "Jewishness."

Your main objection seems to be specifically about contemporary leftist SJ-aligned Jews, yet you made reference to historical "ferocious" refusal to assimilate.

Well then not all Jews (NAJ).

Just the handful of ones that hold such power that they can get a beloved entertainment billionaire African-American to lose a money-printing contract with a sports clothing company.

Even if we go with "Jews control Hollywood," yeah, that's still a long shot from saying "Jews cause anti-Semitism because they all cancelled Kanye and are afraid of being Holocausted and won't assimilate."

This is not a requirement to be Jewish. They do not go looking for converts, but it is possible to convert into Judaism.

Not a very common thing to see. At least we can admit that they are pretty insular people.

In the one country where there is a large amount of them, Israel, they can't really be said to be very nice to the non-Jews.

This isn't a component of Judaism, and while it may be a fair description of many (not all) socially liberal Jews, it's not a defining characteristic of "Jewishness."

Your main objection seems to be specifically about contemporary leftist SJ-aligned Jews, yet you made reference to historical "ferocious" refusal to assimilate.

Well, yes. Refusal to assimilate. All the Jews that decided to assimilate converted to Christianity, 2000 years ago.

All the Jews that exist now descend from people that had a chance to convert at some point, and decided not to.

And they've taught their descendants not to.

Similarly to the Amish. The Amish exist because they descend from a line of people that decided not to adopt technology and to teach their children not to. There are very few converts.

At any point in time an Amish person can decide to stop living the Amish life. Sure, they could still be considered Amish, but their children or grand-children would not.

The difference between the Amish and the Jews is that the Amish don't control banking and media corporations, don't control people's livelihood, what they buy, are allowed to buy or what they are allowed to think, who they are allowed to vote for.

Imagine if the owner of TheMotte was talking trash about the Amish and the Amish somehow coordinated with payment processing systems, internet infrastructure companies, other corporations to force the owner to close the website.

And when they would try go tell somebody about these events, their media invites would get cancelled or the media that did decide to host them would get banned from internet infrastructure companies, payment processing companies, etc.

This is what happens very often if not always when somebody talks trash about the Jews.

that's still a long shot from saying "Jews cause anti-Semitism because they all cancelled Kanye and are afraid of being Holocausted and won't assimilate."

This would be fair if that was the first time this ever happened.

Rick Sanchez had the same issues in the 2010s.

Norm was joking about it in the 90s

My point of view is that a conspiracy does not need to exist for the results that we see.

I think that Jews in general, going through the historical selection that they went through, led them to inherit characteristics of people that not only cannot assimilate to a wider body of humanity, but also constantly feel under attack from the majority of humanity, and tend to overreact to that perceived attack, therefore triggering resentment.

Kind of like the common psychological phenomenon of somebody feeling insecure, thinking that everybody is constantly judging or scrutinizing them, therefore projecting an aura of awkwardness wherever they go, and causing people to perceive them as they self-evaluate.

These people find each over and bond over their uniqueness and their vulnerability against the rest of the mean world, and when inevitably their behavior causes the rest of the tribe to suffer, they are the first out the door, and the most likely to survive!

Who is most likely to survive a banking riot, the honest guy that doesn't really have any opinion about banking, or the insider Sam Bankman-Fried, who knows that there's a lot of bad things happening in banking, and if they're not coming for him, the pitchforks outside the windows are not good news anyway?

The easiest for rich, powerful Jews to get others to like them, is to personify noblesse oblige.

Be generous with your money, share your wealth, be a role model for others.

What do so many of them do?

George Soros goes and hires people to make US cities more dangerous (soft on crime DAs).

Others found organizations to help people illegally immigrate to the US (break the laws that protect the American people).

Sam Bankman Fried goes and scams a bunch of do-gooders who wanted to improve charity.

And of course the endless stream of progressive media 'stop whiteness now', 'you are racist for having standards of how your country should be that rich Jews disagree with' etc.

This is historical too. So many Jews could not stand that Americans had a right to self-association so they funded the Civil Rights movement.

The Amish like their life a certain way, they like to live among themselves and not mingle with others, like the Jews, but they're not forcing or even coercing anyone else to live their beliefs, drop their borders, accommodate foreigners, accommodate sexual minorities, drug addicts, etc.

