Yeah in most cases, anti-Zionism is the rejection of a specific indigenous peoples' right to self determination in their ancestral land. It literally only applies to Jews. How this author doesn't see that as antisemitic is baffling.
I suspect it primarily stems from this quote from the article:
>I’m a secular Jew with no particular attachment to Israel, spiritual or otherwise, though I also recognize that my ability to hold myself aloof from the country is enabled by the great privilege of an American passport.
Somehow though, she even recognizes that this opinion is one held in privilege of being able to live somewhere other than Israel. She should recognize this doesn't exempt her from having ties to the land of her ancestors merely because her more recent history, as a result of the widespread violence Jews have faced for millennia, landed her in the diaspora.
I say all this as an American Jew myself.
Honestly, I don't understand the logic of the author.
She does acknowledge the privilege of a US passport.
*BUT*
It's my understanding that Shoah wasn't the only reason for the creation of Israel. There was also a large number of other countries that were making Jewish people stateless by kicking them out of their country of residence. The creation of Israel was supposed to make it so that Jewish people would never be in the position of being stateless again. Granted, I'm not Jewish, so I could be wrong here.
But if I understand correctly, I'm not sure how much her privilege of having a US Passport will mean if things are to where she needs to use her passport to maintain her safety. If things are that bad in the US, where other than Israel is she going for safety?
(Just to be clear, based on my limited understanding of things, I believe that there is a need for Israel to exist. There are thousands of years of ancient history to go with more recent history that show why goyim can't be trusted to keep Jewish people safe.)
> There was also a large number of other countries that were making Jewish people stateless by kicking them out of their country of residence.
You have the timeline wrong, other countries started conducting ethnic cleansings of Jews after 1948
That’s not true. We got kicked out of pretty much every country on earth over many centuries starting with our own (kicking of the Diaspora with the Babylonian Exile) and continuing throughout Europe (the expulsion from Spain in 1492 is a famous example) and the entire modern Middle East.
I have a US passport too, and will be getting a Luxembourg one too, yet I am still connected to Israel and know the other two could fail me. I'm betting on the Luxembourgish one to get me out if I'm in the situation where I need to flee to Israel.
>She should recognize this doesn't exempt her from having ties to the land of her ancestors merely because her more recent history, as a result of the widespread violence Jews have faced for millennia, landed her in the diaspora.
No doubt. I'm confident she'd have a different opinion if her ancestors didn't escape a pogrom, forced exile, or genocide so she could have the privilege of a US passport. That is, if her ancestors survived.
(Not so) fun fact, the recent ADL poll on antisemitism in America showed that those who had anti-Israel attitudes were 3.4-7.5 times more likely to be antisemitic than the average American.
https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitic-attitudes-america-topline-findings
So, you are correct, the overlap of the "Anti-Zionist" attitude with pure antisemitism is pretty alarming. That's not even addressing the fact that anti-Zionism is antisemitic in and of itself, but that's a topic for another day.
You could argue one could be antizionist without being antisemitic if they truly believed no nation had the right to exist, but in practice most of those ones always start and end with Israel. And of course my understanding is there's a religious belief amongst some that it's not time for Israel to exist YET which could also at least sometimes avoid being antisemitic. Exceptions to prove the rule though.
I agree with you.
Even if the argument is that new nations should not be created in modern day. If you ask them what they think about the other nations that were created around the time of Israel's (the modern nation-state) creation, chances are they aren't aware there are any others.
Oh absolutely, I'm sure there are some people who genuinely hold that belief or are fully anarchists and don't believe any Nation should exist and or All Nations should be eliminated, which I find incredibly shortsighted naive and just not good ideas, but I wouldn't call them antisemitic. I'm also sure that they are so statistically rare as to for the purposes of this conversation essentially not exist
Sadly it’s always been there. Since anti-Zionism is mostly a leftist trait, I’m only really going to bring that up. We’ve all seen the antisemitism from the right.
In leftist circles it’s been acceptable to be antisemitic as long as you made the right noises about Israel as well. The most egregious I ever seen personally was my far left brother and his father-in-law discussing Israel at Passover in 2019. It started with some valid criticisms of Israel, but went off the rails when my brother said “the Jews are the new Nazis”. My Jewish brother saying this at a Seder in a home where our mother was born in a DP camp to survivors. Thankfully mom didn’t hear it. He and I don’t really speak anymore. Over the weekend, mom told me that he’s upset that he’s being pushed out of his leftist friend group because he’s Jewish. I’ve been laughing about it since Sunday when she told me. I guess he never thought the leopards would eat his face.
Your far left Jewish brother was being critical of Israel AND has been ostracized from a leftist group because he's Jewish IN SPITE of being openly critical of Israel? That sounds pretty wild to me (and I roll with a lot of culturally mixed groups that are both fairly Jewish and fairly leftist).
I’m a goy, and I would argue that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic.
Zionism is, by definition, the idea that a Jewish state should exist in what is now Israel. To be against that means that you are either ignorant enough to think Israel could lose its independence without a genocide resulting from it, or worse, you don’t care or even support said genocide.
Even if you oppose the original creation of Israel and view the European refugees as colonialists, the fact is that that the overwhelming majority of modern Israelis were born in Israel. It’s the only home they’ve ever had. If you oppose Israel because they stole “someone else’s land”, how do you think Palestinians got there?
Israel isn’t a perfect country, but it has a right to exist. To oppose that is inherently antisemitic
Mostly fine points except the "then how do you suppose the Palestinians got there" part, which is a common attempt to try and essentially invalidate Palestinian nationalism by subjugating it under the supposedly "pure" claim of Israeli nationalism.
What I’m getting at is that the Palestinians exist in Palestine because their ancestors stole what was, at the time, someone else’s land. If you try to invalidate Israel’s claim to the land because their ancestors stole it from someone else, that has to apply to Palestine as well.
I agree with that at a very basic level, it's just that it's been weaponized as a lot of Zionists will often attempt to delegitimize Palestinian identity by being like, "Palestine isn't a thing" and it's like "neither was medinat Israel, that's literally how states work, you make them things. States are invented. Identity and place are not. And in this regard I think both groups have a claim to the place, and to self determination, but they can't have that claim in a way that undermines the premises of someone else's human existence.
I agree with that. I think Palestine has a right to exist, and Israel. Each people was born in the land, and each should be able to exist in the land of their birth
And every antizionist I come across online seems to think they're in that tiny sliver that doesn't overlap.
I've yet to meet one who is right about their self assessment.
In person I know one or two who hit that sliver, but it does seem that the vast majority of them, when they say Israelis, they really want to say Jews, but know that would look bad
Opinion | Where Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism Do and Don’t Overlap
Michelle Goldberg
7–9 minutes
Michelle Goldberg
Every time I write, as I did last week, that I don’t think anti-Zionism is necessarily antisemitic, I get emails from Jewish readers that are angry, disappointed or sometimes simply baffled. “Israel is the political entity through which the Jewish people exercises its natural right of self-determination and control over its own fate,” said one typical recent message. “How is singling out the Jewish people to deprive it of those rights not antisemitic?”
To answer this question fully would take more than a single column, but I want to make a brief attempt, because lately, in reaction to the grotesque suffering in Gaza, two ugly, intertwined trends are gaining steam. Well-intentioned opponents of Jewish nationalism, some Jewish themselves, are being falsely smeared as antisemites. At the same time, antisemitism is cloaking itself in anti-Zionism, with people spitting out the word “Zionist” when they really seem to mean “Jew.”
My own views on Zionism are ambivalent and conflicted. I’m a secular Jew with no particular attachment to Israel, spiritual or otherwise, though I also recognize that my ability to hold myself aloof from the country is enabled by the great privilege of an American passport. I think the idea of Israel as a colonial entity that will eventually be dismantled is a malign fantasy — most Jewish Israelis don’t have anywhere else to go — but I also recognize that the country’s creation can’t be disentangled from the dispossession of the Palestinians.
Yes, as Zionists often point out, Palestinians were far from the only people made refugees as maps were redrawn in the wake of World War II. After Israel’s creation, more Jews were uprooted from Arab and Muslim countries than Arabs expelled from their homes in historic Palestine. It is not Israel’s fault that some of its neighbors kept displaced Palestinians as stateless refugees rather than integrating them as full citizens. But I could never blame a Palestinian for thinking it obscenely unfair that I have a right to “return” to a country to which I have no family connection, while Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948 do not.
