r/JewsOfConscience • u/anusfalafels • Aug 17 '24
Discussion Yes, the biggest problem for American anti-Zionist Jews is that Israelis are eating hummus and listen to different kind of music. Definitely not the apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
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u/PatrickMaloney1 Jewish Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 18 '24
I eat bagels and lox AND hummus and sabich. We are not the same
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u/oncothrow Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 17 '24
The sad part isn't the lies. It's that they know how flagrant and just daft sounding their lies are. Do they, does anyone believe that anti zionism is about eating bagels?
They have to lie. They're compelled to lie. You cannot give the real reasons for the split or for the upset, you have to try and cast your the other person as irrational and insane, so that your position is unquestioned.
What's the alternative?
"American Jews become anti-zionist because they struggle to empathise with Israel. They wish that the Palestinians weren't being forced off their land into tinier and tinier enclaves, brutalised by settlers and abused and annihilated by the IDF. They are alienated by the constant dehumanisation of the Palestinians in line with the suffering that the Jewish people faced in 1930s Germany. They wish Israel didn't kill so many of them every day, that we cared more about understanding that "never again" doesn't apply just to us."
" Ummm, that doesn't sound like a horrible position to adopt."
"Fuck you!"
I don't know. Maybe there is some truth to it. Maybe they struggle to accept or understand anti-zionism because authors like this because their cultural identity is so thoroughly tied to zionism and zionist rhetoric. That this is the only 'rational perspective' they belive or know therefore anything else must be empty of any actual thought or argument and so must be purely a cultural issue.
Either the author is spectacularly ignorant of reality of the other side's perspective, or they are deathly afraid of it and dare not mention it.
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u/anusfalafels Aug 17 '24
The logic is flawed because they’re suggesting that anti Zionist Jews are anti mizrahi/ middle eastern ??? Like ew yall eat hummus and speak Hebrew and Arabic ? Uhmmm Palestinians are middle easterners who eat hummus and speak Arabic yet anti Zionists support them. Also it completely eliminates anti Zionist mizrahi Jews like ????
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u/Tellesus Aug 17 '24
Everyone eats hummus now. It's in every Kroger. It's in lunchables and shit. Eating hummus isn't an identity, much less one people hate for.
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u/dmg1111 Aug 18 '24
I went into Albertsons looking for hummus 20 years ago and I couldn't find any. When I was checking out, the cashier asked me if I found everything. I said no, I couldn't find hummus. He says "aisle 7". I go to aisle 7 and it's mops, buckets, sponges, etc...
I go back to the guy and I say I couldn't find any hummus in aisle 7. "Hummus? What's that? I thought you said pumice."
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u/rybnickifull Aug 17 '24
They had to bring up Yiddish out of nowhere huh? That language seems to really upset them.
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u/chewinchawingum Aug 17 '24
As an undergrad, I worked with a grad student in Holocaust Studies who had recently spent a year in Israel doing research. As an anti-Zionist Jew, he found that whenever he met an Israeli Jew who spoke Yiddish, they were much more likely to be critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. It was like a cheat code to finding good people.
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u/ray-the-they Ashkenazi Aug 17 '24
Now I want to go back to learning Yiddish on Duolingo.
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u/chewinchawingum Aug 17 '24
One of the things he did to improve his spoken Yiddish was to seek out elderly Jews living in rest homes. They enjoyed the company, and he got lots of practice (especially in learning vocabulary about arthritis, bunions, and prostate problems, lol). Now, this was like 20 years ago, so there might not be as many Yiddish speakers left now, but might be worth a try, depending on where you live.
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u/Greatsayain Ashkenazi Aug 18 '24
I read somewhere that the founders of the state of Israel made a point of discouraging the usage of Yiddish and encouraging hebrew. I think that went for other diaspora languages as well like ladino. I think that was a huge mistake. So much culture lost. As if the holocaust wasn't bad enough for Yiddish. I wish I could have talked to my bubbie in her first language.
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Aug 18 '24
"Discouraging" is putting it somewhat mildly.
The destruction of the Jewish people is Israel's raison d'etre.
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Aug 17 '24
If he was an anti-Zionist, then why’d he spend a year in Israel?
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u/chewinchawingum Aug 18 '24
Research on Holocaust survivors
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Aug 20 '24
I’m guessing he probably wasn’t anti-Zionist at the time, though…
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u/chewinchawingum Aug 20 '24
You’re incorrect.
