Open thread: The wave of antisemitic attacks

Something that adds to the pain is that Republicans will try to spin this for their own gain. To be clear, a few facts:
1. In the last few presidential elections, Jews voted overwhelmingly for Democrats.
2. In the 2020 midterms, 82% of Jews voted for Democrats
3. The Republican Party is an antisemitic party, and Trump is the most antisemitic president in my lifetime (and likely that of my parents as well)
4. The Religious Right view on Jews is largely antisemitic. It is a view which sees Jews as pawns to bring about the end times rather than people, and believes that Jews will not be saved when the end time comes. This is antisemitism.

Do not believe Republicans when they libel Democrats as antisemitic, or when they pretend to be a party that supports Jews. Neither of those ideas are true. The Republican Party is one that actively empowers neo-Nazis and other people that would like to see us Jews dead.

I am tired.

The obvious explanation is that this is mostly coming from the same alt-right that appears on this blog. There isn’t really any grand strategy, rather they are just scape-goating the jews for their own psychological issues. Of course the original Nazis were also “merely” scape-goating the Jews and that still resulted in a very real genocide. It won’t get that bad here and now, but of course it doesn’t have to go that far to be a serious problem.
The USA prides itself on defeating the Nazis, on opposing authoritarianism, on promoting freedom and equality, and yet this fascistic thinking can still find purchase in Americans minds. It isn’t clear why or how, but I think people reading this have some ideas.
I would recommend “The Alt-Right Playbook” series by “Innuendo Studios” on Youtube, and the book/webside “The Authoritarians”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g
https://www.theauthoritarians.org/

@QuantumInc

It won’t get that bad here and now

I hope not, but I am worried. The attitudes present here and now are not that different from those present in the Weimar Republic, and Trump’s rhetoric is quite similar to that of Hitler. We have concentration camps ready to go. It can get worse.

It isn’t clear why or how, but I think people reading this have some ideas.

I have some thoughts. First off, it has been 70 years since the Holocaust and WWII. Most Americans did not live through these. As a result, people have begun to forget. After the Holocaust, for a while open antisemitism was frowned upon because of the connection to Nazi Germany. Now, it’s been long enough that people are forgetting the dangers of fascism and falling into it.
Secondly, people are capable of extreme mental gymnastics That’s how someone can think they’re being a patriot while supporting the ideology of a US enemy.
Third, this did not come out of nowhere. Antisemitism has always been there, below the surface a bit. Trump has made it publicly acceptable again, even egged it on. When Trump ran for president, many people were angry. Trump offered what appeared to be a simple solution to their problem: scapegoating. This is a parallel to Hitler, who ran a similar rhetorical campaign when many people were angry in Nazi Germany.
Sorry if I’m rambling, I have a lot of thoughts but it’s hard to phrase everything.

@lilome

The way the rubric went, first Satan would persecute the Jews and then evangelical Christians would follow.

I didn’t know that that was the script. Thank you for adding more information.

@Victorious Parasol:

I keep wondering if I’m going to find out whether or not I have the gumption to hide people in our attic.

If it comes to that, I can’t imagine I could find a nicer attic.

@everyone, generally:

I don’t have a lot at stake personally in most of these attacks – I don’t have any Jewish family back east where most of the attacks have taken place or in SoCal where there have been a couple. There are ways in which this feels distant and ways that it feels very close to home. I feel odd commenting on it from any personal perspective as if these attacks are about me – a semi-Jewish atheist who hasn’t been to shul in several years and really don’t network much within Jewish community. My networks, such as they are, are more about queer community no matter your religious or ethnic history.

For those reasons, this isn’t about me. Yet, I also feel I have to speak up, because how can I have ever been Jewish or even semi-Jewish and then vanish when times get tough for those people who are visibly Jewish in locations which outsiders identify as Jewish population centers. They don’t come hunting for me, in my queer neighborhood. They go hunting the rabbi who lives next door to the Synagogue, the one wearing the obviously Jewish regalia of the Orthodox or the Chabads.

And so I speak up, not knowing what really to say except to tell the attackers: make it about me you violent motherfuckers.