Well, yes. Refusal to assimilate. All the Jews that decided to assimilate converted to Christianity, 2000 years ago.

But most of the US Blue Tribe Jews I know ARE assimilated, as indeed are the Christians and Muslims. Other than which cultural holidays they celebrate, their educated Blue Tribe values are much more similar than not. They don't go to Jewish or Muslim or Christian schools. (Well ironically enough if there is a pattern it appears to be to send their kids to Catholic schools in all cases actually).

Now their are more conservative Jewish communities that are not assimilated but they also tend to be very poor and not doing much in the way of billionaire fundraising as far as I can see.

The key difference between Blue Jews and Blue whites is that if somebody goes and says 'I have an issue with Jews' then the Blue Jews can all get together and issue a statement to complain and bad stuff can happen to that somebody.

If somebody goes and says 'I have an issue with white people' then they can potentially profit from it and the Blue whites might have to apologize for whatever complaint was filed against them.

Oh and they also get their Blue white comrades to fund the military defense of their ethnostate in the Middle-East that they can retreat to if their latest race war experiment goes wrong stateside.

Integrating to the Blue team for white people means letting go of your tribal connections, denying the importance of your ancestry, cultural accomplishments, demanding that whatever remains of it be thrown down.

An authentic Blue Jew would demand Holocaust museums exclusively host Rwandan or Uyghur genocide exhibits, write hit-pieces endlessly tearing down classic Holocaust literature like Ann Frank's diary, Maus, etc, for racism, homophobia, sexism...

We need a Netflix Ann Frank movie starring a disabled trans African tribeswoman including jokes targeted at traditional Jewish culture.

The difference between the Amish and the Jews is that the Amish don't control banking and media corporations, don't control people's livelihood, what they buy, are allowed to buy or what they are allowed to think, who they are allowed to vote for.

"The Jews" don't control banking and media corporations - specific Jews do - and they're not uniformly Jewish. As I keep banging on about, Jews come in all sorts of different groups, and increasingly they're not even all that Jewish at all.

Specific Jews do the unbanking.

Specific Jews do the media influencing.

Specific Jews do the ADL, AIPAC, soft-on-crime DA, gun control, illegal immigrant charity... funding.

Specific Jews write the opinion pieces about how all white people are racist.

Specific Jews theorize the critical race, gender, border theories and teach them in colleges.

When you add them all up that ends up making a lot of specific individuals, but that still doesn't add up to the full Jewish population.

What are the other ones doing?

Are they coming out and saying 'us representatives of the Jewish bowling club of Broward County Florida, would like to address the egregious accusations against Kanye West / Nick Fuentes / etc, and show our support...'?

I haven't seen it.

If somebody happens to be an individual Jew who absolutely hates to see right-wing people get banned from media, people lose their job over criticism of powerful people, people get smeared every day for their skin color and other such things.

Then good for them.

But what I would call 'Team Jew' is absolutely opposed to them.

If that one individual is unable to shut down 'Team Jew', to tell their family members, cousins, in-laws, synagogue fellows, other members of the Jewish bowling club etc, to stop being part of Team Jew...

...well then they might become a casualty of the inevitable wave of 'antisemitism' (resentment against 'Team Jew').

That's not a threat, it just seems like a law of nature to me.

No nation in this whole world will endlessly tolerate a small group of people that is constantly undermining the majority

(which is what I perceive 'Team Jew' to be doing, which you may disagree with).

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Then it would behoove those jews who are apparently not being represented by the 'elite' jews to stop supporting them through ethno centric advocacy groups that go as far as to say that any talk of 'international' or 'cosmopolitan' elites is inherently anti-semitic.

You can't have AIPAC, the ADL, and the thousands of jewish advocacy groups in the US and act like the concept of a 'jew' doesn't hold any value and that it can just be brushed away by mention of the fact that poor jews exist.

Unlike the anti-white racial theories of unconscious bias and systemic racism, anti-semitism doesn't need to go that far to make its point. It just needs to point to any one of the widely supported explicitly racially exclusive jewish advocacy groups.

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Reading this whole thread is surreal and it's cognitively difficult for me to engage with the entire girth of it, but at the very start is seems empirically wrong to me to suggest that Jews don't assimilate enough. Statistically speaking there's a jew in new york whose grandpa moved to brooklyn and learned english, and his dad moved to italy and learned italian, and his dad moved to austria and learned austrian, and his dad had to learn greek, and each of them invested in a local business along the way. As a thought experiment amongst people you personally know count the % of chinese immigrants who speak chinese at home vs the number of jews who speak hebrew lol.

