I heard gyp/jip a fair bit as a kid and welsh/welch occasionally pops up to this day in television. Weird how those were ever acceptable…
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It’s not about economics either. Just see it as it’s own thing rather than trying to force it into a model designed for something else.
That makes sense, and this capsule summary applies quite broadly (e.g., not just to economic problems). Thanks for engaging my question about how to approach these matters with compassion. There was an interesting case reported in this story: “The white flight of Derek Black”. But I’m trying to get a more full perspective, and this discussion is super helpful.
I’m sorry to hear that, but thank you for the clear answer to my question. It sounds like the kind of education mentioned by roomwithaview is lacking across a very wide demographic. But as you, and Wanderfound, have indicated – not just any education will do.
Will read, thanks. By the way my own “Jewish identity” is pretty convoluted and not well developed, but it exists. I’m sure I was thinking of the concept of “restorative justice” when I posted earlier. In that, I was inspired recently by this article: “Should We Forgive the Men Who Assaulted Us?” Perhaps obviously that’s written in the context of sexual assault, though the concepts would apply more broadly. The author concludes: I’m not ready to forgive him — at least not yet. Until restitution is made publicly as well as privately, his reckoning rings hollow. That seems to resonate with what you were saying about homeland. For me, I might never go to Israel, but I do hope to find something that feels like home. I’ve gotten close in recent years, but I don’t know if it can stick.
Thats a really good piece, she did a good job of explaining at a high level our understanding of what goes into forgiveness.The three concepts she mentioned are also deeply linked to our high holidays and are also understood as the three pillars upon which the world rests. That is to say, yes its hard and yes its really important to seek forgiveness for the wrongs one has done. But only after putting in the effort to understand the wrongs.
It can only be done as she mentions after the offender has understood, really understood, ones wrongs. This is not the world we live in. The world doesnt play by our rules anyway. We dont ask now that what is ours to begin with be ours again in the case of our homeland. It would be futile. I dont in any way forgive the world for how things are now (Jews dont “turn the other cheek”) because the world isn’t ready for it. They dont owe us our homeland so much as we have returned to what was ours to begin with despite the objections and vilifications on that matter which clearly show that no forgiveness is possible.
One might ask why history is full of anti-gay flare ups (interspersed with periods where people really didn’t care). Being gay is randomly distributed throughout the population, no class of people benefits from hating gay people. Alan Turing wasn’t part of an oppressed underclass, and his trial, punishment and young death didn’t benefit the UK or it’s ruling class at all.
I think to make sense out of any bigotry I have to separate the bulk of bigots who have authoritarian mindsets, who lack compassion, who respond to stress with aggression - people who engage in all the bigotries a society throws at them (a person who is racist is probably also sexist and homophobic and antisemitic and islamophobic) - from the reason why that particular bigotry is on the menu of bigotries in that culture.
If I want to understand American racism against black people I need to understand slavery and the money people made off of it. If I want to understand antisemitism, I need to recognize that its history is long and no analysis of recent or current economics is going to help.
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A friend of mine in university and I trained ourselves out of saying ‘gyp’. Any time one of us said “gyp” the other would say, “I also hate the Romani.” It was some extremely effective conditioning.
I was aware of “welch” and I think I said it at least a few times as a kid, but it wasn’t the go to word where I grew up, so I never really had to overcome it in the same way.
ETA: I think even as a small child I recoiled at “indian giver”. At least with “gyp” and “welch” I think we had no idea what we were saying.
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Unless of course part of it (here in the US at least) is to continue to drive American Jews out of the US to Israel, where they “belong”? It goes back to the goal of nationalists in creating an “ethnically pure” (however that’s actually defined) state. They seriously believe that that is how to make a more peaceful world - “if only ‘those’ people were in their correct place, the ‘end of history’ would be upon us.”
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I do question the choice of Israel though. I get the emotional reasons why, but… oof. Early on, there WZO did scout out alternatives. Too bad nothing stuck.
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Fuck homelands. What a terrible concept. Some Palestinian family gets displaced so some Israeli folks can build a settlement? Even the fact they’re called settlements… that ain’t no frontier!
I don’t think Israel should have a right to exist and Palestine doesn’t. Israel seems to be driven by racism, xenophobia. It’s disgraceful.
And don’t give me some line about me being antisemitic. I’m Jewish.
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Well, on some sense they do, depending on the meaning of “they”. The creation of the Israeli state was the Allied “solution” to the question of what to do with displaced Jews; whether or not it was the best or all possible solutions, the establishment and the Holocaust are so tightly linked that it is hard not to interpret some of the more extreme criticism (such as call for the State not to have existed, or assertions that “Zionism=racism”) as operationally equivalent to a desire that the Jews of the period should have simply have been discarded, and therefore are fundamentally anti-Semitic.
