I'm Jewish, and I'm here to tell you that antisemitism exists on the left.
I get it. Israel has a lot of power and influence, and antisemitism was used against Corbyn as a smear. That doesn't mean that antisemitism on the left isn't also a real thing, and I'm tired of being regarded with suspicion as a Zionist stooge every time I bring it up.
I'm sick of being grilled by strangers about Palestine as soon as they find out I'm Jewish. You wouldn't get in a Sunni's face about the ongoing Saudi genocide in Yemen, so why do I have to answer for a whole country I'm not from? Why am I a "suspect" until I can prove my credentials?
I'm sick of being regarded as just a (((white person from Brooklyn))), as one poster on here put it. White people from Brooklyn don't get their places of worship shot up at random, or called k*kes everywhere online, or get assaulted if dressed traditionally.
I'm sick of making friends in left spaces IRL, to later hear them regurgitate Rothschild conspiracies or tell racist jokes about the Hasidic communities nearby. Big noses! Love of money! We have sex through a hole in a sheet! It never gets old! This shit people say about Jews would never get said about any other minority. I've even seen a "left" (ex)-friend from school say that "the only good jew is a dead jew" in messages (which apparently was "fine because she's Lebanese and it's a cultural thing and she doesn't really mean it").
There are many problems on the left, including racism and sexism, and it doesn't get better if we just pretend they don't exist. Jewish leftists are your allies, please treat us as such. We want the same goals as you. If we bring up that we feel uncomfortable, PLEASE do not just write us off. It's heartbreaking to raise the issue of the racism that you're experiencing in a supposedly inclusive space, just to be accused of being a shifty wrecker working for a foreign state.
This post was inspired by this one, where a random Jewish person (with "free palestine" on their page, no less) is implied to be a paid Israeli troll just for bringing up that anti-Semitism is a problem on our side too.
Edit: I’d just like to say thank you all for the overwhelmingly positive response to this post. It’s really great to know your comrades have got your back. I also appreciate how those with questions have (mostly) been open minded and engaged in good faith. It makes a difference.
I hope this site treats antisemitism with the same brush it treats transphobia.
Make their names public.
I was actually breaking character and being serious. I guess we'll know if mods treat antisemitism as a real prejudice or not. :shrug:
phase in
You can read all about the rapture and why we need conflict in Jerusalem in my novel, Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation.
Dr. Zens, what about Jews in China? Will they bring about the rapture if they have a conflict with the evil communist party?!?
Watching people treat downvote policing as a form of politics is like being trapped listening to the Adam Curtis chapo episode on a neverending loop.
Yeah that post obviously blows, I have no idea how it got so upvoted. I'd hope it's just because the point is so confused that people didn't really pay attention to what they were upvoting...?
I think people get wrapped up in this idea that our politics are nearly perfect and everyone is out to get us. Plus there are plenty of bad faith concern trolls about leftist anti-semitism, like the whole Corbyn fiasco, or even when people say Eli Valley's art is anti-semitic, or TrueAnon is an anti-semitic podcast.
Sometimes you're so used to fighting one thing you forget about another very similar thing.
the only thing we can do is judge each claim on its merits. if you prejudge, you've fostered prejudice.
What episode does Felix say that in? I don't think I've heard it. The comments I've heard from him regarding his Jewishness are usually jokes, so hearing him actually get angry about an anti-Semitic terror attack would be impactful.
Ah so "wants Jews to be afraid everywhere and scared and targeted" was actually Will, still a killer line though.
I upvoted and commented on that thread largely making fun of the poster themselves and frankly overlooked/did not push back on the part where the poster here claimed they worked at a troll farm. My lack of push back is because I roll my eyes every time people here accuse people of being psyops and just ignore it, but obviously letting that slide on that post wasn't a good call
Yeah I mindlessly upvoted it at first because it was confusing and I didn't really understand what it was supposed to be about and then I read it a bit closer and I realized what the point was.