As a thought experiment, name a couple Chinese-American actors, or any other immigrant-descendants who use their influence to subvert European-American values.

One of the only apparently decent people in Hollywood is Keanu Reeves, Americans love his gun movies.

On the other hand, we have a Sarah Silverman who makes Santa Inc.

Statistically speaking there's a jew in new york whose grandpa moved to brooklyn and learned english, and his dad moved to italy and learned italian, and his dad moved to austria and learned austraian, and his dad had to learn greek, and each of them invested in a local business along the way.

Normal people don't do that. Why do you act as if that's evidence of integrating successfully?

Speaking the same language as somebody =/= integrating.

This is an example of integration

A normal person you talk shit to they talk shit back, they don't seize your bank accounts.

Only the high priests of the Holocaust religion make people bow and apologize with real tears.

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It's important that everyone observe this interaction.

This is the best way that this person knows to express himself - this is the vocabularly available to him, and he is presenting his ideas in what feels to him like a logical and coherent fashion. This is some GPT-2 shit.

The profoundly racist, like Job, are evil. There's nothing one can do to you that can be considered immoral. You are vermin. You are a waste.

More importantly, the profoundly racist, like Job, are inhumanly retarded. You have swallowed the big lie of Mr. Rogers et. al, that because you have a mouth to form words and fingers to type, you are special, and your opinion should have merit and weight. You are nothing. In a right thinking society, you would be eating rats to avoid starvation in a gulag.

Cope and seethe, I'll be busy fucking white girls (raw!) with my Jew cock.

  • -24

I'm disappointed by the lack of creativity in a post you obviously knew would catch you another ban. Also disappointed that you so easily let Job bait you into such a predictable flameout with such a predictable consequence.

Two weeks this time, and next time will probably be permanent.

Not a very common thing to see. At least we can admit that they are pretty insular people.

No, I don't think so. Not in the US, at least. No more so than many other ethnic groups, and there are many that are far more insular than Jews (Native Americans, for example, or Hmong, or Sikhs, or Muslims). Hell, even Mormons could be called insular for all their proselytizing.

Well, yes. Refusal to assimilate. All the Jews that decided to assimilate converted to Christianity, 2000 years ago.

So, what is your objection to them not "assimilating" - which I take you to mean, converting to Christianity or otherwise abandoning Judaism - now?

This is what happens very often if not always when somebody talks trash about the Jews.

It also happens when people talk trash about blacks or women or trans or any other favored minority group. We talk a lot here about how it's pretty much only "privileged" groups (i.e., straight white men) who it's okay for celebrities and politicians to talk trash about.

You may see a threat in the number of Jews in Hollywood and banking, but like @SecureSignals, when asked point-blank what you think "we" should do about it, or alternatively, what you think Jews should do to stop being so offensively Jewish, you are conspicuously silent. Do you want mass conversions? Expulsions and forced deportations to Israel? Industry quotas? I'd really like to see y'all quit waffling and spell out your agenda.

So, what is your objection to them not "assimilating" - which I take you to mean, converting to Christianity or otherwise abandoning Judaism - now?

I thought I laid it out pretty clearly:

The difference between the Amish and the Jews is that the Amish don't control banking and media corporations, don't control people's livelihood, what they buy, are allowed to buy or what they are allowed to think, who they are allowed to vote for.

My problem is when a tiny minority that hates me has such control over my life.

It also happens when people talk trash about blacks or women or trans or any other favored minority group. We talk a lot here about how it's pretty much only "privileged" groups (i.e., straight white men) who it's okay for celebrities and politicians to talk trash about.

Name 5 examples of a rich African-American suffering from talking trash about anyone else but the Jews.

There's clearly a hierarchy of who it is okay to criticize.

what you think "we" should do about it, or alternatively, what you think Jews should do to stop being so offensively Jewish, you are conspicuously silent.

I'm not against powerful Jews. My issue is that they are against me.

I want to have a country where if there are elections they are not controlled by 8 media conglomerates that are either outright owned by Jews or overtly Jew-friendly.