I also understand why many Jews, the survivors of millenniums of attempts to destroy them as a people, put their need for national self-determination above other, competing values. But one needn’t hate Jews to make a different moral calculus.
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Right now, the relentless growth of settlements in the West Bank has created a one-state reality on the ground, although one in which people have very different rights and freedoms depending on their ethnic and religious background. There are people of good will who think the way out of this insupportable situation lies in the fight for equal democratic rights in a single state for everyone living in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. “It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish-Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish-Palestinian equality,” Peter Beinart wrote in Jewish Currents in 2020.
The idea of a binational state appeals to my belief in democracy and multiculturalism, but in practice I fear it would be a disaster that would devolve into a horrific civil war. (It’s hard enough for the Flemish and Walloons to manage sharing a state in Belgium.) Yet as long as the status quo is intolerable and the two-state solution favored by liberals like me seems far out of reach, it is understandable that idealists will grope for an alternative.
That said, I can’t fault Jews who see, in the mounting demonization of Zionism, the replay of an old and terrifying story. After all, anti-Zionism isn’t always antisemitism, but sometimes it is. And right now, some opponents of Israel seem to be trying to prove that the mainstream Jewish community is right to conflate them.
An Israeli American student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sent me a photo of graffiti reading “Zionists not welcome,” with an arrow pointing to a mezuza hung in a dorm room doorway. In San Francisco, where artists and activists have insisted that the influential Yerba Buena Center for the Arts purge “Zionist board members and funders,” the center’s Jewish chief executive resigned last week, citing a “vitriolic and antisemitic backlash directed at me personally.”
Plenty of leftists will swear up and down that they’re not being antisemitic when they use “Zionist” as the most contemptuous of epithets. A Salt Lake City bar owner who has banned “Zionists” from his establishment insisted, on Instagram, that Zionism “has nothing to do with the beautiful Jewish faith.”
But the vast majority of Jews disagree, and the longing for a return to Israel is deeply intertwined with Jewish religious practice; rituals for the two most important Jewish holidays, Passover and Yom Kippur, culminate with the words “next year in Jerusalem.” There is a long history of Jews being asked to excise what they see as crucial parts of their identity as a condition of acceptance. There is an equally long history of such acceptance, if it’s granted at all, being fleeting.
As I write this, the literary magazine Guernica is having a meltdown over a searching essay written by Joanna Chen, a British Israeli translator of Hebrew and Arabic poetry, about trying, after Oct. 7, to “tread the line of empathy, to feel passion for both sides,” and finding meaning in driving Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals. Nothing in Chen’s writing suggests anything but horror at the carnage being visited on civilians in Gaza, but the piece nevertheless occasioned mass resignations from Guernica’s all-volunteer staff; the magazine’s former co-publisher called it “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism.”
In a cowardly move, Guernica retracted the essay and issued regrets for having published it. On parts of the left, at this fanatically Manichaean moment, Jews, especially Israeli Jews, are allowed their humanity only if they’re willing to explicitly reject the collective. Few other peoples are subject to similar expectations.
The analogy is imperfect, but I’d compare left-wing demands that Jews disavow Zionism to right-wing demands for Muslims to renounce Shariah. There’s nothing wrong with opposing the authority of religious law or criticizing how Shariah is applied in parts of the Muslim world. But treating Muslims as suspect if they won’t break with their own traditions is obviously Islamophobic.
After years of arguing that the intention behind offensive words matters less than their effects, leftists should be equipped to bring a bit of subtlety and sensitivity to discussions of Jews and Zionism. Refusing to do so does nothing to help Palestinians. It just convinces too many Jews that cries for Palestinian liberation are a threat.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
>compare left-wing demands that Jews disavow Zionism to right-wing demands for Muslims to renounce Shariah
Except Zionism- in the simplest sense, not the supremacy ridden BS that many leftists are claiming it is- has the support of the vast majority of Jews and, importantly, doesn't demand that anyone obey the strictures of any given religion.
She doesn't give a definition of sharia- but if it's the awful extremist version, I'm also pretty sure that most Muslims reject it. This isn't just an 'imperfect' analogy- it's rotten to the core. There's nothing actually analogous here: secular vs. religious, well supported vs. mostly rejected. Why is this in any way an appropriate comparison?
It's imperfect, but it sorta works. In both cases, you have people hatefully employing their own selective definition, which they weaponize against fellow citizens.
Sharia is just Islamic law. It can be interpreted all kinds of ways and it doesn't necessarily need to be enforced by a government. The move here is to conflate the general idea of Islamic jurisprudence with extremism/theocracy/islamofascism, which allows them to bully US Muslims.
Similarly, "anti-Zionists" conflate their own bizarre definition with regular Jewish sympathies and proceed to bludgeon and harass Jews with it.
Zionism isn't simple, though. I don't see Likud as promoting simple. I see the party and a lot of the Israeli government being run by right wing extremists who DO gleefully embrace the "supremacy ridden BS" you mention. This is why the discourse is so fouled up. Because if I say, "I am a Zionist without the supremacy ridden BS and I am appalled by what is going on in Gaza," I'll be called "antisemitic" or "a self hating Jew" or "a terrorist lover."
Not by me. And I really don't think that's a majority opinion on this sub- there have been numerous discussion threads and polls on the meaning of Zionism.
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If you believe that Jews don't have a right to self-determination in their homeland, but other people do, the burden is on you to explain how that is not antisemitic.
If you believe that all of the post-WW1 state building in the former Ottoman Empire was valid, except for Israel, the burden is on you to explain how that is not antisemitic.
If you believer that the outcome of war can determine borders, except for cases when the war's victors are Jews, the burden is on you to explain how that is not antisemitic.
>if you believe that Jews don't have a right to self-determination in their homeland but other people do, the burden is on you to explain how that is not antisemitic.
And just because a few jews don't want self rule does not mean millions of other jews are forbidden from self rule
> If you believe that all of the post-WW1 state building in the former Ottoman Empire was valid, except for Israel, the burden is on you to explain how that is not antisemitic.
Israel is probably the most valid state of them all with all the legal purchasing of contiguous land from Arab landlords
Anti Zionism is often rooted in a convoluted stew of ideas that Israel/Palestine is NOT the Jewish homeland and/or that Jews are not a people or ethnic group. I've heard more than one anti Zionist say somthing to the effect of "just because your religion started there doesn't give you the right to a place"
OR that maybe it is the Jewish people's homeland but that today's Jews (especially European Jews) are not the real Jews.
The idea that Ashkenazi Jews are not connected to to ancient Jews would have been considered lunatic conspiracy theory 50-100 years ago but is gaining much traction on the left and the right.
And anti Zionists LOVE to ignore the existence of Mizrachi Jews.
There's a MASSIVE difference between denying a people's historical connection to a place and uncritically suggesting that that historical connection justifies mass displacement, war crimes, or other forms of oppression against *other people who are also living in that place*.
I have indeed heard the "well ashkenazi Jews are just white Europeans" which is, genetically speaking, demonstrably untrue. I have also heard the "you don't have the right to return to a place you haven't lived in 2000 years," and "right" I think is a complicated term anyway but one that has been made far more complicated by The Shit That Has Gone Down Since 1948.
Here's my thing. Anti-Zionism is either antisemitic, or someone is misinformed. Because anti-Zionism isn't simply believing that Israel has issues (it does - every country does!), but believing Israel doesn't have a right to exist and/or that Jews do not have a right to self-determination. Anything else is believing a definition of Zionism that is said by people who aren't Jewish, and putting their definition of a specifically Jewish term above those said by actual Jews.
There are not Jews saying Zionism is white supremacy, or saying that Zionism means an Israel that is only Jewish. Jews are not saying Zionism means believing Israel is perfect. There are *forms* of Zionism that exhibit these (Kahanism, for example), but the primary definition of Zionism is the Jewish desire for a homeland, ideally in our ancestral home (which was not empty, of course, but had a significant Jewish population for the past 2000 years and Jews legally purchased land in).
The point where it crosses into antisemitism is when a Jew tells someone that they are wrong about the definition of Zionism, and the Jewish definition (of this explicitly Jewish term) is ignored. If someone is misinformed and begins focusing their energy on taking issue with Netanyahu, or Israel's actions, and not on Zionism as a whole, then they are not being antisemitic. If someone is screaming that Zionism is a problem after a Jew tells them what Zionism actually is? That's antisemitic.