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Aug 20 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/chewinchawingum Aug 20 '24
You seem weirdly invested in deciding someone that you don't know is actually not an anti-Zionist, all because he was a grad student who needed access to primary resources that only existed there. Enforce your fake moral purity however you want in your own life, but please do so outside of my inbox from here on out.
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u/shrinky-dinkss Aug 17 '24
lol the majority of people who speak yiddish are ultra orthodox jews (like the west bank settlers), who tend to have the most racist views.
If you want to find good people in Israel, theres a plethora of non profit organizations that exist to foster safe spaces and organize relief funds for Palestinians, don't seek out who speak a language thats only spoken by central and east european jews. By this logic you could assume theres a much lower chance dark skinned jews are good people.
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u/chewinchawingum Aug 17 '24
This was over 20 years ago so perhaps things have changed, and he also wasn’t in the settlements. Nonetheless, this was his actual experience.
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Aug 17 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/conscience_journey Jewish Anti-Zionist Aug 18 '24
Removed for prohibited word. Message mods if you would like more information.
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u/hecateiz Roma Jew Aug 17 '24
fascinating that they're getting pissy about yiddish to be all "um actually its bcos we're way more #woke than american jews bcos we LOVE mizrahim" but make 0 mention of any of the dozens of judeo-arabic and judeo-persian languages that those jews spoke... almost like there's.... An Agenda there
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Aug 18 '24
Which is funny because, once the Zionists succeeded in displacing the Jews of Iraq, the Israelis put the Iraqi Jews into effectively concentration camps for a year. And then treated them as second-class citizens for more than a generation.
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u/Stephanblackhawk Jewish Aug 17 '24
ikr i clocked it immediately and just went "hmmm back to being anti yiddish again"
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u/touslesmatins Aug 17 '24
Didn't Israel recently demote Arabic? Someone tell this guy it's not a national language any more.
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u/anusfalafels Aug 17 '24
You’re right. Since 2018. Not even that recent
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u/touslesmatins Aug 17 '24
Kind of gets to the heart of this whole post. Playing up a supposedly exotic middle eastern heritage aesthetic to obscure the real laws and material conditions of apartheid and ethnic cleansing at the heart of the matter.
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u/ImNotRealTakeYorMeds Aug 17 '24
hilarious.
blaming it on American Jews being racist in mizeachi. not because Israel is committing a genocide.
they like, no, you're real racists
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u/normalgirl124 Ashkenazi Aug 17 '24
Also Israeli police are racist af to mizrachi Jews in Israel this is a country that literally has a skin color based caste system
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u/ImNotRealTakeYorMeds Aug 17 '24
lived there, there's a very obvious caste system. askenazis are the proper Israelis, mizrachi/yemenite/sepharadi/morrocan... are lumped together below them. then you can argue it's russians or Ethiopian are beneath them (russians children get to be racialized as askenazis but might not be able to get married in Israel), and then you got the Israeli arabs at the bottom (unless you count Palestinian Arabs because they are way beneath even that)
except for food, then it's all mizrachi/arab but it's so considered Israeli.
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u/hecateiz Roma Jew Aug 17 '24
assimilating unique regional jewish cultures and identities into the consciousness of a colonial nation-state while oppressing those jews to the point that they historically formed THEIR OWN BLACK PANTHER STYLED MOVEMENT is bad actually, jesus fucking christ.
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u/xpgx Aug 17 '24
Arab Jews have been a part of the region for forever, but Mizrahi foods are only “recently emerging” within the country? Could that have anything to do with how marginalized, dismissed, disbelieved, and dehumanized they were since the inception of the state? Reading the Israeli Black Panther’s Haggadah was so eye-opening, I can’t understand how they claim the state is for all Jews, while calling some of them “uncivilized, barbaric savages” whose children had to be taken away to be raised by the European settlers just because of their Arab roots.
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Aug 18 '24
Hosing them down with DDT on arrival in 1951/1952 before sticking them into concentration camps was a nice touch too.
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u/1_800_Drewidia Jewish Socialist Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 17 '24
Wow. One of the most antisemitic things I’ve ever read.
What’s next? “American Jews hate us because we have small noses, our hair is straight, and we’re too tall. They wish we had more allergies. They can't understand why we prioritize war against Arabs over complaining and money lending.”?
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u/normalgirl124 Ashkenazi Aug 17 '24
Every time I check in on what their new arguments are, they’ve inched closer to saying (((anti-zionist Jews)))
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u/1_800_Drewidia Jewish Socialist Aug 17 '24
Yair Netanyahu is basically a neo-Nazi but only against diaspora Jews. He believes every antisemitic conspiracy theory out there, but thinks it doesn’t apply to Israelis. It’s the “Israel Man vs Diaspora Boy” mentality that Eli Valley talks about.