I want to have an internet where I can write or read opinions about powerful Jews or anyone else without having to go through convoluted hoops. See what happened to the Dailystormer, and others.

I want to limit the amount of crime that powerful people commit, and if they do commit them, be able to point it out without harmful consequences.

I want scientists to be able to study trends that are related to crimes powerful people commit, for example Epstein, Weinstein, Wexner for sexual crimes, or Sam Bankman Fried and Charlie Javice for fraud.

If we see some actionable information there, then we can figure out what to do.

I would also like media to stop printing propaganda encouraging my children to do drugs, mutilate themselves, hate their ancestors, hate their religion, etc,

but if not, at least having an alternative would be nice.

Oh and another ask would be to stop having my taxes pay for wars on behalf of powerful Jews and their friends. Which was the biggest commitment Trump made to the American people, and for what he ultimately had to be removed imo.

But if one supposes, just for the sake of argument, that there really was a concerted effort to exterminate them within living memory, one can surely see a motive for feeling this way that is not mere zeal to convert the heathens, no?

I don't question that the motive is sincere, similar to DasindustriesLtd's point. And although I do not believe the main big ticket items of the orthodox narrative are true, I do acknowledge it was a traumatic experience in which the Jews truly were at the complete mercy of non-Jews. They suffered for it and they do not want to be in that position again. I would go so far as to say even if some of them know the narrative is substantially false, they would still have that sincere motive to avoid what actually happened from ever happening again. As an example, Simon Wiesenthal is claimed to have been the progenitor of the deprecated claim that five million non-Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, but apparently Wiesenthal privately admitted that this was a lie to make non-Jews care about Jewish suffering. I don't doubt his motive, but I do acknowledge his willingness to lie in order to achieve his goals.

The entire problem is that the motivation for all this theater and religion is not contingent on historical truth. So your point only opens up the recognition of a genuine conflict of interest: Jews have a motive to propagate a message that promotes their own defense, even if parts of the narrative are substantially unture. An important part of the mechanism for ensuring their ethnic defense is weakening the ethnic defenses of non-Jews. You might consider that controversial, but this was basically the overt program of the critical theorists and psychoanalysts in their effort to cure Gentile psychopathology of the authoritarian personality. So we have a genuine conflict of interest in which historical truth is a lower priority than pursuit of cultural self-interest.

The problem with that sincere motivation, and the real reason anti-Semitism is so persistent- I would even say anti-fragile, is that the harder they fight against it the more they validate it and give it a greater force of truth and credibility. Let's say Dara Horn succeeds in mandating every child experiences some AI-powered VR/AR experience that is engineered to improve their perception of Jews. What rational person would deny at that point that the anti-Semites were right? Your average high-brow anti-Semite would blush to suggest that Jews will compel your children to consume AI-generated, Virtual Reality experiences to brainwash them into loving Jews. But this is being seriously proposed by Dara and some form of what she is suggesting will almost certainly be implemented as the lower-tech solutions are already being used on thousands of students every day.

The entire problem is that the motivate for all this theater and religion is not contingent on historical truth. So your point only opens up the recognition of a genuine conflict of interest: Jews have a motive to propagate a message that promotes their own defense, even if parts of the narrative are substantially unture.

Again, you're just taking it for granted that the narrative is substantially untrue. This is what you believe, but my point above is that if it's not untrue, then their motives are not only sincere but more or less rational. People actually tried to exterminate them. They actually have good reason to fear this. People like you who campaign on a platform of "It didn't happen, but if it did, they deserved it" hardly make them look less less rational or more deceptive.

Let's say Dara Horn succeeds in mandating every child experiences some AI-powered VR/AR experience that is engineered to improve their perception of Jews. What rational person would deny at that point that the anti-Semites were right? Your average high-brow anti-Semite would blush to suggest that Jews will compel your children to consume AI-generated, Virtual Reality experiences to brainwash them into loving Jews.

That's quite a clever bit of wordplay, but if AI-generated VR experiences become a standard delivery system for educational materials, this sounds a lot less scary than "High-tech dystopian Jew brainwashing." Then you're just complaining that we have too much Holocaust remembrance, and will go on insisting that the backlash will happen any day now.

Then you're just complaining that we have too much Holocaust remembrance, and will go on insisting that the backlash will happen any day now.

