When oppressors promote contrarian minorities

I just did a google image search for "Orthodox Jews." I wanted the image to show how Jews often can stand out as quite different in a visual way. A huge number of the early results are Neturei Karta. Seven images of 19 images (I'm ignoring a Barbie Doll in Tefellin) on the first page.

Neturei Karta, which has maybe 5,000 members (of whom perhaps only a tiny minority are politically active), and more specifically a one-dimensional representation of even this group as anti-Israel that ignores their stances on a million other issues, has come to represent for many people what Orthodox Judaism is.

Well, no. NK is a tiny group that doesn't represent Orthodox Judaism. Chabad-Lubavitch, for example, has over 200,000 members worldwide. And because they're very active, it would make a lot more sense to me if people took C-L as representative of Orthodox Judaism, even if they're not even as large in number as Modern Orthodox.

But C-L and Modern Orthodox have much more pro-Israel stances than NK. So when people who aren't Jewish (or Orthodox Jews) want to talk about Judaism in a way that fits their anti-Zionist views, they pretend NK are "true Jews." This, of course, means I get Christians and Muslims trying to tell me, effectively, that I'm not Jewish enough to speak from a Jewish perspective -- which is just insane. And Racist. It's colonialism, plain and simple.

Mom's film reviews

I've talked a bit to my mother about Holocaust films. (Here's a piece I wrote for Racialicious.) For some reason, she saw two over the weekend. Boy in the Striped Pajamas didn't move her at all, since it wasn't really about Jews. Defiance did move her, and she wants to buy the DVD.

Btw, in Koreatown yesterday, the book store that rents DVDs in back had the poster for Defiance up in Hangul. Soo tells me it was a pretty big hit in Korea.

Left(?) Antisemitism

On Chavez's antisemitism, at the Boston Review (via Bob). Honestly, I don't know how anyone has ever considered Chavez a Leftist. Petty fascist from the first.

And, while I'm at it, David on Naomi Klein. I think I can understand why David is as angry as he is (or seems), but I'm not sure Klein deserves language such as, "Klein's antics reveal her true colors -- as an ally of hate, of the fury and bigotry that threatens to consume us all." And yet, to say she seems confused rather than hateful would be condescending given that political theory is her thing. And David's criticism is far too cogent to let Klein's offense pass.

Seriously, this is victim-blaming at its most blatant. Klein admits that Ahmadinejad's speech was racist, but still faults Jewish groups for opposing the conference that gave him an open mic. Because we refuse to be abused, we're committing sabotage at an anti-racism conference. Here's a thought -- maybe if putative anti-racists like Klein would step up and refuse to tolerate anti-Semitism, then Jewish students wouldn't need to dress up like clowns to draw attention to it.

Alice Walker once wrote that "No person is your friend who demands your silence." In the face of growing anti-Semitism -- a rise in racism that has occurred on both the left and right, in Europe and worldwide -- Klein's demand of Jews is that they shut up and let the real people talk. No dice.

Absence of Closure

A recent article at HNN by Gustav Schonfeld begins in an interesting way:

Except for the year from May of 1944 to May of 1945, my life has been very satisfactory. However, that one year left an indelible mark upon my life, a mark which affects me still. It was the year my relatives and I spent in four Nazi German concentration camps: Auschwitz, Warsaw, Dachau, and Muhldorf.

Often, I think, people assume the Holocaust was a natural progression from ubiquitous, European antisemitism. I guess it's fair to say that it was, except that "ubiquitous" suggests that antisemitism was salient at all times. It wasn't.

Most Jews experienced the period from the late 19th century into the earliest part of the 20th as exceptionally tolerant for Jews. So today, when many Jews experience this period as exceptionally tolerant, a question ought to arise. Will this moment last?

But this question doesn't arise for those who don't understand the period leading up to the Holocaust. It's assumed that because today is a tolerant period that it is fundamentally different from times long past. But that difference is imagined. Anyone who has confidence that serious antisemitism is a thing of the past is simply ignorant of history.

This introduction at HNN -- and the title of Shonfeld's new book, Absence of Closure -- suggest a compelling reason for another survivor's memoir. The Holocaust cannot be safely sealed in the past.

Stonewall anniversary

From Wiki:

The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. They are frequently cited as the first instance in American history when gays and lesbians fought back against a government-sponsored system that persecuted homosexuals, and they have become the defining event that marked the start of the gay rights movement in the United States and around the world.

On Left and Right and Antisemitism

In the wake of the USHMM shooting, and following on the heels of Jonah Goldberg's completely idiotic Liberal Fascism, there's been an attempt on the right to politicize the shooting by claiming the shooter was a Leftist. Many commenters have rightly expressed indignation at the stupidity of such arguments, including Leonard Zeskind in the interview on WNYC I linked to Friday.

Unfortunately, this is framed around Goldberg, which is to say that the debate is kind of beside the point in a discussion of antisemitism. Left and right are adequate for describing older variants of antisemitism, but a major political function of antisemitism is to organize coalitions during reorganization of the Left/Right divide. The USHMM shooter was a member of the far right, but in saying so, we're also saying that he's holding on to political arguments that aren't very relevant today. His kind of antisemitism is probably the most lethal to me today, but not tomorrow.

Here's Zeskind in an interview with Hatewatch:

More, the concepts of left and right have lost a lot of their explanatory power. Who’s on the left, who’s on the right, in Russia and Eastern Europe today? I can’t tell.

Also, from the same interview, and this is meaningful because people often mistake all revolutionary tendencies for Left revolutions:

Here’s the trick about spotting the transformation into a white revolutionary movement: The piece that makes them the most revolutionary is anti-Semitism, because it creates for them a ruling class. The invention of a fake ruling class transformed a reform-oriented conservative movement into a revolutionary movement. Jared Taylor [editor of the white nationalist journal American Renaissance], for example, does not embrace the anti-Semitic theories that William Pierce [late leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance] did. Taylor apparently worked in international finance at one point, and he doesn’t see himself as separate from that, despite the people railing at the banks and the Federal Reserve. It would be a mistake to call vanguardists and mainstreamers factions; they’re ideological tendencies, and they can both exist within a single organization.

Nixon's concern for Jews

No surprise Nixon was an antisemite. We've known that for a long time, but with the release of new tapes there's a little more detail for me.

Anti-Semitism is stronger than we think. You know, it’s unfortunate. But this has happened to the Jews. It happened in Spain, it happened in Germany, it’s happening — and now it’s going to happen in America if these people don’t start behaving. ... It may be they have a death wish. You know that’s been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.

That quote is reported by the NYT here and in the "main" article here. Toward the end of that main article, the quote is presented in pieces --both articles elide parts of the conversation, but the "main" article is more disjointed-- but some context is provided that's less apparent in the article with the full quote. Only the main article provides a short audio clip in a sidebar.

What's a little surprising for me is how sincere Nixon sounds in expressing his concern for Jews. His "concern" includes stereotyping Jews as having a death wish and using that as an excuse to blame Jews for antisemitism. But I wouldn't have guessed that someone also capable of much more blatant, explicit, and hateful antisemitism could sound so genuine expressing what he thinks of as concern.