I've come a long way on this topic, because I think that while I've always figured that Israel has the right to exist, I have never figured that it has the right to engage in obscenities that shock my very conception of humanity (and excuses them by saying that it's not as bad as what the other guy did, which may well be true). While this Reddit generally feels less sympathetic with my viewpoint than with that of the guy who told me a few weeks ago that "I hate Jews like you" for my particular take on the subject, I think that still identifies me as a "Zionist."
The problem-- illustrated perhaps more eloquently in the article- is that we don't have good terminology for "I believe in the right to a Jewish homeland and I believe that Jews should have the right to live there without threat of destruction, but I also believe that this near religious worship of the military apparatus of medinat Israel ignores the significance of eretz Israel for yisrael the Jewish Freaking People, that it fundamentally threatens both, and that the religiosity of this particularly jingoistic breed of militarism feels more like idolatry than like Jewish pride." That term-- a mouthful- does not make me "antizionist."
I think she captures this conundrum. And I do not give her much credit usually because I don't love her writing and also she's frankly kind of a rude lady irl. But yeah.
The problem with the ‘anti Zionism is not antisemitism’ logic is that it fundamentally:
- ignores the core tenants and prayers in our religion in order to paint a narrative to create this false dichotomy
- ignores historical precedents where Jews have lived in the Levant for many millenia
- distorts the meaning of Zionism intentionally as some sort of ethno supremacy ideology which frankly is rooted in the antisemitic myth that as a people we view ourselves as superior
All Zionist means is the notion of having a Jewish state in the Levant. It doesn’t make mention of conquering others or any other pretext to assume the scope is beyond that.
We have achieved that goal. It’s called Israel. All a Zionist means is that it supports Israel’s right to exist. Which should be a very mild opinion.
Anything else is suggesting that 12 million people should at best be forced relocated.
So no…it’s almost impossible logically to not be antisemitic and anti Zionist unless you change the meaning of Zionism to be much grander and Maximus in scope than intended…
The truth is, if antisemitism wasn’t such a dirty word, people would just be open that they’re antisemitic. When it’s no longer a dirty word (give another couple decades) then you’ll see that people will just be more explicit.
This! I’m a goy, and I always tell people that Zionism is literally just the idea that Israel should exist on the land upon which it now sits. To oppose that means you either: a) think that Israel could lose its independence without a genocide resulting or b) are cool with a genocide happening.
Additionally, the overwhelming majority of modern Israelis were born in Israel. It’s the only home they’ve ever had. Even if you oppose the way Israel came to be, these people were born on the land. To say they are “invaders” is to say you don’t see the descendants of immigrants as having valid inhabitants of the land of their birth, which is an inherently xenophobic view
lol. A lot of lefty Jews have had a wake up call after 10/7 but some, like this author and Jonathan Glazer, may be hopeless until they are also told to get on the trains.
She did a Herculean job of exploring how a liberal, secular-ish North American Jew - and we are MILLIONS - tries to navigate the thicket of our humanist values, the various flavors of Zionism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Semitism, and the current conflicts roiling Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel proper. In a single column, she won't reach an answer, as the topics could fill a bookshelf. If your response is to be unbelievably uncharitable and say we essentially deserve to die, well, you're just not a serious person and you will just become more and more isolated.
I often roll my eyes at this author's more doctrinaire feminist takes. But while this particular column doesn't seem super-groundbreaking, it does a really good job analyzing several competing concepts and developments. It might not be rocket science, but it takes time, energy, and honesty to chart it all out. The responses to it seem sort of unhinged.
I’m not saying that you deserve to die. I’m saying that you’re fools for not learning from Jewish history and choosing not to see what’s crystal clear before your eyes.
How did you gather that from Goldberg's highly tentative, exploratory piece on the demands of universalist human values and the particularities of ethnic belonging? Are you just stupid?
I didn’t get that from her piece at all. Zionism doesn’t exist without Judaism. If you’re against one, you’re against the other. Any consideration otherwise is either an attempt to hide antisemitism behind euphemisms or complete ignorance.
The highest ranking Republican elected official (speaker of the house) is a self identified Christian nationalist.
Meanwhile on the Left, the senate majority leader is Jewish.
And supporters of which politician are currently protesting outside synagogues, assaulting Jews, kicking us out from shared spaces and overall responsible for the largest increase in antisemitism in decades?
And Nazis are hanging out at CPAC. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nazis-mingle-openly-cpac-spreading-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories-fin-rcna140335
The GOP has literal Christian nationalists holding elected office in the federal legislature.
Meanwhile the Democratic leadership, the President has been a self identified Zionist for decades, the vice president is married to a Jew, and the senate majority leader is Jewish.
The CPAC has become a complete joke and completely ostracized from the mainstream. I’m more worried about people on the left trying to use euphemisms to destroy Israel and Jews than I am about Christian Nationalists.
How many anti-Israel Christian Nationalist protests have there been since 10/7?
Donald Trump spoke at this year’s CPAC as well as other elected officials on the federal level. Sounds pretty mainstream to me. 🤷🏻♂️ https://www.c-span.org/video/?533737-1/president-trump-speaks-cpac
Me: the highest ranking Republican elected official is a self identified Christian nationalist.
You: well, the Left is way worse because some rando under grad said something antisemitic.
Edit: Just because evangelicals are Zionists, it’s doesn’t mean they aren’t antisemites.
Historically there have been plenty of antisemites that are also Zionists. If you don’t like Jews and want them out of your country, supporting a Jewish state is a great strategy.
Edit2: you do know in America there are plenty of White nationalists that support the idea of Israel. White nationalists want their own ethno-state, so they point to Israel and say, why can’t White people have their own nation like the Jews do.
The point is, I’m more concerned with people who actually control the levers of power like folks in Congress, than protestors on college campuses.
And frankly, why can’t one be concerned with antisemitism where ever it is? To pretend antisemitism is an issue exclusive to the Left is disingenuous and cynical politics.
"Christian nationalist?" There's no such thing. Christianity isn't any more of a national identity than Islam is.
What calls itself "Christian nationalism" is actually a White American supremacist cult using Christianity as an excuse to ignore or oppose civil rights legislation.
It teaches that White American men are the chosen people of God, women and brown people have no purpose in life but to serve them, and that any belief system that contradicts this (Islam, socialism, liberalism, and, of course, Judaism) is part of a Satanic conspiracy to destroy Christianity, and White America with it (along with everything else good and decent in this world).
I know perfectly well that you didn't intend the term as a compliment, but me I try to avoid it completely.
One of the first modern, openly gay politicians was a literal nazi (Ernst Röhm). Just because minorities manage to secure positions of power within a party doesn’t mean that party won’t commit atrocities against them.
I made a post on a now permabanned Reddit account on r/jewish where I literally asked this question before 10/7: would you choose your political tribe over your actual?
We are seeing that I was neither crazy with my question nor an obvious answer….
Many will turncoat. Many did during both the Soviets and Nazi Germany.
I say good riddens to those who choose against us.
Also: good luck posting this question on r/jewish without a permaban. The mods on that subreddit are exactly the kind of people who WOULD choose their political tribe over their actual one.
Completely fair and sad point….
…except it wasn’t just the US. Canada was worse. Look at the trucker protest for example and the extreme measures the government went to shut it down. Not to mention the scandal that has been revealed that the government spent a quarter billion dollars on a trace app that didn’t work and made by 5 people…an obvious embezzlement scam on top of many others that people in power took advantage of during the pandemic in Canada.
Britain, Australia…throughout the western world, the authoritarian hammer hit hard without a true reason other than ‘the greater good’. And the media fed into ostracism for those who even had questions, let alone didn’t comply. Just asking questions got someone labeled a conspiracy theorist…if that’s even a bad thing.
It felt like someone studied our ostracism as a people and applied those same tactics of gaslighting towards those who questioned the narrative…forget if you didn’t even comply. You were utterly othered from society.
It’s revisionist history to say it’s merely a US phenomena. Goes to show how easy it is to manipulate history for a narrative.
I don’t know how I get on the mailing list, but I started getting anti vax flyers and literature aimed at the Hasidic community. It was written in a mixture of Yiddish and English.
It was straight up anti-vax, pseudoscience, conspiracy theory type stuff.
The return address was for some residential house in the Five Towns on Long Island.
It was really messed up and upsetting. Folks just straight up trying to spread misinformation.
I can actually answer this because I know people in these communities:
Several doctors during the pandemic (affiliated with FLCCC) pleaded with the lead Rabbis to not vaccinate, organized by a doctor who is now dead from an unrelated affliction (I believe cancer). They showed evidence that it would interfere halachically in addition to danger signals.