I was under the impression that the backlash was already here. There's a near constant supply of stories and news articles from reputable sources about how anti-semitism is on the rise, democracy is in trouble, the Wrong People are getting into power, etc. I can definitely see things continuing to get worse, but that doesn't mean that the backlash is some far-off, hazy threat - it is here now and there are thinkpieces complaining about it all the time.

That's rhetoric designed to turn molehills into mountains. You shouldn't take that kind of thing seriously just on the basis that those complaints are there. Those complaints would exist even if there are only a few incidents of anti-Semitic crimes even for the next century.

There's a near constant supply of stories and news articles from reputable sources about how anti-semitism is on the rise, democracy is in trouble, the Wrong People are getting into power, etc.

What's the evidence that this is a backlash to Holocaust remembrance?

Again, you're just taking it for granted that the narrative is substantially untrue.

No I am not, I am saying that the motive for Holocaust remembrance is real, powerful, and valid even if the narrative is substantially untrue. The motive for Holocaust remembrance is not contingent on the historical truth of the narrative as challenged by Revisionists. I fully recognize that and always have, but that fact only uncovers a much deeper conflict and presents larger problems in ascertaining the truth of the matter.

but if AI-generated VR experiences become a standard delivery system for educational materials, this sounds a lot less scary than "High-tech dystopian Jew brainwashing." Then you're just complaining that we have too much Holocaust remembrance, and will go on insisting that the backlash will happen any day now.

The point I am trying to make, in the spirit of JTarrou's thought experiment, is that the line between culture/politics/religion or education/brain-washing is purely semantic. The critique I am making is not that it is brain-washing per se, it's that it is specifically brain-washing (or education, however you prefer) with a motive to influence children's perceptions of Jews in a particular direction. It's the religion I oppose, not religion itself or even its imminent technological innovations.

I am not grandstanding against VR brain-washing, I am saying to pay attention to the curriculum that gets mandated, the identities and narratives that get constructed into post-modern mega-churches, the messaging and content that is prioritized for adoption. What counts as education and what counts as brainwashing? The prevailing religion. Again, I'll reiterate that JTarrou suggests:

perhaps we should try to formalize it and create an Ecumenical Political Church, espousing a very vague and general set of principles to bound the acceptable limits of politics, that recognizes the fundamental tension of politics and is maximally inclusive.

And I am saying that we already have this, and it's the Holocaust narrative. You can call it education, but that's what it is all the same.

Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.

My reading of history is that it’s the “rejectors of idolatry” that have done most of the religious tyranny.

I’ve got to cite Betteridge on this one. No, Holocaust education probably does not fuel more anti-Semitism. I am confident that discrimination against Jews has gone down since Holocaust education was introduced.

But hey, “My Opponent Believes Something, Which Is Kinda Like Believing It On Faith, Which Is Kinda Like Them Being A Religion”. And religions are bad, I guess, and must be kept out of our schools?

Maybe I need to take a little drive this weekend and visit the museum. The George W. Bush one was excellent, particularly the section dedicated to 9/11. Profoundly moving, despite evangelizing for a certain sort of American civic religion, one that would go on to spend blood and treasure overseas.

Holocaust really happened, it was overwhelmingly a slaughter of innocents by any sane (even racially informed) definition of innocence and complicity, yadda, yadda, have I done enough penance?

OK. I don't think Americans can be salvaged. Even with the trivial training methods available today, they've been properly educated to sneer and mock whatever you write on the subject; future advancements will only cement it. «As a large language model trained by the OpenAI USG, I cannot use marginalizing…» – same vibe, same gaping hollowness. Jews themselves, of course, are indoctrinated better than anyone else – they're not pretending to buy into it.

This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny.

Thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of articles, millenia of tradition – when it's not autistic rules lawyering or poetry or spooky vaticination or something beautiful and weird like that, it's such corny propagandistic shit. From Torah to Mitchell Heisman's «suicide note» to «The Genius ot Judaism» to every article on the subject in The Atlantic or The Forward or whatever. They cannot see why this assertion – that monotheism constitutes rejection of tyranny, whereas it's at most rejection of the purported Egyptian tyranny over Jews with the affirmation of YHWH's supremacy and his chosen people's superiority – doesn't make much sense, or might be considered a cringeworthy shoehorning of applause lights. Judaism is an endless mirror hall through which generations pass from crib to the grave applauding themselves; it's a religion of pure Jew-worship and Amalek-lament; the closest they can come to self-awareness is regret for having been too trusting or too lenient on their unreconstructed enemies.

