Showing posts with label Woke Antisemitism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Woke Antisemitism. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 16, 2023


The world is in an uproar because Bradley Cooper wore a prosthetic nose to look more like Leonard Bernstein in “Maestro,” a film Cooper co-wrote and produced. They say he wore “Jewface” and that doing so mirrors classic antisemitic stereotypes. Also, they say, his own nose was sufficiently large that it was unnecessary to make it bigger—that the prosthesis is exaggeratedly large—larger than Bernstein’s. There’s more—and we’ll get to that—but to summarize: the general consensus is that the wearing of the wannabe-Jewish shnoz by Bradley Cooper is antisemitic, if not by intention, then by effect. Are they right, or was he just doing what actors have always done, and using prosthetics to “dress the part?”

Perhaps we should begin with prosthetics. Is it common for actors to wear prosthetics to play a part? And is it sometimes inappropriate for them to do so?

Ask google and you will be shown the photos of several contemporary actors, right off the bat, and not wearing the prosthetics in question. 


You might also find the article with the blaring clickbait title, 40 Actors Made Unrecognizable in Prosthetic Makeup: From Emma Thompson to Jessica Chastain (Photos). (One can almost hear the exclamation points.)

In the above photo dump piece, it’s easy to understand why the actors needed prosthetics for their film work. Mostly they were playing fantastical or mythical creatures, or even monsters, going all the way back to Boris Karloff in Frankenstein. 


But then there was Tilda Swinton in Suspira (2018) as the 82-year-old male psychoanalyst Dr. Josef Klemperer. 


Why? Why did they need a woman to play a man. Couldn't they find a man to play the part? Was she wearing "manface?" I am, of course, making fun of anyone who would say this. The transformation of Swinton into the male Klemperer is astonishing, stunning. You would never know this is a woman playing a man. It's nothing like the outmoded practice of blackface.

You need prosthetics to play monsters, mythical creatures, or the opposite sex. But did Cooper really need to put on a nose to play Lenny Bernstein? Bernstein didn’t have THAT big a nose. And Cooper’s nose isn’t really that goyish.

Contrast and compare.

In a side by side comparison, it's hard to see the difference.

So, on the one hand, there’s not that much difference between the nose of the goy Bradley Cooper, and the nose of the Jew Lenny Bernstein.

On the other hand, Cooper perhaps does a disservice to the Jewish people. The wearing of the nose to some seems like a caricature of the Jewish people. Some seem to think that the nose, in fact, is right out of the pages of Der Stürmer with its depictions of Jews as ugly creatures with hooked noses. Those who protest against Cooper’s prosthesis don’t think this is an image we should be reinforcing in viewers’ minds. Especially in a time of rising antisemitism. Especially since Cooper’s own nose probably sufficed.

That is likely the reason Jewish socialite Lizzy Savetsky, who is active on Instagram on behalf of her people and the one Jewish State, said she felt triggered by the prosthesis and unpacked her feelings for us.

Some say Bradley Cooper didn't need the nose, he needed to do the work. He lacked talent, so he used a prop. For those in this camp, it’s not good enough to say that the prosthesis is a professional tool of the trade. Because from this point of view, Cooper isn't acting like a professional. 

Actor, writer, and producer Tracy-Ann Oberman, suggested as much when she wrote on Instagram:

If Bradley Cooper green lights your film to play the Jewish composer Bernstein and you want him over a Jewish A-Lister who can equally play that role - then let Bradley Cooper’s acting be so magnificent and truthful that the character of Bernstein shines through what he already looks like.

If he needs to wear a prosthetic nose then that is, to me and many others, the equivalent of Black-Face or Yellow-Face.

For “Golda,” on the other hand, a prosthesis was definitely indicated, no matter who played her on the big screen, Jewish or not. Golda Meir, whatever you thought of her politics, had a prominent and hawkish nose, for her a mark of distinction. So when Helen Mirren put on a prosthetic nose for the role, there was not too much hubbub over that, only that she was a goy playing a Yid. They accused the actress of “Jewface,” a play on the “blackface” of once upon a time in which white actors wore exaggerated stage makeup to portray and parody black people.