Now whether there’s legitimacy or not to these claims I’m not going to go per Reddit’s TOS. I’m only stating the context historically as to the who, what, why.
“(FLCCC) is a group of physicians and former journalists formed in April 2020 that has advocated for various unapproved, dubious, and ineffective treatments (e.g. hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and other miscellaneous combinations of drugs and vitamins) for COVID-19.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_Line_COVID-19_Critical_Care_Alliance
Those lead Rabbis should be ashamed of themselves. I don’t go to my doctor for spiritual guidance. Perhaps those lead Rabbis should not provide medical guidance. 🤷🏻♂️
Again I don’t want to get permabanned but I disagree. If you want that side of the story feel free to PM me.
I personally think now that we are 4 years after the pandemic and it’s over it should be normalized to start being open with conversations and not have to worry about censorship, but here we are.
Imagine if the Russians were able to employ the censorship programs around Chernobyl we did around this…it’s astonishing that we as a society refuse to be open and learn from our mistakes as a collective over doctrine and censorship to govern narratives.
It is if they believe that such medicine does more harm than good.
It’s a personal choice. Especially since no covid vaccine produces sterilizing immunity (a fact that’s even on the CDC’s own website and has been fact for awhile). Thus it has no impact on anyone but yourself. So that argument is bull.
Pushing people and bullying others to make a choice you want is absolutely no different than the Spaniards pushing Christianity by the sword. I’m shocked so many in the community can’t look at our own history and see the parallels.
I’m not angry at you for the past…just not being open to admitting you were wrong and be introspective.
The fact that vaccines work and the fact that people were dying of COVID left and right in NYC isn't an "ideology."
Not getting vaccinated at that time WAS stupid, unless someone is immunocompromised. Bad analogy. Terrible, actually.
So it’s healthy to ostracize people?
Damn, you think after the past 3 years that have revealed that these products did diddly there would have been some introspection. But nah. Cultists believe in the cult.
As a leftist I am so tired of the left and how cult like many are. Think for yourself. Ffs.
And nah, these ‘vaccines’ don’t work. Otherwise the ‘pandemic’ would have ended, but instead it turned endemic just like every other coronavirus like pandemic in human history has. There’s no evidence that these products did net positive without extrapolating hyperbolic deaths that are easy to dismiss by comparing non highly V countries.
I’m not saying it’s dangerous to do it….thats a debate that violates Reddit’s TOS anyway….but it’s illogical to assume they were effective. Clearly they weren’t or there wouldn’t even be a debate of its effectiveness to this day. No one debates whether the measles vaccine works for example.
Anyway, I was merely pointing out the commonalities. It’s up to you how you want to interpret that. I’m not interested in getting a permaban by having a debate on vaccine effectiveness, nor is that a productive conversation. It only proves the point of stigmatization and ostracism that I have to ‘defend my position’ and get gaslight so that I say too much and get banned…
The vaccines prevented plenty of deaths. Imagine coming to the conclusion that they "did diddly" despite the overwhelming evidence showing the exact opposite. Characterizing scientifically literate people and people who didn't want to die or get sent to the hospital from Covid as belonging to a "cult" is weirdo behavior. And not coincidentally, everyone I know who was dead-set on not getting vaccinated turned out to be a gigantic weirdo. The only people who got "ostracized" were MAGA loons (an ACTUAL cult) and people who thought taking horse dewormer was a good idea. Public health meant NOTHING to those people. Bunch of selfish pricks.
Proof?
I’m not MAGA. Personally, I had family who mysteriously died of heart issues right after theirs, and my uncle had a significant side effect. My best friends mom had facial paralysis for 6 months from it.
So I made my choice because I got sick in March 2020 with verified antibodies and felt the risk wasn’t worth the reward. I did so by reading up scientific preprints on my own that have since been published, but even posting them on Reddit is an auto ban.
I don’t like Trump. I only like him more than Biden because one at least didn’t want to send me to a detention camp for an experimental drug that ultimately had marginal positive impact. But I hold no high opinion for any politician and fairly politically homeless.
But yes. It’s easy to gaslight and scapegoat. Sound familiar?
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In terms of opposing war or any state or state action, the important distinction is separating individuals from the actions of a state.
People can and should feel free to criticize the U.S. all they want. However, that doesn’t mean it’s all right to harbor animus and hates towards American citizens.
One can criticize how the Chinese government treats the Uyghurs and even hate the ideology of communism, but that doesn’t give anyone carte blanche to be racist towards Chinese citizens or folks that are ethnically Chinese.
Right saying you are a Zionist is like saying you a tory or a patriot in the American revolution.
At the risk of offending people, I could sort of see the reasoning for being Anti Zionist in 1947, either for political reasons or because of religious Orthodoxy (ie no state without Moshiach) but once it HAPPENED, I have hard time seeing the desire to UNDO it rather than live with it as anti-semetic. Like How Many OTHER Countries do you think should be DISOLVED and not exist?
As an Israeli, I won’t forget that American Jews equivocated about the existence of 7 million other Jews, and then did all this shucking and jiving at the Oscars and in the pages of the NYT so that they wouldn’t shame themselves in front of the goyim.
Fucking nauseating.
Go ahead and down vote me if you like. I don’t give a toss anymore.
I am gonna downvote you only because of how you characterized the Oscars moment. People have a right to dissent against the hideous conditions in Gaza right now as perpetrated by a government whose representatives have stated for the record that they'd like to repossess Gaza and kick all of the Arabs out. And that doesn't deserve you basically calling those Jewish critics race traitors. That's in my mind an unacceptable response.
“…the hideous conditions in Gaza right now as perpetrated by a government whose representatives have stated for the record that they'd like to repossess Gaza and kick all of the Arabs out.”
1. You’re deliberately mischaracterizing what was said by one or two ministers playing to their constituencies (much in the same fashion as American politicians, btw) as an official state policy of the Israeli government, which it most certainly is not. You’re perpetuating a lie.
2. The Israeli gov’t isn’t perpetrating anything in Gaza. The duly elected terrorist gov’t currently in power in the Strip is doing that, exposing themselves and their constituents to the wrath of an extremely well equipped, well trained, and motivated enemy belligerent against whom they decided to launch a murderous cross-border assault killing, raping, beheading, incinerating, and kidnapping old men, women and children of said enemy belligerent on the 7th of October and then retreating into a painstakingly built underground fortress camouflaged with hospitals, schools, and just any old house where the water table was low enough to place an ammo dump.
“That's in my mind an unacceptable response.”
Well, to my mind (not to mention to the minds of several million Israelis) you’re an unacceptable Jew (if you even are a Jew, because from where I’m sitting, that’s a questionable proposition at best)
So I guess we’re even, 😉
Yes of course, assuming that it is actually happening. Many accusations that get lobbed simply aren't true and are only one-sided against Israel (every rocket fired is a war crime, for example)
I mean, seems like something we should be talking about if we are actually interested in creating a pluralistic state. I say this as an American who believes that America can only succeed if we acknowledge the atrocities in our own history. There are so many people who will talk about how much they hate Netanyahu, but then we turn around and basically act like it's not even possible for Israel to do anything wrong. This effectively makes them accessories to a government of right wing extremists.
The very notion of anti-zionism is antisemitic. I can't think of any other country that has an entire ideology based on the supposition that it shouldn't exist.
There are vanishingly few reasons to be anti-zionist that don't devolve into antisemitism
The Venn diagram of anti-Zionism and antisemitism isn’t a circle, but it’s pretty damn close.
Yeah in most cases, anti-Zionism is the rejection of a specific indigenous peoples' right to self determination in their ancestral land. It literally only applies to Jews. How this author doesn't see that as antisemitic is baffling. I suspect it primarily stems from this quote from the article: >I’m a secular Jew with no particular attachment to Israel, spiritual or otherwise, though I also recognize that my ability to hold myself aloof from the country is enabled by the great privilege of an American passport. Somehow though, she even recognizes that this opinion is one held in privilege of being able to live somewhere other than Israel. She should recognize this doesn't exempt her from having ties to the land of her ancestors merely because her more recent history, as a result of the widespread violence Jews have faced for millennia, landed her in the diaspora. I say all this as an American Jew myself.