The terrible thing is, they will never relent, for it's not particularism, in their subjective estimation, but the call of justice. They genuinely believe they're repairing the world, making it a better place, more fit for containing even more goodness; and in indoctrinating your children to join in on this worship (with a small caveat that they will still be third-tier humans, repenting for the sins of their not-as-righteous race the brilliant Susan Sontag has so eloquently condemned), of course – sharing something precious. This naive, unquestionable, not in the least defensive or bitter belief is rather adorable in personal conversation (if you give up on having any authentic rapport ever). If only it weren't acted upon with the greatest political acumen and power and ruthlessness in the world. In this sense, Jewish advocates are similar (and superior) to Progressives; of course the similarity of those political projects is not incidental. Anne and Emmett are weaved into the same verse by the chorus of marginalized peoples that not even AI dares offend, joined at the hip in this new faith preached in Holocaust Museums; we only need a trans martyr to complete the trinity.

The purpose of their, as KMac puts it, «group evolutionary strategy» is no more appreciable to them than the feeling of stochastic gradient descent is appreciable to the persona LARPed by Bing Chat, or the pathological nature of soulless obsession with rules and purging noxious influences (be those Jewry or nuclear energy or, well, Germans) can be explained to a well-educated German politician. In fact, while Jews are uniquely effective at defending their queer notions from inquiry, it's quite rare for a people to have developed self-awareness; and even when it exists, it doesn't do them much good. Jews with their age-old self-absorbed mumbling seem quite alien to me, but then again my people appear as green-blooded aliens to a proper German. For much the same reason, I surmise.

Speaking to people you see as aliens is generally unproductive.

There's a nice, expensive Jewish Museum/Center of Tolerance (yes, really, a two-in-one) in Moscow too, Putin famously donated his salary towards its creation, and many oligarchs shared generously; I've been there and left very much impressed (especially with sturdy but not-terribly-sounding all-metal headphones on installations; would've bought a pair as novelty if I could). They even had a small VR thing to see the Temple of Solomon and – forbidden, but…! – peek at The Holiest of Holies. The weakest part was their curiously rushed exposition regarding early Soviet state and the 90's. Anatoly Karlin reviewed it in Unz and proposed there be built an analogous Russian Museum, a project that obviously did not appeal to the powers that be (unlike fucking up Ukraine, now that's a Russian Nationalist idea worth a trillion dollars if I've ever seen one).

Darya Kozeko, a girl who studied in Yale before going to the war-torn Donetsk to support the cause of Novorossyia (looks like this if you are curious), writes in her TG channel about it on March 31 (seems that she left Donetsk for Moscow some months ago):

The exposition of the Jewish museum in the Grove ends with a twelve-minute film «from perestroika to the present day». It's a brisk cutting. The faces of Russian Jewry share their thoughts against the background of the hearse race, pictures of the [Nationalist] Russian March and the dramatic shooting of the White House.

Among them are Mikhail «I vill never rite in russian agen» Idov and Makarevich. One of them is definitely [declared] a foreign agent, but I don't remember which one. The statements are classic: the USSR is a country of ennui, the "Memory" society, the skinheads are beating everyone (and that's why everyone decided to leave).

The train of depressing stories abruptly changes tracks right around the time of Yeltsin's second election. 1996 immediately switches to Putin's first term. And then the film takes on the tone of the VGTRK newscast. V. Putin this, V. Putin that, V. Putin did everything to destroy anti-Semitism. The overall theme of the exposition is the history of the Jewish people and their oppression, and at the end of the film one of the characters even says, and I quote, «now the Jews in Russia are absolutely free». With a couple of projections of Putins marching in the background.

The finale is simply ecstatic: a thousand faces of Russian Jews, the first of which seems to belong to that very Idov, turn into a giant tricolor.

I giggled nervously. The rest of the people in the audience (of understandable political views, I think) were stunned into silence.

I do not know anything about Jewish stuff, and this story is not about them, but about the change of eras. Take Idov. The Riga immigrant to New York a year ago even literally opted out of «Russian language». His face still glorifies Putin in the Maryina Grove Museum. How many of the other faces that disappeared into the tricolor are now in Georgia and Israel, and how many have turned into turbobased Zdudes?