I was sad to read about this when the murmurs began. I was flattered to have Helen Mirren play such an important and historic Jewish figure, because I admire Mirren’s work. Should I now be expected to protest her performance because of her faith? 

(no dogs and Jews allowed)

Then again, isn’t acting all about playing someone else? Jonathan Tobin thinks so (emphasis added):

The idea that only members of a minority group can portray the Jewish people has in recent years taken on the aspect of an unwritten law of the entertainment industry.

The whole point of acting is people pretending to be someone other than themselves.

Tobin takes us through the history, how once white actors played Indians and Asians, and how ridiculous they seemed. Today that just doesn’t happen. And that is all to the good. As Tobin says, “That has saved us from some embarrassing examples of whites engaging in ethnic stereotypes to overcompensate for the difference between their own backgrounds and those of their characters.”

Here is where things get tricky, because Jews are not all one color and many do not have features stereotypically associated with Jews, such as the unusual proboscis of Golda. So why is it that only a Jew can play a Jew? Smells a LOT like bigotry. Tobin blames it on identity politics [emphasis added]: 

[Those] reasonable complaints have now brought us to a situation where identity politics has run amuck. While we are spared the spectacle of a white person using makeup to appear brown or black, the unwritten rules of Hollywood now tell us that no one but a transgender actor can play someone, regardless of race, who claims that identity. That’s something actor Scarlett Johansson, who has pretended to be all sorts of types of persons, including superheroes and ethnicities far removed from her own Jewish background, learned when she had to give up a transgender role after a storm on Twitter.

Tobin hints at the way Netflix insistently pushes anachronistic fare on its paying audience, training us to think it is okay to have a “black Anne Boleyn or the ahistorical foolishness in which, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, British King George III’s wife Charlotte is portrayed as a person of color in Netflix fare like ‘Bridgerton’ is treated as not merely reasonable but necessary.”

It’s all a game, asserts Tobin:

That Jews should be playing this game is both appalling and slightly ridiculous. Indeed, the Jew who screamed the loudest about a previous “Jew face” controversy—comedian Sarah Silverman, who complained about the casting of the non-Jewish Kathryn Hahn to play Jewish comedian Joan Rivers—is a member of the cast of Cooper’s maestro film in which she plays Bernstein’s sister.

Going back to Tobin's point about the olden days of whites playing ethnic minorities, now we have non-Jews playing Jews. According to some, that's not the real problem, the problem is the ratio. From 'Oppenheimer,' 'Golda,' 'Maestro': Will the Real Jewish Actors Please Stand Up?

A flurry of mainstream films released this year pivot on Jewish historical figures who impacted the world in ways impossible to ignore: Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Oppenheimer, is known to history as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Leonard Bernstein, played by Bradley Cooper in Netflix’s Maestro, which Cooper will also direct, is considered one of the 20th century’s most influential composers. And Golda Meir, played by Helen Mirren in Guy Nattiv’s Golda, served as Israel’s first — and, to date, only — female prime minister, shepherding the fledgling nation through the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

All of these individuals were Jewish. In their cinematic counterparts, none of them are played by Jews.

“The problem right now is the ratio,” says Jewish actor-writer Jonah Platt, who starred in Wicked on Broadway as well as Showtime’s Uncoupled, and will appear in upcoming Universal film The List.

“If we found ourselves in a place, eventually, of more balance, it would be a lot more palatable,” says Platt of the dearth of Jewish actors cast in Jewish roles. “But right now, we're at, like, zero. All of the major giant Jewish parts are played by non-Jews. We have this inherited fear that people are going to say all these nasty things about us if they think we're too powerful or think we're controlling things. We’re so afraid of these very old, ubiquitous and harmful tropes that we abandon our own identity, we don’t take up the space we have earned, we hide from our successes. Instead, we continue to totally hold back, to pull back and give ourselves less representation than we give to everybody else, out of fear.”

Perhaps the most ironic twist to this story is the fact that member of the tribe, Brokeback Mountain actor Jake Gyllenhaal lost the bid for the film to Cooper:  

Actor and producer Jake Gyllenhaal, who has Jewish heritage, previously spoke of his disappointment upon losing a bid for the rights to a Bernstein film to Cooper, admitting he had been yearning to play “one of the most preeminent Jewish artists in America” for almost two decades..