No, we on the left are not always the best at defending the Lubavitchers. Their politics are anathema to me and even their religion includes shit I can’t stand. We go to rallies, but it’s hard for us to imagine doing dedicated worship-escorts the way we do organized, everysinglefuckingday clinic escorts. It feels distant, the lives of those on the inside of those religious communities. They’re often anti-vaxx. They’re always anti-abortion. They’re always anti-feminism.

Genesis asserts that humans were to be given dominion over all land animals and most of the rest as well. But there are two traditions responding to that declaration. One is that of the benevolent king: we are given power in order to bring the population to blossom, to plenty, to health and to wealth. The other is that of the dictator: we are given power so that your flesh is ours to control and even destroy, should we wish it, so that we may prosper even as you suffer, even from your suffering.

Though they are less likely to embrace the view of the dictator than evangelical Christians, still those Orthodox jews and the ultra-othordox, the Chabads and others, take this side often enough, when none of my own friends would see the world in the same way.

These differences are large, and they contribute to the difficulty left-wingers have in stepping in to defend the visibly Jewish, the insular Jewish communities. We’re not unwilling, but we’re also not sure we’re welcome. We feel ambivalent, even afraid, of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons or in the wrong way.

But come for me, motherfuckers. If you’re really about killing Judaism and us Jews, it won’t die until I do. It’s been years since I went to temple regularly, but you can bet your fucking ass that if you kill all but 9 jews in a community, I’ll show up ever week to satisfy the minyan.

So come for me. Bring your machete to my house. And after my friends finish throwing coffee tables at you, just wait to see how fast my hesitant queerbo friends take to the street, how fast my hacker friends explode your ugly truths across the internet.

We have language problems, the lefties and the Lubavitchers. We have gulfs of communication and even of thought that have been rarely and incompletely bridged.

But come for me and you’ll see just how much your anti-semitism is reviled. You want to eliminate Judaism? Do you dare try?

Come for me. Come for those the Left communicates with more easily. Come for us, cowards.

We are not isolated in pockets as you imagine us to be. We do not live in the ghettos anymore. We build communities, yes, and you will find many of us there. But we are fucking everywhere.

Come for me, cowards, if you have a tenth of the revolutionary bravery you say you have.

Come for me, and in living or in dying your violence will put an end to your groups, your beliefs, far more certainly than they will ever put an end to Jewish groups, Jewish beliefs, my groups, my beliefs.

Come for me, cowards.

Thanks for posting this. The writers Jessica Price and Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg explain things excellently. And @Crip Dyke, that was…well, I’m tired, and I can’t decide whether to write “eloquent” or, less fancily, “fucking awesome.” Both!

@Naglfar, @Moggie –

The attitudes present here and now are not that different from those present in the Weimar Republic, and Trump’s rhetoric is quite similar to that of Hitler. We have concentration camps ready to go. It can get worse.

WW2 is fading from our collective memory. Are we doomed to repeat the same disaster every eighty years?

I was talking about this with my dad just this evening. Well, my main fear was of large-scale terror aimed at Muslims, given what’s been happening in China, India, and even here in Quebec with Bill 21, added to what Trump’s been saying for years. But it was based on the fact that the anti-Muslim rhetoric (racism building on pre-existing religious intolerance against a specific group) sounds a lot to me like the Nazi rhetoric about Jews.

I said things like, “Please tell me that I’m being overly anxious, that it won’t happen again,” but he didn’t answer anything specific other than something like, “We’re all worried.”

(Then we pass our neighbour; she must be all, “Well, they have cheerful conversations.”)

I completely think thoses attacks are the early warning of the next genocide. There is a lot of other early warnings as well ; for the more mundane one, the fact governements pretty much have given up negociating with the public, which is particulary visible in France (see: strike, yellow vest, authoritarian-level of excessive force use in law enforcement), the high poverty and miscontentment in the population, and I could forgot more.

Note that before WW2, Germany was far from the only country with early onset fascism. Also, it probably will target several categories, not just the jews. (stating the obvious, but I feel it necessary)

Also of note : the other real risk is a revolution in one or several countries. Regardless of why it happen, even if it’s a reaction to, say, even more trumpist bullshit, that can easily led to mass murders of whatever group isn’t on the right line.

One of the thing that make me despair is that among the numerous reasons for which the situation is bad, one of them is voting systems. Almost all of them, all over the world, authorize a group of fascist to force a majority as long as the other groups are divided. It’s exactly what happend in Great Britain in the last election. Ironically, the best odds to avoid them using democratic rules to get to power is to hope *they* will get divided themselves.