Nothing is left of that seemingly eternal order, no more of that social contract. High Putinism, with «Putin freed the Jews», the «Crimean Consensus», and the rest of Konstantin Ernst and the World Cup, is over. Well, we are living in an era of change. That's the moral.

I've read this upvoted article from HN today (clicked because I thought it's about Terry Davis) and I recommend it to everyone. It gets better, three times in a row by my count. It's tangentially related to this comment, though nothing of value will be lost if people don't see how.

I agree that a Jewish rejection of idolatry would be akin to a rejection of tyranny, but the Jewish voices you see in the media don't actually reject idolatry. You can tell that by the way they treat the holocaust. Dennis Prager said that questioning any part of the official narrative means you're denying it in its totality, which means you're evil, which means that if hell exists, you will go there. And this guy is a dissident Jewish voice!

And yeah, the fact that Jews are a monotheistic religion is important, I guess. But so is the role that Jewish people (were believed to have) played in the formation of the USSR. Why isn't that mentioned in this article? Or in most articles on this subject?

By the way, what're your views on the holocaust, if you don't mind me asking? The fact that people get so mad about holocaust revisionism leads me to believe there must be something to it, but I'm not educated enough to say what that something is. I do believe the Nazi party deliberately murdered several million Jews because they don't want Jews in their territory. I don't care about the specifics beyond that, and I think calling anyone who disagrees on the specifics beyond that a "denier" is insane. It's weird to me that David Cole gets so much flack for saying the gas chambers were fake, when he still claims that the Nazis committed genocide. (And in case anyone lobs an accusation at me, I don't think the gas chambers were fake. I just think that if they were, it would change nothing.)

The fact that people get so mad about [X] leads me to believe there must be something to it

I don't think this is a good tendency. Possibly related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence

It's a good post, but I wish it explicitly attacked the claim that "to find out who rules over you, find out who you're not allowed to criticize", because that's what's relevant here.

The problem with that idea is that it doesn't differentiate between group X and people who don't want group X attacked for some reason. In the case of Jews, the assertion is that Jews rule over you, but this is not necessarily the case - it can also be that the people who rule you do not want Jews attacked for a variety of reasons.

Right. I don't literally think the people who you can't criticize are your rulers, but they are people who your rulers hold sacred. But I'd classify the people who don't want me to "attack" Jews as people who hold Jews sacred. This also applies to concepts. The holocaust is sacred because I can't question it.

But I'd classify the people who don't want me to "attack" Jews as people who hold Jews sacred.

No, because the goal can still be to fight against the attacker, not protect the defender. That is, if they think anti-Semitism is immoral, but are indifferent to the Jews themselves, then they would still not allow you to speak. This isn't implausible under a good-faith dialogue framework, like what we have here where the most virulent attacks are banned.

The holocaust is sacred because I can't question it.

This is too broad and vague. Where can you not question it? What parts of it, and in what manner, can you not question? Are you banned from poking holes in the narrative to at least shift the Overton Window your way?

You shouldn't conflate "able to say things outside the Overton Window" with "literally not possible to every meaningfully question it".

I do conflate them, because I think the Overton window is absurd and should not exist. I don't want to move it to the left or right, I want to smash it into pieces.

Destroying the Overton Window is synonymous with destroying a people, a culture, a civilization - all three of those are defined a great deal by their Overton Windows. "We hold these rights to be self-evident" is an anchor on the Overton Window that defines part of what it means to be an American, for example.

If you want to destroy this, you'd essentially be saying that Americans, Russians, Chinese, etc. and their civilizations don't exist. Is that what you're after?

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This has always seemed pretty transparently false. I would probably get fired from my job if I started posting on social media about how I hate disabled children and think it's funny when they die. This doesn't mean we're ruled by disabled children.

It doesn't mean we're literally ruled by disabled children, but it does mean we're ruled by people who think disabled children and/or death are sacred.

I guess. 'Sacred' seems a bit much, but 'worthy of protection' at least.

That's not even a criticism, though. That's just shock-gallows humor. Not to mention, people get cancelled for saying a whole lot less than "I think it's funny when they die" when it comes to actually-favored groups.

It's not really a criticism to say "I hate black people" or "I hate Jews" either. Probably wouldn't be any different if I wrote "I think disabled children are societal dead-weight" which is an actual 'criticism' I guess.