“No one likes to admit this, but, we got beat at our own game,” he told Deadline in 2021.

“That’s basically what happened. There’s really nothing more to say about it than that. There’s always another project. Sticking your neck out, hoping to get to tell the stories you love and that have been in your heart for a very long time is something to be proud of.”



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Monday, July 17, 2023

As reported yesterday, US Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, described Israel as a “racist state” while trying to calm down pro-Palestinian protesters at the annual progressive Netroots Nation conference in Chicago on Saturday.

“As somebody who’s been in the streets and participated in a lot of demonstrations, I want you to know that we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state," she said.

This caused a backlash from many other Democratic Congressional leaders, who (without mentioning Jayapal) issued a statement that flatly said, "Israel is not a racist state." 

This prompted Jayapal to issue a clarification that has been reported as an apology or a walk-back of her words.

But it is neither.

Jayapal's statement said, “At a conference, I attempted to defuse a tense situation during a panel where fellow members of Congress were being protested. Words do matter and so it is important that I clarify my statement. I do not believe the idea of Israel as a nation is racist. I do, however, believe that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government has engaged in discriminatory and outright racist policies and that there are extreme racists driving that policy within the leadership of the current government.”

Words do matter, and Pramila Jayapal indeed chose her words carefully. 

There is no contradiction between her Saturday statement that "Israel is a racist state" and her Sunday statement that "I do not believe the idea of Israel as a nation is racist."

She is saying that it is theoretically possible that a state called Israel can exist that is not racist - but Israel is racist, today, and she has been fighting to make that clear to the world.

She didn't even say that "the idea of a Jewish state" is not racist, and the libel that a Jewish state is inherently racist (while Christian, Italian, Spanish, Arab and Muslim states are not)  is the basic position of the modern antisemites. 

It is an antisemitic lie to say that Israel, which has numerous laws to ensure the equality of all citizens, is a racist state. It is antisemitic lie to claim that Israel is racist for treating non-citizens differently than citizens, which every other nation on the planet does - and indeed is obligated to do as part of its job to defend and support its own citizens. It is antisemitic to blame Israel alone for the lack of peace when every rejection of every peace plan that would lead to an independent Palestinian state while keeping Israel as a Jewish state was done by the Palestinian side. 

Several pro-Israel Democrats have drafted a letter that says, "We are deeply concerned about Representative Pramila Jayapal’s unacceptable comments about our historic, democratic ally Israel, and we appreciate her retraction....We will never allow anti-Zionist voices that embolden antisemitism to hijack the Democratic Party and country.”

But she didn't retract anything. Jayapal did not say a word that disagrees with her shameful, antisemitic statement to the protesters - protesters who, incidentally, hijacked the entire conference for 16 minutes while the organizers pathetically pleaded with them to allow the proceedings to continue.

Pramila Jayapal had a chance to apologize and retract her disgusting statement. She went out of  her way to do neither. And the mainstream Democrats have not done anyone any favors by pretending that everything is all smoothed out now. On the contrary, they have enabled her to double down on Jayapal's bigotry and hate, as well as that of the "progressives" who support her. 



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Tuesday, May 02, 2023

Sometimes I can get the message across in a cartoon or meme far better than I can in an article. 
















Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 



Sunday, April 02, 2023

Tabia Lee was the Director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, CA, and was recently fired from that position because she didn't adhere to the standard DEI orthodoxy. She describes her experiences in Compact:
What made me persona non grata? On paper, I was a good fit for the job. I am a black woman with decades of experience teaching in public schools and leading workshops on diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism. At the Los Angeles Unified School District, I established a network to help minority teachers attain National Board Certification. I designed and facilitated numerous teacher trainings and developed a civic-education program that garnered accolades from the LAUSD Board of Education.

My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice, a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled. This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is at many other educational institutions.
One section of her essay is relevant for this site:

The conflicts were not limited to my tenure-review process. At every turn, I experienced strident opposition when I deviated from the accepted line. When I brought Jewish speakers to campus to address anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, some of my critics branded me a “dirty Zionist” and a “right-wing extremist.” When I formed the Heritage Month Workgroup, bringing together community members to create a multifaith holiday and heritage month calendar, the De Anza student government voted to support this effort. However, my officemates and dean explained to me that such a project was unacceptable, because it didn’t focus on “decentering whiteness.”