There are two kinds of anti-semitic attacks. One is the traditional kind from the right; the ‘Jews will not replace us’ of the white supremacism of neo-Nazis and outright Nazis.
The other kind is demonstrateded by some Muslim extremists, most in Europe. It springs from anti-Israel beliefs (completely legitimate) and is extended to Jews in general . In the United States there are also some extreme African-American groups such as the Black Hebrew Israelites.
Both kinds must be resisted.

There were anti-semitic graffiti attacks by the far-right on synagogues in North London at the weekend. At the same time, in recent weeks we’ve seen several thousand members of violent far-right organisations and political parties such as the EDL join the ruling tory party (aka the ‘Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’).

The tories and their backers among the media-owners (which is very nearly all of them) continue to work very hard to ensure blame is put on the left, while preparing to bring in voter-restriction measures to make sure they stay in power (plans to re-draw boundaries, plus un-needed photographic ID requirements; totally taking a leaf out of the US republicans’ book. Not so incidentally, our eminence grise Dominic Cummings has links with Bannon).

A friend whose (Indian) parents live in a town where the National Front were big in the ’70s tells me they say it’s turning back quickly there. All the pubs that used to be NF pubs are EDL etc. pubs again now, they say, with nazi “decorations” inside.

There are a lot of prominent left-wing Jewish voices, both organisations and individuals, who have been pointing out for months that the increasing hostility is coming from the far-right, but they have had very little (almost zero) coverage. instead there has been never-ending coverage of right-wing organisations and individuals blaming the left. This is of course not to say there’s no anti-semitism on the left – it permeates throughout society; but the British media are doing a bang-up job of ignoring open racism on the right, and blaming the left including people who’ve been anti-racism activists all their lives.

Right wingers never care about something until it affects them directly, by which point it’s far too late.

@ Crip Dyke

Well, thank you, though any attic in Texas is bound to be a little uncomfortable. But any attic in a storm, I suppose.

WW 2 is fading in living memory, so we have to take up whatever torches have been passed our way. My German professor was a military translator who helped in the liberation of the camps, and later dedicated his scholarship to exposing/refuting the $%!#% people who deny the Holocaust. He was a sweet, quiet man, and imagining his disappointment in me is motivation a-plenty.

@Naglfar

Do not believe Republicans when they libel Democrats as antisemitic, or when they pretend to be a party that supports Jews. Neither of those ideas are true. The Republican Party is one that actively empowers neo-Nazis and other people that would like to see us Jews dead.

I am tired.

You and me both, sister. But thank you so much for posting this.

The right’s weaponization of “protecting Jews” has been incredibly effective so far TBH, and I have no reason to believe goyim won’t keep falling for it, but they have to keep hearing how it is wrong. The way the far right are literally using us as human shields, I’m almost as scared by what I’ll face from my own leftist comrades.

Solidarity. And fuck antisemites.

@Crip Dyke

Your experience is your own, and is perfectly valid. But I’ll note that I’m a secular queer Jew, and a pagan of sorts by religion, and I’ve still had to deal with antisemitic harassment throughout my life – as someone with dark curly hair, a big nose, etc. people immediately know I’m a Jew, and many of them hate me for it.

With all due disrespect to the Ultra-Orthodox, the fascists are coming for all of us, and so are tankies and other antisemitic tendencies on the left. I wish I had any idea what to do, beyond what we’re already doing.

@Cyborgette

The right’s weaponization of “protecting Jews” has been incredibly effective so far TBH, and I have no reason to believe goyim won’t keep falling for it, but they have to keep hearing how it is wrong.

It’s working far too well. I was talking to a (generally liberal) acquaintance about antisemitism and he said he thought Trump was protecting Jews. It took me about 10 minutes to explain that this is not what is happening.
You know something’s up when someone claims to be for a certain group, but the members of that group overwhelmingly oppose them.

the fascists are coming for all of us, and so are tankies and other antisemitic tendencies on the left.

That’s my thought. They’re going after the Orthodox now because they’re easier to spot in public. They’ll eventually come after us. If Crip Dyke feels like she can take the antisemites on, more power to her. But a lot of us aren’t as confident. If anyone has some good ideas on what to do, I’d like to know about it.