Thanks for saying this I have a hard time articulating it. It's funny because when some leftists find out I am jewish they also almost instantly ask my thoughts on israel which makes me feel like I don't belong. For some reason certain people act like Jews are not a "real" minority or we don't get discriminated against like other groups. Well, from personal experience that isn't true :/
"This shit people say about Jews would never get said about any other minority. "
i agree with everything else but ???? u know they killing black people right? saying mexicans are rapists? drug dealers? asian people are getting attacked because of xenophobic fears re covid
I think OP was talking about left circles and you're talking about right wing actions against jews. Other groups are generally less criticized by the left when compared to the Jews. If you wanted to talk about right wing violence than it also makes no sence because there were several synagogue attacks in the last few years.
i think the left focuses equally on being racist sometimes, just in a different way
To clarify, I’m talking exclusively about left wing circles where most forms of racism are quickly stamped out.
yeah but in leftist circles including this page, people say or insinuate racist things too and its not stamped out quickly, if at all. i understand the idea that in left circles there seems to be more of a stigma against attacking certain groups, but these groups are still heavily attacked at a degree that can get very real very fast, corresponding to skin color....... (ofc jews are too but this entire summer was about black people being killed senselessly and a lot of very "liberal" white people realizing just now that that's not okay like dude).
someone on hear this summer was like "i feel bad for kyle rittenhouse because he looks lost" and that shit was very upvoted.
Fair enough. It's not something I've seen personally, most leftists I know IRL and on here are usually very good about racial issues, but I don't doubt it happens and also shouldn't be tolerated at all.
Good post. Thank you for sharing your experience. So bizarre to me that people would immediately grill a Jewish person about Israel when support for Israel among younger Jews is basically at an all time low.
The rest of this shit is downright messed up.
Jewish comrades that I have met irl have been some of the most supportive, kind, and helpful people I know.
Heck the small town DSA I was with half the organizing committee were ML Jewish dudes.
Love to you comrade
As a Jew, this is my problem with the TrueAnon podcast. While they never explicitly mention The Jewish Question, they seem to uncritically reference a multitude of conspiracy theories clearly borne out of right-wing circles. I know they try to frame it as a curiosity or "just asking questions" or whatever, but functionally, they may as well just be reading excerpts from the Turner Diaries.
On the flipside, yeah, Jews, and Zionists in particular, hold way too much power and lord it over American and Middle East society. So I "get" the antisemitism. By demographics, they're overrepresented in politics, law, entertainment, and finance, so any conspiracy corkboard is gonna be lit up with red string. And while we can talk about "white men" dominating all sectors of society, any similar discussion about Jews gets swept under the carpet.
It's complex. What's certain is it's next to impossible to discuss it without everyone bringing their baggage.
Not to be a person who defends podcasts (and I haven't listened in a while), but trueanon does the ironic antisemitic conspiracy thing for comedy, the same as they do with lots of other veins of conspiracy. Felix Biderman and Eli Valley also do it. Michael Brooks loved to do joking antisemitism bits. As you are jewish you can probably appriciate black humor being a cultural staple, and you can also appriciate how annoying it is to be jewish and face constant accusations of being anti-semitic or self-hating.
Not that it is any sort of ironclad shield, but some times jokes are just jokes
Nah, they'll devote 30-40 mins of a podcast uncritically regurgitating fascist conspiratorial nonsense. That's a completely different ballpark than some blue checkmark ironically doing triple parentheses. It's kinda sus that you'd pull those other names into the same realm.
You're right very suspicious that I associate these four leftist jewish professional online joke-makers who exist in the same small media sphere and frequently crossover. They bear no real similarity besides their religion, what they do, and also that all four famously face(d) unrelenting bad-faith accusations of anti-semitism from the twitter right. Its probably just me doing self-hating Judaism, you are right to immediately imply an accusation of antisemitism you have won
Nah, they’ll devote 30-40 mins of a podcast uncritically regurgitating fascist conspiratorial nonsense
link pls the trial of true anon has begin
Also, if you're generally skeptical like me and think 9/11 was "allowed" to happen by the security state so the US could invade the Middle East and ram through panoptical legislation like the Patriot Act, there's no doubt Israeli leadership/AIPAC had a seat at the table. Again, just ...complex. But ascribing that bloodthirst Zionism to all Jews is really the problem. That being said, anyone defending Israeli apartheid should get the wall.