When I later sought the support of our academic senate for the Heritage Month project, one opponent asked me if it was “about all the Jewish-inclusion stuff you have been pushing here,” and argued that the senate shouldn’t support the Heritage Month Workgroup efforts, because I was attempting to “turn our school into a religious school.” The senate president deferred to this claim, and the workgroup was denied support.
I looked up what she did for Jewish Heritage Month, and from what I can see, it was incredible

The first event in 2022, I believe, was this one on defining antisemitism, with panelists Rabbi Dr. Mark Goldfeder, Esq. from the National Jewish Advocacy Center and  Alyza Lewin from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.  They both explain the logic behind the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism and explain why the "3D" test is an accurate description of when criticism of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism. Rabbi Goldfeder spoke specifically about why labeling Israel as an apartheid state, as the then-recent Amnesty report did, is in fact antisemitism.

Dr. Lee even went through a breakout room exercise where students could take real world examples of "anti-Israel" slanders and identify whether and why they were antisemitic.

No wonder the hard Left on campus was upset about this! 

This video is nearly two hours long, but it includes not only excellent presentations by Goldfeder and Lewin, but also a video by the later Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explaining why anti-Zionism is often antisemitism. 

I don't know how many people attended this, but it is astonishing that this was shown on any campus today.


 

There are many other videos of different events celebrating Jewishness, moderated by Dr. Lee,  that interview Jews who are unabashedly woke but also often unabashedly Zionist. One example: This one interviews Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky, a Black Jewish social worker who disagrees with critical social justice and intersectionality theory, and features rap videos by her quite proudly Jewish son "Westside Gravy."

I am fairly certain that De Anza will not have another Jewish Heritage Month. 

Tabia Lee appears to be a principled warrior against all kinds of racism and bigotry, and as such she couldn't survive on that campus. I hope that there might be a larger university that actually cares about real equality and anti-racism that hires her and gives her the resources she needs to lead the students, not be led by the extremists. 

Her dismissal is a huge loss for the De Anza community.  I hope some other campus can gain her expertise.



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Thursday, February 09, 2023

The American Bar Association proposed a Resolution 514 condemning antisemitism that referred to the widely accepted IHRA working definition.

Israel haters immediately attacked. 

More than 40 organizations, both those that are explicitly anti-Israel and "progressive" organizations, joined a campaign claiming that the IHRA Working Definition chills free speech. "Any embrace of the IHRA definition by the ABA would legitimize and encourage this undermining of core democratic rights," they say, without explaining exactly how.

The National Lawyers Guild said, falsely, that "the IHRA definition would provide a tool to stigmatize and suppress lawyers, legal advocates and law students from expressing political criticism of Israel or advocacy for Palestinian human rights." Of course, they cannot point to any wording in the IHRA definition that would do anything like that.

Human Rights Watch wrote a similar letter. 

The main point that these critics make is that the IHRA definition has supposedly been used to suppress free speech. They cannot point to where the definition actually does that, because it doesn't mandate anything: the definition is filled with caveats that in the end only provide guidance. If the IHRA Working Definition is being misused, then these organizations should fight the misuse, not the definition. The fact that they don't tells you all you need to know.

Moreover, the ABA resolution explicitly said that nothing in the resolution is intended to diminish or infringe upon the Bill of Rights or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so even if their lies about IHRA were true, the text wouldn't allow it to be misused that way.

They are lying when they say that their opposition to the definition is based on human rights and free speech concerns. The only problem they have with it is that it notes that singling out Israel as uniquely evil far out of proportion to its supposed crimes is antisemitic. And they want to have the right to do exactly that. 

Their objections are based on their hate of the Jewish state, not their interest in Palestinian human rights or in fighting antisemitism. 

The original draft resolution also included an attached 17 page report on antisemitism that went through a history of antisemitism in Europe and in the US. It mentioned Natan Sharansky's "3-D" test for antisemitism as well as further references to the IHRA and US State Department definitions of antisemitism. 