Now, as a diasporic Jew I likewise fail to see the operational benefits of a “homeland”, I hate that the current Israeli government has forced people like me as a non-Israeli into even having opinions about the country, the crazed obsession of the religious right with my people scares the pants off me, and I think that the Israeli government can be criticized without that criticism being anti-Semitic, and in fact should be because Netanyahu is dangerous idiot.
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Netanyahu is no more an idiot than trump. They’re both masters at wagging the dog, both adept at pushing their extremely right wing agendas. Both are thieves. trump is a blowhard asshole, but that seems to be in line with his masterly distraction of the world’s attention from all the terrible things being done in the background.
They’re both dangerous, both hideous, but unfortunately neither is an idiot. I really wish they were.
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The usual explanation for homophobia/heterosexism is that it’s a subset of the enforcement of patriarchy. Not everything is about class.
OTOH, you can find plenty of work by queer and feminist writers exploring the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism. I haven’t read enough of it to say much about it, though.
Explaining the rise and fall of social conservatism is tricky, but I suspect that there’s a fair bit of economic influence there; stock market vs hemline correlations etc. The correlation between social liberalism and wealth is far from absolute; excessive inequality can cancel it (e.g. Saudi Arabia).
I’m less interested in the individual psychology and more in the structural and historical forces that create and maintain systems of injustice.
I think that there has been too much focus on individual psychological factors (prejudice) and not enough on global structural factors (power). I associate this one-sided approach with liberalism, and I see it as entirely ineffective. Diversity training will not solve our problems.
Yup, you have to start at the roots.
For African American history, that means roughly Sungbo’s Eredo and the Revolt of the Zanj, then through the Mali empire, Transatlantic slavery, the Haitian Revolution, the Jamaican Uprising, the US Civil War, the Betrayal of Reconstruction, the return of the Klan, the destruction of Black Wall Street…and then you get to the more modern stuff, and the number of hyperlinks here is already getting ridiculous. See the BLM thread for the rest.
For antisemitism…
The diaspora is fundamental, so you have to start at least as far back as the Jewish Revolt and Masada. Then through the medieval expulsions, Isabella’s Inquisition, Tsarist pogroms, Dreyfuss, the Protocols and White Russian propaganda and then to the rise of fascism.
Fascist antisemitism of the interwar period was fairly closely linked to economics, though. The horror of WWI and the suffering of the Depression shocked both left and right into a radical critique of the war and the capital behind it. But while the radical left responded with opposition to capitalism, the fascist right deflected the blame into antisemitism.
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Do you apply this idea to all nation states which include such an idea or is this a double standard?
“Discarded” gets to the heart of the matter and this goes back far beyond the Holocaust. There’s enough history of this going back very far and even now (social media posts about “Hitler didn’t finish the job” and so on) that it isn’t a matter of interpretation.
You may also recall @jlw posting this one a while back
How do we “interpret” the desire for Judenfrei environments in 2018 differently than in 1948?
That can’t be pinned on the current government as these controversies go back to the first organized efforts to return to our homeland in the 19th century.
I’ve never disagreed but let’s be clear about the difference between actual criticism (as per my previous comments) and emotional response, rage or baseless hate. Really how often does any of this “criticism” address any actual government polices or actions outside of land use? Also I might be strange but I kind of expect critics to have a minimum understanding of the topics they address.
As an example of quality criticism take a look at Operation Opera
This fits well with the basic Clausewitz concept of war being an extension of politics and the article goes into the Begin Doctrine, it’s plusses and minuses and how this specific operation though an operational success may be also understood as having counterproductive results. Also interesting that it sets the legal precedent for pre-emotive strikes in current military law.
Compare this as criticism with what is in the ADL report, the Op-Ed in the press that poses as reporting or even what’s in this very thread.
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Our diaspora goes far beyond Europe. As does anti-semitism
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Further back to at least Manetho. And don’t forget bans on intermarriage, forced conversations, yellow patches & special hats, the Council of Toledo, bans on citizenship, the Fez pogrom, the 1391 Spanish pogrom, Pope Gregory IX fallout, blood libel, black death persecutions, Jewish segregation into ghettos, Martin Luther, Pope Paul IV, Pope Clement VIII’s expulsions, King Louis XIII’s expulsions, Khmelnytsky Uprisings…
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How does pre-Revolt Jewish history influence antisemitism?
There’s nearly limitless detail to dig into, to be sure. However, there do seem to be commonalities between some aspects of the Jewish experience and those of other religious/ethnic minorities. Empires use and abuse minorities in predictable patterns.
Like say, Palestinians.
Oh, the awful ironies.
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Don’t read more than what I said, barring a few nitpicks from my own experience I agree with you on all points, while also pointing out that it’s really far more complicated than you present, but I digress…
As for the study, a quick search isn’t turning it up, but there’s various avenues for further investigation cited in this article.
Because Jews have been persecuted since the time of Christ.
Hitler didn’t invent that, he just used it to his own advantage.
I certainly think this is certainly part of the issue. But Im still meditating on it.