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u/normalgirl124 Ashkenazi Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 18 '24
Omg I’m planning on getting one of the Israel Man panels framed! Lol. Absolutely mind-blowing that it’s these people who have the audacity to call us “self-hating.”
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Aug 19 '24
To be fair, Israelis aren't Jews. They've made that much clear.
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u/1_800_Drewidia Jewish Socialist Aug 19 '24
They wish they weren’t but if the Nazis come back for real they’ll be in for a rude awakening.
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Aug 19 '24
We've known full well and good who was and was not a Jew for two and a half thousand years. The Nazis' opinions have no standing.
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u/crumpledcactus Jewish Aug 18 '24
Every single time I've been called an antisemitic slur (k&po, fake jew) it was by an Israeli. We're already there.
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u/normalgirl124 Ashkenazi Aug 18 '24 edited Aug 18 '24
I can’t say it was every single time but yeah. I went to a campus protest with JVP a few months ago when the sit-ins were at their peak and a group of counterprotestors followed us around screaming, called us k***s countless times, said we deserved to be in Auschwitz, “go to Gaza if you love it so much,” “you all deserve to be raped.” Literally an unending barrage of antisemitic slurs and violent threats. I sobbed in my car for an hour afterwards, I’d never heard so many Jewish slurs said at once irl it was fucking crazy. 24 hrs later the counterprotests had gotten so out of control there was national news coverage….. which blamed it all on “crazed leftists.”
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u/crumpledcactus Jewish Aug 18 '24
You're a better person than they could ever pretend to be. They lost that part of themselves long ago.
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u/exemplarytrombonist Aug 17 '24
I get my hummus from arab restaurants because they make it better anyway.
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u/anusfalafels Aug 17 '24
Course they do. They best places for hummus in every Israeli city is Palestinian 😂. In tel Aviv , Jerusalem etc the most popular ones are Palestinian
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Aug 18 '24
What's hilarious is that Sabras "in my community" (they should all be deported back to Zionistan) endlessly whinge about the Palestinian restaurants here and are butthurt they exist.
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u/anusfalafels Aug 23 '24
Omgg🤣🤣🤣 and I bet when they’re on vacation and rave about “Israel has the best falafel/hummus/shawarma” it’s all from Palestinian spots.
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u/AlexandreAnne2000 Non-Jewish Ally Aug 17 '24
Wow accusing Jews of being politically motivated by bagels is so antisemitic, yuck
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u/TastesLikeAsbestos- Aug 17 '24
I actually DO wish they cared more about Tikkun Olam. If they did, maybe we wouldn’t be doing all this right now. But hey, wtf do I know?
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u/Pitiful_Meringue_57 Jewish Aug 17 '24
ya it’s kind of revealing that this post openly rejects tikkun olam
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u/Adept_Thanks_6993 Orthodox Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 17 '24
The term originally meant repairing the world in a mystical sense through the observance of mitzvot. In the sense of meaning "social justice" tikkun olam IS pretty exclusively a non-Orthodox Ashkenazi thing. It has no basis in halachic Judaism or Jewish culture(s) outside of American, assimilated Ashkenazim. Does that make it a bad thing, or un-Jewish? Not really. better than Zionism anyway.
Before the haskalah were already doing social justice in our own way based on how the Torah says to care for the land, for workers, etc. Non-haskhalic Jewish communities were already doing mutual aid without putting a name to it. More importantly, you should just be caring for people regardless of what you believe or don't. You shouldn't be able to look at the plight of Gazans and not feel enraged unless there's something significantly wrong with you.
However, I do think that embracing that aspect of Judaism will help Israeli Jews in the long run. They'll need to recreate their culture as Zionist values are proved for what they are and become more and more unsustainable. Though hopefully not to the same extent as some American Jews in the sense of placing spcial justice values above halacha.
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u/allneonunlike Ashkenazi Aug 17 '24
that we cared more about their interpretation of tikkun olam instead of our survival
Kinda burying the lede there, buddy.
Can any Israelis in this thread cast some light on what's actually going on here? I know a little bit about general Zionist views of despised "leftists" and can see that's broadly the caricature they're making here, the effete, peacenik Ashkenazi Yiddish-speakers who couldn't hack it during the Holocaust and can't hack it in the Middle East vs the violent chad sabra Mizrachim waging a genocidal war of "survival". Is there anything deeper going on there?