In the end, the ABA removed everything that could be considered a definition, including virtually the entire report, and left the eviscerated resolution to condemn something that could mean anything:


Without a definition, this is entirely meaningless. Some Israel haters define antisemitism as hating Arabs. Others define Zionism as antisemitism. There is nothing in this resolution that contradicts those bizarre definitions. 

The resolution doesn't even mention Jews - only a single reference to improving security at "Jewish institutions and organizations." It mentions "houses of worship," not synagogues. 

Right now, the resolution is about as meaningful as a resolution saying that puppies are cute. It is a checkbox - now the ABA can say they oppose antisemitism (whatever that is)! Mazel tov!

Because of the modern antisemites who use obsessive, conspiracy-theory driven hate of Israel as a proxy for the age old obsessive, conspiracy-theory driven hate of Jews, the ABA believes that it passed a resolution that didn't upset anyone.

Well, this Jew is upset. 

The Jews who publicly identify as Jews, those who wear identifiably Jewish clothing, those who publicly support the Jewish state or speak Hebrew in public or who stand proud in their Zionism - they are the biggest targets and victims of antisemitism today.  

This resolution doesn't give a damn about them. 




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

From Ian:

Col Kemp: Jew-Hate at American Universities
[The Amcha] report paints a stark picture of an increasing, intensifying and carefully coordinated campaign of attacks on Jewish identity at over 60% of the colleges and universities that are popular with Jews, including 2,000 incidents intended to harm Jewish students since 2015.

[T]hese activists demand an end to Zionism, which... means just one thing: an end to the democratic State of Israel. This itself is antisemitism in any book and is spelt out as such in the US State Department definition of antisemitism.

Despite expending so much energy against their fellow students, German Gentiles had plenty left for their Jewish professors. Unsatisfied with Nazi race regulations restricting Jewish faculty, students boycotted the classes of those who were exempt under the race laws and pressured university authorities to dismiss them. The result was that every Jewish professor who was still legally allowed to teach had resigned by 1935.

The Amcha report characterises the situation on US campuses today as a crisis for American Jews. It is much more than that. It is a crisis for us all that one section of our student body is bullied, abused, intimidated and cast down by their fellow students and often abandoned by their professors and faculty authorities.

It is high time for the federal government, under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to withdraw its funding from all universities that participate in bigotry such as that.


Jonathan Tobin: Ilhan Omar is the Democrats’ problem, not Kevin McCarthy’s
By standing with Omar, Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have effectively normalized antisemitism. And McCarthy’s effort to punish her will again test whether they mean what they say when they speak of their opposition to hate.

As was the case with Greene and Gosar last year, it will take a vote by the majority of the House to remove Omar from her perch on the Foreign Relations Committee. Given the GOP’s narrow majority, the fate of Schiff (who repeatedly lied about the hoax he helped promote that former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election) and Swalwell (who had an intimate relationship with a Chinese spy) will also be part of the same debate.

Democrats will also answer the list of Omar’s antisemitic statements and actions with their own brand of “whataboutism,” which will involve McCarthy’s recent embrace of Greene, who was an ally during his fight for the speaker’s chair. They’ll bring up other Republicans for censure, as well. One is Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who lied about just about everything during his campaign for election, including whether he was Jewish.

If every member of Congress or the executive branch had to be censured for lying, however, Washington would soon be emptied of politicians, including Biden, who takes second place to no one when it comes to being a serial fabulist. Moreover, there is an argument to be made that neither party should be engaging in this kind of tit-for-tat punishment.

If the voters think they deserve nothing better than to be represented by such scoundrels, perhaps it’s best if we leave it to them to decide at the ballot box who should sit in Congress or on committees. As the great cynic, journalist H.L. Mencken wrote, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Nevertheless, if the Democrats are going to play this game, then McCarthy can hardly be blamed for answering in kind. And if House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) isn’t prepared to agree to remove Omar, then the speaker is justified in seeking to oust her.

At stake here is not the broader question of how much extremism or bad behavior Congress should be willing to tolerate in its members. Rather, it is specifically one that will force Democrats to decide what is more important to them.