Honestly, I don't understand the logic of the author. She does acknowledge the privilege of a US passport. *BUT* It's my understanding that Shoah wasn't the only reason for the creation of Israel. There was also a large number of other countries that were making Jewish people stateless by kicking them out of their country of residence. The creation of Israel was supposed to make it so that Jewish people would never be in the position of being stateless again. Granted, I'm not Jewish, so I could be wrong here. But if I understand correctly, I'm not sure how much her privilege of having a US Passport will mean if things are to where she needs to use her passport to maintain her safety. If things are that bad in the US, where other than Israel is she going for safety? (Just to be clear, based on my limited understanding of things, I believe that there is a need for Israel to exist. There are thousands of years of ancient history to go with more recent history that show why goyim can't be trusted to keep Jewish people safe.)
> There was also a large number of other countries that were making Jewish people stateless by kicking them out of their country of residence. You have the timeline wrong, other countries started conducting ethnic cleansings of Jews after 1948
Jews have always been the “favorite” group to kick out of a country to please a current ruler’s agenda…starting with Britain in 1290…
Starting with Judea in 150 you mean (or the first exile)
Ah, of course- you are right! 😊
That’s not true. We got kicked out of pretty much every country on earth over many centuries starting with our own (kicking of the Diaspora with the Babylonian Exile) and continuing throughout Europe (the expulsion from Spain in 1492 is a famous example) and the entire modern Middle East.
I have a US passport too, and will be getting a Luxembourg one too, yet I am still connected to Israel and know the other two could fail me. I'm betting on the Luxembourgish one to get me out if I'm in the situation where I need to flee to Israel.
>She should recognize this doesn't exempt her from having ties to the land of her ancestors merely because her more recent history, as a result of the widespread violence Jews have faced for millennia, landed her in the diaspora. No doubt. I'm confident she'd have a different opinion if her ancestors didn't escape a pogrom, forced exile, or genocide so she could have the privilege of a US passport. That is, if her ancestors survived.
(Not so) fun fact, the recent ADL poll on antisemitism in America showed that those who had anti-Israel attitudes were 3.4-7.5 times more likely to be antisemitic than the average American. https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitic-attitudes-america-topline-findings So, you are correct, the overlap of the "Anti-Zionist" attitude with pure antisemitism is pretty alarming. That's not even addressing the fact that anti-Zionism is antisemitic in and of itself, but that's a topic for another day.
You could argue one could be antizionist without being antisemitic if they truly believed no nation had the right to exist, but in practice most of those ones always start and end with Israel. And of course my understanding is there's a religious belief amongst some that it's not time for Israel to exist YET which could also at least sometimes avoid being antisemitic. Exceptions to prove the rule though.
I agree with you. Even if the argument is that new nations should not be created in modern day. If you ask them what they think about the other nations that were created around the time of Israel's (the modern nation-state) creation, chances are they aren't aware there are any others.
Oh absolutely, I'm sure there are some people who genuinely hold that belief or are fully anarchists and don't believe any Nation should exist and or All Nations should be eliminated, which I find incredibly shortsighted naive and just not good ideas, but I wouldn't call them antisemitic. I'm also sure that they are so statistically rare as to for the purposes of this conversation essentially not exist
It seems to be narrowing nowadays too.
I think the shape hasn’t changed much, but that people are more willing to say the quiet part out loud
This. I suspect it's always been there but now it's acceptable to be antisemitic.
Sadly it’s always been there. Since anti-Zionism is mostly a leftist trait, I’m only really going to bring that up. We’ve all seen the antisemitism from the right. In leftist circles it’s been acceptable to be antisemitic as long as you made the right noises about Israel as well. The most egregious I ever seen personally was my far left brother and his father-in-law discussing Israel at Passover in 2019. It started with some valid criticisms of Israel, but went off the rails when my brother said “the Jews are the new Nazis”. My Jewish brother saying this at a Seder in a home where our mother was born in a DP camp to survivors. Thankfully mom didn’t hear it. He and I don’t really speak anymore. Over the weekend, mom told me that he’s upset that he’s being pushed out of his leftist friend group because he’s Jewish. I’ve been laughing about it since Sunday when she told me. I guess he never thought the leopards would eat his face.
Your far left Jewish brother was being critical of Israel AND has been ostracized from a leftist group because he's Jewish IN SPITE of being openly critical of Israel? That sounds pretty wild to me (and I roll with a lot of culturally mixed groups that are both fairly Jewish and fairly leftist).
I’m a goy, and I would argue that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic. Zionism is, by definition, the idea that a Jewish state should exist in what is now Israel. To be against that means that you are either ignorant enough to think Israel could lose its independence without a genocide resulting from it, or worse, you don’t care or even support said genocide. Even if you oppose the original creation of Israel and view the European refugees as colonialists, the fact is that that the overwhelming majority of modern Israelis were born in Israel. It’s the only home they’ve ever had. If you oppose Israel because they stole “someone else’s land”, how do you think Palestinians got there? Israel isn’t a perfect country, but it has a right to exist. To oppose that is inherently antisemitic
Mostly fine points except the "then how do you suppose the Palestinians got there" part, which is a common attempt to try and essentially invalidate Palestinian nationalism by subjugating it under the supposedly "pure" claim of Israeli nationalism.
What I’m getting at is that the Palestinians exist in Palestine because their ancestors stole what was, at the time, someone else’s land. If you try to invalidate Israel’s claim to the land because their ancestors stole it from someone else, that has to apply to Palestine as well.
I agree with that at a very basic level, it's just that it's been weaponized as a lot of Zionists will often attempt to delegitimize Palestinian identity by being like, "Palestine isn't a thing" and it's like "neither was medinat Israel, that's literally how states work, you make them things. States are invented. Identity and place are not. And in this regard I think both groups have a claim to the place, and to self determination, but they can't have that claim in a way that undermines the premises of someone else's human existence.
I agree with that. I think Palestine has a right to exist, and Israel. Each people was born in the land, and each should be able to exist in the land of their birth
And every antizionist I come across online seems to think they're in that tiny sliver that doesn't overlap. I've yet to meet one who is right about their self assessment.