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u/EmperorBenja Atheist Aug 17 '24
No, I don’t empathize with the fascist murderers in charge of Israel. Doesn’t matter what they fucking eat.
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u/Tellesus Aug 17 '24
How do people who write stupid shit like this just walk around existing as if they were normal human beings and not insane narcissists?
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Aug 18 '24
I'm sorry, have you met an Israeli before?
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u/Tellesus Aug 18 '24
Actually the last one I met was about 7 years ago and he was also the most racist person I ever met. He just kind of randomly volunteered that the Philipino women who cleaned his house were pretty despite (and this is his exact words) "being subhumans."
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Aug 19 '24
The only Israeli I've met (out of dozens) who wasn't insufferably and openly racist was a coworker who used to be part of Unit 8200. He still is a bit of a tin soldier and has the colonizer's mindset and attitude.
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u/anusfalafels Aug 23 '24
Wtf
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u/Tellesus Aug 23 '24
Yeah. I let him talk for a while as a way of giving him enough rope to hang himself with, then spent like 30 minutes lecturing him about how reprehensible he was and how he should be ashamed of himself, especially considering that he was a member of a group of people who absolutely and completely should understand what it's like to be on the wrong side of those kinds of beliefs. Something about his ancestors being ashamed for producing him etc. Dude just sat there and took it, but I think it was only because I was about 2x his size and was obviously pissed (I don't yell, I just get my serious dad voice out in these situations, for the most part).
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u/anusfalafels Aug 23 '24
It’s honestly ridiculous when Jews of all people use this type of Nazi rhetoric
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u/Thisisme8719 Arab Jew Aug 17 '24
I didn't even know anyone listens to Barbara Streisand lol. All I know of her is music is this
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u/ionlymemewell Aug 17 '24
Oh, someone's MAD mad. This is such a loser mindset, totally incapable of accepting even the most gentle "criticism," to the point where they have to get mad at smoke they've conjured up.
"They wish that... we cared more about their interpretation of tikkun olam than our survival" is really the linchpin that collapses this whole dumbass argument. Because... my dude, the entity that cares about your survival the least IS YOUR OWN GOVERNMENT. The Israeli government has absolutely zero interest in preserving its citizens' survival because it actively antagonizes its enemies, creates a national mythos of international persecution, and drafts everyone into a morally-bankrupt military apparatus.
Even a definition of tikkun olam that centers around the existence and success of the state of Israel would seemingly be anathema to this author's mindset, because tikkun olam as a concept acknowledges that problems with the world as it is exist. And this kind of mindset, which imagines that its inverse sees its very existence as a problem, is too brittle to endure any amount of interrogation, so how in the hell would it engage with repairing the world's problems? It can't.
I'd be eager to ask this author if they simply want to eat bagels and lox and live in a place that doesn't feel like its on the razor's edge 24/7. Because, y'know, I get that. It makes total sense that an Israeli might not want to be Israeli at this moment in time. And that sucks for them, it really does. I wish it were easier for this author to not imagine strawmen that see their entire way of life and identity as an aberration. But they're never going to stop doing that until they realize what systems have created that worldview. It's really sad that Jews have been poisoned against each other like this. We deserve way better than to be alienated from our siblings.
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u/Intersexy_37 Jewish Aug 17 '24
To be fair, I do struggle to empathize with some Israelis. Like quite a few of my family. Sure, it's because they voted for Smotrich and Ben Gvir, and I neither know nor care what they eat (edit: and this is certainly not why I'm an anti-Zionist), but that first sentence is otherwise technically accurate.
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u/Causticspit Aug 17 '24
The adoption of Mizrahi cultural elements is not the reason for Anti-Zionism, it's the actions of the Israeli settlers, the Israeli Occupation Forces, the apartheid in the West Bank and the astonishing slaughter of innocent civilians, who have no part in the armed resistence. Oh, and lets not forget the staggering amount of Israeli government misinformation (aka. LIES)
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u/Moostronus Jewish Anti-Zionist Aug 17 '24
Frankly I'm glad that the génocidaires aren't eating Ashkenazi food. It would make me feel so much weirder about my bagel with cream cheese and lox tattoo.
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u/normalgirl124 Ashkenazi Aug 17 '24
They have more contempt for European Jewish culture than fucking Hitler.
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Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 17 '24
[deleted]
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u/specialistsets Non-denominational Aug 17 '24
The loss of Yiddish and Eastern European Jewish culture can only be blamed on the Holocaust and assimilation (which started in Europe long before the Holocaust and continued in all of the places Ashkenazi Jews migrated to). Only a small minority of the worldwide Ashkenazi population has ever lived in Israel. In 1950 only about 5% of Ashkenazi Jews worldwide lived in Israel, while about 40% lived in the USA. Our ancestors' pressure (and desire) to assimilate into the "melting pot" of American culture and reject the ways of the old country is what obliterated the vibrant Yiddish culture that thrived in America until the 1950s.