Is it the fight against antisemitism at a time when Jew-hatred is on the rise throughout the globe? Or is their true allegiance to identity politics and the toxic intersectional myths that allow Omar to paint herself as an oppressed victim, rather than a hatemonger, simply because of the color of her skin?
Caroline Glick: The ‘woke’ West is assaulting Jews for embracing their heritage
As Israel is being pilloried at the U.N. Security Council by friend and foe alike for daring to allow Jews to visit the Temple Mount, professor Richard Landes joins Caroline Glick on this week’s episode of the “Caroline Glick Show” to discuss the contemporary roots of the demonization of Jews and the Jewish state.

Landes recently published “Can the Whole World Be Wrong: Lethal Journalism, Anti-Semitism and the Global Jihad,” the product of 22 years of work.

He began his study of the subject in the aftermath of the first modern blood libel, the alleged killing of Muhammed al-Dura, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, by IDF forces in Gaza on Sept. 30, 2000.

The false allegation that the boy was killed by IDF forces that day, and that they murdered him deliberately, formed the basis of a massive propaganda effort. Its product has been the legitimization of the mass murder of Jews in Israel and worldwide by Palestinians and other jihadists.

Landes argues that the West’s embrace of the al-Dura blood libel was the foundation not only of the antisemitism assaulting the Jewish people worldwide today, but also of the West’s inability to acknowledge, let alone defeat, the forces of global jihad, whether in the United States or Europe or in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and beyond.

Glick and Landes examine the current pathologies of the “woke” West—including the assault on Jews for embracing their heritage, by among other things, visiting the Temple Mount—through the prism of the al-Dura incident. Their conversation traverses space and time and ends with vital insights into what needs to happen for the West to survive the ravages of the Red-Green alliance which was born with the al-Dura blood libel.

Monday, January 02, 2023

From Ian:

The New York Times in Bibi-land
The New York Times is in panic mode. A front-page article by Jerusalem reporter Isabel Kershner (Dec. 30) began with an expression of trepidation that Israel’s “right-wing and religiously conservative government,” led by newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “will undermine the country’s liberal democracy.”

How so? By ensuring “increased tensions with Palestinians,” “undermining” judicial independence, and “the rolling back of protections for the L.G.B.T.Q. community” and “other” (unidentified) “sectors of society.”

But for Kershner it gets even worse. The Netanyahu governing coalition has “declared the Jewish people’s exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” including biblical Judea and Samaria (until the Six-Day War identified as Jordan’s “West Bank”). It has also “pledged to bolster Jewish settlement in the West Bank,” which would undercut the “recognized formula for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel.” In translation, Israel would reclaim its biblical heritage.

Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition, Kershner writes, might “complicate” Israeli-American relations. Although President Biden proclaimed his eagerness to work with Netanyahu (“my friend for decades”), he reiterated American support for “the two state solution” that the Palestinian Authority and President Mahmoud Abbas (now beginning the 18th year of his four-year term) have repeatedly rejected.
A new book challenges progressive Jews
David Bernstein’s “Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews” is making waves in Jewish communities across the Western world.

David Bernstein is the founder and CEO of the Maryland-based Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (JILV), as in classical liberalism and moderate politics. He has been involved with Jewish organizations throughout his life, leading several, and identifies as politically liberal. But changes in recent years inspired him to leave these organizations and create a new one.

“I have spent my entire career in the Jewish world, and had always felt proud of the openness to varied opinions, even if the organizations ultimately took sides on an issue,” Bernstein shared with JNS. But starting “around 2020….People refused to discuss and debate key topics, especially on sensitive issues.”

He soon realized that the same ideology that was shutting down debate was also fueling antisemitism.

Realizing the harm that this does by labeling Israel and Jews as “oppressors,” he was inspired to write his book, “Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews.” The tome is full of Bernstein’s anecdotes on his journey from being a child bullied in school for being Jewish, to a liberal Jewish student on college campus witnessing a new form of antisemitism.

He also details the origins of woke ideology on the far left and how it has begun to attack Jews and Zionism. Troublingly, it is being gradually adopted by many mainstream American Jewish organizations.

In the book, Bernstein isn’t shy about admitting that he considers himself a Democrat and supports socially-liberal causes. Yet he points out that much of the political movement he considered himself a part of has drifted away from the values it claims to espouse.