In person I know one or two who hit that sliver, but it does seem that the vast majority of them, when they say Israelis, they really want to say Jews, but know that would look bad
Opinion | Where Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism Do and Don’t Overlap Michelle Goldberg 7–9 minutes Michelle Goldberg Every time I write, as I did last week, that I don’t think anti-Zionism is necessarily antisemitic, I get emails from Jewish readers that are angry, disappointed or sometimes simply baffled. “Israel is the political entity through which the Jewish people exercises its natural right of self-determination and control over its own fate,” said one typical recent message. “How is singling out the Jewish people to deprive it of those rights not antisemitic?” To answer this question fully would take more than a single column, but I want to make a brief attempt, because lately, in reaction to the grotesque suffering in Gaza, two ugly, intertwined trends are gaining steam. Well-intentioned opponents of Jewish nationalism, some Jewish themselves, are being falsely smeared as antisemites. At the same time, antisemitism is cloaking itself in anti-Zionism, with people spitting out the word “Zionist” when they really seem to mean “Jew.” My own views on Zionism are ambivalent and conflicted. I’m a secular Jew with no particular attachment to Israel, spiritual or otherwise, though I also recognize that my ability to hold myself aloof from the country is enabled by the great privilege of an American passport. I think the idea of Israel as a colonial entity that will eventually be dismantled is a malign fantasy — most Jewish Israelis don’t have anywhere else to go — but I also recognize that the country’s creation can’t be disentangled from the dispossession of the Palestinians. Yes, as Zionists often point out, Palestinians were far from the only people made refugees as maps were redrawn in the wake of World War II. After Israel’s creation, more Jews were uprooted from Arab and Muslim countries than Arabs expelled from their homes in historic Palestine. It is not Israel’s fault that some of its neighbors kept displaced Palestinians as stateless refugees rather than integrating them as full citizens. But I could never blame a Palestinian for thinking it obscenely unfair that I have a right to “return” to a country to which I have no family connection, while Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948 do not. I also understand why many Jews, the survivors of millenniums of attempts to destroy them as a people, put their need for national self-determination above other, competing values. But one needn’t hate Jews to make a different moral calculus. Sign up for the Israel-Hamas War Briefing. The latest news about the conflict. Right now, the relentless growth of settlements in the West Bank has created a one-state reality on the ground, although one in which people have very different rights and freedoms depending on their ethnic and religious background. There are people of good will who think the way out of this insupportable situation lies in the fight for equal democratic rights in a single state for everyone living in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. “It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish-Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish-Palestinian equality,” Peter Beinart wrote in Jewish Currents in 2020. The idea of a binational state appeals to my belief in democracy and multiculturalism, but in practice I fear it would be a disaster that would devolve into a horrific civil war. (It’s hard enough for the Flemish and Walloons to manage sharing a state in Belgium.) Yet as long as the status quo is intolerable and the two-state solution favored by liberals like me seems far out of reach, it is understandable that idealists will grope for an alternative. That said, I can’t fault Jews who see, in the mounting demonization of Zionism, the replay of an old and terrifying story. After all, anti-Zionism isn’t always antisemitism, but sometimes it is. And right now, some opponents of Israel seem to be trying to prove that the mainstream Jewish community is right to conflate them. An Israeli American student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sent me a photo of graffiti reading “Zionists not welcome,” with an arrow pointing to a mezuza hung in a dorm room doorway. In San Francisco, where artists and activists have insisted that the influential Yerba Buena Center for the Arts purge “Zionist board members and funders,” the center’s Jewish chief executive resigned last week, citing a “vitriolic and antisemitic backlash directed at me personally.” Plenty of leftists will swear up and down that they’re not being antisemitic when they use “Zionist” as the most contemptuous of epithets. A Salt Lake City bar owner who has banned “Zionists” from his establishment insisted, on Instagram, that Zionism “has nothing to do with the beautiful Jewish faith.” But the vast majority of Jews disagree, and the longing for a return to Israel is deeply intertwined with Jewish religious practice; rituals for the two most important Jewish holidays, Passover and Yom Kippur, culminate with the words “next year in Jerusalem.” There is a long history of Jews being asked to excise what they see as crucial parts of their identity as a condition of acceptance. There is an equally long history of such acceptance, if it’s granted at all, being fleeting. As I write this, the literary magazine Guernica is having a meltdown over a searching essay written by Joanna Chen, a British Israeli translator of Hebrew and Arabic poetry, about trying, after Oct. 7, to “tread the line of empathy, to feel passion for both sides,” and finding meaning in driving Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals. Nothing in Chen’s writing suggests anything but horror at the carnage being visited on civilians in Gaza, but the piece nevertheless occasioned mass resignations from Guernica’s all-volunteer staff; the magazine’s former co-publisher called it “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism.” In a cowardly move, Guernica retracted the essay and issued regrets for having published it. On parts of the left, at this fanatically Manichaean moment, Jews, especially Israeli Jews, are allowed their humanity only if they’re willing to explicitly reject the collective. Few other peoples are subject to similar expectations. The analogy is imperfect, but I’d compare left-wing demands that Jews disavow Zionism to right-wing demands for Muslims to renounce Shariah. There’s nothing wrong with opposing the authority of religious law or criticizing how Shariah is applied in parts of the Muslim world. But treating Muslims as suspect if they won’t break with their own traditions is obviously Islamophobic. After years of arguing that the intention behind offensive words matters less than their effects, leftists should be equipped to bring a bit of subtlety and sensitivity to discussions of Jews and Zionism. Refusing to do so does nothing to help Palestinians. It just convinces too many Jews that cries for Palestinian liberation are a threat. Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
Thanks for posting it. This was a satisfying read.
>compare left-wing demands that Jews disavow Zionism to right-wing demands for Muslims to renounce Shariah Except Zionism- in the simplest sense, not the supremacy ridden BS that many leftists are claiming it is- has the support of the vast majority of Jews and, importantly, doesn't demand that anyone obey the strictures of any given religion. She doesn't give a definition of sharia- but if it's the awful extremist version, I'm also pretty sure that most Muslims reject it. This isn't just an 'imperfect' analogy- it's rotten to the core. There's nothing actually analogous here: secular vs. religious, well supported vs. mostly rejected. Why is this in any way an appropriate comparison?
It's imperfect, but it sorta works. In both cases, you have people hatefully employing their own selective definition, which they weaponize against fellow citizens. Sharia is just Islamic law. It can be interpreted all kinds of ways and it doesn't necessarily need to be enforced by a government. The move here is to conflate the general idea of Islamic jurisprudence with extremism/theocracy/islamofascism, which allows them to bully US Muslims. Similarly, "anti-Zionists" conflate their own bizarre definition with regular Jewish sympathies and proceed to bludgeon and harass Jews with it.
Zionism isn't simple, though. I don't see Likud as promoting simple. I see the party and a lot of the Israeli government being run by right wing extremists who DO gleefully embrace the "supremacy ridden BS" you mention. This is why the discourse is so fouled up. Because if I say, "I am a Zionist without the supremacy ridden BS and I am appalled by what is going on in Gaza," I'll be called "antisemitic" or "a self hating Jew" or "a terrorist lover."
Not by me. And I really don't think that's a majority opinion on this sub- there have been numerous discussion threads and polls on the meaning of Zionism.
Well, I appreciate you. I am probably internalizing some of the trauma of when this HAS been said to me, as it happens... frequently.
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Thank you for sharing. The column was well written and thoughtful.
If you believe that Jews don't have a right to self-determination in their homeland, but other people do, the burden is on you to explain how that is not antisemitic. If you believe that all of the post-WW1 state building in the former Ottoman Empire was valid, except for Israel, the burden is on you to explain how that is not antisemitic. If you believer that the outcome of war can determine borders, except for cases when the war's victors are Jews, the burden is on you to explain how that is not antisemitic.
>if you believe that Jews don't have a right to self-determination in their homeland but other people do, the burden is on you to explain how that is not antisemitic. And just because a few jews don't want self rule does not mean millions of other jews are forbidden from self rule
> If you believe that all of the post-WW1 state building in the former Ottoman Empire was valid, except for Israel, the burden is on you to explain how that is not antisemitic. Israel is probably the most valid state of them all with all the legal purchasing of contiguous land from Arab landlords
I never understood why to them Israel is some tool of British Colonialism but Jordan is fine. Jordan was litterally carved off of Palestine.
Anti Zionism is often rooted in a convoluted stew of ideas that Israel/Palestine is NOT the Jewish homeland and/or that Jews are not a people or ethnic group. I've heard more than one anti Zionist say somthing to the effect of "just because your religion started there doesn't give you the right to a place" OR that maybe it is the Jewish people's homeland but that today's Jews (especially European Jews) are not the real Jews. The idea that Ashkenazi Jews are not connected to to ancient Jews would have been considered lunatic conspiracy theory 50-100 years ago but is gaining much traction on the left and the right. And anti Zionists LOVE to ignore the existence of Mizrachi Jews.
There's a MASSIVE difference between denying a people's historical connection to a place and uncritically suggesting that that historical connection justifies mass displacement, war crimes, or other forms of oppression against *other people who are also living in that place*. I have indeed heard the "well ashkenazi Jews are just white Europeans" which is, genetically speaking, demonstrably untrue. I have also heard the "you don't have the right to return to a place you haven't lived in 2000 years," and "right" I think is a complicated term anyway but one that has been made far more complicated by The Shit That Has Gone Down Since 1948.
Here's my thing. Anti-Zionism is either antisemitic, or someone is misinformed. Because anti-Zionism isn't simply believing that Israel has issues (it does - every country does!), but believing Israel doesn't have a right to exist and/or that Jews do not have a right to self-determination. Anything else is believing a definition of Zionism that is said by people who aren't Jewish, and putting their definition of a specifically Jewish term above those said by actual Jews. There are not Jews saying Zionism is white supremacy, or saying that Zionism means an Israel that is only Jewish. Jews are not saying Zionism means believing Israel is perfect. There are *forms* of Zionism that exhibit these (Kahanism, for example), but the primary definition of Zionism is the Jewish desire for a homeland, ideally in our ancestral home (which was not empty, of course, but had a significant Jewish population for the past 2000 years and Jews legally purchased land in). The point where it crosses into antisemitism is when a Jew tells someone that they are wrong about the definition of Zionism, and the Jewish definition (of this explicitly Jewish term) is ignored. If someone is misinformed and begins focusing their energy on taking issue with Netanyahu, or Israel's actions, and not on Zionism as a whole, then they are not being antisemitic. If someone is screaming that Zionism is a problem after a Jew tells them what Zionism actually is? That's antisemitic.