That's the thing though, I don't live in fucking Israel and I don't have a say in how they run their country. I'm literally just a guy with a religion working a normal job so I can have a holiday once in a while. I'm not a Mossad commander because I'm circumcised and take Saturdays off.
The biggest hate I've received for supporting Palestinian rights is from other American Jews. It's a multi-pronged attack.
I posted about weaponized antisemitism a day or two ago, so it may be that i was part of the overall situation that made you feel the need to write out this post. I apologize for that and want to let you know that reading your post has made me agree hard in almost every paragraph. I appreciate how you give both good examples for false accusations, like the smear campaign against Corbyn, and legit concerns like the things you list from your own experience. We need to be aware of these distinctions, both to prevent antisemitism from taking root in our movement and to push back against the concern troll narrative that exclusively projects antisemitism onto the left, and we cannot live up to either demand if we ignore what comrades directly affected by the situation can weigh in with. So thanks for taking the time to write out your post, i think we need a discussion like this.
Just as an aside, anti-semitism is so bizarre and alien to me personally, probably because I grew up with and live in a country with a pretty tiny Jewish population that isn't really visible and isn't really talked about. As a kid, I could've named precisely one Jewish Finnish person. Now I can name two
Some of the folks I grew up were racist as fuck towards black people and Muslims (and Romanis, naturally) but I never heard anyone say a single thing about Jews (some of them thought Israel was cool for "keeping those Arabs in check".)
Ironically, I only learned what anti-semitic tropes were from ironic usage in American media like South Park and later when I discovered that the Internet was full of Nazis
There's also only about 10 Jews in my country, but they have to have constant armed guards around their one synagogue.
Also every single one of my countrymen have made antisemitic jokes without ever having met a Jew.
Every year I hear jokes about gas ovens at Christmas time.
Not to be that guy but Finland has loads of antisemitism historic and current. I have met antisemitic leftwing Finns and seen Finnish nazis post online
Oh, I know, we have an active NSBM scene after all.
Still, I would make a distinction between the sort of insular kneejerk xenophobia I witnessed growing up and arcane Nazi race science. Like the grandma who thinks the Somali lady that was in front of her in the line at Lidl was being rude isn't likely to quote the Protocols at you. You need to fall pretty deep into a Nazi rabbit hole to get into that stuff. Of course, the Internet makes falling into said holes terrifyingly easy.
If you're talking about the Finnish branch of the NRM, they were never an official party and were ordered to disband this year. (Not that it matters much, they just started operating under a different name)
What do you mean Nazi, it's not like the leadership belongs to some sort of secretive Völkisch organisation that defines Finnishness in exclusively genetic and ethnic terms- ohhhhhhhhhhh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_n_qtgUKnY extremely relevant.
Antisemitism in leftist spaces is, sadly, real and we must work to eliminate it. The left still has a fuckton of work to do, antisemitism, racism, homophobia and transphobia are big internal enemies.
Solidarity comrade, I'm sorry you have to deal with so many assholes
I’m sick of making friends in left spaces IRL, to later hear them regurgitate Rothschild conspiracies
This is part of what pisses me off as a Jew. The Rothschilds did themselves and Jews a huge disservice by playing into the stereotypes. They funded and built Israel's Supreme Court building and included a monument to Freemasonry. Indeed, more of the architecture is quite... "illuminating". (I love studying symbolism, so this stuff is like crack to me.) But seriously, these guys are idiots.
If I was an evil billionaire capitalist family I would definitely play into the global secret society sillyness
wait I thought fucking through a hole in a sheet is a conservative Christian thing
Its an orthodox Jewish thing. Or, rather, it isn't an orthodox Jewish thing. It comes from a misunderstanding of Jewish customs relating to some traditinal garments, and general segregation of the sexes. Its very old nonsense
So it’s a trope based on misunderstanding of orthodox Jewish custom, and evangelical Christians said, hey we should do this unironically
No, No one does it unironically. Its not a real thing. Nobody does it. Conservative Christians have a lot of sexual pathology (The specific pathologies depending on the denomination and person), but this one is made up.
Listen. I'll cut a hole in a sheet and make you a tinder profile if you're really desperate.
Huh. That's a lot of dumb shit there. Thanks for sharing, it's very informative.