He says that American Jews must fight against antisemitism from all fronts–Islamists, the far right and the far left–or else American Jews will begin to feel disenfranchised and see life become unbearable.
Posters Glorifying Palestinian “Martyrs” Found in LA
Various posters glorifying Palestinian “martyrs” were found in Los Angeles on December 16.

The Palestinian Youth Movement announced in an Instagram post that they had put the posters around Los Angeles, Orange County and the Inland Empire; some posters were found on Wilshire Boulevard. The posters stated, “Glory to our marytrs!” and featured the faces of various Palestinians that were killed by “Zionist forces.” One such face was Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera journalist who was shot and killed while covering an Israel Defense Force (IDF) raid in Jenin in May. The State Department announced in July that their investigation concluded that the bullet that killed Abu Akleh “likely” came from the IDF but was probably unintentional; however, damage to the bullet “prevented a clear conclusion.” A separate CNN investigation, on the other hand, concluded that the IDF had intentionally fired at Abu Akleh.

Other faces included on the posters included Oday al-Tamimi and Tamer al-Kilani, who were both members of the Lion’s Den terror group, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL listed al-Kilani as a founding member of the terror group. The poster also included faces of those killed during clashes between the IDF and Palestinians in the West Bank, such as Omar Manna. Manna was killed on December 5 when the IDF were executing a raid to arrest three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); the IDF said at the time that “during the operation, suspects threw stones, Molotov cocktails, and explosives at the troops, who responded by shooting.”

The posters on Wilshire Boulevard were taken down on December 21.

Jewish groups denounced the posters in statements to the Journal.

“There is nothing wrong with mourning those who die from the tragic and ongoing violence between Palestinians and Israelis,” StandWithUs CEO and Co-Founder Roz Rothstein said. “However, this anti-Israel poster includes and glorifies terrorists, such as former Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) commander Farooq Salameh. It implies Israel alone is to blame, ignoring that groups like PIJ seek to destroy Israel and trap both peoples in an endless cycle of suffering and conflict. Hopefully one day Palestinian leaders will accept that Israel is in the region to stay, so both peoples can focus on building a better future together.”

Simon Wiesenthal Center Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action Agenda Rabbi Abraham Cooper also said, “Importing [a] culture of death where children are brainwashed to believe [that] martyrs are not mere cannon fodder for genocide-seeking Hamas and corrupt pay-to-slay Jews Palestinian Authority teaches youngsters here to hate Jews is a disaster in the making.”

“Their martyrs are our murderers,” Stop Antisemitism Executive Director Liora Rez said. “It’s always disturbing to see people idolizing terrorists like this.”

Thursday, December 08, 2022

From Ian:

NGO Monitor: Does Europe Support This? Al-Haq Tells the World to Dismantle Israel
On November 29, 2022, the Palestinian NGO Al-Haq published yet another antisemitic screed dedicated to denying the Jewish people sovereign equality, by defining Zionism and the State of Israel as inherently illegitimate. For 200 pages, the Palestinian NGO – designated as a terrorist entity by Israel in October 2021 over its ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization – extorts the international community to dismantle the Jewish State. To achieve this goal, Al-Haq absurdly distorts Israeli policy and practice beyond recognition, and misrepresents international legal standards.

Central to Al-Haq’s publication is the repetition of the claim that Israel’s existence as a Jewish State represents “apartheid.” This assertion was debunked in NGO Monitor’s 2021 and 2022 analyses: “False Knowledge as Power: Deconstructing Definitions of Apartheid that Delegitimise the Jewish State” and “Neo-Orientalism: Deconstructing claims of apartheid in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”

Al-Haq’s publication is intended to influence the UN Human Rights Council’s permanent Commission of Inquiry’s (the “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel,”) plan to formally declare Israel to be committing “apartheid”; to pressure the International Criminal Court to indict Israeli officials for crimes against humanity; and for third states to apply a wide variety of sanctions against Israel, associated institutions, companies, and individuals.

While broader in scope, this publication echoes the same ideological position expressed by Al-Haq in a formal submission to the COI in May 2022. (For more information, see “Al-Haq’s Antisemitic Submission to the UN’s Permanent COI”)

EU and member states support for Al-Haq
If not for the millions of Euros in support from the EU and its member states Al-Haq has received over several years, the Palestinian NGO would not enjoy nearly the same level of influence and access as it currently does. Despite the organization’s reported ties to the PFLP, and its campaigning to dismantle Israel, Europe has yet to denounce and reject its longtime partner.