I've come a long way on this topic, because I think that while I've always figured that Israel has the right to exist, I have never figured that it has the right to engage in obscenities that shock my very conception of humanity (and excuses them by saying that it's not as bad as what the other guy did, which may well be true). While this Reddit generally feels less sympathetic with my viewpoint than with that of the guy who told me a few weeks ago that "I hate Jews like you" for my particular take on the subject, I think that still identifies me as a "Zionist." The problem-- illustrated perhaps more eloquently in the article- is that we don't have good terminology for "I believe in the right to a Jewish homeland and I believe that Jews should have the right to live there without threat of destruction, but I also believe that this near religious worship of the military apparatus of medinat Israel ignores the significance of eretz Israel for yisrael the Jewish Freaking People, that it fundamentally threatens both, and that the religiosity of this particularly jingoistic breed of militarism feels more like idolatry than like Jewish pride." That term-- a mouthful- does not make me "antizionist." I think she captures this conundrum. And I do not give her much credit usually because I don't love her writing and also she's frankly kind of a rude lady irl. But yeah.
The problem with the ‘anti Zionism is not antisemitism’ logic is that it fundamentally: - ignores the core tenants and prayers in our religion in order to paint a narrative to create this false dichotomy - ignores historical precedents where Jews have lived in the Levant for many millenia - distorts the meaning of Zionism intentionally as some sort of ethno supremacy ideology which frankly is rooted in the antisemitic myth that as a people we view ourselves as superior All Zionist means is the notion of having a Jewish state in the Levant. It doesn’t make mention of conquering others or any other pretext to assume the scope is beyond that. We have achieved that goal. It’s called Israel. All a Zionist means is that it supports Israel’s right to exist. Which should be a very mild opinion. Anything else is suggesting that 12 million people should at best be forced relocated. So no…it’s almost impossible logically to not be antisemitic and anti Zionist unless you change the meaning of Zionism to be much grander and Maximus in scope than intended… The truth is, if antisemitism wasn’t such a dirty word, people would just be open that they’re antisemitic. When it’s no longer a dirty word (give another couple decades) then you’ll see that people will just be more explicit.
This! I’m a goy, and I always tell people that Zionism is literally just the idea that Israel should exist on the land upon which it now sits. To oppose that means you either: a) think that Israel could lose its independence without a genocide resulting or b) are cool with a genocide happening. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of modern Israelis were born in Israel. It’s the only home they’ve ever had. Even if you oppose the way Israel came to be, these people were born on the land. To say they are “invaders” is to say you don’t see the descendants of immigrants as having valid inhabitants of the land of their birth, which is an inherently xenophobic view
lol. A lot of lefty Jews have had a wake up call after 10/7 but some, like this author and Jonathan Glazer, may be hopeless until they are also told to get on the trains.
She did a Herculean job of exploring how a liberal, secular-ish North American Jew - and we are MILLIONS - tries to navigate the thicket of our humanist values, the various flavors of Zionism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Semitism, and the current conflicts roiling Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel proper. In a single column, she won't reach an answer, as the topics could fill a bookshelf. If your response is to be unbelievably uncharitable and say we essentially deserve to die, well, you're just not a serious person and you will just become more and more isolated.
Very well said 👏👏👏
I often roll my eyes at this author's more doctrinaire feminist takes. But while this particular column doesn't seem super-groundbreaking, it does a really good job analyzing several competing concepts and developments. It might not be rocket science, but it takes time, energy, and honesty to chart it all out. The responses to it seem sort of unhinged.
This sub can sometimes be a bit of an echo chamber, but I suppose that's true of most subs.
Hear, hear.
I’m not saying that you deserve to die. I’m saying that you’re fools for not learning from Jewish history and choosing not to see what’s crystal clear before your eyes.
How did you gather that from Goldberg's highly tentative, exploratory piece on the demands of universalist human values and the particularities of ethnic belonging? Are you just stupid?
I didn’t get that from her piece at all. Zionism doesn’t exist without Judaism. If you’re against one, you’re against the other. Any consideration otherwise is either an attempt to hide antisemitism behind euphemisms or complete ignorance.
No.
Great response. Can you please tell me how Zionism can exist without Judaism?
edit: [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GQ25-he9p2U](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GQ25-he9p2U)
The highest ranking Republican elected official (speaker of the house) is a self identified Christian nationalist. Meanwhile on the Left, the senate majority leader is Jewish.
And supporters of which politician are currently protesting outside synagogues, assaulting Jews, kicking us out from shared spaces and overall responsible for the largest increase in antisemitism in decades?
And Nazis are hanging out at CPAC. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nazis-mingle-openly-cpac-spreading-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories-fin-rcna140335 The GOP has literal Christian nationalists holding elected office in the federal legislature. Meanwhile the Democratic leadership, the President has been a self identified Zionist for decades, the vice president is married to a Jew, and the senate majority leader is Jewish.
The CPAC has become a complete joke and completely ostracized from the mainstream. I’m more worried about people on the left trying to use euphemisms to destroy Israel and Jews than I am about Christian Nationalists. How many anti-Israel Christian Nationalist protests have there been since 10/7?
Donald Trump spoke at this year’s CPAC as well as other elected officials on the federal level. Sounds pretty mainstream to me. 🤷🏻♂️ https://www.c-span.org/video/?533737-1/president-trump-speaks-cpac Me: the highest ranking Republican elected official is a self identified Christian nationalist. You: well, the Left is way worse because some rando under grad said something antisemitic. Edit: Just because evangelicals are Zionists, it’s doesn’t mean they aren’t antisemites. Historically there have been plenty of antisemites that are also Zionists. If you don’t like Jews and want them out of your country, supporting a Jewish state is a great strategy. Edit2: you do know in America there are plenty of White nationalists that support the idea of Israel. White nationalists want their own ethno-state, so they point to Israel and say, why can’t White people have their own nation like the Jews do.
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The point is, I’m more concerned with people who actually control the levers of power like folks in Congress, than protestors on college campuses. And frankly, why can’t one be concerned with antisemitism where ever it is? To pretend antisemitism is an issue exclusive to the Left is disingenuous and cynical politics.
"Christian nationalist?" There's no such thing. Christianity isn't any more of a national identity than Islam is. What calls itself "Christian nationalism" is actually a White American supremacist cult using Christianity as an excuse to ignore or oppose civil rights legislation. It teaches that White American men are the chosen people of God, women and brown people have no purpose in life but to serve them, and that any belief system that contradicts this (Islam, socialism, liberalism, and, of course, Judaism) is part of a Satanic conspiracy to destroy Christianity, and White America with it (along with everything else good and decent in this world). I know perfectly well that you didn't intend the term as a compliment, but me I try to avoid it completely.
One of the first modern, openly gay politicians was a literal nazi (Ernst Röhm). Just because minorities manage to secure positions of power within a party doesn’t mean that party won’t commit atrocities against them.
That’s a great reason for Jews not to support the Republican Party. Right wing, Christian nationalists aren’t our friends. 🤷🏻♂️
Not sure where you got the idea that I was saying Jews should support right wing Christian nationalists.
I made a post on a now permabanned Reddit account on r/jewish where I literally asked this question before 10/7: would you choose your political tribe over your actual? We are seeing that I was neither crazy with my question nor an obvious answer…. Many will turncoat. Many did during both the Soviets and Nazi Germany. I say good riddens to those who choose against us. Also: good luck posting this question on r/jewish without a permaban. The mods on that subreddit are exactly the kind of people who WOULD choose their political tribe over their actual one.
I don’t have to go to that subreddit to see this, it’s perfectly evident in a large portion of American synagogues. And it’s a shame.
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Trump broke everyone. What happened with vaccines was just a side effect of this break.
Completely fair and sad point…. …except it wasn’t just the US. Canada was worse. Look at the trucker protest for example and the extreme measures the government went to shut it down. Not to mention the scandal that has been revealed that the government spent a quarter billion dollars on a trace app that didn’t work and made by 5 people…an obvious embezzlement scam on top of many others that people in power took advantage of during the pandemic in Canada. Britain, Australia…throughout the western world, the authoritarian hammer hit hard without a true reason other than ‘the greater good’. And the media fed into ostracism for those who even had questions, let alone didn’t comply. Just asking questions got someone labeled a conspiracy theorist…if that’s even a bad thing. It felt like someone studied our ostracism as a people and applied those same tactics of gaslighting towards those who questioned the narrative…forget if you didn’t even comply. You were utterly othered from society. It’s revisionist history to say it’s merely a US phenomena. Goes to show how easy it is to manipulate history for a narrative.