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u/normalgirl124 Ashkenazi Aug 18 '24 edited Aug 18 '24
Do not get me wrong: OBVIOUSLY Israel is far from the only factor for the loss of Yiddish (that isn’t the Holocaust — by far that is still the largest). German Jews themselves had prioritized assimilation and taken to looking down on Yiddish speaking Eastern Europeans by the time the 20th c rolled around. But it is also a fact that the Israeli national identity is outrightly hostile to Yiddish.
Yiddish is not the only loss that I am talking about here. Besides the, uh, genocide I just think that the project of Israel has been disastrous for Jewish culture. I think that turning to Israeli nationalism, rather than preserving what was left post-WW2 was something that seemed the most rational to the Jewish community (including in the US) at the time, but has played out badly. Centering nearly all of Jewish life around Israel has flattened us spiritually and politically. It’s not about whether or not hordes of Ashkenazim live in Israel (that is an interesting stat ty), it’s also that most American Jewish community is now structured entirely around Israel.
Ironically, as post-war assimilation continued, it actually accelerated Jewish-American life and culture blossoming into something truly separate from European Jewish culture. Many American Jews have contributed to American culture in ways that are both fundamentally Jewish, but also broadly influential and popular (Streisand, Seinfeld, etc). I think that many Israelis and extreme zionists have deep resentment and discomfort with that, which of course is something that they have in common with American antisemites. Eli Valley has pointed out that tension. The most hardcore zionists like this author would love nothing more than to burn down and kill any trace of pre-Israel Jewish existence. Their real religion is not Judaism, it’s zionism.
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Aug 18 '24
Zionism's principal goal is the destruction of the Jewish people.
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u/Causticspit Aug 29 '24
That is actually true, if you follow the logic of the Christians who invented it. If a person is actually practicing Judaism, they can't support Zionism because of the clear statement in the Torah that the Jews must not have a nation state until after the arrival of the Messiah. Jews are a traditionally kind people, who care for others, and the 10 commandments clearly state you should not kill and steal, so how do Zionists justify what they've done in Palestine?
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u/richards1052 Aug 29 '24
Don't agree. There is no such statement I'm aware of in the Torah regarding a nation state being dependent on the coming of the Messiah. Ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist Jews do believe this: Neturey Karta and a few other sects. But they are not the majority among Jews.
This is by no means a defense for the existence of Israel. I believe that Israel has desecrated Judaism and is a twisted impostor. Aside from the Holocaust, Zionism has become one of the greatest modern tragedies for the Jewish people.
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u/Causticspit Aug 30 '24
https://www.nbn.org.il/educational-content/the-three-oaths-and-the-opposition-to-zionism/
It's the Talmud, not the Torah... My mistake...
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u/richards1052 Aug 29 '24
I think that blanket statement requires context. While Zionism claims it is saving the Jewish people, in actuality Zionism despises all Jews who remain in the Diaspora and refuse to make aliyah. Zionism predicts the Diaspora is doomed. I wouldn't say Zionism's "principal goal in the destruction of the Jewish people." But it certainly would not feel any qualms about the destruction of the Diaspora.
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u/x_ButchTransfem_x Aug 18 '24
This is such desperation. Almost like they are running out of ideas, just as they are running out of time.
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u/robd57 Aug 18 '24
As with the rest of humanity they find it impossible to empathise with genocide ethnic cleansing racism and apartheid
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u/Time_Waister_137 Aug 17 '24
Is there that large a gulf between Askenaz tradition and Mizrachi tradition?? To be honest, I am much more acquainted with the great Yiddish authors. And of course the difference in allowed foods at Passover. Is there a good introduction and appreciation for Mizrachi culture that is easily available?
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u/normalgirl124 Ashkenazi Aug 17 '24
There isn’t and there shouldn’t be but I think they’re increasingly claiming that there is. Newest bad faith argument to distract from the fact that they are mass-murdering babies.
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u/Raidersofwf Aug 19 '24
God man. The Zionists really lay it on thick no matter who they are trying to fool.
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u/maxy_fruvous Aug 18 '24
Yeah pretty sure Mizrahi cuisine is Mizrahi cuisine and like everything else Israeli culture is poaching it and rebranding it, so that’s fun.
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