While the EU froze financial support to Al-Haq in May 2021 as a result of its links to the PFLP, in June 2022, the organization claimed that this freeze had been lifted – and as yet uncorroborated assertion.

Notably, in May 2022, Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra, met with Al-Haq officials in the West Bank – despite the Israeli designation.

Moreover, Al-Haq is listed as an implementing partner on multi-grantee projects funded by the French (€900,000 for the entire project) and Swedish (Al-Haq receives over $2.5 million of the over $8 million project) governments.
John-Paul Pagano: What Is a Conspiracy Theory?
When I began studying Antisemitism two decades ago, one of the first things that occurred to me was its essential nature as a conspiracy theory. While mundane anti-Jewish bigotry is always found, the form of Jew-hatred that is historically salient identifies “the Jews” as a preternaturally powerful, secretive, evil elite which enslaves and exploits humankind. Even a surface examination of conspiracy theories shows that while the identity of the elite changes, this narrative outline is common to all of them. Alternately—and with good reason we will explore later—Antisemitism is sometimes singled out as the ultimate conspiracy theory.

So we can better understand conspiracy theories if we widen our scope to include insights from the much larger literature on Antisemitism. The history of the “Longest Hatred” is an opportunity to examine more than a thousand years of the consistent social practice of a single conspiracy theory. In this vast and detailed record, we will detect patterns and peculiarities that expose the essence of the thing.

The definition I propose hence will leverage scholarship on conspiracy theories and conspiracism, but be situated in the living context of Antisemitism—the up-punching form of racism that is centrally rooted in the cultural heritage of the West and has done so much to shape its social and physical reality. This approach yields a dense definition, but one that is also—after some clarification of terms—comprehensive and empirically legible.

It is, as follows:
A conspiracy theory is a belief that a circumstance or event is a deliberate, connected, and occulted product of the timeless struggle between the forces of Good and Evil, attributable to the malign influence of a secret elite that supernaturally coordinates to enslave and exploit humankind, fabricates false consciousness to hide its activities, and indulges in pleasures and rites of extreme misanthropy.

In upcoming (though not necessarily contiguous) posts, I will clarify the terms I highlighted above and will also discuss three conceptual domains—Manichean, Epistemic, and Magical—in which many of the features and themes of conspiracy theories should be evaluated. I will explain and justify my definition over posts that I will specially mark for this purpose, so they become a series that readers can revisit and reference.

As a variety of racism, the historian Paul Johnson viewed Antisemitism as “so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category.” Defining that peculiarity also helps to reveal what is a conspiracy theory—a mode of thought that is in some ways more corrosive than caste-based racism, but against which we’ve mustered no social movement to stigmatize and diminish it.
An open letter to progressives: It’s time to speak out
I wanted to believe perhaps I’d simply missed something. After all, I have always worked in progressive spaces myself. I know how much this movement cares about the safety, dignity, and flourishing of all communities in this country.

But diving into various digital channels and searching through recent public statements yielded nothing. I saw plenty of commendable statements of solidarity aimed at other groups. Perhaps I wasn’t searching hard enough.

It shouldn’t take this much effort to uncover sentiments of support in a time of need.

The progressive movement should be a seamless, natural ally to the Jewish community. But despite the fact that so many Jews in this country find themselves ideologically aligned with the progressive left, for a long time now that movement has behaved as if we are either inevitable supporters – no matter their approach to our oppression – or unimportant ones.

Throughout my tenure in progressive environments, I encountered deafening silence through the violence in Pittsburgh, Poway, and Colleyville. I was told my identity didn’t qualify me to join workgroups focusing on diversity, solidarity, and inclusion. I was called a Zionist (I am one – they meant it as a slur). Assumptions were freely and unapologetically made about my political leanings, my perspectives, and my general pleasantness based on the fact that I was born in Israel and that I am a Jew. Throughout it all, I was expected to continue supporting the causes that have always meant so much to me – and I still do. (h/t jzaik)

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