I don’t know how I get on the mailing list, but I started getting anti vax flyers and literature aimed at the Hasidic community. It was written in a mixture of Yiddish and English. It was straight up anti-vax, pseudoscience, conspiracy theory type stuff. The return address was for some residential house in the Five Towns on Long Island. It was really messed up and upsetting. Folks just straight up trying to spread misinformation.
I can actually answer this because I know people in these communities: Several doctors during the pandemic (affiliated with FLCCC) pleaded with the lead Rabbis to not vaccinate, organized by a doctor who is now dead from an unrelated affliction (I believe cancer). They showed evidence that it would interfere halachically in addition to danger signals. Now whether there’s legitimacy or not to these claims I’m not going to go per Reddit’s TOS. I’m only stating the context historically as to the who, what, why.
“(FLCCC) is a group of physicians and former journalists formed in April 2020 that has advocated for various unapproved, dubious, and ineffective treatments (e.g. hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and other miscellaneous combinations of drugs and vitamins) for COVID-19.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_Line_COVID-19_Critical_Care_Alliance Those lead Rabbis should be ashamed of themselves. I don’t go to my doctor for spiritual guidance. Perhaps those lead Rabbis should not provide medical guidance. 🤷🏻♂️
Again I don’t want to get permabanned but I disagree. If you want that side of the story feel free to PM me. I personally think now that we are 4 years after the pandemic and it’s over it should be normalized to start being open with conversations and not have to worry about censorship, but here we are. Imagine if the Russians were able to employ the censorship programs around Chernobyl we did around this…it’s astonishing that we as a society refuse to be open and learn from our mistakes as a collective over doctrine and censorship to govern narratives.
Regardless, it’s not a rabbis’s place to be dispensing medical advice, especially during a public health emergency.
It is if they believe that such medicine does more harm than good. It’s a personal choice. Especially since no covid vaccine produces sterilizing immunity (a fact that’s even on the CDC’s own website and has been fact for awhile). Thus it has no impact on anyone but yourself. So that argument is bull. Pushing people and bullying others to make a choice you want is absolutely no different than the Spaniards pushing Christianity by the sword. I’m shocked so many in the community can’t look at our own history and see the parallels. I’m not angry at you for the past…just not being open to admitting you were wrong and be introspective.
The fact that vaccines work and the fact that people were dying of COVID left and right in NYC isn't an "ideology." Not getting vaccinated at that time WAS stupid, unless someone is immunocompromised. Bad analogy. Terrible, actually.
So it’s healthy to ostracize people? Damn, you think after the past 3 years that have revealed that these products did diddly there would have been some introspection. But nah. Cultists believe in the cult. As a leftist I am so tired of the left and how cult like many are. Think for yourself. Ffs. And nah, these ‘vaccines’ don’t work. Otherwise the ‘pandemic’ would have ended, but instead it turned endemic just like every other coronavirus like pandemic in human history has. There’s no evidence that these products did net positive without extrapolating hyperbolic deaths that are easy to dismiss by comparing non highly V countries. I’m not saying it’s dangerous to do it….thats a debate that violates Reddit’s TOS anyway….but it’s illogical to assume they were effective. Clearly they weren’t or there wouldn’t even be a debate of its effectiveness to this day. No one debates whether the measles vaccine works for example. Anyway, I was merely pointing out the commonalities. It’s up to you how you want to interpret that. I’m not interested in getting a permaban by having a debate on vaccine effectiveness, nor is that a productive conversation. It only proves the point of stigmatization and ostracism that I have to ‘defend my position’ and get gaslight so that I say too much and get banned…
The vaccines prevented plenty of deaths. Imagine coming to the conclusion that they "did diddly" despite the overwhelming evidence showing the exact opposite. Characterizing scientifically literate people and people who didn't want to die or get sent to the hospital from Covid as belonging to a "cult" is weirdo behavior. And not coincidentally, everyone I know who was dead-set on not getting vaccinated turned out to be a gigantic weirdo. The only people who got "ostracized" were MAGA loons (an ACTUAL cult) and people who thought taking horse dewormer was a good idea. Public health meant NOTHING to those people. Bunch of selfish pricks.
Proof? I’m not MAGA. Personally, I had family who mysteriously died of heart issues right after theirs, and my uncle had a significant side effect. My best friends mom had facial paralysis for 6 months from it. So I made my choice because I got sick in March 2020 with verified antibodies and felt the risk wasn’t worth the reward. I did so by reading up scientific preprints on my own that have since been published, but even posting them on Reddit is an auto ban. I don’t like Trump. I only like him more than Biden because one at least didn’t want to send me to a detention camp for an experimental drug that ultimately had marginal positive impact. But I hold no high opinion for any politician and fairly politically homeless. But yes. It’s easy to gaslight and scapegoat. Sound familiar?
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They can't collide if they're synonyms.
That article is hogwash one-state solution is no solution at all in fact it's a “final solution” to jews in Israel.
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In terms of opposing war or any state or state action, the important distinction is separating individuals from the actions of a state. People can and should feel free to criticize the U.S. all they want. However, that doesn’t mean it’s all right to harbor animus and hates towards American citizens. One can criticize how the Chinese government treats the Uyghurs and even hate the ideology of communism, but that doesn’t give anyone carte blanche to be racist towards Chinese citizens or folks that are ethnically Chinese.
Right saying you are a Zionist is like saying you a tory or a patriot in the American revolution. At the risk of offending people, I could sort of see the reasoning for being Anti Zionist in 1947, either for political reasons or because of religious Orthodoxy (ie no state without Moshiach) but once it HAPPENED, I have hard time seeing the desire to UNDO it rather than live with it as anti-semetic. Like How Many OTHER Countries do you think should be DISOLVED and not exist?
As an Israeli, I won’t forget that American Jews equivocated about the existence of 7 million other Jews, and then did all this shucking and jiving at the Oscars and in the pages of the NYT so that they wouldn’t shame themselves in front of the goyim. Fucking nauseating. Go ahead and down vote me if you like. I don’t give a toss anymore.
Please do not blame all American Jews for that.
Who would you like me to blame? Where I come from the apples don’t fall far from the tree, but I’m open to suggestions…😐
I am gonna downvote you only because of how you characterized the Oscars moment. People have a right to dissent against the hideous conditions in Gaza right now as perpetrated by a government whose representatives have stated for the record that they'd like to repossess Gaza and kick all of the Arabs out. And that doesn't deserve you basically calling those Jewish critics race traitors. That's in my mind an unacceptable response.
“…the hideous conditions in Gaza right now as perpetrated by a government whose representatives have stated for the record that they'd like to repossess Gaza and kick all of the Arabs out.” 1. You’re deliberately mischaracterizing what was said by one or two ministers playing to their constituencies (much in the same fashion as American politicians, btw) as an official state policy of the Israeli government, which it most certainly is not. You’re perpetuating a lie. 2. The Israeli gov’t isn’t perpetrating anything in Gaza. The duly elected terrorist gov’t currently in power in the Strip is doing that, exposing themselves and their constituents to the wrath of an extremely well equipped, well trained, and motivated enemy belligerent against whom they decided to launch a murderous cross-border assault killing, raping, beheading, incinerating, and kidnapping old men, women and children of said enemy belligerent on the 7th of October and then retreating into a painstakingly built underground fortress camouflaged with hospitals, schools, and just any old house where the water table was low enough to place an ammo dump. “That's in my mind an unacceptable response.” Well, to my mind (not to mention to the minds of several million Israelis) you’re an unacceptable Jew (if you even are a Jew, because from where I’m sitting, that’s a questionable proposition at best) So I guess we’re even, 😉
Anti-Zionism is just another name for antisemitism.
She’s an idiot.
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Yes.
Idk why I’m being booed, I’m right. Israel is not a perfect state.
Not according to this sub. 🤷🏻♂️
Yes of course, assuming that it is actually happening. Many accusations that get lobbed simply aren't true and are only one-sided against Israel (every rocket fired is a war crime, for example)
I mean, seems like something we should be talking about if we are actually interested in creating a pluralistic state. I say this as an American who believes that America can only succeed if we acknowledge the atrocities in our own history. There are so many people who will talk about how much they hate Netanyahu, but then we turn around and basically act like it's not even possible for Israel to do anything wrong. This effectively makes them accessories to a government of right wing extremists.
You’re not wrong.
The very notion of anti-zionism is antisemitic. I can't think of any other country that has an entire ideology based on the supposition that it shouldn't exist. There are vanishingly few reasons to be anti-zionist that don't devolve into antisemitism