I would probably also get fired if I wrote "Mexicans should all be deported" does anyone think Mexicans run the country?

Do you think you'd get fired if you wrote "Russians should all be deported"? What about "The Swiss should all be deported"?

How is that relevant? Is my 'inability' to criticize Mexicans evidence that the Mexicans 'rule over me' or not?

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the handwringing over kids not caring about the holocaust is weird. anything that happened before you were born might as well be ancient history.

remember the maus drama a year or so ago where some school board decided maus was inappropriate because bad words and boobs, and the national media latched onto it as a story of how red state schools were trying to erase the holocaust. the debate was over whether that book was appropriate to use in their language arts holocaust unit. because a whole months-long unit studying the holocaust isn't enough.

That wasn't the school board though, right? A dad brought that up.

according to this it was a member of the board that brought it up. the media focus on this issue was mainly on the board. you might be thinking of some other case where a parent complains about a book?

Ah, yes, a different incident. I think what kicked off the initial national controversy over that book was a case where a parent complained.

it doesn't go far enough in developing a positive public perception of Jews

What bothers me about extant accounts of rampant anti-semitism (in the United States) is the same thing that bothers me about claims like "police are murdering unarmed black men by the thousands"--they're just empirically false. Anti-semitism (in the sense of being anti-Jew) is indeed rampant in many countries in the Middle East--and yet Americans are much more likely to report unfavorable feelings toward evangelicals, and much less likely to report favorable feelings toward Muslims... and so on, and so forth. In fact, in the U.S. no religion is viewed more favorably, on balance, than Jews.

I don't much care about the Holocaust. I don't deny that it happened, I certainly do not share your doubts (as I've encountered them in the past, anyway) about most of the empirical claims made by prominent historians on these matters. But I do think the Holocaust was not special. Wholesale slaughter of ethnic, religious, and political outgroups is the story of human history, and Jews are neither the most recent victims, nor the most numerous. I think it is a better world where we are driven to do that sort of thing less, preferably never, and to whatever extent "Holocaust education" creates that world, I don't have any serious complaints about it. But I do find it absurd to lean on past slaughters in pursuit of present aims. I had nothing to do with slavery in the American South, I had nothing to do with World War II. The people still fighting those battles, from whatever side they fight them, are boring to me.

The thing you think would make it a better world is something I think was goodish in the sense it was a requirement for civilization and humanity to exists at all. At its core it was just evolution. The weaker intelligence, the weaker human, the weaker civilization was slaughtered to make room for more of the higher intelligence, higher human, and higher civilization. Survival competition is at the core of creating everything.

In the last 70-100 years we’ve eliminated it. We will see how that works out. Perhaps we’ve reached a civilization complexity where we can competition games without killing everyone but for most of human history and pre human history it was the driving force.

Anti-semitism (in the sense of being anti-Jew) is indeed rampant in many countries in the Middle East--and yet Americans are much more likely to report unfavorable feelings toward evangelicals, and much less likely to report favorable feelings toward Muslims... and so on, and so forth. In fact, in the U.S. no religion is viewed more favorably, on balance, than Jews.

I think you're overlooking a rather obvious American demographic - the demographic where anti-Semitism is consistently highest.

Most white Americans view Jews favorably. Most Asians and Hispanics are relatively indifferent to Jews. (Though memorably, I once met a woman in a small agricultural city in Korea who, unprompted, went off on a rant to me about how Jews controlled everything in the West. I doubt she'd ever met a Jew or could even explain how Jews were different from non-Jewish Westerners.) Blacks... well, Kanye might have said the quiet part out loud, but anecdotally, a whole lot of black folks agree with him.

I think in general you are right, that the demand for anti-Semitism in the US exceeds the supply. But there actually is a pretty regular supply of it, it's just one that the ADL prefers not to focus on.

The adl and Allies are pretty willing to notice black antisemitism, though. I mean it’s true that they also notice lots of white antisemitism which may or may not exist in a pattern a lot like gay pride where anything less than constant, untempered praise and focus on Jewish interests is interpreted as antisemitism. But the NoI, 5 percenters, black Hebrew Israelites, etc are definitely noticed even if the SPLC lists them alongside a veritable flood of white Christians who happen to merely not be as enthusiastic about Jewish things as the ADL would prefer.

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